By Brandon Rhodes

“…or speak to the earth, and it will teach you.” -- Job 12:8

Gardening in my experience has been a deeply spiritual practice.  It is a way of engaging God’s creation in a personal and intimate way that I have found to be first of all frustrating, then humbling, next centering, now rewarding, and finally (if I succeed) delicious.  All throughout, I experience gardening as an other-minded discipline.

It is frustrating in the first place because when I first begin a garden I realize that I have little idea of where to begin.  The networks of life and matter and sunshine and water that produce plants are something that even in my third year of gardening are still ungraspable.  I observe that the soil has a much longer history that I do and, although usually just “dirt”, is in truth just as complicated as the broccoli and tomatoes and lettuce I hope it will produce.  Like knowing how to best love another human, I am frustrated at once that I do not have all the answers for what this soil needs.

Physically starting a new garden only compounds the frustration, as it requires considerable labor.  As if it weren’t enough that I feel nearly humiliated before the land’s complexity, I now must clumsily go about hoping that many hours spent bent over a shovel, hoe, and rake will actually satisfy this thing.  Callused hands and an aching back often seem like the only products of my first days in gardening.  Like loving a child or sibling through a rebellious state, I have to trust that all this hard work will in the end bear fruit, because at the start the garden only looks like couple rows of upturned soil!  At this early stage I find it silly that such work – tending and keeping a garden – was humanity’s first vocation, way back in Eden.

As I set to the more delicate work of fertilizing, mulching, and seeding the soil, my hesitant frustration gives way to humility.  I do my best to apply my nascent knowledge of what plants and soil need to thrive, knowing that God made the business of both far grander than I used to give it credit.  Leaning over the rows and gingerly dropping tiny lettuce seeds every couple inches and gently patting a bit of living earth over each, I gasp at how fragile God’s creation really is.  If I put even a quarter-inch too much soil over these seeds, they may never sprout.  And if they do not receive my daily affection in the form of watering, especially in these early days, they will quickly perish.  It is astonishing that every meal I have ever enjoyed came from such delicate, miraculous, and yet utterly plain circumstances as this.  Then again, “From dust we came…”; indeed, I am only alive now because I have eaten so many things which came out of dirt.[1]

As the plants grow, I know that my job was to continue in my care and tending to the soil itself.  It is, of course, what keeps the plants thriving.  And those plants, in the end, are what permit me to live: they feed and nourish me.  Thus in order to receive life and service from the soil, I must immediately humble myself and serve it.  How oddly beatific.

Gardening shows me that my life is inextricably bound to the life of the land.  If I abuse the land in my garden, I am also abusing myself.

My times in the garden also bring some spiritual centering to every day.  During the warmer months I am outside by 7:30 every morning to water and inspect the plots.  I find it to be a delightful quiet time that allows me to pray without succumbing to the wanderings that my mind is so prone to otherwise.  I immediately am re-enveloped in humility before God as Creator as I dutifully inspect the health of the soil, the strength and color of my tomato plants, and do my best to let them tell me what they need.  I see that every plant and every plot is different, and each needs love in different ways.  If, in the Christian vernacular, people have “love languages,” then my times with the plants and God show me that they have love languages, too.

As my squash plants’ blooms re-open at the return of the morning sun, so also my heart merrily and reverently greets my Lord in heaven with prayer and praise.  I am sometimes contentedly quiet before Him as I go about my verdant chores, and at other times I am grinning boyishly about how good a job God did in making these silly little plants.  At other times I am praying in the more regular sense.  Sometimes I even spend time reading my Bible in the middle of my potato patch!  I wonder if those old claims that plants which are prayed near grow better, is actually true.

I also get in the habit of checking on the plants first thing after returning home.  Does anyone need water?  Have the beans’ young tendrils grasped the trellis yet?  My mind is flooded with sweet concern.  Affection for these fragile lives and faith that the season will produce its fruits keep me busy in these ways, and give me tastes of what it may be like as a father some day.  I consider often if this steady care isn’t too far from how the Lord looks after and cares for us.

These daily disciplines, I find, help orient me toward my Creator and reminds me of my status as His creature.  I am beginning to understand why God gave us gardening as our first vocation.

It didn’t take long before I found this hobby to be immensely rewarding.  Seeing these wee plants go from seed to sprout and into ripe maturity warms my heart and much improves the aesthetics of my backyard.  I gaze at the varied and colorful rows with a similar quiet glee that my artist friends take in their work.

I am also rewarded with unexpected encounters with other critters in my garden.  Various bird chirp about me in the mornings and evenings, while ants and slugs occasion my strawberry patch.  When I’m not looking, raccoons steal my radishes and deer graze on my lettuce.  Another time, I find a cat enjoying the warmth provided beneath my cloches.

Tending the garden also becomes a corporate discipline.  Because the garden is adjacent to several Christian community houses, many of our neighbors will see me in our garden and come help weed or inspect.  The crops were chosen according to what they all would enjoy, so as harvest time dawns, the garden becomes an excuse for me to greet them with an armful of carrots, lettuce, or tomatoes.  Serving the food, too, becomes an occasion to invite friends over.  And so, the fruits of the garden become a catalyst for bringing our fellowship closer to one another, to God, and to God’s creation.

Finally, of course, my garden is delicious.  I am reminded that all good things come from God as I revel in the impeccable flavors which only vegetables this fresh can provide.  The freshness and quality of homegrown produce is particularly evident in the basil, radishes, potatoes, broccoli, and tomatoes.  Thank you, God, that you made food so good, and that you provided for this garden and this land.  Thank you for letting me help you in making these tasty foods.  You did good, God.  No wonder this was our first job! 

This entire discipline of cultivating life in little places has kept me constantly other-minded.  It has left no room for self-absorption, save the ongoing tempo of humility that I encountered from the start.  From being sensitive to the needs of the soil’s life, to letting others direct what crops are grown, to beholding that these plants point to the Lord, to joining them in praising God: the gardener’s attention is rarely inward.

I see in the end that this is a spiritual discipline whose other-centeredness is not merely about inner peace and hearing from God and “warm fuzzies.”  It is a discipline of the faith that works in the world for good.  By enjoying the literal fruits of my own labor, I am choosing a way of feeding myself and using land which stands in dazzling contrast to the putrid neglect and creation-destroying ways of modern industrial agriculture.  And so I rest contented that our restoring this tiny bit of Eden both enriched my relationship with God and made His world a better place.