In the Garden with my Father

Written May 20, 2016  

              I’ve always had a curiosity about where you were going and what you were up to. Hence the incessant questions as you laced up your shoes or put on your cap. Although you occasionally gave me your annoyed side glance, I know you always found it endearing (and now even miss it!). More often than not, whether you answered with an affirmative plan of action or an uncertain “I don’t know…something outside,” you found your way to the garden.

                The garden…your place of refuge where rest and work become one and you enter a quiet place of joy and peace. This is where I most enjoyed following you although I’d quite honestly follow you anywhere. For me, the garden has always been a different place however. After all, it is your garden so it seems even fair that it’s always been less fun for me to be there without you. Sure, it still has its charm of bringing forth new life in all shapes and sizes, but my favorite thing about the garden, when I find myself there alone, is that it reminds me of you.

                When I try to work in the garden by myself – and believe me, I’ve tried – it’s just work to me. In fact, it’s downright exhausting! But when it’s with you that I simply cooperate, allowing you to place my hands in their rightful position, following your lead, and even taking up the “menial tasks” of moving hoses, gathering buckets, fetching tools, or turning on and off faucets…this is when joy and peace really enter in. Just call me “Daddy’s little helper!” I’m not looking for a promotion!

                Even the way you look at the garden is different than my view. Where you see a beautiful, life-giving plant encroached upon by weeds, I see a clump of weeds and with luck manage to discover the plant before destroying it along with everything else. What’s more, you won’t even pull a weed if it’ll put a plant into danger even if it means a decreased beauty of the garden. But what makes a garden beautiful anyways? Is it perfectly formed rows of rich soil giving home to evenly spaced vegetables or fruits thriving without a weed in sight? Certainly that has its appeal, but weather is unpredictable, and you’ve taught me that the highest beauty a garden can achieve is simply in helping it, through gentle care and consistent cultivation, reach its greatest level of fruitfulness according to the circumstances of that particular season. In a rainy season an overgrown garden may seem at first to be in a neglected and run-down state but if, despite the undesirable wet conditions, life is still present and even able to sustain the human lives around it, that garden indeed possesses a remarkable beauty!

                By viewing the garden from your perspective, I begin to see its beauty in a deeper way too. When walking between the rows with you, I love pointing out plants and asking you about them: their names, their growing season, the care they need, how they are doing that year. I love availing myself of your wisdom born of experience and loving care. You know what you know because year after year, season after season, day after day, you walk these same rows asking yourself these same questions so as to cultivate the most fruitful and thus most beautiful garden possible. You help me to see the beauty of the garden and to wonder and marvel at its fruitfulness.

                I also love working with you in the garden. Whether it’s planting or harvesting, as long as I’m doing it with you, I’m happy to get in there and get my hands dirty. I never tire of your instruction and even often ask that which I know I’ve asked hundreds of times just to be sure about each step. I love watching you do it as well. They say it’s one of the best ways to learn but I don’t know if I’ll ever get my hands to work the way yours do – so sure and steady, gentle and strong, eager and patient. To each plant you give its due care, never letting even one receive neglect because of a “rush”. It is only in partaking in your work that I begin to partake in your rest, too. Planting 150 onions may take more than an hour but I barely notice the passing of a few minutes when I’m doing it with you. And in this, I become a collaborator also of your joy and peace, and with time, I no longer see first the weeds and then maybe the plant. Rather, I see first the plant and take action on the weeds according to their effect on the plant’s fruitfulness. Slowly I become more like you – the gardener – never with the intent on surpassing you but merely the desire to cooperate with you more perfectly so as to bring about a greater fruitfulness along with peace and joy. Like I said, I’m not looking for a promotion. I just want to be more perfectly who I already am: “Daddy’s little helper.”

