Gardens
Sermon
Growing in Christ
Sermons for the Summer Season
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
-- Genesis 11:1-2, 5-9
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, and the Spirit gave them ability.
-- Acts 2:1-4
When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.
-- John 15:26-27
I have received my Smith & Hawken Catalogue for the summer. If I had the money, I could order a ratchet anvil pruner with such a powerful cutting action that it can sever branches up to three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Or I could order a shuffle hoe with an angled blade that cuts weeds just below the crown. I could order a Dutch hand-weeder that is indispensable for working borders, and I am so attracted to border lines -- or a Scottish composting fork. Sometimes I think all the cycles and responsibilities of life are contained in a Smith & Hawken gardening catalogue.
It is a good time of year for the study of phenology, the science of appearances; it is a good time to study the cycles in biological events and how they respond to light and climate. For example, when forsythia was in bloom, gardeners knew it was the proper time to prune the rosebushes, which by then had green buds on their canes.
When new oak leaves are about the size of a squirrel's ear (or the ear of a field mouse -- there has been some serious debate about this), then the soil is warm enough to plant corn or beans. If they are planted before this natural signal, the ground would be too cold and the seed would not germinate. (The Algonquin Indians knew that 1,000 years ago.)
Phenology is the science of appearances. I don't know about you, but there is something about Mother's Day and gardening. It's the right time to go out and dig in the earth, and plant some life there with hope for beauty and fruit and the future.
The science of appearances -- I want to examine more than appearances on this Mother's Day, Parents' Weekend, and Day of Pentecost. I want to examine with you the topic of gardening and human relationships and the good news, especially on the Day of Pentecost.
We could consider transcultural truth and gardens, and how the pentecostal spirit calls us into universal unity, willing us to speak all the languages of the good earth.
At Princeton University, there is a professor of the history of architecture who believes adamantly that gardens should be treated with academic respect because they reveal cultural philosophies. The thesis is that different cultures developed different gardening patterns reflecting lifestyles, political structures, and even attitudes toward nature and God and hope.
In the sixteenth century, for example, formal French gardens were laid out by wealthy landowners with rigidity and symmetry in a subconscious attempt to prove that nature was under their domination, just as the French people were under the absolute power of the king and his friends who owned the formal gardens. During the same time period, formal Italian gardens, many maintained by cardinals of the Roman Catholic church, accepted the finitude of human power and the fact that plants both bloom and die. Flowers in their gardens were allowed to go to seed, but the French replaced flowers the minute they began to fade. In arrogance and idolatry, they wanted control over both life and death.
On the other hand, the gardens of Ming Dynasty scholars were tended in the hope of capturing the pure state of natural harmony beyond the chaos that often sweeps through our living together. In their gardens, the Ming scholars attempted to capture peace and harmony, the balance of flowing water and solid rock, the fragile flower and the eternal human spirit. They wanted to contain in their small backyards the kingdom of God. Here was a pentecostal hope for the unity of the divine promise.
What would this type of study say about our US culture today? According to a recent New York Times magazine article on trendsetting contemporary gardens, we are in an "American Garden Revolution." It is the age of the "new romantic garden," a garden for all seasons, marked by lush plantings of decorative grasses that blend with the landscape and can be viewed with interest all year long: ornamental grasses and shrubs and perennials with lasting meaning, not quick spring thrills, not just a splash of summer fun and color before facing the reality of cold winter death, but something that lasts, that stays around to comfort us, to center us. We want some lasting meaning and hope, open for some Holy Spirit.
But on this Pentecost and this Mother's Day, I believe it would be most appropriate not to attempt a cultural analysis in light of the mission of the whole church, but rather it is a good day to dig for something more personal. I want to spade down into the gardens of our own unique history and hope.
Karel Capek (1890-1938), the author of a book titled, The Gardener's Year, first published in 1929, is a connoisseur of earth. He wrote that when digging, the dirt should, "crumble, but not break into lumps ... it must not make slabs, or blocks, or honeycombs, or dumplings; but, when you turn it over with a full spade, it ought to breathe with pleasure and fall into a fine and puffy tilth."
I am for pleasure and fine sifting, but let us also be honest as we dig into our gardens, because it is not really humus we are digging in, but history.
