A giant jalapeño sprouted from a patch of urban dirt next to our patio in Jakarta. There was little to see and less to hope for when my wife rescued this reject seedling—like Christ’s mustard seed—from my potted pepper garden and propped it up with a dollop of potting soil. Four inches beneath the dark humus, we both knew, lay a hardpan of red clay that bent our spades and twisted our gardening forks. Two papaya trees in succession had died near this spot, stifled by concrete, impermeable soil, and a hidden drainpipe. Amidst these enemies, surely sheer survival was a miracle to be hoped for—our piquant fantasy salsas would have to get their zing from my pampered and potted jalapeño in the driveway. As the weeks proceeded, however, my own precious plant gradually wilted while its rejected brother thrived, throwing out thick shoots of leaves and reminding me uncomfortably of the parable’s mustard tree. Such is gardening.
Like most of my American friends, I did not grow up a gardener. Unlike them, I grew up in God’s own garden, a shadowy and solemn rainforest cathedral choired by birds of paradise and guarded by poisonous vines, stink bugs, and death adders. Power chainsaws have desecrated most of the world’s rainforest temples during my own short youth, opening earth-wounds upon which farmers or palm oil companies smear the fertilizers and pesticides of agroscience, hoping to scab off fuel or a little food, survival or bio-profits, before the hard red clay puckers into dusty, sterile scars. Though many of my friends and acquaintances in Manila and Jakarta were exposed to third-eye levels of farming chemicals in childhood, few are interested in sacrificing the enticements of quick ‘n easy flower boxes for the perilous joy of a garden.
In the midst of a concrete jungle, Tim Stark and Robert Pogue Harrison have been helpful guides as I begin to discover the relationships between my dinner table, my soul, and the soil. Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford, has written the philosophical Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Stark, a failed freelance writer from New York City, has penned Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer, a juicily written tale of his mad affair with the tomato.
For a still-raw gardener, the particularity of Stark’s Lancaster County tomato patch roots Harrison’s ethereal speculations about Versailles, Zen gardens, and Boccaccio’s Decameron, reminding me that the human condition must be lived amongst my own derelict pots and peppers. Yet without Harrison’s breadth of vision, I would have struggled to articulate the philosophical underpinnings of my own half-understood gardening commitment. Along the way, Harrision introduced me to places like the homeless gardens of New York City, careful arrangements of green plastic, teddy bears, cast-off tires, and water that link a hard-luck man or woman to a particular place, opening a small and personal world for the soul that seems to trump considerations of shelter.
Early in the book, Harrison muses convincingly that gardening must prefigure farming just as poetry precedes prose in human history. He suspects that the enchantment of the garden began with the promise of aesthetic or spiritual refuge for our forebears. Because the success of wheat and the development of garlic, say, could not have been surmised ahead of time, perhaps our meditative ancestors cultivated gardens first and foremost for their own delight, preparing communal and ritual spaces for dreaming, thinking, and worshiping.
Having framed his narrative thus, Harrison traces the role of gardens throughout recorded history, arguing that they have variously represented healthy societies, offered a sane escape from human worlds gone mad (à la the Decameron or the garden of Epicurus), and even demonstrated our vices. In this latter category Harrison includes both the sublime hubris of Versailles and and “the paltry ornamentalization of decorative ‘landscaping’ ” that surrounds our modern office-towers, arguing that such imaginatively barren spaces represent the final triumph of modernism’s maniacal insistence on perfection and commodification.
Stepping back for a sweeping critique of the teleological orientation of Western Christian thought, Harrison alleges that the eternal desire reflected in the always-upturned eyes of Dante’s Beatrice keeps the global West from enjoying the present. The magnetic pull of ecstasy-to-come, Harrison contends, blinds us to the earth beneath our feet. We need to relearn the art of gardening for the cultivation of our own souls—and ultimately for our very survival.
