Reflection #86 (7th July 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
Over the last few weeks – on those rare days when the weather’s been neither too hot nor too wet – I’ve been engaging in quite a bit of therapeutic gardening. As many of you know, the first half of this year has been quite full-on for me, and as a result my little garden has been sadly neglected – just at the time of year when it’s most important to keep on top of things. Everything was growing away so vigorously in springtime – and I didn’t have the capacity to give it the care and attention it needed – after a winter and spring of unusually wet weather the growth was especially rampant.
So, I found myself standing at the back door a few weeks ago, surveying the scene, and asking myself: where do I begin!? It was a bit of a mess. So many of my favourite plants were smothered in bindweed and looking very sorry for themselves. Others had been lost to frost, or waterlogged through the cold, rainy, winter months. An old hosepipe and a broken ladder had been left laying on the ‘lawn’ (I had to put ‘lawn’ in inverted commas as it has long consisted more of weeds than grass) and the grass had grown right over them. There were snails and slugs as far as the eye could see.
At first glance, it was all too easy to fixate on what was wrong with the garden, to feel somewhat overwhelmed with the scale of the task in hand, if I was going to get back on top of things. And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea here – I’m not even aiming for a tidy, manicured garden – that was my dad’s preferred style, but he mostly conceded to my preferences at the point when I took over the lion’s share of maintenance, some years ago now. My garden is managed for wildlife – and tomatoes, of course – and though the local foxes seemed happy that my absence left them with a comfortable hideout, I feel I was letting the frogs, grasshoppers, bees, moths, and butterflies down. The little pond had silted up, and all my carefully-selected plants for pollinators were overgrown.
This is the little plot of land I’ve been given to tend. And as I said earlier in the service – even if we aren’t lucky enough to have a physical garden of our own – we each have our own metaphorical ‘plot of land to tend’ – as Wayne Muller put it, ‘the garden of our life’. In this life we’ve been given, we find ourselves situated in a particular time and place, we have a certain sphere of influence, a setting in which we might just have some power to make a difference. When we look at the big picture, the state of the world these days, we can so easily feel disheartened or even hopeless. The problems facing humanity (and indeed all the other forms of life with whom we share this planet) seem quite overwhelming. There are so many issues for us to care about; it doesn’t seem possible to fully engage with them all at once and give all these worthy causes the attention they deserve.
So what happens if we draw back? If we accept we can’t do it all – we can’t save the world single-handed – let’s consider what is uniquely ours to do… What is contained in our ‘plot of land to tend’? What is included in ‘the garden of our life’? What work are we called to do? What issues are we going to actively engage with? What community are we committed to showing up for, and nurturing? Who are the people that are ours to love? To echo our weekly prayers: How are we going to use our unique gifts in the service of love, justice, and peace?
I wonder if we might learn from drawing a few parallels between literal and metaphorical gardens.
First off: I feel lucky to have a garden at all – it’s only a little plot behind my small terraced council house in East London – but I realise what a gift it is to have a garden at all in this city, especially in social housing, and to have a little bit of free time in which to nurture it. I don’t want to waste that gift. I really want to make the most of the opportunity I’ve been given – to create something beautiful. And what about our metaphorical garden – the garden of our lives? Well, I reckon it does us good to remember that life itself is a gift, and an opportunity, and ground ourselves in a practice of gratitude. Perhaps it will help us to switch from a focus on life’s burdens, and the heaviness of responsibility, towards a feeling of openness and possibility. Here we are – we’ve been given this one wild and precious life – and none of us know how long we’ve got left – so what are we going to do with it?
Another thing we need to consider, when we stand at the back door and look out on our garden, survey our little ‘plot of land’, is that there’s a kind-of ‘givenness’ or ‘thrownness’ to it. We have to take it as we find it. We are rarely working with a blank canvas. Generally, we will have inherited our garden from someone else and, unless the previous tenant was Alan Titchmarsh or Carol Klein, it’s unlikely to come to us in tip-top condition. Maybe there are established plants that someone else left behind – that could be quite promising – or perhaps the soil is riddled with bindweed roots – oh dear. If you have moved into a new build the soil might be poor or altogether absent – just a yard full of builders’ rubble or rock-hard clay – in which case you’ll need to do some groundwork, and improve the soil, though it might take time. Some things we can change. But some – like the aspect of our garden, the way it faces – we cannot. And the same goes for the garden of our lives. We were born into conditions we did not choose. Somehow we have to work with the situation in which we find ourselves. Hopefully, over the long haul, we’ll be able to make things better, incrementally improving our lot. I wonder what small step you might be able to take, right now, to improve the conditions in the garden of your life to help it flourish? (As an aside, I can’t help thinking of our new government, and the garden that they have inherited… I hope they are asking themselves some of these same questions about our collective flourishing).
A further consideration is that gardeners have choices to make – discernment about what will and won’t be included in your little plot of land – and, disappointingly, I can confirm that there are only so many plants you can fit in to your garden, no matter how hard you wish it was otherwise. There’s a gardener’s saying about the importance of choosing ‘the right plant for the right place’ – some thrive in sun and some in shade – some need good drainage and others ‘need their feet wet’. Similarly, we need to make wise choices about the garden of our lives. We are finite creatures. There are only so many hours in the day. We can’t do it all. So we have to ask ourselves: Where will we put our energy? What causes or projects will we take on? Which relationships will we invest in? This is likely to require some hard decisions as there will be causes, projects, and people we care about but haven’t got the capacity to engage with. They’re outside the boundaries of our garden. And that phrase ‘the right plant in the right place’ is helpful here, for me, as it suggests the need to play to our strengths. It is wise to honour the diversity of our characteristics – our gifts and needs – our attractions and aversions. What is ‘right’ for me might not be ‘right’ for you (and vice versa). And that harks back to the message of our flower communion, doesn’t it? In community we can appreciate and celebrate that every one of us makes our own unique and beautiful contribution.
There’s one last parallel I want to draw. Gardens typically take a lot of consistent attention and care to maintain – there’s always watering, feeding, staking, and pruning to be done – and you must be responsive to wild weather conditions, rampaging weeds, creeping fungus, marauding slugs. And – as I discovered this spring – if you are waylaid for a few months it can all get away from you. A garden is not a static thing. It evolves and transforms through the seasons and over the years. Part of the fun of gardening is to try out new things to see what thrives (and what does not). And so it is with the garden of our life, this plot of land that is ours to tend, for all too brief a time. If we consistently give our time, attention, and care to those things that matter most, then there’s every chance that by our living we will have added to the sum total of beauty and goodness in this world. We will have done our bit, however modest it might seem, and this planet will be a better place for us having lived on it.
So, by way of encouragement, I will repeat those words from Wayne Muller one last time.
‘We must plant what we love in the garden of our life.
As the Tao Te Ching insists, our centre will heal us.
When we attend to what is loving and beautiful,
we are brought forward into our most exquisite manifestation.’
May it be so for the greater good of all. Amen.
Reflection by Jane Blackall
An audio recording of this sermon is available: