by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, June 1, 2003
In an essay some time ago in The Christian Century, Anthony Robinson comments on the parable from the gospel of Matthew, "Often called "the parable of the workers in the vineyard", [this story] might better be described as "the parable of the generous landowner". It would be difficult to imagine a parable that is at once more disturbing and yet more relevant to our lives and society. It offends our sense of justice and fair play. It puts a finger, none to gingerly, on that most common human experience -- the sense that others have gotten more than their due and that we have not received what we deserve….
If we find ourselves identifying with the first-hired workers who "have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat", that is probably as Jesus and Matthew intended. We think of all the times we arrived early and stayed late, all the committees we have served on, all the wash we have done, all the work we have undertaken, and we say, "It's not fair!"
[But] are we really like the all-day workers? Or are we the inheritors of gift and grace,…of mercy and blessing that are not strictly correlated to our efforts and virtues, and are far greater and wilder than we imagine or deserve? Is it possible that from God's perspective, we've all shown up at 5:00pm? The point is not that fair play and justice do not matter. The point is to gain a fresh view of the world in which…grace, gratitude and graciousness are [central to] the equation."
I wanted to spend some time this morning thinking about grace and gratitude, along with some of the other lessons that come my way every time spring rolls around and I can again begin grubbing around in the garden. I probably should start with a little apology, since I know there are some among you who are not active gardeners. There may even be a few who would at least claim that you'd rather walk over hot coals barefoot than spend an hour or two weeding in the flower bed. Nevertheless, I think that even for the non-gardeners, there might be some small insight to be gleaned from the whispers and intimations of holiness that some of us think we hear from time to time when we enter our gardens.
I didn't become a gardener with any intention toward self-improvement or gaining spiritual insight. Actually, I didn't set out to become a gardener at all: it was more like a chance encounter that suddenly blossoms into a passionate romance.
I had done some gardening when I was growing up in Spokane -- in fact my mother assigned all four of her children a small plot as our own, and I think I was the only one who really took an interest in it. But my first adult garden wasn't planted until many years later, when I moved to Winston-Salem in 1987 to serve my first congregation. By that time I had lived like a nomad for almost twelve years, sometimes moving more than once a year and to places as far apart as Tanzania, Spain and Nicaragua. So when I arrived in Winston-Salem, the idea of a garden was really the idea of stability: sinking roots, as literally as possible.
I rented a tiny house with plum trees and dogwood in the front yard and a glorious, untended jungle of grass and honeysuckle in the back: the perfect place to start a garden. I approached it with a cavalier attitude. I didn't do any research or reading on gardening or soil composition or on the kinds of plants that would thrive there. I didn't even have a clue what some of the most basic words referred to, like "mulch", and I had no real preferences about what I wanted to grow. I did have a neighbor who took pity on me as I whacked away with a hoe, who came out with her tiller, plowed up a plot for me and told me what I should dig into the ground to break up the North Carolina red clay.
But I walked into the whole thing casually, with no real sense of investment; and then, as is sometimes the case in relationships, my heart took off without my cool rationality to balance it. Long before the relationship with that first garden was fully established, I had fallen hopelessly in love. Fortunately my garden made it easy to believe it actually returned my affection. It flourished with what seemed a minimum of attention and care, and gave me lettuce and spinach, peas and radishes before people in the Northeast could even see the ground through the snow -- a memory that haunts me every spring!
Before the end of that summer I had harvested strawberries, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers, cantaloupe and watermelon, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower. I don't even like cauliflower! But it was as though I were discovering for the first time that because all these things come from the earth, they could come from my earth. Scattered through the vegetables in a chaotic jumble were flowers I picked out at random: sweet William and Japanese irises, zinnias and marigolds, pansies and phlox and various other flowering wonders whose names I've forgotten. All of this wild and glorious abundance grew on a plot of ground no more than four yards by six.
