Everyday Creation Theology

“The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the birds for mirth, You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on earth."

Those are the best known lines of a longer poem called ‘God’s Garden’ by Dorothy Frances Blomfield. There is something special about gardens, large or small, carefully ordered with borders and beds of themed blooms, arranged in formal, regular patterns such as parterres, or more random plantings. They all seem to have an ability to soothe the senses, sometimes with scents or beautiful colours, sometimes with their orderliness, sometimes with their seemingly random nature. One has a sense of being taken away from the everyday concerns of life into a peaceful, timeless place where one can rest.

I am not a gardener, I don’t do the groundwork that prepares the soil and all the other tasks. I just appreciate these microcosms of God’s Creation, tended by those joining in with God’s handiwork. Those who do this must feel not only pleasure in the results of the task but also satisfaction in the fruit of their labours. And some of those fruits go on, not only to please the grower aesthetically but also as food for themselves and other people. Others provide food for a wide variety of smaller animal life. 

Many poets have found themselves moved to write about gardens, as others write about the wonders in the larger scale of God’s creation. John Clare, Northamptonshire poet (1793-1864) who wrote, ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar,’ said that the poetry was in nature, he just wrote it down. I think that expresses how Creation acts on our senses, and why we love gardens. The poetry is God’s, and it speaks to us on a deep inner level even as we enjoy the beauty of each garden.  

This year my annual visit to Lindisfarne was in August, a very busy time for the Island and an unusual time for my visit. The sheltered Walled Garden of the Lindisfarne Castle was abloom with an abundance of flowers. I had never seen it in Summer before and it was a delight to the senses. And so peaceful despite the many visitors. This garden is a glorious mixture of plants, no doubt carefully selected, but randomly scattered throughout the whole garden. It was created in 1911, on the site of a vegetable patch that once provided the castle’s soldiers with food, by Gertrude Jekyll for her friend Edwin Lutyens, while he was transforming Lindisfarne Castle into a holiday home. The present day gardener was quietly and unobtrusively at work, gently removing dead blooms. I was able to have a brief chat with him and it was obvious how much he loved the garden and his task of caring for it - definitely one of God’s fellow workers. 

On the way home we paused in Yorkshire to revisit Mount Grace, once inhabited by Carthusian monks whose purpose was to serve God by personal devotion and fasting. They lived a solitary life, only worshipping together infrequently and only eating together in the refectory on Sundays, feast days and if a brother died. The rest of the time their food was brought to them by one of the lay brothers who did all the manual work of the house. Their cells were built with an ingenious way of the food being delivered without personal contact. It was put through a ‘hatch’ in the cell wall, constructed by an open stone ‘window’ on the outside of the cell and another at right angles on the inside. We wondered at the amazing provision made for the monks solitary lives, including running water to each cell, and latrines, although seated with planks with holes in the centre, that were flushed by water flowing underneath. With each cell there was a small garden that provided fruit, herbs and vegetables for the monks, In tending their gardens no doubt the monks were very much aware of being close to God’s heart. English Heritage have planted a small garden following the pattern used by the monks and here too there was tranquillity as we walked around the cloister. 

I came back to my own small garden and my beloved Rowan tree and gave thanks for my patch of God’s creation, feeling, along Gerald Manley Hopkins in his poem, ‘ The Grandeur of God,’ that, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’ and that, despite that now it, ‘wears man’s smudge,’ ‘for all this, nature is never spent’ and ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things, ‘ ‘Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’  

Love, Prayers and Blessings, Joy