Homecoming :
Stories of Living in God's Way
Shera Jenne- The spiritual practice of gardening
In today’s hectic world, for me, feeling connected to God has always been about getting back to basics. Getting away from traffic, bills, housework, and busyness to a place where the pace slows and I try to remember What Life’s All About. Whether it’s a church service, an idea, or a place- it has to be stripped of all unnecessary distractions. I don’t like bells and whistles. And for me, the “place” has always been outside- ever since I was a little girl. If I go weeks without getting away- getting in the woods or on a hike, I begin to crave it. It is there that I can strip away all the distractions of everyday life and finally feel the Divine. I’ve prayed better in the woods than anywhere else. So living in God’s way has always included these times alone in the world God made.
So it was not a big surprise that when Bill and I bought our first house I took to gardening immediately. The first year was the most exciting. We spent an entire season ripping out poison ivy, honeysuckle, and dead bushes. It was easy to envision a grand plan for the future. Vegetable gardens! Butterfly bushes! Native flowers! Stepping stones leading to frog ponds and … well- we dream big for a small yard.
After a long day of getting dirty I felt wholesome and alive. Every weekend was a vacation from my very stressful job. Digging in the dirt brought me back to “the basics”- what could be more pure, what could be closer to God’s plan for us than toiling in the dirt?
The next year changed my tune. If anything- the next year I came to a clear understanding as to why God’s punishment for Adam and Eve was to condemn them to eking out a living working the soil!
My first passionate gardening project was an attempt to grow tomatoes. There is truly nothing like a red juicy homegrown tomato. I just stuck some seeds in the soil and waited for the magic to happen! They would be organic! The magic, as it turned out, was a tomato blight that withered every leaf of my garden no matter how much I watered. (And apparently watering can make it worse.) It was very disappointing to buy tomatoes at the farmers market that summer, but I was willing to try again.
The next year I found all sorts of remedies for tomato blight- both organic and not. I did them all. And while my neighbor’s plants withered, mine thrived. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. So did the squirrels. Nearly every other day the clever squirrels harvested a tomato and deposited it- HALF eaten- on my picnic table for my inspection. I quickly covered the tomatoes in netting. They quickly figured out how to get in. I sprayed a pepper concoction on them. They said salsa is good. I left my cat out in the yard… and he watched with detached amusement as they ravaged my garden.
I began to fantasize vividly about bb-guns and slingshots- or keeping a bobcat as a pet. After a several weeks of this I understood many of the reasons why wildlife was obliterated as settlers marched across America. They were competing for food. This animal instinct rose in me, too. I wanted all the squirrels… dead. What happened to the pure and wholesome feelings I’d had in those early days? What happened to being outside making me feel closer to God? What about squirrels being part of God’s creation? This gardening thing had clearly thrown me a curve ball. It was making me frustrated and angry. I have considered finding a new hobby.
But now that frost has settled on my blighted beds, it’s easy to see the simple metaphor at work here. I always expect things to come easy- my faith and my tomatoes. And it doesn’t always work that way. It’s cliché, I know, but sometimes the weeds really do choke out the good news in our lives, or- the squirrels eat it. If I want to continue gardening as a means to live in God’s way I’ll have to take the bad with the good. It will sometimes be a struggle- and I’ll have to realize that even connecting with God is not always that easy. But every now and then, if you’re disciplined, you get a sweet red tomato out of the deal.