If you really do garden and often dig in cultivated soil, you know this to be true; one often finds himself becoming an amateur archeologist. Garden soil consists primarily of special ingredients, such as leaf mould, peat, stones, pieces of glass, and old mugs, broken dishes, nails, wire, bones, arrowheads, silver paper from long-consumed chocolate bars, broken bricks, old coins, pipes, tins, bits of string, buttons, soles of shoes, dog droppings, coal, pot handles, washbasins, buckles, rusted horseshoes, insulating material, scraps of newspapers, and innumerable other components, which the astonished gardener digs up at every stirring of the beds.
Let's look first at some of this history into which we wish to plant our hopes. If we are honest, one thing we will all turn up is that old Tower of Babel story from the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings. It is a story that first appears from our present perspective to be so odd, so old, so alien, and so primitive, and yet it has a certain hypnotic character of recognition. "Once upon a time, all the world ..." it begins. You must be careful with stories that begin with "once upon a time" because that could be anytime! But as I study this story in my archeological dig of our individual gardens, it carries me back into the earthen layers of millennia, back into what I had assumed were past strata of time. Then there occurs, as often happens when one studies the Old Testament, a shock of realization, the realization that what I am actually digging into is my own time. We turn back the soil and uncover our own time. It is a probing into our human spirit.
When you brush aside the dirt, it becomes apparent that ancient Babel is our city, and that we walk through the ruins of the tower on our way to class or on our way to work; this is the land of Shinar.
"Once upon a time, all the world spoke a single language...." We are back into the misty, opening morning in the Garden of Eden. We are back to when the mind had just been set free to range beyond the search for good and warmth and shelter, to when our human mind was first asking, "Why?" What difference does it make how we treat each other? Upon a grassy plain in the land of Shinar, planting those first proto-gardens of tubers and grains and wondering why there is division between us as human beings, divided not by distance, but by some perceived difference, not by race really but by rage. Why separation? Why the otherness? Why the lack of human compassion and communication between us at times, even between mother and child, sister and brother, husband and wife, friend and neighbor? It should not be this way!
This is the land of Shinar. Never trust a story that begins, "Once upon a time."
Once upon a time, there was unity, one language. We communicated to one another clearly; we understood each other, each other's deepest feelings, and we accepted each other in that unity, that trust, that peace. There was a binding center to all meaningful futures together. Now and always this is God's will for us, alluding to the Christ of Pentecost; God sends the Holy Spirit to offer just this gift.
Then the human, once upon a time, in his and her freedom, your freedom and my freedom, said, "I know the purpose of things, and it is centered around me. Come, let us build ourselves a tower with its top in the heavens, and we can be God. Let us eat from the tree of knowledge in the center of the garden called Eden. No one else is in charge except me." But without God, with no ultimate centering point, there can be no meaning; with God removed, there is only separation. There is disagreement, disappointment, and division even between father and child, brother and sister, friend and neighbor. People no longer really speak to one another with any assurance of acceptance or respect or security in Babel. We don't understand each other; we thrust ourselves outside the Garden of Eden.
Do you see the power of the grace-gift of God through Jesus precisely in this situation? That life of love was lived in compassion and justice calling us home to unity. The Holy Spirit of God was offered now to engage us in reunion and peace and mission -- the Pentecost gift. Look at the grace-gifts within our own gardens.
In her essay titled, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker wrote:
In the late 1920s, my mother ran away from home to marry my father. Marriage, if not running away, was expected of seventeen-year-old girls. By the time she was twenty, she had two children and was pregnant with a third. Five children later, I was born. And this is how I came to know my mother: she seemed a large, soft, loving-eyed woman who was rarely impatient in our home. Her quick, violent temper was on view only a few times a year, when she battled with the white landlord who had the misfortune to suggest to her that her children did not need to go to school.
She made all the clothes we wore, even my brother's overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds.
During the "working" day, she labored beside -- not behind -- my father in the fields. Her day began before sunup, and did not end until late at night. There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts; never a time free from interruption -- by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children....
But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit? (her garden) ... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. And not just your typical straggly country stand of zinnias, either. She planted ambitious gardens -- and still does -- with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom profusely....
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms -- sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia....
And I remember people coming to my mother's yard to be given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia -- perfect strangers and imperfect strangers -- and ask to stand or walk among my mother's art.
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible -- except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.
Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She had handed down respect for the possibilities -- and the will to grasp them.
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength -- the search of my mother's garden -- I found my own.1
The garden is a way to give us a specific image around which to study our individual histories, beginning today perhaps with the influence of our mothers. It is not about gardening but about growth into wholeness.
I read a book for this sermon written by a number of feminist theologians who speak out of a number of different cultural backgrounds from all over the world with different languages, yet the garden was one setting that they could all use to define themselves and their unity in Christ.
The image of the garden can be both positive and negative. For some, garden walls were confining, some of the gardens we inherited are colored by destructive factors like racism or classism, or maybe represent various kinds of suffering and oppression, perhaps family violence, alcoholism, divorce, poverty, or sickness, all separated, scattered outside of Eden, beyond the plain of Shinar. For others, their garden heritage has been a mixed bouquet, with flowers but also with weeds; but gardens are intended to be life-affirming -- life-sustaining -- assisting us to make critical choices in regard to our own journeys -- Spirit led.
Poet Stanley Kunitz was asked about his inspiration: He said "gardening." And how does a poet garden? Mostly by caring: "Gardening for me is a passionate effort to organize a little corner of the earth, which I want to redeem." Can we sense the Spirit of God -- the counselor -- active through some of those who formed who we are today, when God's image shines through?
Digging in one's own garden, one should seek the gifts we have received and now can offer, and what parts of your garden might have been harmful to you and to others? The hope is to find a way to grow that offers wholeness to others that is Spirit led. How to have a global garden as partners, rather than as exploiters of one another, within the goal of clearing away the blight and making space so that we may all grow into the whole human beings that God created us to be.
In the book, Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens, one woman from Cuba wrote,
Often when I disagree with my mother, she gets upset, because she thinks I do not value her way of thinking and the way she has lived. But that is not true. To see things differently, and even to think that the way my mother has acted in certain situations is not the way I would act, is in no way a judgment of her. I have a different perspective and have had very different experiences. As a matter of fact, I think the difference exists in part because what she has told me, and the way she has lived has pushed me a few steps farther ... she gave me growth; like her, I believe that apart from community we cannot be about the work of God....2
A woman from El Salvador wrote:
This year I have witnessed the beauty that has come forth from (my mother's) garden; the variety of colors, shapes, and designs. I thought of my mother's tiny gardens in city barrios. I now understand much more clearly; gardening is about visioning. It is about faith ... patience, beauty, and sharing. Gardening is about dreaming and futuring. It is one of my mother's legacies to me.3
A professor at Yale Divinity School wrote:
Each summer I went to visit my grandmother and followed her about the hot, dusty garden, watering, cutting, and weeding, not because I had come to like gardening but because I loved her.4
Jesus told the disciples in today's text from Saint John, "I am going to God who sent me, but the Holy Spirit of God is offered to you." It is the grace-gift of forgiveness and love. The barriers can fall, and we can again speak the same language.
Here is the heart of Pentecost -- gift of the Holy Spirit as the center unity of God, the breath-touch of God; the presence of Christ; the directing, unifying God-force in all existence, the directing heart of what we should be together -- mother and child, friend and neighbor, sister and brother, husband and wife. The truth is that you and I are eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted, not because of the towers that we have built or the gardens we have tended, but often in spite of them. The spirit of God is that which brings into balance, unites, and calls us home.
This Pentecost, birthday of the church, Parents' Weekend, or Mother's Day, it is time to plant the annuals and to celebrate the perennials. It is time to dig in the soil of our own heritage, and also to accept the gift of the sacred seed and life and faith that grows there.
In the light of Christ, may we all view life as an opportunity for servanthood and reform. May all of us be called into assertive peacemaking and justice-giving; not afraid to challenge and eliminate prejudice. May we be called to be people of dialogue, empathy, respect, and joy, all of which derive from God's grace-gift of faith imaged as the burning word-flame of the Holy Spirit.
Guided by this heritage of love and respect and forgiveness and promise and resurrection, in search of our mother's garden, may we find our own. Amen.
Sermon delivered May 14, 1989
Weaver Chapel
Wittenberg University
Springfield, Ohio
____________
1. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1983), pp. 238-239, 241-243.
2. Letty M. Russell, Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspectives (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988), p. 100.
