The Garden of the Soul
July 18, 2016
The Artist’s Garden at Vethueil, Claude Monet
THE Garden of Eden was perfect. Every garden since has been on the brink of obliteration.
The garden is always in need of tending. If you give up on it even for a short time, it goes to weed or disease or overgrowth or drought. The garden is a lesson in not giving up in the face of constant hostile forces.
The soul is also always in need of weeding. God is the gardener. We are not. We can assist him, but he’s in charge and every action — all the daily drudgery of weeding — is as nothing without his graces.
“Let us now return to our orchard, or flower-garden, and behold now how the trees begin to fill with sap for the bringing forth of the blossoms, and then of the fruit — the flowers and the plants, also, their fragrance. This illustration pleases me; for very often, when I was beginning — and our Lord grant that I have really begun to serve His Majesty — I mean, begun in relation to what I have to say of my life, — it was to me a great joy to consider my soul as a garden, and our Lord as walking in it. I used to beseech Him to increase the fragrance of the little flowers of virtues — which were beginning, as it seemed to bud — and preserve them, that they might be to His glory; for I desired nothing for myself. I prayed Him to cut those He liked, because I already knew that they would grow the better.'”
And, St. Francis de Sales wrote of the mystical role of plants, which help us to know God:
Men have forgotten that God’s thoughts find expression in the visible, as well as in the invisible, world, and that inner and secret harmonies bind the natural and the supernatural together. The things of beauty which God has bidden arise on the earth lose half their grace, because men do not mount by them to the better understanding of the supernal beauty of the operations of that world which Faith reveals to our gaze.
The God who writes his thoughts in the Book of Nature is the same who writes in the Book of Scripture.