While I learned a great deal from Harrison’s book, and while his gloomy ivory-tower meditations on the train-wreck of modernism resonated at points with my own experience, I’m not ready to give up on a hope-driven teleology. Stark’s lively account of his improbable gardening experiments, taken in small doses, is wonderfully diverting, but over the long haul his book reminded me of all too many literary efforts to craft a personal “meaning of life” from a glorified hobby. Either way, something was missing.
I felt the need for a sort of earthy middle ground, where intentional reflection about my own gardening could occur within a teleological framework that emphasizes my place along the span between the duties of cultivation given in Eden and the promised remaking of the earth in the Revelation of John. But the teleological sunlight would dessicate my thinking without the moist soil of present sociopolitical and ecclesial realities, however poisoned such a soil might be! Without a particular church community or a particular human culture, a theology of gardening would forget the humble simplicity of Yahweh’s daily visits to the garden, tending inevitably toward a definite-article theology that fixes God in the firmament, far above the earthy concerns of pepper plants and novice gardeners.
Though perils of telos-overdrive and temptations of hobby glorification loom, robust theologies of gardening are desperately needed. Harrison darkly describes our present lives, where the “visible world” disappears from view, displaced by the image-focused “present frenzy” that obscures our human capacity to look and to create. He is right.
In the global East as well as in the West, the neglectful eyes of Beatrice have marked the land. In the city of Jakarta and across the whole island of Java, natural and built landscapes reflect chaotic collisions of villages and malls or else the perfect uniformity of endless Green Revolution rice paddies. The trees that defined village squares for centuries are increasingly under attack, seen by officials as a lucrative source of income rather than centers of village life.
In the cities, public parks are cultivated increasingly for the Versailles-like purity of their lawns and hedge forms—spaces designed above all to manage and be manageable—and Harrison’s “green shade” is hard to find. The bright greensward seems to be a proud reflection of the nation’s new ability to tame the tropical landscapes of the archipelago, rolling out plantation-carpets on once-forested lands, taming the humble present with enormous and vivid visions of the future.
As globalization spreads the ecstatic promises of perfection-to-come across the world, our collective relationship with the land has been disrupted. Thus, any theology of gardening must be first a project of recovery, exploring the place of the earth in the biblical narrative and the story of God’s people upon the land. Undertaken thoroughly, such an enterprise would remind the church that reading land claims and prophecies post-Adam Smith, we have too often regarded the land as essentially an object of production rather than a creation.
I suggest that a close reading of the first chapters of Genesis yields a very different vision of the earth and our intended relationship to it. Although Harrison prefers to read the first two chapters of Genesis in light of the Western tradition of a perfect paradise, emphasizing by contrast what he sees as the fertile possibilities within Eve’s rebellion for the cultivation of ourselves and the soil, I think both Harrison and his Christian sources have misread the text.
The 8th and 9th verses of Genesis 2 do indeed evoke the image of God as Gardener, as he plants a garden and causes the plants to spring forth from the ground. Furthermore, Genesis 3 memorably describes Adam’s post-Edenic future: “thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.” These verses evoke a grim morality tale: living in someone else’s garden, our first parents resort to deliberately breaking the rules to get kicked out, prompting a vengeful God to curse his bored vacationers with the divine equivalent of labor camp.
Read as a whole, however, the first chapters of Genesis represent neither an excuse for vacationing in Eden nor an image of a booby-trapping deity intent on making disobedience psychologically irresistible. Although a thorough alternative reading is beyond the scope of this article, a few telling verses point us toward a very different reading of the text, prefiguring the peaceable paradise of Isaiah and envisioning a fulfilled earth in a manner that can be found here and there throughout the Christian tradition but that too often has been obscured or explicitly rejected.
In the Bible’s second verse, the earth is described as “without form and void.” Such language alerts us to the mystical and relational possibilities of an earth that bears an existential need for fullness. Reading on, we learn that though God fills the earth with living ingredients, this earth-fulfillment seems to be a duty of humanity (1:28). Can it be that we live in a world that God himself yet considers unfulfilled?
