The garden is a place particularly susceptible to contemplation. Gardens can be, of course, great aesthetic, even spiritual, achievements—the manicured walkways of the English promenade, the polished stones of Chinese enclosures, the layered harmonies of beauty-tamed chaos in the Japanese garden, the otherworldliness and humid refinement of the Hawaiian botanical garden and arboretum. Such places display the marvelous intertwining of the human and natural worlds, and in this order (the taxis, if you will), a more perfect realization of an invisible order is brought about. A spiritual harmony is embodied within a concrete, sensible locale: a logos is unearthed and shines through with the light of wisdom. This is true of refined gardens, but it is also true of the simplest gardens, and indeed of the whole visible world, however much more the natural environment tends to lend itself to such thinking. By contemplating the visible, we may begin to discern the invisible, the patterns of being that are always unfolding themselves, their stories, and the greater suggestions they bear.
This kind of thinking is commonplace within many religious traditions. Within Christianity, we are invited to consider these depths by figures as diverse and chronologically distinct as Gregory of Nyssa and Simon Weil, who each in their own way contemplate the invisible in the visible. For them, the sensible world, and our lives within it, ought to be seen through the luminosity of metaphor, of symbol, not merely as an arbitrary representation, but as the living embodiment of invisible truths, of the hidden structures of reality.
For Gregory, the stability of the earth is a model by which the soul might contemplate and learn endurance and steadfastness; the ever-filling but never-filled sea is an image of our own insatiable appetites. God can be thought of as an infinitely upwelling spring from which we drink, growing infinitely in our capacity to imbibe even while being full. We, moreover, are the arrows stretching forward into God, who is simultaneously the target and the hand that embraces and looses these arrows in his love. In this way of thinking, Gregory shows us how to see through the surface of the phenomena into their deeper interiors and correspondences. Throughout his writings, Gregory often utilizes images and metaphors drawn from the patterns discovered in the phenomenal world, and such patterns frequently serve as better conduits for the ideas being expressed than abstract concepts. He shows us how to read the world as a book divulging the mysteries of God and the soul. A great deal of these images are drawn from scripture, the Bible becoming a lens through which the sensible is examined and invisible realities discerned. The images of the steadfast earth and unfilled sea, for instance, are both drawn from Ecclesiastes, and the image of the arrows is drawn from the Song of Songs.
Using a similar method, Simon Weil considers the most mundane of daily labor, particularly agriculture. She seeks to set the worker free from meaningless drudgery, to make the laborer’s task one of mysticism. She states that this can only be done through the contemplation of the world as symbol. She provides the example of the farmer, articulating a means by which each of the elements of his or her work can be interpreted as having religious significance. In the domain of agriculture, sunlight is like the grace of God falling upon the plants and bringing them to perfection; the farmer fosters the conditions for this grace to be properly received, but he does not create it. In addition, in Christian communities, the man behind the plow gives his life, his sweat and blood to bring forth the wheat that shall produce the eucharist; his body is consumed to became the body of Christ, and so he himself is in a very real sense being transformed into Christ. Similarly, by an act of charity, one’s labor, through the medium of currency, can feed Christ, who identified himself with “the least of these.”
Like Gregory, Weil uses biblical imagery as an important component of this task, for it provides the connections between the daily realities of humanity and the the mysteries of Christ, particularly through parables. By contemplating the images of the Bible and integrating them into our lives, our days become filled with the contemplation of Christ. This might be fruitfully compared to the old notion of nature and scripture as the “two books” in which the inspired observer may contemplate the intention of the divine. This must not, of course, be done simplistically or in a literalistic manner, but carefully, prayerfully, as an attempt to see the patterns, the layers, the logoi of meaning and beauty that permeate the architecture of reality even in its fallen state.
This kind of thinking can be fruitfully applied to our own lives. Let us again consider the garden. In my own paltry vegetable beds and among my fruit trees, I find much with spiritual resonance. I must prune the bushes and the trees, cutting of the wild and disparate growth, as I must cut back the accretions of sin and misdirected desire within my own heart. If I do not cut away this errant, excess growth, the tree will suffocate itself and be less fruitful. I must collect the rot and refuse of the yard and kitchen and stir it into compost to aid the fertility of the land, and in this process I behold a form of resurrection, the overcoming of death on a small scale, just as every spring the life that soars within the buds and seedlings is the presence of Christ’s life coming closer into time.
In the light of the sun, the grace of God falls upon the soil I have prepared and the seeds that I have planted, and I can see my better moments, my whole soul layered before me—its weeds, cracks, growth, fruit, flowers, filth, insects, souring clouds, and perching birds. Do God’s words, his logoi, find in me a place to prosper? Do his intentions find fulfillment in me? Or do they die unrealized? Each human soul is a garden, a city, a cosmos, and in each a vast multitude longing to born as one breathing organism in harmony. Yet these crowds are all too often scattered, at odds with themselves, perverted, sick. The garden must be tended, united in the harmony of all things, brought together by the efforts of a gardener working under the auspices of a singular vision, a unified goal. This task is one both exterior and interior. And if I can make this one small plot beautiful and good to eat, perhaps I might also cultivate the unruly wilderness of my own being. And if I can consider the garden as a place of spiritual realities embodied, perhaps my vision might expand to see that these truths are the deeper reality of which the sensory is merely the most external layer.
Reading the Visible
I'm spending time delighting in your poetry instead of tending to my unruly garden!