A recent post over at the Green Roof Growers blog, on a road trip they took to a south side church, included — almost as an afterthought — a link to a  2007 essay from Orion Magazine, on how a community garden has helped one traumatized small town patch itself back together. 

That sounds deadly, right? Who wants to read about a bunch of kumbayah do-gooders finding healing through gardening? But it is, in truth, a lovely, moving piece of writing. It is also explicitly religious. And not just religious, it’s Christian.

It’s hard to spend any time around gardens, gardeners, or garden lit without running into God. Religious organizations often lead the charge for environmental justice in their communities, and the many corollaries between spiritual practice and gardening are so obvious I’m embarrassed to even point them out (cycle-of-life awareness, acquisition of enlightenment and/or sustenance through mundane daily ritual, irrational yet fervent belief in miracles …. you get the drift). And, of course, the Bible is overrun with gardens, from Eden to Gethsemane. You can’t throw a rock at the good book without hitting one seed-related parable or another.

My relationship with organized religion is pretty ambivalent. My paternal grandfather was an Episcopal bishop, one of my uncles is a reverend, and my father is in about as deep as a layman can get. You could say it’s  the family business. When I was a child we not only went to Sunday services, we sat in the front row and I tried hard to look holy.

And then, around the time I started experimenting with asymmetrical hair-dos, I denounced the whole thing as a patriarchal conspiracy and flounced off to listen to the Smiths. No big surprise there.

Now, as a grownup, I am surprised by how much comfort I find in liturgical ritual on those rare occasions that I turn up in a church. I don’t know quite what to make of that. Even trying to write about it is making me deeply uncomfortable. But, reading the Orion piece, I thought about the weird ways Christianity still has its hooks in me, and I also thought about my other grandfather, my mother’s father, who taught English and Latin at a boys boarding school and loved to mow the lawn sans shirt. Grandpa rarely darkened the door of a church. He found his peace  in nature; his scripture was written by Robert Frost. 

Pops’s ashes are interred in the basement crypt of an Episcopal church in Harlem. Grandpa’s were scatted in Puget Sound. Both are lovely places to visit (though the crypt is a little creepy).

For me, the act of growing things is where these two strands of DNA twist and meet. Halfway through life I have yet to develop any sort of coherent belief system, but I am slowly coming to believe in the power of getting up and going outside to weed and water and stake. It is a devotional practice — one just as compromised, as fraught with good intentions and frustration and shortcuts, as any other, and occasionally just as enlightening.