Texts: Proverbs 7: 1-13; John 20: 11-18
Even for those of us who are not gardeners, gardens capture our imagination. It is no surprise that Scripture places human beings living first in a garden. When the most ancient of our species moved from wandering as hunter gatherers and settled into places, we created gardens.
The remains of the world’s oldest city Catal Huyuk located on the Anatolian plain in modern day Turkey, established around 7500 BCE, had a garden. When the ancient Egyptians built a mortuary for Metuhotpe II who reigned around 2100 BCE, they designed a garden. The palace at Knossos in Crete dating from the thirteenth century BCE had a garden, mixing fruits, vegetables and flowers much the same way that Thomas Jefferson designed his gardens at Monticello.
What is it about a garden that so enthralls us? “A garden is a portal, a passage into another world, one of your own thoughts and your own making; it is whatever you want it to be and you are what you want to be,” wrote William Longgood. In other words, we become creators while recognizing that we are created, that even we have limits. Anyone who gardens knows that weeds always pop up where you least expect them. Gardening has always had sacred associations and not just in our Judeo-Christian tradition. Buddhism has the Pure Land of the West, a garden where the soul goes before attaining nirvana, the pure state of being. And for those of us who had space only for pots, we have our hero in plant hunter Francis Masson who brought back a palm to Kew Gardens, England, in 1777, which, by the way, is still thriving. It is little wonder that we often meet God in a garden.
But in today’s world, we often stand at the edge of a garden, caught up in our hurry-up lives, getting here and there, not thinking about the way that gardening forces us to stop, to recognize our limits in a gentle way. Nature has its way of telling us that she is in charge. Tornadoes across the Midwest and a glacier the size of Rhode Island crashing into the ocean are ways that Nature displays her anger at what we are doing to the planet. Rather than building gardens we are tearing up the rain forest, using up water without regard for the future, and polluting our earth without regard for the consequences.
The Arara, an indigenous tribe in Brazil, stand at the edge of their garden as they fight the planned construction of the world’s third largest dam. The Belo Monte Dam flooded 160 square miles of forest and dried up the Xingu River, forcing the relocation of more than 20,000 indigenous because they have no river for fishing, their main food source, and no way to travel in the deep interior since the river is also their main source of transportation. The Brazilian government built the huge dam to provide hydroelectric power to the rapidly growing cities of Rio de Janeiro to the north and Sao Paolo to the south. Hydroelectric is cheaper and cleaner than coal, to be sure, but how do we balance the environment with our expanding need for energy? And not just in Brazil, either.
One sees few gardens in coal mining parts of Pennsylvania, where I remember going to Wilkesboro, Pennsylvania, in 1966 with my late husband Bob as we were looking at colleges that had offered him teaching positions. Wilkes College was really lovely but the coal dust was everywhere from the mining communities in the area. I encouraged him to consider New Haven instead. There were more gardens in New Haven.
Standing at the edge of a garden forces us to think about how to balance nature and the limitations she enforces on us and our desire for growth and development. In 1972 -- more than fifty years ago -- the Club of Rome published a study called The Limits to Growth. Back in the 1970s when our demand for energy was much less than now and when we warned about global warming, this report predicted what would happen should we not re-examine the lifestyle we were all heedlessly plunging into.
We are standing at the edge of the garden and if we want that garden to thrive we must reorient our thinking. As a new report to the Club of Rome states, we must look beyond short term, incremental changes and look at our planet as one ecosystem that is being degraded. We are grossly overusing the resources of Mother Earth. The Native Americans who lived here long before our ancestors came understood the importance of a proper relationship with the earth. Moreover, we need to develop a framework that is more equitable and sustainable. The Climate Change Conferences over the past several yearas have shown the difficulties of a divided world wherein the rich live off the poor.
We as Americans will have to learn to share in a real way, not just by handing out our used clothing and pittances to the developing world but by radically altering our lifestyles. Consumption cannot be the basis of our economy as it has been. Just look at how an economic recovery is being framed: it’s getting better because we spend more on Chinese made stuff. There must be a better way to address economic issues. We cannot sustain ourselves at this rate. We will have little, if anything, for our children and grandchildren and if that future has any meaning, then we must address these issues with imagination or there will be no gardens left.
We need to think about how to respond to the issues we face here in Middletown and Monmouth County along the shore, in the wetlands, the issues we face in our state in terms of priorities, and in our Nation in terms of energy and sustainability. Each one of us can do at least one thing to open the portal of the garden door where God enters into our lives and gives us meaning.
Let us pray: We are humbled, O God, by the limits we face as human beings in the face of the power of your creation. Enter into our minds and souls, Holy Creator, to enlarge our imagination to find solutions to environmental degradation and create a more sustainable world where equity and justice exist. In the name of the One who met Mary in the garden, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.