My Lenten garden

February 12, 2016

  It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom. But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. -Galatians 5 19-22, The Message

Lent usually arrives about the time our garden begins to wake up. The roses we cut back in January are beginning to leaf out, the fruit trees are beginning to bud and blossom, hollyhock and larkspur seedlings are emerging, and the temperatures are generally in that sweet spot between the chill of the winter and the blast furnace of the summer. We usually aim to plant tomato transplants and other warm-weather crops by Valentine's Day, so that they will have a decent start before it gets too hot for them to prosper. Today I put out transplants of Roma, Early Girl, Mr. Stripey, and Pink Brandywine tomatoes, Armenian cucumber, zucchini and acorn squashes, along with a couple of pony packs of petunias. In the next week, I'll plant seeds of Roma II bush beans,Red Burgandy okra, yellow squash, and basil. By Easter time, the current barren brownness of the raised beds should be alive with tasty and beautiful growing things.

On the one hand, it seems incongruous that Lent, that traditional time of introspection, repentance, and self-denial, should occur just when the circle of life is reinventing itself in our back yard. On the other hand, it makes total sense. The garden has to be prepared in order for desirable plants to grow. That includes a lot of digging in order to remove Bermuda grass, Mexican primrose, clover, and assorted weeds which will take over the garden if ignored, and crowd out the vegetables and flowers I want to have. It includes adding fertilizer, compost, and other soil amendments to nurture the growing plants, and making sure the drip irrigation system works so they will get enough water. If I don't do these things, the garden won't be what I want it to be.

And so I think it is with life. Lent isn't about giving up something for a prescribed number of days. It's a time for taking stock:  thinking about what kind of person I want to be, of acknowledging the many ways I fall short of being all I could or should be, and of making the changes needed to start anew in the right direction. Sometimes that means digging up weeds, and sometimes that means adding fertilizer.

Blossoms on the peach tree

Peas at last