The 28th verse of Genesis 1 is a sort of Old Testament Great Commission, God’s triple-verbed blessing and commision to his children. The point of the fruitfulness God gives to the human race is wrapped up in all three verbs in the following command and intimately connected to the emptiness described in the second verse of Genesis. Instead of exercising our dominion to kill off our ecological competitors and replace them with a teeming humanity, we are to fulfill the earth, bringing forth its latent potential and perhaps weaving wild lives and landscapes into a productive and peaceable whole. Certainly, the commission instructs us to lead the creatures of the earth into fulfillment with one another, with ourselves, and with our common Creator. Our first calling, then, is to garden the earth.
The second chapter of Genesis builds upon the fulfillment theme, describing a land that was barren because “there was no man to work the ground.” After creation, Adam is set to work in Eden “to work it and keep it.” Two verbs underline the importance of the gardening task. Read carefully, then, the curse of chapter 3 is not the curse/blessing to cultivate, as Harrison and others might suggest. It is rather the curse of inevitable opposition or enmity toward the creation itself. Instead of conversing with the animals, as suggested by Christian mythology, Adam and his descendants are forever cut off from fully satisfying communion with the natural world. The real curse is that our disobedience breaks our relationships, rendering us unable to fulfill our gardening commission and the Shalom-vision on earth despite our best efforts.
Although the possibility of full restoration cannot be divorced from the regenerative hope of Easter, humanity post-Eden has mostly ignored God’s first instructions. Today, we are increasingly an urban race, clumping into crowded concrete environments while large stretches of the countryside are devoted to the mechanical and chemical production of plant products or the extraction of natural materials. Almost everywhere, land is defined as a commodity and frequently as merely the ground upon which developers can exercise “dominion” in its most twisted and despotic forms.
Living ourselves in tightly defined windows of time and constrained spatial environments, where are the footholds for a garden of revolt? The beginnings of the answer must lie in the cracks, in the narrow windows of time and space that remain marginal to the global economic system and that offer us already shards of quiet and moments to get away. I contend that a vital part of our calling as the church and as individuals is to garden in these cracks, rescuing the literal and temporal spaces around us from the indignity of objecthood and restoring them to relationship with ourselves and others. We must learn to cultivate Harrison’s “green shade” in our own lives, hoping that the mini-gardens of refuge we cultivate will offer ourselves and others desperately needed spaces in which to think, converse, and reflect. Like the garden of Epicurus, such spaces would offer all who enter refuge from the mad polis, saving the seeds of civilization in the eschatological hope of Shalom.
I have seen two peace gardens. Once, I visited the peace garden of Corregidor, a sunny hillside memorializing the Japanese, Filipino, and American war dead who perished fighting to take and re-take a small rocky island at the mouth of Manila Bay. As I remember it, it is morning and the garden is noisy with clicking camera-shutters. The smooth, sloping lawns are dotted and blotted with excited clumps of Japanese and Filipino tourists. The garden itself seems to be nothing but a page tilted toward the bay below, its only concession to three-dimensionality a few artistic sculptures. The land itself lies passively in the golden morning, subdued by an award-winning garden design but still empty. The perfectly-shaved lawns memorialize more the glory of memorialization and the power of the memorializer than the disquieting memories of the dead.
Another time, I visited the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC. In my memory, the land itself opens beneath my feet. The perfectly manicured lawns of a superpower sink out of sight and I descend to meet the dead. They lie facelessly behind a hard black wall, all of them. In a blur, it seems I’m walking past the endless face of grief, past pointing little boys, wilted flowers, and pencil flags. No one I know died in Vietnam, but I know I have a place in this garden as well. There is space enough on the small strip of pavement for me to think, and though it is a somber place, conversation and prayer are welcomed. In this giant crack of grief, the nation itself gardens and is healed. Such are the gardens of Shalom. In our own small cracks, we must cultivate more of them.
Nate Jones was born and raised in Indonesia and also lived in the Philippines before attending Wheaton College. After a stint in Jakarta, he and his wife Charity were recently transferred to Bangkok, where he is going to try gardening atop two shady window ledges.
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