THE PRIEST
AS GARDENER
‘Priests are to be servants and shepherds among the
people to whom they are sent…They are to be messengers, watchmen and stewards
of the Lord’.[1]
The
language of the Ordinal gives familiar images of the priest, replete with
Biblical allusions and imagery.[2] In
his reappraisal of the work of Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s classic The
Christian Priest Today (1972) in
an anniversary lecture, Rowan
Williams adds a new image, that of the priest as weaver, one who interprets and
draws together the stories that form and shape the community that the priest
serves. In this blog I want, humbly, to suggest and explore another image, that
of priest as gardener. As it continues I have written on the basis that the
word ‘gardener’ can be replaced by the word ‘priest’, and ‘garden’ be replaced
by ‘human spirit’ or ‘church’, such are the parallels.
It reminds me of a story when I
started my second curacy, before I was licensed and no one knew who I was. A
woman came into our new garden as I was chopping some overgrown things down.
She was clearly looking for someone and said to me, 'Are you the gardener? Can
you tell me where the keys to the church hall are?' Nice to be mistaken for the
gardener.
Of Gardens
Gardens
feature in the Bible as locations that are, and represent, a place of proximity
to God in God’s creative and redemptive purposes. In the Old Testament, the
Garden of Eden is the place where Adam and Eve dwell, initially in harmony with
God, before fracturing that relationship (Genesis 2.15 ff), and it is also a
place where the man and woman hide from God (Genesis 3.8); the garden in the
Song of Songs is a place where the loved purses the beloved (Song of Songs 6.2).
In the gospels the Garden of Gethsemane is where Jesus bears the weight of the
fallen creation to reverse ‘Adam’s fall’ in saying ‘yes’ to the Father (John
18.1); and in the Garden of Resurrection, which is in such close proximity to
the place of crucifixion (John 19.41), Mary Magdalene’s tear-filled search for
her Lord sees her find the beloved (John 20.15).
These
gardens interconnect typologically: Adam and the New Adam; the lover’s pursuit
in Song of Songs, Mary Magdalene’s in the garden of resurrection. In Eden and
the Garden of Resurrection the true gardener is God.
Of Gardeners
The task of
a gardener is to cultivate, tend and nurture a garden. The gardener does this
to (co)create something beautiful and that grows, not to the gardener’s glory,
but as something for everyone to behold and for God to delight in. The garden
is an offering beyond itself and is subject to forces beyond the gardener’s
control. So then, the garden, like the human spirit or church community is a
microcosm of the world; or, is it the world, the Kingdom, in embryo? Like the
trees of the field the plantings of the garden will ‘clap their hands’ (Isaiah
55.12), or in the words of the canticle Benedicite, omnia opera, ‘O all ye Green Things
upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever’.[3]
The
gardener intercedes for the garden. The prayers of Rogationtide are perhaps
more agricultural than horticultural, but the same principle applies: the
gardener asks God’s blessing on the garden.[4] The
gardener knows, like St Paul, that whilst planting and watering it is God who gives
the growth (1 Corinthians 3.6). The tending of the garden is a work of trust on
the part of the gardener and one in which grace is bestowed.
There is
nothing the gardener enjoys more than to perambulate around the garden. The
poet George Herbert interpreted the ‘beating the bounds’, the traditional
Rogation procession, ‘as a means of asking God’s blessing on the land, of
preserving boundaries, of encouraging fellowship between reconciling neighbours
with the reconciling of differences, and of charitable giving to the poor’.[5] The
gardener knows that whilst boundaries are in the mind of the gardener: bees,
birds, butterflies and dandelion seeds do not observe boundaries. In gardens
boundaries are trnagressed. There is cross fertilisation, literally. The
gardener has to live with and accept this graciously.
Biodiversity
is crucial to support the ecosystem of the garden. Plants that may not be
desired by the gardener nourish and support the life of other deeply valuable
aspects of garden life. The caterpillars that are a nuisance become the
pollenating butterflies. Even 'weeds' (insert names as applicable) have a place
in a healthy garden. That which is deemed a weed by the gardener can be a thing
of beauty; it can be redeemed and seen as a blessing to the garden.
The gardener
has to be endlessly patient. There are many pressures to short-circuit
patience. Planting of rapid growing shrubs or ground covering plants and those
that provide instant splashes of colour are easy to do. But they will need to
be replaced season by season. We do not plant many oak trees any more. In the
eighteenth century Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown changed landscapes with a
patient vision knowing that neither he nor his aristocratic employer would see
instant benefits. The landscape would look its best when trees had matured and
lakes had reeds around them. And that would be long after his day.
The
gardener has to take particular care in transplanting. Seedlings are delicate
and do not always take root in new soil. Indeed the gardener has to attend to
the whole garden but know that some plants are more self-sufficient than
others. The gardener’s task is inter-generational. The youngest plant can bloom
and be beautiful as can the mature plant; each will need different treatment.
The
gardener can only work with the garden that has been entrusted. So it would be
impossible to create the gardens of Sissinghurst into the Australian outback.
The gardener has to pay heed to the soil conditions of the garden as well as
the local climate and conditions, what the French viticulturists would call the
terroir. A gardener is on a hiding to
nothing in attempting to replicate the planting of a garden from elsewhere and
to not pay attention to the realities of the terroir of their own garden.
Like the
vine grower, the gardener has to prune (John 15.1-2). Pruning helps
healthy growth, can increase fruiting and cuts away disease. On first sight
pruning looks brutal or harsh yet it is profoundly necessary. Furthermore
pruning can benefit other plants as well as the pruned one. Pruning enables light
to get to dark places to allow those plants growing in the shade of others to
flourish, although some plants are shade loving and the gardener needs to
honour that. The full sun will impoverish those plants.
From time to
time the gardener has also to tie up and support those plants that cannot stand
by their own strength. The trellis is needed to ‘bind up and heal’. Gardeners
also need to feed and nourish the soil. Feeding is a task of the gardener. The
need for patient digging in of nourishment and nutrients, watering in drought
but knowing some plants draw from deep down and not just at the surface (cf Jer
17.7,8).
‘You cannot bear the weight of this calling
in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God…Pray earnestly for
the gift of the Holy Spirit.[6]
This is a
profoundly Trinitarian vision into which the gardener is bound. In the
gardener’s task we see the Triune God: the Father, the source of all being and
life, the Creator, who spreads the garden before us; we see the Son, in the
redemptive capacity with the Father, to recreate the garden as the New Adam;
the Holy Spirit in the Spirit’s boundless creativity, sustenance, beauty and
diversity of gifts, the Spirit which enables even ‘the desert [to] blossom and
burst into song’ (Isaiah 35.1).
[1]
Common Worship: Ordination Services,
Study Edition, p. 37.
[2]
Common Worship: Ordination Services,
Study Edition, p. 37. This edition gives biblical references for these
images.
[3]
Book of Common Prayer, p. 9.
[4]
Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p.
610.
[5]
Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p.
597.
[6]
Common Worship: Ordination Services,
Study Edition, p. 39.
