Entering the Garden

"Entering a garden is like passing through a mystical gate." 

Thomas Moore, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life.

If you have entered the Restoring Eden Project Contemplative Garden recently, you would have seen a new sign on the double doors. The sign reads:

Restoring Eden Garden Safety and Usage

All are welcome to use the Restoring Eden Contemplative Garden area outside the narthex.
This is an area of quiet prayer, reflection and fellowship.
The vegetable garden is a working garden. 
 For safety, children and youth must be supervised at all times.

 Thank you.

The entrance of the garden is more than a location. This a sacred threshold where the exuberant joy of children, the contemplative thoughts of prayer and fellowship unite with the Holy Spirit in shared space. For some it is or will become a type of inner sanctum. For others it is or will become a colorful, fragrant  haven when the joy of children will hop from slate to slate chasing butterflies. The garden is a space where all who enter can be more fully open to a personal movement of the Spirit while respecting the community around them. 

Come, enter the garden joyfully.

Come, enter the garden prayerfully.

Come, enter the garden, soaking in the warmth of the sun...God's embracing hug.

Come and enter the garden and dance with God.

"Behind the soulfulness of pure, saturated light and color, as best see in the myriad flowered faces of nature, is the beautiful face of God smiling down in blessing upon us."

Narana

Garden Resurrection

"God planted a mustard seed

deep within my heart

A tiny grain, a kingdom presence,

a hidden germ of life

warmed by God's love it grew

sending down its roots

a tender shoot, branches too

and its season fruit

A harvest far beyond my dreams

increasing through the years
A miracle, a life transformed

abundant act of grace."

The Easter Story is alive in the Restoring Eden Garden. Bulbs, all beautiful, pushed their fragile heads up through the chilly earth. Splashes of daffodils, sunny and golden waved in the cool spring air.  Red tulips danced in their interlacing cluster of a cross formation.

Spring burst forth in the garden with glorious new life just as we entered the Easter Season. God is working in the garden as we experience this new life at the Easter Sunrise Service along with the energy, joy and inquisitiveness this is creating in our community.
The garden is a constant reminder of the Easter story.  Each time we plant a seed, bury it in the earth, and watch it sprout, we participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  I think Jesus was aware of this relationship too.  "Unless a seed of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed but if it dies, it produces many seeds."
We are all like a seed waiting to be transformed by the power of the resurrection. 

Dying......Resurrection......Eastertide

We embrace the season of Eastertide, the celebration of light and life,  in the garden. This is a way to engage in the season of Easter beyond just one day. Eastertide is the 50 days after Easter. This is a time to practice resurrection.  This is a time to cultivate resurrection in our lives and in the lives we encounter every day. This is a time to be reborn and
"sow it forward" sharing our abundance as we live the gospel.

The Easter lilies and hydrangeas that adorned our sanctuary will be planted in the contemplative garden space. They will be reborn each year with glorious blooms.  Life dances in the garden with the preschool children who explore with exuberant joy as birds and butterflies create their habitat. The Family Fun Night Ministry prepared the soil and planted tomato plants in the vegetable garden area. Sunday May 5th we are having our first community planting day in the vegetable garden that feeds the hungry in Loudoun County.

I believe our faith is not a faith of reading something and thinking, “How nice.” Our faith is a faith of proclamation, action, prayer, and response....living the gospel.  Easter implores us to proclaim the resurrection, and the garden is one way that offers us a simple, profound, and even quirky way to do so.

Come get your hands dirty. Jesus did.