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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
May 1, 2011
Readings
The first reading is by Henry David Thoreau from his book, Walden,
in which he reflects upon the bean field he planted near Walden
Pond.
“We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields
and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all
reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small
part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course.
In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden.
Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a
corresponding trust and magnanimity. This broad field which I have
looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but
away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make
it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do
they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat should not be
the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain is not all that
it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also
at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the
bird? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the
farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the
squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts
this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing
all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind
not only his first but his last fruits also.”
The second reading is by Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan has become
known for his writing about ethical eating. But he also writes
wonderfully about gardening. This is excerpt from his book, Second
Nature: A Gardener’s Education.
“The gardener knows how tenuous his control of nature is, especially
here in North America, where the land can seem so ungovernable. So
why then does he go to such lengths to hide this fact, to clothe
such recalcitrant land in so much lawn? Maybe it's time we began to
acknowledge, perhaps even evoke, that tenuousness in the design of
our gardens. By leaving some parts wild, and by making a virtue of
their juxtapositions with more formal areas, we can introduce into
our gardens a measure of doubt about our control of nature, and that
might be a good thing to do. But it's not more romance about
wilderness we want, that's not what I'm saying—rather, it's irony
about gardens, about these plans we make in nature. The act of
leaving parts of the garden untended and calling attention to its
margins seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom
on the part of the gardener. It may be in the margins of our gardens
that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our
ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.”
Gardening is our topic this morning: a theology of gardening. You
might have heard the following method of identifying a Unitarian
Universalist. At a fork in the road with a sign that offers two
alternatives—one arrow pointing to heaven and the other to a
discussion about heaven—the Unitarian Universalist chooses the
discussion.
Well, this morning—a cool spring morning that fairly begs us to be
outdoors—we’re inside discussing gardening. The fact that we're here
does seem to underscore the point made by that quip. I thank you for
your devotion to our faith.
Sermon
With the arrival of spring, Americans take to our yards and gardens.
There you can find us; digging and planting, weeding and
fertilizing, mowing and trimming—creating landscapes that aim toward
some inner vision of what the world ought to be.
My family had a large vegetable garden as I was growing up, a
descendent of gardens my grandparents planted to help feed their
five daughters during the Depression. They were German immigrants,
amazed at the amount of land available to Americans, and they sought
to use it to its full advantage. My mother still speaks of summers
spent canning vegetables and fruits while listening to soap operas
on the radio. So when I was a child, we had fruit trees and a large
plot of land that produced an abundance of vegetables, much of which
was canned for use throughout the year. By that time, the Depression
was long gone, and economics didn’t drive this garden. Rather it was
the sense that this was the right thing to do—tend the land, grow
our own food. I took our home-grown produce for granted, and it was
a treat to go to a friend’s house where I could have, for example,
Welch’s jelly instead of that homemade stuff we always had around
the house.
Yet, when I acquired a house and some land, I too put it to work
growing vegetables. It didn’t seem right not to, even though the
size and ambitions of my gardens have varied as I’ve moved around.
Some of my houses have had areas that could be easily converted into
gardens. Others would barely support a few tomato plants. The house
where we are now has a small yard with wonderful big shade trees
that probably cuts the air conditioning bill for the house in half.
But all that shade is lousy for a garden.
For a few years, a neighbor let me use some space by her garage for
a few tomato plants, but the neighbor moved. So this year our son
Eli helped us construct two garden frames that we’ve placed in what
is probably the sunniest spot in the yard, out back by the alley.
We’re going to try to grow some lettuce and beans and cucumbers and
maybe some squash and, of course, tomatoes. I don’t know if it’s
going to work, but I have o try. When I have a garden, it seems like
I’m in proper relationship to the natural world, to the universe.
There are important things at stake when we garden. The materials
are ordinary—seeds and soil and plants and water and light—but with
those ordinary things, we reach into other realms. We explore the
human connection with nature. We consider the meaning of our
existence in the larger context of the world. We are confronted with
what is ultimate. There is morality in gardening and drama and birth
and death and wonder and the occasional flash of insight.
I've called this sermon a “theology” of gardening for this is what
theology is concerned with: meaning, morality, our contact with what
is ultimate. Today there is discussion about how to relate to
nature—how to conceive our place in the natural world. It matters
how this discussion turns out. There are implications not just for
how we regard our own gardens and yards and plants growing on the
windowsill but also for how we approach this garden which is our
planet.
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The American landscape is distinctive. It doesn't look like any
other in the world. Our gardens are different, our yards are
different, our forests are different. This results somewhat from the
uniqueness of our topography, but mostly because our ideas about
nature are different.
To understand the American approach to nature, we go back to Henry
David Thoreau. Thoreau, that fussy individualist who frequented the
Unitarian circles in the mid 19th century that gave birth to the
philosophy of transcendentalism. Thoreau articulated an American
attitude to nature that has been with us, for better and for worse,
ever since.
