Gardeners are a peculiar lot who, like their gardens, come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. First-rate gardeners produce bushels of veggies each year; others put a tomato plant in the flower bed and call it a garden. During the heart of winter, the full-bloodied gardener is already imagining the produce, while turning the good earth in preparation for that day when the seed can be planted. There is a time to sow, and the true gardener can’t wait for that day to dawn.
What is it that attracts some people to this horticultural endeavor? Is it some primitive drive for survival? Or, on a more noble plane, maybe there is a vocational link with our first parents’ occupation as one of those clowns in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” describes it in an attempt to plan the burial of Ophelia: “There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave makers. They hold up Adam’s profession.” When our fore parents are driven from the automatic Garden of Eden, they started tilling the earth to grow their own grub. And it looks like their descendants will till it ’til kingdom come.
Ever since leaving the Garden of Eden, we’ve been trying to harvest the earth. Part of it is for the survival of the species. Without the potatoes and bread and okra and kale, we could not live. Yet, we do not live by bread alone, and there’s a transcendent quality about gardening that is the soul’s delight. It is communing with Mother Nature, but more than that. There is a tie that binds gardeners into a fellowship. When you till the earth, you begin to understand the common ground, double entendre intended.
One of the funniest stories in all of the scriptures is when Mary first arrived at the tomb on what would become the first Easter. She had no earthly idea of what was going on and innocently mistook Jesus for the cemetery gardener. That might be a fairly good supposition. One of his simplest descriptions of kingdom life was “…like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” He used wheat and tares and lilies of the field and barren fig trees to make his gospel points. Not sure he would be cover material for Garden and Gun magazine, but he spoke with some authority about this great garden in which all God’s children are invited to the table together.
“Are you a gardener?” asked the Easter morning Mary. You bet your life he was a gardener… a master gardener, double entendre still intended. Those early birds in the grave yard that morning almost stumbled over that stardust right in front of them. And the angels that morning asked us all a hard question: why are you seeking the living among the dead?
Very thought provoking, hit me right this morning