When I moved to Connecticut in January of '91, it was as painful to leave that little garden as it was to leave my friends. I salved my sorrow by digging up divisions of some of my favorite perennials. Although they're common plants and would be easy to replace, I've now dug up their divisions three more times when I've changed homes, and it both fills me with wonder and gives me a powerful sense of continuity to realize that the irises and wild phlox and hostas in my current garden are directly linked to that Winston-Salem garden I planted fifteen years ago.
I've learned a lot in those fifteen years, mostly by trial and error. I've learned to pay attention when a label tells me something will grow to be six to eight feet tall. I've learned all about mulch, and enough about soil to finally quit hacking away at Connecticut rock piles and build raised beds instead. I've learned all about organic fertilizing and pest control, and I've learned that bad things happen to good plants: no matter what I do, some things won't survive.
But more important than these practical things are the more subtle lessons. Most of what we would recognize as central religious notions come into a new focus in the work of the garden, at least for me. They live there in the garden. At the top of the list is grace, of course. In the garden, I understand what Jesus might have had in mind in claiming that the kingdom of God is like the generous landowner. As might be true for most of you, my first inclination in hearing that parable is to identify with the workers who took care of the vineyard all day long, and then felt short-changed by the generosity that landed on the late-comers, even though they themselves were paid exactly what they'd agreed to.
We tend to want things to add up: we want to believe that what comes our way is more or less what we deserve, that hard work is well-rewarded, that there is an equation we can count on between what we expend of ourselves and what we get in return. We think in terms of what we earn or deserve, and we want everyone else to get what they earn or deserve too -- so it's hard to see a sudden largesse descend on someone else without the wistful or jealous or angry question about how come we didn't get more?
So I like the question that Anthony Robinson asks: Is it possible that from God's perspective, we've all shown up at 5:00pm? Everything is gift and grace, after all, and very little of the abundance or the hardship of our lives comes to us through the merit system.
In the garden, I remember this. We can tend the soil and make it richer, supply the water and pull up the weeds -- but we don't make the iris bloom or form the peas in their pods, sprout the potatoes in the dark mounds of soil or teach the eggplant how to shape its elegant purple load. It still seems magic to me, fantastic, unbelievable, when I put a small black seed into the ground and end up from July all through September with a Mexican sunflower plant that's ten feet tall, covered with flaming blooms. This year something even more wonderful happened, when I went out in April, before there had been a chance to plant anything at all, to find oakleaf lettuce sprouting all on its own in two neat little parallel rows, the consequence of my laziness in the fall in letting the lettuce go to seed.
A garden cultivates wonder; and I find that the wonder stays with me, so that my eyes become more open to the giftedness of life outside of the garden as well. And woven through the underlying grace, there are other religious elements that grow with the garden. I'm pretty sure that if we garden alertly, we come face to face with most of the deadly sins: Pride when our garden looks fantastic, envy when the neighbor's garden looks better; avarice and gluttony, leading us to plant more than we can tend and water; sloth when it all gets to be too much, anger when the dog decides to dig up the freshly planted bulbs. The virtues are in there too: patience and prudence can get planted along with our seeds, sometimes even forbearance and compassion and forgiveness, if we're lucky.
And then there are the ethical issues. What do we do with the old commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill', or the more stringent Buddhist directive to 'do no harm'? Is it okay to kill what we like to call the lower life forms -- say, slugs and aphids -- but somehow wrong to kill once you get up in the area of moles and rabbits and woodchucks? I once asked my friend Bodhin, a Buddhist abbot, how the Buddhist precept "do no harm" should play out for a gardener? How do you "do no harm" and at the same time keep the varmints from doing irreparable harm to the precious plants? His answer sounded less than enlightened -- something politic like, "Well, do as little harm as possible". It doesn't solve the problem, if you're a gardener who is also pursuing a spiritual life.