3. Ibid, p. 131.
4. Ibid, p. 146.
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
-- Genesis 11:1-2, 5-9
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, and the Spirit gave them ability.
-- Acts 2:1-4
When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.
-- John 15:26-27
I have received my Smith & Hawken Catalogue for the summer. If I had the money, I could order a ratchet anvil pruner with such a powerful cutting action that it can sever branches up to three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Or I could order a shuffle hoe with an angled blade that cuts weeds just below the crown. I could order a Dutch hand-weeder that is indispensable for working borders, and I am so attracted to border lines -- or a Scottish composting fork. Sometimes I think all the cycles and responsibilities of life are contained in a Smith & Hawken gardening catalogue.
It is a good time of year for the study of phenology, the science of appearances; it is a good time to study the cycles in biological events and how they respond to light and climate. For example, when forsythia was in bloom, gardeners knew it was the proper time to prune the rosebushes, which by then had green buds on their canes.
When new oak leaves are about the size of a squirrel's ear (or the ear of a field mouse -- there has been some serious debate about this), then the soil is warm enough to plant corn or beans. If they are planted before this natural signal, the ground would be too cold and the seed would not germinate. (The Algonquin Indians knew that 1,000 years ago.)
Phenology is the science of appearances. I don't know about you, but there is something about Mother's Day and gardening. It's the right time to go out and dig in the earth, and plant some life there with hope for beauty and fruit and the future.
The science of appearances -- I want to examine more than appearances on this Mother's Day, Parents' Weekend, and Day of Pentecost. I want to examine with you the topic of gardening and human relationships and the good news, especially on the Day of Pentecost.
We could consider transcultural truth and gardens, and how the pentecostal spirit calls us into universal unity, willing us to speak all the languages of the good earth.
At Princeton University, there is a professor of the history of architecture who believes adamantly that gardens should be treated with academic respect because they reveal cultural philosophies. The thesis is that different cultures developed different gardening patterns reflecting lifestyles, political structures, and even attitudes toward nature and God and hope.
In the sixteenth century, for example, formal French gardens were laid out by wealthy landowners with rigidity and symmetry in a subconscious attempt to prove that nature was under their domination, just as the French people were under the absolute power of the king and his friends who owned the formal gardens. During the same time period, formal Italian gardens, many maintained by cardinals of the Roman Catholic church, accepted the finitude of human power and the fact that plants both bloom and die. Flowers in their gardens were allowed to go to seed, but the French replaced flowers the minute they began to fade. In arrogance and idolatry, they wanted control over both life and death.
On the other hand, the gardens of Ming Dynasty scholars were tended in the hope of capturing the pure state of natural harmony beyond the chaos that often sweeps through our living together. In their gardens, the Ming scholars attempted to capture peace and harmony, the balance of flowing water and solid rock, the fragile flower and the eternal human spirit. They wanted to contain in their small backyards the kingdom of God. Here was a pentecostal hope for the unity of the divine promise.
What would this type of study say about our US culture today? According to a recent New York Times magazine article on trendsetting contemporary gardens, we are in an "American Garden Revolution." It is the age of the "new romantic garden," a garden for all seasons, marked by lush plantings of decorative grasses that blend with the landscape and can be viewed with interest all year long: ornamental grasses and shrubs and perennials with lasting meaning, not quick spring thrills, not just a splash of summer fun and color before facing the reality of cold winter death, but something that lasts, that stays around to comfort us, to center us. We want some lasting meaning and hope, open for some Holy Spirit.
But on this Pentecost and this Mother's Day, I believe it would be most appropriate not to attempt a cultural analysis in light of the mission of the whole church, but rather it is a good day to dig for something more personal. I want to spade down into the gardens of our own unique history and hope.
Karel Capek (1890-1938), the author of a book titled, The Gardener's Year, first published in 1929, is a connoisseur of earth. He wrote that when digging, the dirt should, "crumble, but not break into lumps ... it must not make slabs, or blocks, or honeycombs, or dumplings; but, when you turn it over with a full spade, it ought to breathe with pleasure and fall into a fine and puffy tilth."
I am for pleasure and fine sifting, but let us also be honest as we dig into our gardens, because it is not really humus we are digging in, but history.
