This week we will be looking at ‘garden: a place for work’. George Lings beseeches us “please don’t mainly think of lawns and flowers; begin to think vegetables. Set aside Garden as being about idyllic rest and sylvan beauty; see it as the place of fruitful labour. Then go beyond both.” In the earliest days of the monasteries, Garden was the place where the inhabitants grew food to eat, and perhaps a little extra to sell. It was absolutely essential, a matter of life and death. Lings therefore suggests that “what the monastic tradition calls Garden, we would call the world of work”. Of course there are still those for whom work means planting and growing and harvesting, but for most of us it will look quite different, and it might take a few creative steps to move from the monastic garden to our own experience.
Exodus 20:9 says “six days you shall labour and do all your work”, and Psalm 104:22-23 says “the sun rises...people go out to their work, to their labour until evening”. For most of us, for most of our years, work is part of the usual pattern of our days. I want to define work quite broadly here, because I don’t mean only paid employment, but rather meaningful labour, and that might also be at home or among friends and neighbours or in the voluntary sector. And even then I want to take care not to diminish those who do not work for a variety of reasons, whether that is age or ability or opportunity. The point really is to recognise that work is a significant part of human experience, and yet it is so often disconnected from our spiritual lives, especially for those who find themselves in work that is ill-suited or unfulfilling, for whom it is nothing more than a grim necessity.
The monastic tradition has a more holistic view of things. The Franciscan Rule speaks of “three ways of service”, which are prayer and study and active work. The Rule of Colmcille tells its adherents “your daily occupation should be threefold, namely prayer, manual labour and lectio [reading]”. Northumbria Community leaders write that the work of God requires “heart - daily prayer to nurture the soul, mind - study to nurture the spirit, and hands - manual labour to nurture the body”. Lings fully endorses this threefold view, and recalling his command to “love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”, I believe Jesus would too. (Jesus actually includes four elements, although I have long wondered about the difference between heart and soul, and we might speculate on what the fourth practice might be if they are to be nurtured separately.)
Lings recognises that “it is a mental shift to realise that today most of us will fulfil Garden neither in or for Christian communities, nor in a literal garden”, but the truth is that most of what we do can be part of the work of God. Before I started training for ministry, I did admin for a company that manufactures artists’ paint brushes, and before that I was a sales assistant in a department store. Neither was obviously godly work, but I aimed to serve people diligently and with kindness, and I believe that kind of gentle witness to a way of living rooted in love is part of the work we are called to do in this world. A former minister of mine used to say “you are not defined by what you do, but who you are is defined by how you do it”, and in the same say what we do for work is perhaps less important than how we do it. Lings speaks of having a vocational attitude, commending us to do everything for the love of God, and I would suggest for the love of one another.
The Creation (taken from the Children of God Bible by Desmond Tutu)
In the beginning, God’s love bubbled over when there was nothing else - no trees, no birds, no animals, no sky, no sea - only darkness. Out of this love, God spoke. ‘Let there be light.’ And there was day. And there was night. And when the first day was done, God smiled and knew that it was good. On the second day, God said, ‘Let there be sky where the clouds can float and the wind can blow.’ And the sky was bright and beautiful. On the third day, God said, ‘Let the waters gather together into oceans and let the dry land appear.’ Now God decided to make the world even more dazzling, wth tall trees and long grass. And then the first flower opened in all its glory. On the fourth day, God said, ‘Let the sky be filled with the sun and the moon.’ And God scattered stars across the sky like sparkling diamonds. On the fifth day, God said, ‘Let there be birds to fly and sing, and fish to swim and splash.’ And the world was filled with the joyous sound of birdsong.
I chose for us to hear the story of creation, because this is the work of God in a nutshell. God creates and sustains the world in love and takes pleasure in doing so. There are different ways of understanding what that means, and there are different ways in which we see that expressed, but that is the heart of it. And so this is the work of God that we are invited into. We are called to sustain all that God has made and bring to it creation of our own, and to do it all in love and with pleasure.
I wonder if you have ever seen yourself as partnering in the work of creation. I think it blew my mind a little the first time I heard someone speak like that. I had always thought my part was simply to do as I was told, by the Bible and by my church and by God, if I was fortunate enough to have a direct word. To hear that I had been given creativity and passions and ideas of my own, and that I could use them to work not just for but alongside God was utterly thrilling. I hope it thrills you too, and I encourage you to reflect on the creativity and passions and ideas you have been given, and the ways in which you can exercise them, in your work but also in your worship and in your leisure.
But we are not called to work endlessly or thanklessly. God rested on the seventh day, and calls for us to do the same. Earlier I quoted Exodus 20:9, which says “six days you shall labour and do all your work”, but the really important part comes in the next verse, which says "the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns". The point isn't to work every hour of the six days, but to make sure there is at least one day on which we can rest from all but essential labour.
People talk a lot about the importance of work-life balance, but for many of us it proves so elusive as to seem almost mythical. It is not optional though. God calls us to work but commands us to rest because we need it. Our minds and hearts and bodies fold in on themselves without it. Society will run itself into a pit without it. The earth risks being stripped bare without it. I think that is what I love most about the image of Garden as a place of work. It needs us to labour in it but it also beckons us to sit and enjoy it. May we remember both sides of that.
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If you would like to reflect more deeply on the sacred spaces we are exploring this summer, you can find reflection questions in the file below.
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