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.