If you really do garden and often dig in cultivated soil, you know this to be true; one often finds himself becoming an amateur archeologist. Garden soil consists primarily of special ingredients, such as leaf mould, peat, stones, pieces of glass, and old mugs, broken dishes, nails, wire, bones, arrowheads, silver paper from long-consumed chocolate bars, broken bricks, old coins, pipes, tins, bits of string, buttons, soles of shoes, dog droppings, coal, pot handles, washbasins, buckles, rusted horseshoes, insulating material, scraps of newspapers, and innumerable other components, which the astonished gardener digs up at every stirring of the beds.
Let's look first at some of this history into which we wish to plant our hopes. If we are honest, one thing we will all turn up is that old Tower of Babel story from the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings. It is a story that first appears from our present perspective to be so odd, so old, so alien, and so primitive, and yet it has a certain hypnotic character of recognition. "Once upon a time, all the world ..." it begins. You must be careful with stories that begin with "once upon a time" because that could be anytime! But as I study this story in my archeological dig of our individual gardens, it carries me back into the earthen layers of millennia, back into what I had assumed were past strata of time. Then there occurs, as often happens when one studies the Old Testament, a shock of realization, the realization that what I am actually digging into is my own time. We turn back the soil and uncover our own time. It is a probing into our human spirit.
When you brush aside the dirt, it becomes apparent that ancient Babel is our city, and that we walk through the ruins of the tower on our way to class or on our way to work; this is the land of Shinar.
"Once upon a time, all the world spoke a single language...." We are back into the misty, opening morning in the Garden of Eden. We are back to when the mind had just been set free to range beyond the search for good and warmth and shelter, to when our human mind was first asking, "Why?" What difference does it make how we treat each other? Upon a grassy plain in the land of Shinar, planting those first proto-gardens of tubers and grains and wondering why there is division between us as human beings, divided not by distance, but by some perceived difference, not by race really but by rage. Why separation? Why the otherness? Why the lack of human compassion and communication between us at times, even between mother and child, sister and brother, husband and wife, friend and neighbor? It should not be this way!
This is the land of Shinar. Never trust a story that begins, "Once upon a time."
Once upon a time, there was unity, one language. We communicated to one another clearly; we understood each other, each other's deepest feelings, and we accepted each other in that unity, that trust, that peace. There was a binding center to all meaningful futures together. Now and always this is God's will for us, alluding to the Christ of Pentecost; God sends the Holy Spirit to offer just this gift.
Then the human, once upon a time, in his and her freedom, your freedom and my freedom, said, "I know the purpose of things, and it is centered around me. Come, let us build ourselves a tower with its top in the heavens, and we can be God. Let us eat from the tree of knowledge in the center of the garden called Eden. No one else is in charge except me." But without God, with no ultimate centering point, there can be no meaning; with God removed, there is only separation. There is disagreement, disappointment, and division even between father and child, brother and sister, friend and neighbor. People no longer really speak to one another with any assurance of acceptance or respect or security in Babel. We don't understand each other; we thrust ourselves outside the Garden of Eden.
Do you see the power of the grace-gift of God through Jesus precisely in this situation? That life of love was lived in compassion and justice calling us home to unity. The Holy Spirit of God was offered now to engage us in reunion and peace and mission -- the Pentecost gift. Look at the grace-gifts within our own gardens.
In her essay titled, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker wrote:
In the late 1920s, my mother ran away from home to marry my father. Marriage, if not running away, was expected of seventeen-year-old girls. By the time she was twenty, she had two children and was pregnant with a third. Five children later, I was born. And this is how I came to know my mother: she seemed a large, soft, loving-eyed woman who was rarely impatient in our home. Her quick, violent temper was on view only a few times a year, when she battled with the white landlord who had the misfortune to suggest to her that her children did not need to go to school.
She made all the clothes we wore, even my brother's overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds.
During the "working" day, she labored beside -- not behind -- my father in the fields. Her day began before sunup, and did not end until late at night. There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts; never a time free from interruption -- by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children....
But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit? (her garden) ... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. And not just your typical straggly country stand of zinnias, either. She planted ambitious gardens -- and still does -- with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom profusely....
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms -- sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia....
And I remember people coming to my mother's yard to be given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia -- perfect strangers and imperfect strangers -- and ask to stand or walk among my mother's art.
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible -- except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.
Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She had handed down respect for the possibilities -- and the will to grasp them.
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength -- the search of my mother's garden -- I found my own.1
The garden is a way to give us a specific image around which to study our individual histories, beginning today perhaps with the influence of our mothers. It is not about gardening but about growth into wholeness.
I read a book for this sermon written by a number of feminist theologians who speak out of a number of different cultural backgrounds from all over the world with different languages, yet the garden was one setting that they could all use to define themselves and their unity in Christ.
The image of the garden can be both positive and negative. For some, garden walls were confining, some of the gardens we inherited are colored by destructive factors like racism or classism, or maybe represent various kinds of suffering and oppression, perhaps family violence, alcoholism, divorce, poverty, or sickness, all separated, scattered outside of Eden, beyond the plain of Shinar. For others, their garden heritage has been a mixed bouquet, with flowers but also with weeds; but gardens are intended to be life-affirming -- life-sustaining -- assisting us to make critical choices in regard to our own journeys -- Spirit led.
Poet Stanley Kunitz was asked about his inspiration: He said "gardening." And how does a poet garden? Mostly by caring: "Gardening for me is a passionate effort to organize a little corner of the earth, which I want to redeem." Can we sense the Spirit of God -- the counselor -- active through some of those who formed who we are today, when God's image shines through?
Digging in one's own garden, one should seek the gifts we have received and now can offer, and what parts of your garden might have been harmful to you and to others? The hope is to find a way to grow that offers wholeness to others that is Spirit led. How to have a global garden as partners, rather than as exploiters of one another, within the goal of clearing away the blight and making space so that we may all grow into the whole human beings that God created us to be.
In the book, Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens, one woman from Cuba wrote,
Often when I disagree with my mother, she gets upset, because she thinks I do not value her way of thinking and the way she has lived. But that is not true. To see things differently, and even to think that the way my mother has acted in certain situations is not the way I would act, is in no way a judgment of her. I have a different perspective and have had very different experiences. As a matter of fact, I think the difference exists in part because what she has told me, and the way she has lived has pushed me a few steps farther ... she gave me growth; like her, I believe that apart from community we cannot be about the work of God....2
A woman from El Salvador wrote:
This year I have witnessed the beauty that has come forth from (my mother's) garden; the variety of colors, shapes, and designs. I thought of my mother's tiny gardens in city barrios. I now understand much more clearly; gardening is about visioning. It is about faith ... patience, beauty, and sharing. Gardening is about dreaming and futuring. It is one of my mother's legacies to me.3
A professor at Yale Divinity School wrote:
Each summer I went to visit my grandmother and followed her about the hot, dusty garden, watering, cutting, and weeding, not because I had come to like gardening but because I loved her.4
Jesus told the disciples in today's text from Saint John, "I am going to God who sent me, but the Holy Spirit of God is offered to you." It is the grace-gift of forgiveness and love. The barriers can fall, and we can again speak the same language.
Here is the heart of Pentecost -- gift of the Holy Spirit as the center unity of God, the breath-touch of God; the presence of Christ; the directing, unifying God-force in all existence, the directing heart of what we should be together -- mother and child, friend and neighbor, sister and brother, husband and wife. The truth is that you and I are eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted, not because of the towers that we have built or the gardens we have tended, but often in spite of them. The spirit of God is that which brings into balance, unites, and calls us home.
This Pentecost, birthday of the church, Parents' Weekend, or Mother's Day, it is time to plant the annuals and to celebrate the perennials. It is time to dig in the soil of our own heritage, and also to accept the gift of the sacred seed and life and faith that grows there.
In the light of Christ, may we all view life as an opportunity for servanthood and reform. May all of us be called into assertive peacemaking and justice-giving; not afraid to challenge and eliminate prejudice. May we be called to be people of dialogue, empathy, respect, and joy, all of which derive from God's grace-gift of faith imaged as the burning word-flame of the Holy Spirit.
Guided by this heritage of love and respect and forgiveness and promise and resurrection, in search of our mother's garden, may we find our own. Amen.
Sermon delivered May 14, 1989
Weaver Chapel
Wittenberg University
Springfield, Ohio
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1. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1983), pp. 238-239, 241-243.
2. Letty M. Russell, Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspectives (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988), p. 100.
3. Ibid, p. 131.
4. Ibid, p. 146.
