Lent, of course, is a time where we think about sin – original sin and sin in general. Since our problem with sin began in a garden, maybe it makes sense to use a garden analogy.
This is usually about the time of year that people start preparing their garden plots for the spring, for the new growing season that is coming. The process of trying to grow a garden has a great deal to teach us about sin and about how we can manage its presence in our lives.
In the very beginning of the Bible we are kicked out of the Garden of Eden and told “Cursed is the ground because of you! In toil you shall eat its yield all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field.” And we are also told “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When you receive ashes on your forehead on Ash Wednesday you will likely hear those very words.
Now, if you have ever tried to grow a garden you can identify with the toil, the thorns and the thistles – all of which we have to deal with to be able to eat the plants of the field. We can read this passage and know that the literal meaning is apparent: it is hard to work the earth, to have a fruitful garden.
But like the rest of the Bible, there are often different layers of meaning that we can perceive other than the literal meaning of a passage. There are the spiritual senses of scripture as well. These other senses of Sacred Scripture have a great deal to tell us about how we can grow in our faith, how we can grow our spiritual garden and bear fruit.
There are a number of steps involved in growing a garden – whether a real one or a spiritual one. When you first think about growing a garden, you might find yourself looking at a patch of earth that has never been tilled, that may have sat idle for years and is probably covered in weeds, thorns and thistles. Just a patch of rock hard, stubborn earth star-ing back at you. It needs to be dug up, it needs to be tilled. We need to get the right tools, tillers, shovels, rakes and so forth. But to till our spiritual garden we need a different set of tools: Sacred Scripture, prayer, liturgy, the sacraments.
Tilling this ground is hard and time-consuming work, but it is only then that the soil can become workable, it is only then that there is even any hope of a garden. We have to do that same kind of tilling to ourselves as well. We have to till our hearts, our minds and our souls. We have to examine our consciences and dig through that hard earth, the hard earth where we bury our sinfulness –the sinfulness we bury so we don’t have to look at it or think about it. This has to be the first step – we could call it spiritual tilling.
The first time I tilled the soil for a garden, I was amazed to discover that I kept on digging up these big chunks of rock. I really had no idea they were buried there in that little patch of earth. There were many smaller rocks as well, and as I tossed them all into a bucket it didn’t take long for that bucket to become pretty full and almost too heavy to carry. All of those stones large and small were like sins – the big stones like mortal sins, I suppose, but if I didn’t get rid of them there was no way I would get a garden to grow.
We could call this step two – getting rid of the rocks and the sins, big and small. We might be able to do this on our own for a regular garden, but for our spiritual garden we will need some help. That’s why we have the sacrament of reconciliation, so we can hand all those “rocks” over to Jesus so He can throw them away, big and small. None are too heavy for Him and when we leave confession, we leave all of those rocks behind – they are completely gone. When we do that, then we can start to make some progress with our garden.
Now we need to plant the seeds and water and fertilize the garden – the third step. The nice thing about our spiritual garden is that we can use the same tools to water and fertilize that we used to prepare the soil. In fact, the seeds are included as well. Pretty good deal, isn’t it? This is exciting because now we get to see growth, we get to see new plants shooting up from the soil we have carefully prepared. And in our spiritual lives, we can feel God’s grace take root and start to grow.
Maybe the biggest temptation we have now is to think we are done, that we just need to sit back and watch everything grow and bear fruit and pick it when it is ripe. But if we don’t keep watering the garden, feeding the garden and pulling the weeds, it won’t last very long.
A garden also needs sunshine, but that is out of our control. The sunshine for our spiritual lives, however, is within our control. That sunshine is charity, it is love. It is another thing we can’t do all on our own. We need to be the sun-shine for other people’s gardens and they for ours, otherwise nobody’s spiritual garden will grow very well.
We also might need to fence our gardens in to keep animals out. We might need to spray it for weeds, bugs and dis-eases as there are all kinds of bad things that can damage our gardens. And of course, the same is true for our spiritu-al lives. The devil is dead set on having your garden fail, but instead of animals, bugs, weeds and diseases, he will come after your garden with temptations and lies just as he did to Adam and Eve in the first garden.
Usually these temptations and lies are sneaky – like weeds. They can easily lead to small sins, venial sins. One day we might notice a few weeds in our garden and say, “No big deal. I will get them tomorrow.” Then we see some more but we say, “I will just wait until next week.” Before you know it, our garden is choked with weeds and our plants are dy-ing. Fortunately, we can use the same set of tools again to fix this situation: prayer, scripture, liturgy, the sacraments. So, this is the fourth step – maintaining your garden.
If we do a good job with all these steps, if we are persistent then at the end of the season we can look forward to a good harvest. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash and so forth- a good healthy harvest. If we do a good job with our spiritual gardens, then we can also look forward to a good harvest. We will find we have grown in charity, generosity, joy, gentleness, peace – all of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
But the harvest is not the final step. We have to remember that we don’t have just one growing season – God willing, we have many seasons. And we can learn a little bit more about gardening each season if we want to, if we make the effort. We can make our garden better, more fruitful.
So, perhaps we should all take up gardening this Lent. We should go dig up our rocks, bring them to reconciliation and let Jesus get rid of them. We should plant the seed of the Gospel in our hearts and keep it growing by reading Sacred Scripture, by going to Mass, by prayer and the sacraments. When we go home from Mass this year on Ash Wednesday and look in the mirror and see that little smudge of dirt on our foreheads, we should think of it as the first bit of dirt from our work on this year’s spiritual garden.
Deacon Martin Sheehan serves at Our Lady of the Highways Church in Thomasville and as the youth ministry director at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Winston-Salem.