Mistaken for a gardener

It’s my new goal: to be mistaken for a gardener. I’m doing my prep, sitting on the couch watching Costa and the team on Gardening Australia, then looking out my window and dreaming of what might evolve in our urban backyard. I know, it’s a slow burn start…

But slow is ok. It may be even better for our overrun souls.

Gardens, of course, have become therapy for many. Perhaps there’s something vital about being involved with what takes months, seasons, even years to grow. The organic is slow. Life is slow, but we have become rushed. I’m sensing that slowly working with a garden might reconnect me to rhythms that nurture, hold and heal. Like most of us, I’m regularly ‘run off my feet’ and I’ve spent decades trying to ‘change the world’, or at least, work with and celebrate those who are seeking to transform difficult times and places. I have learnt that this is also long term work. Social and political transformation requires a gardening of the soul and relationships. It requires preparation, planning, planting and weeding. And sometimes, of course, a fight for even a plot to garden at all…

So yes, I’m thinking about being mistaken as a gardener as we consider the possibility of creating an actual community garden at our Malvern Hill site in Croydon. There’s a sizeable grassed area at the rear that is currently leased to the Burwood Council as a green space. It’s just grass and a few shoddy council benches in need of repair. It’s a nice place for the occasional person to sit with their dog. But it could be so much more. A few of us are dreaming of it as a place of welcome; garden beds, kids from our weekly playgroup enjoying picking fruit; flowers and plants painting fresh colour into the site. It’s a place with full northern sun; what if it became a place full of community, lit up by the joy of sharing in the good things of life?

But again, take it slow. It takes time to build the relationships that nurture community. Place-making takes time: months, years, even decades. To be good collaborators you have to get to know one another. I’m still at the beginning of that journey here in Burwood, Croydon and the inner west.

To this end I was encouraged in my journey over Easter that taking it slow pays off, no matter how hard the circumstances. As we know, the circumstance for Jesus and his friends got as hard as they come that first Easter. Yet on the other side of Good Friday the story takes us to Easter morning, and, in John’s account, to - yes - a garden. There, Mary Magdalene is weeping. Jesus approaches her and she mistakes him for the gardener. But it is when he speaks her name that she recognises him. The unmistakable connection of a known voice is joyful, powerful! In moments of despair, loss and grief it is priceless and life-giving in itself.

The voice expresses connection; its depth pulls Mary out of her weeping. It is the fruit of years together, of a mutuality that is so good, so life-giving that it lives in hearts in-and-beyond separation. It’s a reminder to me that building relationship - knowing each other’s voice - is at the heart of the human story. It’s also at the heart of the way of Jesus; a way that intimates life beyond death, hope instead of despair, rising after falling.

And, if we think about it, Mary supposing Jesus to be the gardener is also no surprise. The scriptures start in a garden, and end with the tree of life, full of fruit, on either side of a river in a city redeemed. And here is Jesus, not in a tomb, but walking in a garden. In truth, I think he is a gardener: of souls, bodies, minds and communities. He points to seeds, to lilies, to trees and fields. And he does so to connect us back to the way the Creator wished for us and our beautiful world. His memorable words and phrases are of nature-infused-with-Spirit.

Those old scriptures remind us that gardens are for relationship. And also for gentle, life-sustaining work: Adam tilled the soils even of Eden.

Yes, I am slowly growing in my desire to be mistaken as a gardener as well. I’m also keen for a few actual gardeners with which to join in with so that the things I plant don’t end up needing an early burial, or at least composting (my current standard)!

What about you? What will help you and your community to grow, and grow slow?

Now, where’s those gardening gloves?