I am not a gardener. Never have been. Don't plan to become one.
I did receive a snake plant for my birthday in February this year, and I'm proud to say that it's still alive. So alive in fact, I think it's about time to transplant it to a bigger pot.
I'm not a gardener, but I do appreciate gardeners. For years I have benefited from the bounty of various gardeners in whatever neighborhood I was living in at the time.
And thinking of all those people from all those years, I have to agree with Kate and Jessica when they say, "Gardening requires a certain kind of hope, envisioning new life in the midst of despair and death. Gardeners toil and trowel, pluck and prune, all for a single bloom. The very act of gardening is one of hope" (p 226).
This entry reminds me that the book Good Enough was originally intended as a Lenten devotional, hence the 40ish devotionals. And this entry was meant to be read on Easter Sunday - the same day we read about Mary Magdalene wandering around in the garden, on the verge of losing all hope because Jesus' body has disappeared.
She sees Jesus but mistakes him for the gardener.
Kate writes, "What a strange detail: the resurrected Christ is mistaken for a gardener.
Maybe it's because he stole the gardener's clothes, since his were stripped and gambled over.
Maybe because Jesus looks like his dad, the first gardener, who tended Eden barefoot.
Maybe Jesus looks like the new Adam, the head gardener for the new Eden of the new heavens and new earth.
Maybe it's because he carries the pruning shears of a vinedresser, the careful tender of our souls, ready to pluck and plant, uproot and cutback.
Maybe he looks ready to cultivate new life, to pull us toward resurrection with his fingers digging in among the worms.
Or maybe this gardener looks like he knows something about hope - hope that Mary desperately needs" (p 228).
(I like that last option the best. I'm totally going to use this whole section in a sermon someday, with proper attribution of course.)
Gardeners know, like The Good Gardner, that a seed must be buried in order for it to grow.
"When things look most lost, most dark, most covered, most long-gone, most hopeless ... that's when the seed is undergoing the most important change. Through its death, it might produce much fruit" (p 229)
Over the course of these last 4oish days, I have felt almost the whole range of emotions a human can feel, and I'm guessing you have too. And I hope reading this book has been an encouragement to you, especially an encouragement to look directly into all those emotions and to explore what is lying underneath them.
God loves you -- ALL of you and your life, even the parts of you that you don't want to acknowledge. And the parts you think are imperfect but really are good enough which is in fact good enough. And your body when it lets you down. And the losses you grieve. And the absurdities that fill your heart with joy. The sacred times and places where you hear God speaking to you most clearly.
And I hope more than anything else this journey has led you to a place of hope - bright hope - because really, in the end, that's all that matters: that we do our best to create sacred rhythms in our lives that train us to always look for the glimpses of hope that God scatters in our lives every day of the week but can only be seen by eyes that are searching for them.
"The seed in the ground, the body in the tomb - this is a picture of defiant hope. All of the labor and sweat and love and precious time for a single bloom. Delicate and bold. Brief but memorable.
Alleluia, indeed."
Pastor Allison
