Maybe demographics explain why many of us drift into gardening as the years pass. One of my mother’s favourite stories was about the day, as a tiny diapered tot, I backed into a rose bush—so perhaps destiny is at work. Even as a harried husband and father hanging onto a job, I enjoyed cutting grass and occasionally planting a shrub.
More recently, the attractions of our little backyard have beckoned to dawn weeding and watering. So far, nobody’s offered any prizes for my garden. A fairly successful experiment with tomatoes was abandoned a few years ago when my wife, vice-president of finance in the family, noted that we could buy tomatoes at August markets for six dollars a bushel. Last year, squirrels ate most of fall’s tulip bulbs. The raspberry crop was disappointing. Fungus raided the roses. The marigolds were fine but the pansies failed. The blooms of nameless shrubs ebbed and flowed. I hope as I gaze at the snow banks that, like my golf game, it will be better this year.
Norman Wirzba ignited this minor passion for the garden. Then chair of the philosophy department at Georgetown College, Kentucky, and now research professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke Divinity School, he addressed Faith and the Environment at the annual October series at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal a couple of years ago.
I’m unlikely to become an eco-freak and don’t get me started on Al Gore and “global warming.” Twenty thousand years ago, Canada was covered by glaciers three to four kilometres thick. The climate is changing. Quelle surprise.
But Wirzba takes a different tack in his book, Living the Sabbath. Starting from the Old Testament rule of the sabbath that imposed rest not only on humans but on the Earth that produces our food, he argues in favour of rational stewardship of God’s gifts.
He writes: “God is the ultimate owner of all land, and whatever ownership we enjoy must respect God’s concern that all creation be well cared for.” The Genesis 1 gift of “dominion” does not mean that we rule but that we have been appointed to be responsible stewards “over all the earth,” including my raspberry bushes. The idea is not far removed from the Cree concept of “all my relations,” that we are one with all around us.
Raised on a Lethbridge, Alta., farm, Wirzba promotes gardening as a path for city dwellers to return to the cycles we have forgotten in our busy urban lives, and quotes Wendell Berry’s acknowledgement of something farmers have always known:
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.
The sabbath idea goes further to encompass “menuha, the rest tranquillity, serenity and peace of God … a celebration of, and a sharing in, God’s own experience of delight.”
Last spring, clearing winter’s debris from the garden, the fresh green thrusts of a shrub peeking from the earth caught my eye. Miracles done while we sleep, indeed. Beneath our giant pine tree the ground was littered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of cones. Signs, I thought, of God’s extravagant abundance.
The cycle will soon turn again, and we’ll see if God and I can figure out how to work together to nurture life from the soil. The life will, of course, include those growths that we have chosen to call weeds.
I was bemoaning that particular aspect of my stewardship of the planet one day after church.
“When I’m muttering to myself, down on my hands and knees pulling out weeds,” I said to a young lady in our congregation, “I often wonder why God created them.”
Maybe to get you down on your knees,” she replied.
