God and the Garden

Spiritual conversions of the gardening kind

Red Hook, last summer; neighborhoods here are filled with these little Catholic grottos, and I love them all

We’ve all heard by now how helpful gardening can be for easing depression and anxiety. Magazines and Substacks are full of articles talking up the psychological benefits, so you really don’t need for me to go on about it here. On Gardeners’ World Monty Don regularly preaches the gospel of gardening for mental health (and not just on TV but on podcasts, too—this one is especially good!). And as someone who has been dealing with depression and anxiety for most of my life, I know firsthand how much getting my hands in the dirt can help my mood and make me a nicer person to be around. I’ve been pretty depressed this week (I blame my broken toe and not being able to run—running is my other unofficial anxiety med), but I just did a little bit of gardening on the terrace and came in and felt so much lighter. It wasn’t even a happy gardening job either: addressing a mass bulb casualty situation involving a rat or squirrel, ugh. But the sun was on my face and my hands were in the dirt, and for a second all was well.

Gardening is great for soothing and comforting, for softening the edges of grief and heartache and anger and annoyance. But can it do more than that? Can it be more? I’ve never forgotten hearing our patron saint Monty’s description of being anointed with the gardening spirit. I heard it on a podcast one day while out planting something or other, and it resonated so much with me that I had to stop and listen to it twice. I wish I could remember which podcast it was, but I think that it’s a story he tells fairly often; this time, to a podcast I’ve never heard of called The Dish (via The Mirror):

"I'd been expelled from a few schools and I was sort of fairly wayward, and I remember coming home from school, having a cup of tea, and going out into the garden and I remember I was sowing carrots, and I had this incredible, ecstatic moment of feeling the sunshine, of smelling the earth, of holding the seed in my hand, and it was a kind of beatific experience of just knowing that this was everything I had ever wanted, this was the whole world in this moment."

I don’t think Monty Don is religious, necessarily, but it’s a spiritual moment. Almost Teresa of Ávila.

Me, I grew up religious, but always had a hard time connecting. I wanted to believe, but I struggled to feel any real connection with what we were taught and the way we were taught it and the place in which we were taught it. We were small town America evangelical Christian; our church was very sparse and Plain Jane Protestant, and the only things I really liked about it were the old 19th century hymns that we sung because the lyrics were so lovely.

I also was a snob, very pretentious (funny I say was!). The only things I cared about doing in high school were playing the piano and reading books. I still wanted to believe, but I was a contrarian and had to find my own doorway. I remember going to a youth group at a huge church, (one of those megachurches that look like shopping malls) with all the kids around me lifting their arms and crying while singing contemporary praise and worship songs, and I just looked at them, baffled, and then at myself, wondering what was wrong with me for not being able to feel what they were feeling. The kids were—by the looks of it, at least—having their own Teresa of Ávila moments while singing these songs, and there I was, silently reading the lyrics projected onto giant screens and wondering why they were so poorly written.

But, books! I was reading Anna Karenina then, mainly for the tragic love story, only for the Levin-religious-ephiphany-in-the-fields subplot to come out from behind and sideswipe me:

The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when his arms no longer seemed to swing the scythe, but the scythe itself his whole body, so conscious and full of life; and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work accomplished of its own accord. These were blessed moments.

If I couldn’t find God in the megachurch maybe I could find Him in nature? I wish I could say that I put down the Tolstoy and went outside and started pulling weeds in my dad’s garden, but I wouldn’t start gardening for another 15 years or so. Back then I was a pale little thing afraid of sunburns and dirt and people, so I stayed inside with my books.

If I had anything close to a religious epiphany in high school, surely it was brought about by reading the old copy of Surprised by Joy that had been on our family bookshelf for years. Evangelicals love C.S. Lewis, so I wasn’t expecting much. I went in anticipating something dry and judgmental and instead was surprised to find a love letter to literature with some incidental religious bits thrown in. Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s very much a book about finding meaning through literature, but also about about finding God through unexpected doorways. In Lewis’ case (and in mine) perhaps a library door. Or can it be through a garden arbor?

As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s "enormous bliss" of Eden . . . comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. . . . -and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.

So strange for C.S. Lewis, fellow bookworm and indoor cat, to experience an epiphany triggered by nature and flowers and by memories of a garden, even if it was only a toy garden. Again, at the time I didn’t instantly put down the book and rush out to the backyard, but I do remember feeling something as I read it. A desire and a longing, maybe. But like his, mine didn’t stick around.

Not long afterwards I went off to college—an Evangelical school heavy on rules and light on beauty (we couldn’t drink, smoke, or dance—Drew teases me and asks if it was like Footloose, and it was! I’d laugh about it if it wasn’t so sad), and I gave up on God sometime during one of the Bush administrations. I can’t remember which one, though I guess it doesn’t matter (neither of them were good).

But sometimes over the years that sense of desire and longing would come back. Maybe through books or music, but more often than not it was through nature, and when I finally took it up, through gardening.

Two years ago, while potting up dahlias in my parents’ screened-in porch, feeling the sun streaming in as I transplanted the seedlings into red plastic (frat party) cups, I felt it again. Not necessarily C.S. Lewis’ longing as much as Monty Don’s sense of perfect momentary bliss. I didn’t know what was happening with my life at the time, but I knew that as long as I could plant and grow in some capacity that all would be OK, and at that very moment it was enough.

Now I garden on a terrace in Brooklyn, potting up flowers in the sunshine as old hymns ring out from the bell tower of a nearby church. I don’t go to that church, but I have been going to an Episcopal church in the neighborhood ever since last summer. I started attending a few months after my dad died—everything seemed awful, I felt like I was drowning. I had the garden, but I knew I needed something more. Church seemed scary, but the Episcopal church less so, at least to me, since its values are more like my own: more liberal, more inclusive. It doesn’t forbid dancing, for one thing!

Sometimes I’m not sure what I believe, but I do know that I’d like to believe in something beyond myself, and I already know that—being the obnoxious contrarian that I am—I have to find my own doorway in order for me to get anywhere. But when I first went to church last September the liturgy was filled with Song of Solomon nature imagery and the priest even brought up Wendell Berry in the sermon, so, I wondered, could this be a doorway? And does it go through an arbor? I guess I’ll find out.