This Garden World

To anyone who reads this blog with any regularity, my apologies for the prolonged absence. Things have been something of a whirlwind lately. Two weeks ago, I graduated from graduate school and immediately afterward, my wife and I left for a much needed vacation in Puerto Rico where we camped on the pristine–and tiny–island of Culebra for a week. Outside of that, some profound sadness to report. My good friend (one of my best, in fact) Wei, who had been facing deportation back to his home country of Malaysia for some time now due to a technicality in his work visa, was forced to return home because of the sudden sickness, and, I’m sad to report, untimely death of his mother. This departure from the U.S. effectively ended his immigration appeal process leaving him in Malaysia indefinitely, and leaving me without one of my dearest friends. You can peek at his blog “Torn Notebook” for a bit more about, and a window into the head of Wei. 

Other exciting news involving a possible adoption for my wife and I (as soon as August!!) has all combined to leave my world a bit topsy-turvy at the moment.  In addition, we’re launching our new high school and middle school aged summer adventure camps in a couple of weeks so you’re prayers would be greatly appreciated on that front as well.

Some time ago, I promised excerpts from my Masters dissertation called “A Longing for Home; Rethinking a Biblical Ecological Worldview” which will be forthcoming–likely to keep you busy during my absence at camp through June and July. I’m pleased with it. My new understanding on how the first century Jewish audiences of Jesus, Paul and John may have understood the concept of a ”new heavens and new earth” has left me feeling inspired, guilty and indeed, stupider for my (and the collective Christian) lack of understanding of the complex Hebrew worldview. Hopefully expansion of the project will be enough to keep me busy through the rest of my Ph.D. studies.

So there you have it. Please keep visiting. As I said, I will be taking a brief hiatus during most of June and the first half of July, but I’ll try to fill this space during that time nonetheless. Thanks for your patience and keep looking for more here.

My good friend Wei has added a fascinating post to his blog “Torn Notebook” about the relationship (or rather, his relationship) to and between Christianity and Buddhism. Wei is a Byzantine Catholic who was raised Buddhist in his native Malaysia before converting to Christianity and moving to the U.S. for college. Being from Boulder, Colorado myself, I’ve always been surrounded by what is often sarcastically branded as “Boulder Buddhism”, which in other geographic locales, is often termed “California Buddhism.” With all due respect to the many true devoted followers of the Buddha, there is, in my hometown, a very popular, perhaps watered-down, surely ambiguous version of Buddhism that’s probably more hip and bourgeois in its appeal than actually spiritual. What I didn’t really know until my friendship with Wei, was the great moral and often physical demands which many strands of Buddhism place on the follower; arguably more so than Christianity. His post, called “The Lotus and the Cross” is a response to a series of questions asked by a student researching the relationship between the two faiths. His responses are (pardon the pun) quite enlightening.

Part I: http://wanweihsien.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/the-lotus-and-the-cross-responses-to-questions-on-buddhism-and-christianity-part-i/

Part II: http://wanweihsien.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/the-lotus-and-the-cross-part-ii/

We had an unseasonal snowstorm here in the Denver area this morning. It caught me a bit off guard and my wife and I were not able to cover our budding herb garden or our flowers in time. My hope is that they’re hearty enough to take the cold, but I can’t be sure. If they die, I will lament a bit. Not just because I worked hard to grow them, or because I spent money on the seeds and garden boxes. Rather, my sadness will come from someplace far deeper. The theologian-gardener Vigen Guroian has convinced me in his writings that all gardening is, at its root, a longing to return to the Garden of Eden–that place where man was called to gardening as his primordial vocation.  Indeed, every time we garden, every time we till the soil or work the ground in an effort to bear new life, we participate to some degree that original life of harmony in the Garden. We return to that time when the earth did not oppose us; when all gardening was an act of true joy. If my little garden dies, its loss will be a remembrance–however faint–of the loss of Eden because of sin. The failure of my garden speaks to the reality of a broken world. In his book, The Fragrance of God, Guroian quotes St. Augustine, who says,

Perhaps we should say that what man cultivated in the earth…he guarded or preserved himself by discipline.

In other words, says Guroian,

Because man obeyed God, the earth obeyed him, so there was harmony within man, and he, in turn, was in harmony with his surroundings. Yet “in the end, since he [man] did not wish to remain obedient and guard within himself the likeness of Paradise, which he cultivated”, Augustine continues, “[Adam] was condemned and received a field like himself, for God said: ‘Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth.’

Guroian adds,

I am not speaking merely metaphorically. My meaning is sacramental. Paradise is truly present even in this fallen Creation, even in my humble garden. “Do not let your intellect be disturbed by mere names, for Paradise has simply clothed in terms akin to you (St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise)…Paradise is in this world. It is inside of every earthman and earthwoman and all around them, waiting to be reclaimed. We all should be gardening Paradise, since “All bliss consists in this. Do as Adam did,” says Thomas Traherne.

Guroian concludes,

I believe that gardening is the first and final sacrament of blessedness. Both the first Adam and the last Adam were gardeners.

I strive to be a gardener in the shadow of the last Adam, Jesus, who appeared to the holy women on the morning of his resurrection as a gardener, standing in the garden from which his glorified body had freshly bloomed. I pray that the garden of my backyard as well (and much more so) as the garden of my heart, will not be killed by the threatening chill of the lingering winter.