Inheriting Paradise

I am an Armenian Orthodox believer and theologian. The Orthodox faith is a sacramental faith. When Orthodox Christians perform the great rite of the blessing of the water by ocean beach or riverbank, they behave, as the Armenian liturgy says, like the holy apostles who became “cleansers of the whole world.” While God might have driven Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Paradise, God still ensured that the living waters issuing from the garden continued to irrigate the whole earth and cleanse its polluted streams and lakes. When we bless water, we acknowledge God’s grace and desire to cleanse the world and make it paradise.

Water is the blood of creation. Our own bodies are 80 percent water. Water is also the element of baptism. Saint Thomas Aquinas said: “Because water is transparent, it can receive light; and so it is fitting that it should be used in baptism, inasmuch as it is the sacrament of faith.” By cleansing the water we make it clear again. By expelling the demonic pollutants we ready it for greater service to God. We tend not only the garden that we call nature but also the garden that is ourselves, insofar as we are constituted of water and are born anew by it.

We ought not to draw a line that neatly marks off nature from human kind. This is a modern heresy that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Contrary to environmentalists’ accusations of anthropocentrism, Christians believe that human beings are especially responsible for tending the creation. This is no less a responsibility than the duty to care for our own bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. God has given human beings this responsibility as an emblem of his own great love for all of creation. The fourth-century church father Saint Ephrem the Syrian says in his Hymns on Paradise:

The fool, who is unwilling to realize
his honorable state,
prefers to become just an animal,
rather than a man,
so that, without incurring judgment,
he may serve naught but his lusts.
But had there been sown in animals
just a little
of the sense of discernment,
then long ago would the wild asses
have lamented
and wept at their not
having been human.

Saint Ephrem does not condone an ecologically destructive anthropocentrism. He does not say that human beings are masters over creation with the right to use it solely for their own selfish purposes or comfort. Rather, he reminds us that everything comes from God, and that without God’s constant nurture, nothing would be and nothing could grow. “It is not the gardeners with their planting and watering who count,” writes Saint Paul, “but God who makes it grow.” Indeed, we are not only “fellow workers” in God’s great garden; we ourselves are God’s garden (1 Cor. 3:7-9, reb). This is the ground of our humility as mere creatures among all other creatures loved by God.

Our Christian living ought to reflect an “oikic” ethos. The Greek word oikos means a dwelling or a place to live. The words economy and ecology come from this same Greek word. The oikumene, the whole creation, is the church’s ethical concern. Our incarnational faith inspires a vision of humankind’s relationship to creation that is sacramental, ecological, and ethical. In its elevation of bread and wine, the liturgy of the Eucharist makes this connection clear.

The Armenian writer Teotig tells a story about the genocide of the Armenians during World War I. Father Ashod Avedian was a priest of a village near the city of Erzeroum in eastern Turkey. During the deportations, 4,000 Armenian men of that village were separated from their families and driven on a forced march into desolate re gions. On their march to death, when food supplies had given out, Father Ashod instructed the men to pray in unison, “Lord have mercy,” then led them in taking the “cursed” soil and swallowing it as communion. The ancient Armenian catechism called the Teaching of Saint Gregory says that “this dry earth is our habitation, and all assistance and nourishment for our lives [comes] from it and grows on it, and food for our growth, like milk from a mother, comes to us from it.”

Teotig’s story is a reminder that we belong to the earth and that our redemption includes the earth from which we and all the creatures have come, by which we are sustained, and through which God continues to act for our salvation. If water is the blood of creation, then earth is its flesh and air is its breath, and all things are purified by the fiery love of God.

For the earth to bring forth fruit there must be water and air and the light and heat of the sun. Every gardener knows this, and so recognizes that the right combination of these elements lies beyond the control of science or contrivance. That is the wisdom and agony of gardening. God’s creation cannot subsist without God’s abundant grace. God has given human beings the sacred responsibility of mediating God’s grace and by offering blessings to lift the ancient curse of Adam and expel the demons from every living thing and from the earth and its waters and from the air. No human science or technology can accomplish this, although we are constantly tempted to think so.

So let us be good gardeners and teach our children to be the same. Modern Christians have spoken a lot about “stewardship” of the earth. But I think we are overly practiced at the kind of management that this word easily connotes. We need another perspective, another metaphor. Scripture gives us the symbol of the garden. Adam and Eve were placed in a garden where they walked together with God and did not need to labor. But when they sinned and were expelled, gardening began. Gardening symbolizes our race’s primal acceptance of a responsibility and role in rectifying the harm done to the creation through sin.

The Armenian liturgy speaks of human beings as “cocreators” with God. But what is meant by this expression? Certainly not any kind of equality with God. God alone is the creator. We are not literally cocreators, but sacramental gardeners. We garden in order to provide sustenance for ourselves and the other creatures. But we also use the fruit of our gardens to prepare the bread of the sacrament. In a petitionary prayer of the Armenian Rite of Washing the Cross, the priest asks: “Bless, Lord, this water with the holy cross, so that it may impart to the fields, where it is sprinkled, harvests, wherefrom we have fine flour as an offering of holiness unto thy Lordship.”

The fruit of the garden is not restricted to what we eat. Every garden lends something more to the imagination—beauty. The beauty of a turnip garden may be more homely than the beauty of a tulip garden, but there is beauty in it nevertheless. Every garden holds the potential of giving us a taste of paradise. Sometimes this comes as a grace that does not exact one’s personal labor, but somewhere someone has labored with the sweat of the brow to make the garden grow.

Jesus prayed in a garden and agonized there, watering it with his tears. His body, which was torn on the cross, was also buried in a garden. And three days after his crucifixion, the women who wept as he hung on the cross and anointed our Lord’s body returned to that garden to find that the seed that they had lovingly prepared for planting had already borne a sweet and fragrant fruit. Every garden is an intimation of the Garden that is Christ’s, that he himself tends in the hearts of those who welcome him in.

God also has planted within each human being a seed of hope that, if properly nurtured, grows into a confidence that all will be well, all manner of things shall be well. The breath of God reaches into even the smallest and most remote garden and human heart and infuses life. Even more, it brings salvation. The anemone and the rose grow in the earthly garden, but in the Garden of Paradise the anemone grows without the blood of the cross, and the rose has no thorns. The Armenian Epiphany hymn of the blessing of the water declares: “Today the garden appears to mankind, / let us rejoice in righteousness unto eternal life. … / Today the shut and barred gate of the garden is opened to mankind.”

Let every Christian be a gardener so that he and she and the whole of creation, which groans in expectation of the Spirit’s final harvest, may inherit paradise. If we Christians truly treasure the hope that one day we, like Adam and the penitent thief, will walk alongside the One who caused even the dead wood of the cross to blossom with flowers, then we must also imitate the Master’s art and make the desolate earth grow green.

Vigen Guroian is professor of theology and ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore. This essay is excerpted from his book Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening, just published by Eerdmans. Used with permission.