Edit: Alexander Pope, thanks Reader! This is why I love to be edited!
These last two weeks have found me happily finishing up no less than four essays- and continuing to plug away on my book. I also was invited to speak at Symposium day at my children’s school, and that ate up the time I would otherwise spend on the Hobbits. I’ve included it below. I am on vacation next week but will be back to the Hobbits soon. Cheers- KHS
November 1, 1755 was a sunny day in Lisbon. It was All Saint’s Day, and the majority of the city’s residents were headed to mass- enjoying the clear sky and the breeze coming off the ocean- when a major earthquake struck. The quake was of a giant scale and lasted up to five minutes. Many residents of Lisbon fled the churches and ran to the shoreline for safety, where they were standing when a giant tsunami hit, caused by the earthquake. The waves destroyed much of the city, sweeping away many of its residents, destroying homes and knocking over lamps and candles that ignited into flames and started fires throughout the city that then destroyed what the quake and the waves hadn’t touched.
The Lisbon earthquake visited this city and brought with it the quake and flood and fire; to a religious people, it must have seemed like God was visiting his judgment upon them. Estimates suggest that up to ten percent of the population was killed, though the number might be higher. For such a religious people, the effects of the earthquake were tragic- but the symbolism of quakes and flood and fire were equally as upsetting.
Theologians were, at the time, much more socially prominent than they are today. Before the earthquake, theologians and philosophers were reflecting cheerily on the advances of European society and its newfound marketplaces. Just as scientific discovery was encouraging people about the tidy workings of the world around them,
Theologians applied the optimistic spirit of the Englightenment toward God; just as science has proven that the stars and the moon behave in orderly, reasonable ways- so must God, who made the heavens! So the poet Samuel Pope, in An Essay on Man, writes that
All Nature is but Art, unknown to Thee
All Chance, Direction, which though canst not see
And spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
It was a time of great optimism about the goodness of the natural world and the reasonableness of the God who had ordered it. “Whatever is, is right” means that God only does good; and so we must assume that the world that exists is as God intended it, and that whatever happens is good.
So you can imagine, the confusion when the earthquake hit. It was not only a natural disaster- but a theological emergency! Clearly, either God is not good, or God is not in control, if such terrible things can happen.
The philosopher Voltaire reflected on these events in a famous novel called Candide. The novel ends with his protagonist, Candide, sitting in a garden, eating oranges and pistachios.
Candide has experienced an almost unbelievable sequence of events. He suffers the earthquake, he is crushed by the waves of the tsunami, he barely escapes the fire; he is tried at the Inquisition; he is left to wander America by foot; he faces violence from European royalty and looses all of his sheep.
He has had not one bad day, but a series of bad days- and his misfortunes are set in a time when misfortunes have occurred on a massive scale. This is not Alexander having a bad day; this is the world itself opening up to swallow him.
And yet, Voltaire writes, if Candide had not suffered all these things- the earthquake, the water, the fire, the waves, the wandering, the violence, the loss- without being cast out of his home and sent away-
If he had not suffered this loss, he would not have found himself in the garden, eating oranges and nuts;
“’tis well said,’ replies Candide, ‘but we must cultivate our gardens.”
With this small observation, Voltaire reframes the question of God’s power and human suffering. Now he doesn’t give a perfect answer, theologically— he actually gives quite a bad answer!- but his observation is apt- without the careful and hidden work of cultivating a garden, there would have been no place for Candide to find rest, no place to escape the terrible effects of the earthquake and water and fire—nothing for them to eat!. This place of rest and the gifts of food were only there because someone had bothered to tend the garden.
I’d like to suggest to you that the best way to learn to live Christianly in a deeply broken world is to learn to cultivate a garden.
Three things you should know about gardens; the first is something about Time. When you put a seed in the ground, there is nothing you can do to make it sprout immediately. Now, you can create ideal conditions for it to sprout, and sometimes if you add a bit of heat underneath it, it might sprout more quickly. But under no circumstances is that seed going to sprout right away. You have to wait. You plant the seed, and then every day you go check on the seed and see if it has come up- and you trust it will- but you still have to wait.
The currency of the garden is time- just like the currency of prayer and the soul. There is no such thing as instant spiritual growth, and instant maturity- parents, you know this. Time is a creature, made by God- have you ever thought about this? That God when he made day and night, is actually making time?- and in doing so, God sets the world in time. So time is a gift given to us, or better we are given to time. We work with and in time, but it is not ours. We do not control it. And as you all know, time marches on, no matter how many $200 eye creams we buy. We cannot control time, but we can honor it, by daily tending to whatever is placed before us. So, too, with the garden- we can’t rush the growing! But we can learn to wait, and to be watchful, and to humbly do the next task in front of us.
The second thing you will learn is to tend. The thing you need to know about gardens is that they cannot be controlled- not entirely. You can buy the seeds, and plant the seeds, and amend the soil and add the fertilizer and perfectly time your watering- and still the bugs may come, the rain may come, the rabbits may come!—what you plant may not bloom. Last year I lost a third of my dahlias to a punishing rainy June. What you intend for your garden, for your future, for your children- none of these plans may come to pass. And yet time in the garden can teach us that we are accountable most of all for our tending. What we get to do as Christians is carefully set our hands to whatever is before us. We show up to our work just like we show up to the garden- diligent, trustworthy, hardworking- but always aware that whatever results is a gift of grace: “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow” (1 Corinthians 2).
We are called to do the tending; not the growing.
All of you, but especially you students- have been through a very difficult season- “unprecedented times”—your own personal water and fire and flood. I wish for you that it had been different. It can be easy to lose heart when it seems like so many things are so deeply wrong with the world. It can be easy to feel that there is no time for the garden, that there is no time to learn Latin and to read old books and study difficult things.
But as Christians, you can take heart in the fact that your task is not fixing the world and its giant, sometimes intractable problems- your job is more like tending. What you have learned- what I hope you have learned- in your classical education is that careful attention bears fruit.
We cannot control the future; we cannot prevent drought or disease or sorrow- there are problems we cannot fix- but by turning our attention to the things that are so small- the seedlings, the weeds, the watering- we can be reminded of the things that are so big-
This is the third thing the garden can teach us; how to kneel.
There are problems, as I said, that we cannot fix- the water and the fire and the flood may come. But by turning your attention to the things that are so small- we can be reminded of the things that are so big-
of God who in his kindness made a world, and made time, and placed us in it as creatures, where we might on a sunny afternoon retire to the garden to eat fruit and pistachios, to enjoy the work of our hands, to feel the sun on our skin for as long as it might last. We might kneel, there- we might receive rest for our souls.
The world is given to us that we might tend it- amidst great danger and loss and sorrow- we might find that our gardens bear fruit, and that we might share this bounty with a world facing great brokenness. We might also simply learn what it means to be a creature, set in time.
The Jewish sages spoke of “tikkun olam”; the need to repair the world; and they said this: “You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
You might learn from the garden what it means to be a creature- how to honor time, how to tend, and how to kneel- and you might receive there rest for your souls. I hope you do.