                But my favorite thing of all is just being with you in the garden, present to the moment. No worldly anxiety exists in the garden. If a moment past or ahead does enter in, it is to receive advice or a consoling word. Sometimes we find ourselves immersed in deep conversation born from the fact that I like to pick your brain, but when you become slow to answer, I remember that sometimes – oftentimes – there’s more wisdom in silence. Walking with you in the garden is a place of security for me. It is there, while admiring beauty and marveling at the mystery of life with you, that I feel most loved and accepted in all that I am. In this security of knowing I am loved, trusting you comes easy and being anything but unapologetically myself is just out of the question. As you share with me your cherished garden, allowing me to participate in its cultivation, laughing with me, enjoying silence with me, delighting in just being with me, I realize in your purely joyful gaze that what your eyes find most beautiful in the garden is actually me. The life you desire most of all to nourish, cultivate, grow, and bear fruit from is mine. Yes, you still love your garden and its work will always be rest for you but the greatest joy you can get from your garden is seeing it bring me joy. You desire no gain solely for yourself but to share all with me. A motion of your hand tells me: “Everything I have is yours.” What you offer is a complete participation in the fullness of your riches, and what you ask is merely my presence and open hands to receive. I am the height of your creation…the “as good as it gets” in your eyes. But this, to no merit of my own. It is only because of your love, the perfect love of the Creator for His little creation. And it is only through this love, through being consumed by it in our walks in the garden that I can grow strong, begin to bloom and, in time, – your time – come to full fruition, radiating the reflection of your glory with which you created me. That’s what happens from simply being with you in the garden: transformation, purification, sanctification. With every step, you make me more like you, and your smiling gaze never fails to remind me: “I love you little one.”

This meditation was born of my spiritual exercises led by Fr. Zachary of the Mother of God (SOLT) at the Benedictine Abbey in Atchison, KS from May 15 – May 19, 2016. Spurred initially by the topic of being holy soil and cultivating the garden of my heart, I found myself reflecting on my upbringing in the country outside of a small town in South Central Texas. Being always a Daddy’s girl, following him around was a given. This meant that I quite often ended up in one of his favorite places: the garden. Remembering fondly all that I would do (and still do when at home) with my dad in the garden and how that made me feel, I gradually entered more deeply into a state of prayer. Without much intentionality, my image transformed from a memory of being in the garden with my earthly dad to a prayer experience of being in the garden with my Heavenly Father. This is not much of a stretch since I was blessed with an earthly dad whose paternity has always given me a beautiful image of God as Father.

As I hope one can see clearly from the meditation, it is hard to distinguish between that which I wrote specifically about my earthly dad and that which I wrote specifically about my Heavenly Father. In fact, the meditation could be entirely about being with the Heavenly Father in the garden of our hearts. We are drawn into our hearts by the Father Himself who always takes the initiative and leads us there. The Father finds rest in the “work” of beautifying our hearts, but if we decide to go in on our own and take control, we end up exhausted and without much fruit. The Father’s view of our hearts is also often much more positive. This is certainly the case in my own life. I could name so many of the weeds in my heart that need to be exterminated, but in this rash action I could also very well damage a beautiful and delicate plant my introspection failed to even notice. As we spend more time with our Father in the garden considering ourselves from His perspective, we begin to form it within ourselves as well and start to see our hearts differently. The work that we do in the garden should be always that of simply collaborating with God. We should always strive to be “Daddy’s little helpers” rather than those who try to put “Daddy” out of work. Again, we see a transformation into being more like the Father as we learn from Him and cooperate more and more with Him. But the best part is getting to the point of being before doing. For it is only in being completely ourselves with the Father in the garden that we can recognize His purely loving gaze and be transformed as the piercing truth settles in: We are loved in all that we are, as we are, here and now and for all eternity. In the light of this love, purification and sanctification takes place, and we partake in the journey to become who we were created to be: children who resemble their Heavenly Father, loved, and forever His little ones.

What I think I look like / What I actually look like

("Daddy's little helper" in 1994 and in 2015)