In our yard now, we once had a problem with voles, but it was a problem solved neatly by the cat, who has no ethics but who finds hunting voles to be our equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. It isn't so easy for me: for instance, when I discovered that the primary thieves of my strawberries were some very pretty ground squirrels with massive appetites, I covered the plants with mesh. But early one morning I went out to find one of them hopelessly twined up in the netting and pinned to the ground. As I cut the squirrel free, watching its terrified heart beat under the beautiful striped fur, I realized I'd lost the strawberry war, and I relinquished the mesh.
But the ethical dilemmas persist. Despite the precept to do no harm, I not only do harm in the garden, I willfully kill: I kill slugs and aphids, Japanese beetles and cutworms and caterpillars. I do it organically and hope there is some redemption in this, but I don't do it with an entirely easy mind. That's as it should be: the garden keeps me alert to compromise, and keeps me aware of the questions of right and wrong, whether or not I'm sure of the answers.
The religious issues of life and death appear in another way in the garden as well, as do the very religious notions of resurrection and faith. The most available demonstration of life to death and back again comes in the form of annuals, which really do die at the end of the season. In their death, if we are collectors, they leave us a handful of small dry seeds. The seeds never look like life -- especially not when compared to the glory of the plants from which they came, now gone. But that's the miracle: that life is preserved in these small and apparently lifeless things that we cradle in our palms, carefully pour into envelopes and label for the next spring.
And when it comes to resurrection, a whole new vision of it lies in the lowly -- but in its own way glorious -- compost pile. I don't know of any other demonstration of resurrection -- of death transformed into life -- that's more available than this. The plants of the garden that wilt and die in the fall; the trimmings of the garden through the summer, the leaves when they fall, and our own leavings from the daily table -- all are carefully collected and added to the dead pile that turns itself, miraculously, into life.
UU minister Dennis Hamilton writes, "I turn the compost with reverence, for it is not just a practical way to digest garbage -- it is a metaphor for universal salvation. It promises that beneath our follies and failures, our imperfect lives, there is a deeper significance and a limitless acceptance waiting."
When I walk to the compost pile carrying an offering of kitchen leavings -- the bucket in my hands stinking because of having sat there for a few days -- there is something a little magic about turning the mixed pile out in the back yard and finding that the smell that greets me there is not one of accumulated garbage, but instead the smell of sweet soil. And in witnessing that process I know a little better about the weaving of death and life into and around each other -- about how death, as inevitable as it is for all life, in turn inevitably gives way again to life. I have known passionate gardeners who, as they approach their own death, ask to have their ashes scattered into their compost piles. That sounds like a pretty good ending to me, too.
The best articulation of the sentiment I've ever heard was a poem written by Pattianne Rogers, called "Post Humus":
Scatter my ashes in my garden
so I can be near my loves.
Say a few honest words, sing a gentle song,
join hands in a circle of flesh.
Please tell some stories about me
making you laugh. I love to make you laugh.
When I've had time to settle, and green
gathers into buds, remember I love blossoms
bursting in spring. As the season ripens
remember my persistent passion.
And if you come in my garden
on an August afternoon
pluck a bright red globe,
let juice run down your chin and the seeds
stick to your cheek. When I'm dead
I want folks to smile and say, That Patti,
she sure is some tomato!
In the end, in all of my musings in the garden, I'm brought back to grace. It is grace that we have the chance to work in partnership with the stuff of the planet, and help it bring forth more abundant life. It is grace, giftedness, that we can find in the quiet and methodical work of cultivation a meditation, a spiritual practice, a discipline: a work of hand and mind and soul that open our eyes more fully to the wonder of this world and of our lives.
For some, a thing as common as a garden may not seem much of a religious experience. For me, the amazing little plots of ground I cultivate are unending miracles, and they make me vividly aware of what it really means to enjoy the "good life". The endless motion and striving around us, the push toward more and more things or activities, would try to teach us that the "good life" arrives through more money or respect, more exotic leisure options or racier objects. But the elusive, lovely hum of contentedness is what we're really after and it can lie in something as common and as wondrous as a little piece of fertile ground. It makes me feel deeply blessed, and grateful.