Minutes of Meetings with God
and with Myself

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The Garden Thing...

My wife, Susie, has gone garden happy. She has flower gardens all over the place. There is the serenity garden out back, the shade garden out front, there are flowers around the LP gas tank, flowers under the birdfeeder, there's a substantial planting of day lilies in a low spot out near the burn pile, and there are sunflowers and God-only-knows what other kinds of flowers planted anywhere there are no shrubs up next to the house. And she seems to be happiest when she is working amongst the flowers and plants. She weeds, she waters, she cultivates, she sprays, and, she seemed to take an almost perverse satisfaction in spreading manure around the plants in the shade garden last week. Susie is out just about every day, working in one or more of the flower beds. She takes her wheelbarrow, tools, and her hunk of old coat that she kneels on to work and she does her "flower thing". I think that Susie escapes into her gardens. She decompresses after the hectic pace of working and commuting in the peace and order and beauty of the flowers.

I am no where near as involved in the gardening as Susie. I get volunteered to help if Susie comes on something that she can't handle, like a big clump of Siberian Iris that she couldn't lift into her wheelbarrow the other day. Mostly, I content myself with an 8' x 8' raised-bed garden where I've put in a dozen tomato and pepper plants (jalapeņas, of course) on black plastic (no weeds or weeding). And right next to the raised bed is a rather rebellious planting of horseradish (it's running all over the place). But that's it for me. And to be honest, if Susie didn't water the raised-bed, the plants would die because I tend to forget to do it. I even forget to check things and pick the fruit and vegetables when they are ready. (What was it Susie said to me yesterday? ... "After you plant, and things grow and bear fruit, then you have to harvest ... that's the way it works!"). "A watched tomato never ripens," tends to be my motto. I don't know, I guess I just spend too much time trying to think, which can be a real handful for me.

As I have been thinking about Susie and the flower gardens, I've been realizing more and more that she might be on to something really spiritually important in this gardening stuff, but please don't tell her I said so, it might spoil it for her if she thought gardening was a way to deep theological insight and it might spoil it for me cause then she'd have another good reason for trying to get me into the gardens.

According to Holy Scripture, God was the original gardener. The first thing God did after taking a day off from creating everything was plant a garden, the Garden of Eden. And the Biblical accounts make it pretty clear that God created human beings to be caretakers for the beautiful and unique garden that the original, master gardener had custom made, a garden complete with plants and animals of all kinds.

Everything started out "good" but the care-takers fell down on the job. The garden and everything else "wound up" spoiled. The earliest care-takers were "kicked out" of the garden. The farther we human beings have gotten from that first garden, geographically, spiritually, technologically, and every other way, the more "spoiled" everything (especially the quality of our physical, emotional, and spiritual lives) has become. The farther we have gotten from our God given role of caretakers of God's gift of life on this planet, the worse life on this planet has become.

We have become so self-centered, self-aggrandizing, so enthralled with what we want (just plain greedy!) to the exclusion of everything else that, now, human beings are the primary threat to all life on this planet (we're not just talking nuclear threat, we're talking pollution, deforestation, creation of technological/biological threats through chemistry or genetic manipulation, etc.). There are some medical/ biology experts who have started describing the human race as "the cancer infecting the whole Earth."

We have become the exactly the opposite of what the Creator intended us to be. We have become the destroyers, rather than the preservers of the Earth. We have lost our sense of connection to creation and we have lost our sense of place in creation. We live as if we were in a vacuum, with no one else and nothing else around, so we do whatever we want. We act as if what we do will have no consequences at all or we fool ourselves into thinking that what we do will only have the consequences we want or expect. Essentially, we have lost touch with reality. Can it be any wonder that we, on the whole, feel so unfilled, dissatisfied, and unhappy?

I am not so naive as to believe that going "back to the land" will solve all the problems of humans and the Earth. However, it seems imperative that somehow, someway, we human beings get ourselves back to what God intended (and still intends) for us. When Susie loses herself in the flowers and the gardens , I would like to think that she is happy because she is "somehow" doing more of those things God intended for us human beings to do. Things like nurturing life and beauty, things like getting close to, being part of, and understanding (at least a little better) those fundamental cycles of life and creation that are God's because God made them, things like coming to a realistic sense of place in the cosmic scheme of things, things like coming to the realization of how intimately connected we are to God, to each other and to everything that God has made.

When Jesus tried to help people understand "The Good News" he brought from God, he most often used pictures and illustrations he took from nature and from caring for the land. Repeatedly, Jesus used the images of planting and sowing, of caring for the field, the garden or the vineyard, and of harvesting. And, Jesus used the images in an effort to make it easier for people to understand how God works in an effort to help people understand how the Kingdom of God will come. The Epistle to the Romans (Chapter One) seems to say that, God has built "The Gospel" into all creation; if we look and we can see it.

One thing that Jesus made very clear is: once we get even a basic understanding of "The Good News," of how God works and how the Kingdom will come, then we will have to "repent," not merely saying "O God, I'm sorry for what I done wrong and for the good I've failed to do!" but completely turning around the ways we think, feel and act so that all is directed toward God and the Kingdom. When we repent, we are to begin to do those things that lead to life for ourselves and for all God's creation. When we repent, we are to change into caretakers who work with God and each other.