The GoHealth podcast this month highlights just how important gardens have become for many of us during the last 18/19 months of living through Coronavirus lockdown and restrictions. And since September is traditionally the time when we consider how we care for Creation we share an extract from a talk given by outgoing president of the Guild Professor Jim McManus at the Green Health Awards in 2018 focusing on the theological and spiritual significance of gardens..
Gardening is a rich metaphor for lifelong pilgrimage. It was Cardinal Newman who said the only evidence of life is growth and when you stop having growth, you stop having life. The four gardens of scripture are metaphors for what we should be on our Christian journey and in the life of the church:
- The Garden of Eden: a foretaste of what will be.
- The Garden of Gethsemane: a place of suffering and pain, decision and commitment.
- The Garden of Golgotha: the garden of victory.
- The Garden of Paradise: the place of our final rest.
Gardens are shot through so much of the church’s theological tradition. In the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, he speaks of how humans are on an exodus from God yet created to return to him. During our time of earthly life the work of the church is about sanctifying. That’s not just about the sacraments, but the public role of the church, its role in social justice. And what is the metaphor he uses? A garden.
The Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila uses the metaphor of watering a garden for the spiritual life. At first you are doing an awful lot of work, having to draw the water up. But by the end, the rain falls on you, and God does the work while you bask in it. Imagine standing in a cooling gentle rain on an otherwise hot, parched day.
I think we need to learn how to appreciate these different types of watering. It starts with hard work but ends with letting God’s Spirit rain on us, bringing us to a peaceful understanding of what we can do in this world and encouraging us to find balance and joy in the gardens of our living.
Teresa has much to teach us about how we will never have balance until we find an equilibrium between the active life and the spiritual life. We will never have balance until you stop telling God what to do and just let God do.
There is no health without balance. There is balance when we find friendship with God.
Finally, Teresa calls theologians — and everyone else too — to be faithful to Christ. Theologians – and all Christians – should be gardeners — getting their hands dirty, stuck into the earth, nurturing all of creation. She calls us, just as Acts 1 to 5 does, to model this great calling of the church to be the garden; the setting for balance and relationship.