For about a year, now, I have taken it upon myself to restore the garden at the center of our old Philly neighborhood. The previous caretaker, a well-loved neighbor, died years ago and no one had taken up the cause until we moved in.

As in many Philly forests, thick vines had snaked up into the trees. Last summer, I took many of them down. This year, I finally made my way to the far corner, where another vine was sucking the life out of a pine tree. When I saw it was fuzzy, I suspected it might poison me. But it was beginning to rain, so I did not delay and took my saw to it. It only poisoned me a little.

Besides, I love the Garden. And the garden loves me back in so many ways.

Gardens are love in action

Gardens are “thin places” where we meet God. — at least they are if we read the Bible! In the Bible, gardens are where the loveliness of creation is revealed, focused, and tended.  As you know, the creation story in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, begins in a garden. Then at the close of the New Testament, in John’s Revelation, a garden at the end of time is pictured in which there are trees with leaves for the healing of the nations.

In the middle of the Bible, the Song of Songs imagines a garden where lover and beloved delight in one another:

“A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, springing up in flowing streams from Lebanon… Awake, O north wind, and come thou south wind: blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow… I went down into my garden to see the fruits of the valley, and to see if the vines had flowered, and the pomegranates were in blossom.” — from Song of Songs 4-6

You can almost smell it and feel the breeze!

The Song of Songs is a sexy book (I started humming “Unforgettable” when I thought of it). May you have a lover who fits right into it with you. Regardless, God can fit into it with you, too. It is also describing the spiritual garden where the Lover becomes one with creation, and with each of us.

We may have a lingering memory of losing Eden.  But in the Song of Songs, the Lover cries out, “Let my beloved come into the garden, to eat the fruit of the trees that are therein!” God is calling us back, calling us to return.

Love planted in a wasteland

My wife and I often look at each other these days and say something like, “We did not know we were growing up in the garden spot of U.S. history.” Against all odds, during our lifetime, the country was working on love, justice, beauty, and delight in creation— even led by the likes of Lyndon Johnson, of all people!! But like history ebbs and flows, it was not very long until now we are exchanging these things for prejudice, oppression, hatred, division, and war.  Exchanging the Garden for the Wasteland.

But all is not lost. Jesus lays out a way of return to the garden. He spent his last night before the way was inaugurated in a garden. Then they wrapped his body in spices like we could smell in the Song of Songs. It says in the Bible, “Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so […] they laid Jesus there.”

There’s an ancient tradition in the Church that says Golgotha, the place where Jesus was crucified, occupied the same place where once the Garden of Eden had been—and that the Cross, the Tree on which Jesus was crucified, stood on the very spot where once the Tree of Knowledge had grown—the tree whose fruit expelled us from the Garden.  And now on the Cross, Jesus becomes the ripened fruit of a new Tree; but this time we are invited to eat.

It doesn’t really matter if the tradition is true territorially (although we certainly love to argue about things like that, don’t we?) because it is true of each of us personally. The wasteland we carry in us and often extend into the world is the very place where Jesus is crucified and invites us into a new way, a way back into the Garden.

I probably should not admit this in print, but I spoke to the poison ivy and told it, “I admire your adaptability, but this is not the place for you.” Then I carefully put it in a bag. Love your enemies, but don’t follow them around or let them steal your joy.

All you need is love

After we figured on how to get Pandora on the new TV the other day, the granddaughters wanted to replace Tahitian music with the Beatles. The oldest of them is about the age I was in 1967 when the Fab Four performed “All You Need Is Love” for the first live, international, satellite TV production. It was transmitted to an estimated 400 million viewers across 25 countries. We made sure to watch it.

In retrospect, the broadcast seems like a sweet moment in a charmed era. And I am shocked at the impact the stubbornly-naive Beatles still have on my descendants. So many people were demanding access to the Garden, then!

There is a fruit we love as soon as we taste it. It is the love that shows us the way back to the Garden. We need it to survive: forgiveness, mercy, peace, reconciliation.  Jesus is the Tree and the Gardener. The Song of Songs writer sings it with the Beatles:

Place me as a seal upon your heart,
For love is as strong as death,
its ardor as unyielding as the grave.
It burns like a blazing fire,
Like a mighty flame.
Many waters cannot quench love.
Rivers cannot wash it away. — 8:6-7

Finding Jesus in the garden

Some people imagine Mary Magdalene singing those lines from the Song of Songs as she prepared Jesus for burial. She was on the way with Jesus in his final hours. She was present for every step of Jesus’ final journey — she was there, at the Cross as he died, there to anoint the body and prepare it for burial, and finally, there as the first witness to Love’s return.  On Easter morning, she goes back to the garden, and there she finds the words of the song are fulfilled. Love is as strong as, and stronger, than death; it’s ardor as unyielding as the grave. No flood can erode it or algorithm dilute it.

I’ve been wondering if I have not been enjoying my work in the garden so much this year, because I am surrounded by an increasing wasteland of a country. My grandchildren are the generation the sociologists keep talking about who inherit the work of the hedge fund robbers, the disillusionment of endless war, the rubble which grifters leave behind and a national debt they will never repay. In the middle of that, like our common little greenspace in the middle of Philly, the Garden speaks to me. “Come,” my Beloved calls out, “Come into the garden, and eat the fruit of the trees!”  Come and eat of love.

Of course, Mary mistook Jesus for a gardener! He’s the Master Gardener in his Garden of Love.  All along he’s been showing us the way back, and now he crosses back, even from death, to show us one last time why we are here.  We’re here to garden with him — to tend and cultivate love and beauty, mercy, compassion, justice, and joy.  It’s why we’ve always been here.  And the Garden has always been there waiting for us to return.

Caryll Houselander, a Roman Catholic writer and poet who died in the 1950s says:

[While] Christ was in the tomb; the whole world was sown with the seed of Christ’s life; that which happened thirty years ago in the womb of the Virgin Mother was happening now, but now it was happening yet more secretly, yet more mysteriously, in the womb of the whole world.  Christ had already told those who flocked to hear Him preach that the seed must fall into the earth, or else remain by itself alone.  Now the seed of His life was hidden in darkness in order that His life should quicken in countless hearts, over and over again for all time.  His burial, which seemed to be the end, was the beginning.  It was the beginning of Christ-life in multitudes of souls.

Over and over again the love sprouts and finds a tender. Maybe it is the gardeners who are saving the world, making the landscape free from poison ivy and Pete Hegseth. Regardless, we can be sure the Master Gardener will rise again in whatever era darkness reigns. Jesus only seems hidden until you run into him on Pandora or in your own backyard.

[Thanks to Matthew Wright for inspiration]