Guroian with God in the garden

I seemed to recall today that the Armenian Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian is an accomplished gardener, and that he'd written at least one book about gardening and theology. Well, I found a webpage from the public radio program Speaking of Faith, devoted to Guroian and his teaching on gardening and God. You can hear or download a podcast of his interview on the program, and read excerpts from his work. Here's an excerpt from one of his meditations, in which he explains how gardening "has entirely transfigured my vision of life." Gotta confess that this really excites me about this little garden that we're planting, and draws me into the idea of tending it as a spiritual exercise. And it makes me want to read Vigen's gardening book, too.

Here in Culpeper, I have divided my vegetable garden into raised beds of triangular, rectangular, and square shapes. Shape, size, texture, and color matter to me as much in the vegetable garden as in the perennial beds. For the sake of beauty, I gladly leave the ruffled red cabbage to grow long beyond its time for harvest. I let the mustard reach high with bright yellow bouquets. I cultivate carefully the asparagus row not just for the taste of its buttery spears but also for the verdant fern foliage that shoots up after the spring cutting. I let volunteer sunflower, cosmos, and cleome seedlings grow where they choose. And I sneak orange nasturtiums into the hills of sweet-potato vines. If we modern people thought of our world as a garden, if we gardened more, then I think all the other creatures and things that grow in the ground would be so much better off. Beauty can save the world! But that depends on how much we love beauty and seek it in our lives.

Gardening is not only making the world around us beautiful once more but letting beauty transform us. Gardening grows from our deep longing for salvation, so that beauty fills our lives. "Beauty," writes Berdyaev, "is God's idea of the creature, of man and of the world. … The transfiguration of the world is the attainment of beauty" (The Destiny of Man, p. 247).

In my garden, I take hope from Jesus' promise to the repentant thief on the cross that he will be with his Lord in Paradise. I know that the sweat of my brow and tears of penance bring Paradise near in my backyard. For a garden is a profound sign and deep symbol of salvation, like none other, precisely because a garden was our first habitation, and God has deemed it to be our final home. Beauty is the aim of life. God imagined it so. God spoke the Word, and his invisible Image of Beauty became a visible garden. "The fertility of the earth is its perfect finishing," writes St. Basil of Caesarea, "growth of all kinds of plants, the up springing of tall trees, both productive and sterile, flowers' sweet scents and fair colours, and all that which … came forth from the earth to beautify her, their universal Mother" (Hexaemeron, homily 2). Beauty will transfigure the chaos and deformity of our wounded world into the peace and harmony of a cosmos that God, from the beginning, proclaims to be good and beautiful.

I know that the beauty I aim at in the garden lies hidden within the innate potentiality of the earth and the seeds that the sun and the rain bring to life. I must divide the ground to fit the needs and the habits of the plants that grow. I must prepare the soil and supply it with minerals and nutrients. I must sow the seeds in an orderly way and thin the seedlings so that they have room to spread and capture the light of the sun. And I must cultivate the earth to let in the air and the water.

Alas, the garden has taught me that beauty is both gift and accomplishment. As gift, I accept it humbly and without pride, gratefully and not greedily. As gift, beauty comes from above and beyond my poor power to bring it into existence or to experience it....

For you gardeners among the readership, I'd love to read your own thoughts about how gardening affects your spiritual life.