Thoreau was a descendent of the Puritans who settled New England.
These Puritans came to the new world with a mission: to start over,
to cast aside the evils of the old world, to establish a new Eden.
The area they picked for this radical experiment was unlikely: New
England. New England with its brutal winters and its deep
forests—not a place in which you could run around wearing fig leaves
and plucking food from whatever plant happened to be growing nearby.
Life in this new world was tough and involved a constant battle with
nature, with the wilderness, with a force of life that conspired to
rob these early settlers of their own. In order to survive and build
their New Eden, they had to beat back the wilderness, subvert it to
their own uses. Hence, the Puritan understanding of nature as having
to be subdued so that we could have life.
Thoreau inherited something of the Puritan worldview: an idealism
that still sought establishment of a New Eden. But 200 years had
passed since those first dreadful winters endured by the settlers.
Wilderness no longer threatened civilization, now civilization
threatened the wilderness.
And so Thoreau offered a new vision. He proclaimed that the
wilderness was not the enemy of humanity and our dreams of
perfection. The wilderness was the place in which one was most
likely to find what is sacred and holy. Nature was “God's Second
Book,” and could be read most clearly in regions untouched by human
presence. Thoreau wrote forcefully about the powers and mysteries of
the wilderness, fixing in our consciousness an image of nature as
source of wisdom and transformation.
Thoreau was a purist. But unlike earlier generations, he did not
promote subduing nature. He took the opposite side, stating that any
human intervention in nature was like messing with God. Even with
his own experiment in growing food—his legendary bean field—he
claimed that it was presumptuous to value his bean plants more than
the weeds that sought to compete, for who had the right to decide
which of these species deserved to live and which to die? In words
that must chill any farmer—or gardener, for that matter—he
proclaimed, “Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds
whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little
comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns.”
Today, Americans still perceive a conflict between civilization and
the wilderness, between humanity and nature. We tend to see it as
“either/or.” Either we take the side of ecological preservation or
economic development, owls or loggers, forests or jobs. This is a
tension that has reached far beyond Thoreau's bean field and has
shaped both the look of our land and the problems we now face. I
wonder if it needs to be.
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A case can be made that the most distinctive American contribution
to gardening design is the suburban front lawn. American suburbs are
the most beautiful in the world—to drive through. They are designed
to look good from the vantage point of a car.
As with other gardens, the suburban American front lawn is contains
unstated meanings. It unifies the landscape, presents the viewer
with a continuous stretch of green. Fences or hedges between
properties in the front are considered antisocial, while fences in
the back are completely acceptable. The effect of front lawn
connecting with front lawn is to create a vast democratic space.
This space is made up of private properties, yet each is part of a
larger whole, in which the others in the neighborhood feel they have
a claim. Our backyards are private—the front belongs to the
collective.
If you have a front lawn that adjoins others in your neighborhood,
and doubt that your front is part of collective property, try this
little experiment: don't mow it for a summer. This is just what
Michael Pollan's father did in his suburban development on Long
Island.
He recalled, “The summer my father stopped mowing altogether, I felt
the hot breath of a tyrannical majority for the first time. Nobody
would say anything, but you heard it anyway: Mow your lawn. Cars
would slow down as they drove by our house. Probably some of the
drivers were merely curious. But others drove by in a manner that
was unmistakably expressive, slowing down as they drew near and then
hitting the gas angrily as they passed—this was pithy driving, the
sort of move that is second nature to a Klansman.”
The other significant thing about the American front lawn is the
difficulty with which it is maintained. A summer's worth of
lackadaisical care, and the wilderness reasserts itself. To keep it
green and flat and smooth calls for constant struggle with forces of
nature that have other ideas about proper use of the land.
It seems a long way from Thoreau's ideas demonstrated at Walden Pond
to the modern American lawn, but there is a connection. Thoreau
asserted that there is a clear difference between nature and
culture, between wilderness and the creations of humanity. The
American lawn is a human creation that survives only through
monumental efforts at keeping nature out. Only a culture that sees
such a stark difference between the wilderness and human culture
could produce such a landscape.
It doesn't have to be that way. European homes tend not to have
front yards—in the sense that we have front yards. They have gardens
in front of their homes. There is a blending of lawn and flowers,
the cared for and the uncared for. It is also not uncommon to find
vegetable gardens in front yards—not something we encourage in this
country.
Maybe it’s time to bring these two realms back together. And maybe
“the garden” can provide an image for a blending of the two. Not the
wilderness which has to be completely separate to maintain its
integrity. Not the American lawn that requires constant vigilance to
keep it civilized. But the garden: in which human effort works
together with the forces of nature to produce something which
neither human effort nor nature could achieve alone.
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If we draw upon the image of the garden as demonstrating how there
can be a relationship between humanity and nature, what lessons
might we find? What can we learn about life by consulting with the
gardener?
