The biblical narrative sometimes turns on the encounters that take place in a garden. The garden of Eden is a place of creation and destruction, of carefree joy and cosmic tragedy, of divine fulfilment and human failing. And however we read that story, it portrays in poignant poetry the two poles and entire latitude and longitude of human experience, from innocence to shame, from life affirming stewardship to earth shattering grasping. Gethsemane is the garden where the tragedies and triumphs of human sinfulness become concentrated on the soul of the One who gathers within one human being, the cosmic and human toxins of creation alienated. The Gospel phrase for this anguish, "sweating great drops of blood", and the location of the garden of Gethsemane, make this Gospel episode a cross section of a fallen creation, exposing the age rings of human history which has sweat its own great drops of blood.
I think it's no accident, or incidental stage setting, that the tomb was in Joseph of Arimathea's garden, and that garden the place of resurrection. There's something wonderfully playful about that line of John's, explaining Mary Magdalene's grief-stricken confusion, "thinking him to be the gardener...". Eden the place of lost innocence, Gethsemane the place of God's angst, and that morning scene of so human trauma, of grief and joy, of disbelief and scared to admit it faith - so much of what matters in our faith begins or ends up in a garden.
Kathleen Raine wrote about the garden in terms that make it clear it is a place of healing, and not a place of unreality and retreat from the world. Her poem suggests it may be that we enounter what is most real, most urgent for our flourishing, and most telling for our humanity, in a garden.
I had meant to write a different poem....
I had meant to write a different poem,
But, pausing for a moment in my unweeded garden,
Noticed, all at once, paradise descending in the morning sun
Filtered through leaves,
Enlightening the meagre London ground, touching with green
Transparency the cells of life.
The blackbird hopped down, robin and sparrow came,
And the thrush, whose nest is hidden
Somewhere, it must be, among invading buildings
Whose walls close in,
But for the garden birds inexhaustible living waters
Fill a stone basin from a garden hose.
I think, it will soon be time
To return to the house, to the day’s occupation,
But here, time neither comes nor goes.
The birds do not hurry away, their day
Neither begins nor ends.
Why can I not stay? Why leave
Here, where it is always,
And time leads only away
From this hidden ever-present simple place.
Kathleen Raine
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