For one, we learn about failure. Gardening teaches us to be
accepting of failure. Everything we try isn't going to work. But you
don't know what's going to work until you try. Failure is part of a
process through which we learn to be sensitive to the ways and whims
of nature.
Another lesson: perfectionism is not a useful trait for the
gardener. Too much stands beyond our control. What we picture in our
imaginations may not be what nature will permit. And anyway, the
beauty of a garden comes not from our forcing our wills upon a
landscape. It comes from an interaction of human imagination with
the forces of nature. To be a happy gardener, you recognize the
limits of your control over this environment.
Gardening involves periods of boom and bust. There are times when
nothing you do works, and there are other times when it all comes
together. And, as in life, the seeds of renewal are sown amidst the
failures. While warnings of future disaster can be found even in the
best of times.
Finally, gardening involves attentiveness to this relationship
between a person and the forces of nature. It demands both
creativity and the willingness to listen to and accommodate your
partner. The most successful garden develops over time—a
relationship between what we want and what nature will allow in this
particular space.
This is a relationship that isn't always easy but that allows for
growth and change and those occasional wonderful moments that tell
us that what has occurred here could only have happened in this
particular relationship—with these struggles that have made us who
we are.
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Theology has to do with meaning, with one's relationship to the
ultimate. A subset of theology is ethics. Given what we find to have
meaning, given the relationship we have developed with the mystery
at the center of being, what are the implications for how we live?
By developing an ethics of gardening, we may find guidelines that
help us tending the great big garden which is this earth.
1. An ethic based on the garden gives local answers to local
problems. It recognizes that what works in one spot won't
necessarily work in another. Hence, it resists sweeping answers that
claim to address all our concerns. Yes, there are laws and creeds
and insights with wide applicability and validity but first we have
to determine whether they work right here, in this place, right now.
2. The gardener starts with what he or she has got, for better and
for worse. Every plot of land has drawbacks, things it's just not
cut out to do. But we also hope that there's something we can do
with any bit of earth that can support life. In gardening, we learn
to play the hand we've been dealt.
3. The gardener is not romantic about nature. Nature isn't always
beautiful, isn't always right, can be good and can be bad. In modern
times we are vulnerable to developing crushes on nature. We are
captivated by the beauty and the mystery, and we forget that nature
also produces weeds and storms and plagues and rot and death.
Gardeners learn to live with the ambiguities of nature, the good and
the bad—the times when nature gives us more than we have hoped, and
the other times when she takes it all away.
4. Gardeners learn that there is a place for human choice and
participation in nature. The old wilderness ethic assumes that any
human intervention in nature will take away more than it gives. As a
result, America has protected more wilderness land than any other
developed nation. But we do badly in managing the 92% of our land
that is left, that is, the land that is developed. The wilderness
ethic tends toward all-or-nothing. Either it's wilderness or it's
not. Either it's nature or culture. There's little in-between.
What the gardener may teach us is that there is a lot of in-between.
Setting wilderness against culture has led to stalemate upon
stalemate. There is more possibility in relationship—in partnership
between human effort and nature. The gardener tells us that human
intervention has a place in preserving the wilderness. And that
there is also value in letting more wildness into our carefully
managed landscapes.
The wilderness ethic that we inherit from Thoreau proclaims that God
is in nature, and nature has a plan. Left to her own devices, Mother
Nature always will know what's best. This 19th century romantic
nature ethic is a lot like another 19th century romantic ethic: free
market capitalism that saw an invisible hand guiding the production
of goods and services if economic forces were simply left alone.
But it's not so simple. It was a naive faith that assured us that
the free market would always do what's best. And it is a naive faith
that nature will always do what's best, if we but leave her alone.
A more sensible course is to follow the guidance and the ethics of
the gardener, who patiently tends to his or her charges, trying to
discern the fine line between giving too much help or not enough,
between over-cultivation and under-cultivation, between the suburban
lawn and the unchecked wilderness, often tipping one way or the
other. But resilient, learning, trying again and again. And in the
process establishing a relationship. Above all: a relationship
between himself or herself and those forces that create the garden
and give us life.
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One last thing.
A church is a kind of garden. For, like the garden, we too seek a
balance between human effort and the force of life. We too sometimes
tip to one side of that line or the other. We too cultivate the
resilience that urges us to learn from mistakes and keep on trying.
We too make plans that then must be tested in the real world of
danger and pain and drought and bugs. We too must abandon the dream
of perfection and the aim of complete control.
We too may profit from bringing more wilderness in to renew us when
our culture becomes too stale. But also by asserting that human
participation is called for when there is too little form or
direction in the wilderness.
And we too, like the gardener, find our rewards in process more than
in product: in the surprises that happen along the way, in the
moments of unearned serendipity, in the occasional flashes of beauty
and in the relationships that develop over time with each other and
the world and the force of existence that gives us life.
And so I close with these words by the American essayist, Charles
Dudley Warner
“To have a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds,
and watch the renewal of life—this is the commonest delight of the
race, the most satisfactory thing a person can do
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