Finding God in the Garden

by Balfour Brickner

Genres: Family Life; Religious & Inspirational; Jewish Fiction

Synopsis

Grieving after the death of a beloved daughter, Rabbi Balfour Brickner struggled with his faith while preparing a flowerbed. One day the rabbi found himself writing down the thoughts that came to him as he turned the soil, and observing nature's abundant examples of order and renewal, miracles and beauty, Rabbi Brickner found his faith returning like a garden in spring. Using the garden as a sanctuary and springboard, Rabbi Brickner considers the lessons to be learned from the tasks of caring for the land, the wonder of a garden in full bloom, and the connections between Biblical teachings and botanical life. Finding God In The Garden is a passionate, witty, and provocative celebration of mature religious faith derived through nature, reason, and the joys of everyday work. Explores rational spirituality, reconciling faith with enlightened thought.

Release date: April 1, 2003

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 240

Sample

Acknowledgments

Writing about gardening is as lonely a chore as gardening itself. Yet one can rarely do either without the help of others. Gardeners rely on the experience and wisdom of those who before them labored in the soil, learned from the effort, and passed their knowledge to the next generation. People who write know how indebted they are to those who surround them for the advice, guidance, and inspiration that turn a vague idea into a reality.

I am either one of the luckiest people in the world or a person who, for reasons I cannot comprehend, the Great One decided to save from self-destruct. How else to explain the extraordinary good fortune of having Arnold Dolin as my editor? If I did not know better I would say our meeting and his willingness to work with me was bashert — Yiddish for fore-ordained. His gentle but firm direction guided me at every turn. He even made rewriting almost a joy. He is an exact and exacting craftsman, but his patience with me was unbounded. He is a legend in the world of publishing, and now I know why he richly deserves his splendid reputation. This volume would never have come to birth without his professional oversight and, I hope, his friendly faith in me.

Arnold introduced me to my agent, Sarah Lazin of Sarah Lazin Books. At a time when I needed all the encouragement I could get, Sarah expressed confidence in the project even before it was warranted. Sarah led me to Little, Brown and through that relationship to Deborah Baker, my editor there. Most of Deborah’s trenchant and demanding suggestions have found their way into this book. Deborah Baker is a formidable editor and a fine writer. Her skills reflect the depth of her personal resources. Once again, good fortune smiled kindly on me.

For over a decade, Lawrence Kirshbaum, CEO of AOL Time Warner Book Group, has watched this book pass through its several permutations. From its earliest incarnation he encouraged me, sometimes chided me, frequently berated me, and suffered with me as I journeyed through the “black holes” of self-doubt and despair. I will always treasure Larry’s quiet confidence. Larry is a person who enables.

Doris Brickner was among the first who shared her knowledge with me. She helped me learn how to do more than just look at flowers. She helped me understand the deeper meaning of planting a garden. I am indebted to her for that introduction.

My indebtedness to my assistant, Gloria Adell, can only be hinted at in this brief paragraph. She labored patiently through endless bouts of writing and rewriting, and always she did so with a wonderful sense of humor and a boundless willingness to give of herself. Late hours, frantic calls late in an evening or too early in the morning, frenzied demands for misplaced papers, left her unfazed. Gloria is just that: “gloria.” I am acutely grateful and most fortunate.

It is my loving companion, Marcia Soltes, who, to use the words of Dylan Thomas, remains “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” She is the one who, listening to my poorly conceived ideas at the end of a gardening day, encouraged me to write them down. She conceptualized the book long before I did. When self-confidence would desert me, Marcia would rebuild my shattered ego, directing me back to thought and keyboard. Marcia was and remains that force in my life that drives far more than any flower. Marcia is the sum of all the elements that, regardless of the season, make the garden of my life bloom. It is no accident that it was into the earth of our home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, I sank the shovel, planted the bed, and enjoyed the first bounteous armful of flowers that became this book. Woods Whole, as she calls it, has always been her spiritual well. It now also nourishes me.

It is a good life. I am constantly aware of the spirit flowing through all that happens to me. I am a most blessed man.

BALFOUR BRICKNER

Woods Whole

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

June 2001

Introduction

Gardening is a lonely hobby. With no people to talk to, those of us who garden do a lot of talking to the plants and flowers — and even to the weeds. We mutter, we mumble, we groan. Occasionally, as when the tree peonies come into full bloom near the end of May, we “ah!” (Everyone does then. The blooms are sometimes eight inches across, and the colors are breathtaking.) Besides digging and pulling, clipping, spraying, staking, raking, and hauling, we get time to think. And that is how this book began to germinate.

Since I have been a Reform rabbi for more than forty-five years, it is hardly surprising that I began to find some spiritual parallels with what was going on in my garden. Gardening is a hobby I began rather late in life. I certainly had no prior experience or, for that matter, interest in plants and flowers or in growing vegetables. I was a Jewish boy born and raised in a midwestern suburban setting, son of a distinguished Reform rabbi, doing all the things kids do. World War II propelled me into the navy. After the war — with college and seminary behind me — a pulpit in Washington, D.C., marriage, and a young family made their predictable demands. Avocational interests that filled what spare time remained were mostly water related, since by then we had built a summer house on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where boating, sailing, fishing, skin diving, and an occasional tennis game were our way of life. Gardening? Aside from dropping some annuals in a flower box at the beginning of the season, the thought never crossed my mind.

So how did I get into gardening? I certainly was not born to it. When I was a child, my mother had a sizable garden behind our suburban home. I still have a mental image of her talking with the gardener, instructing him about planting this or that. I had as much interest in that garden as a fish has in a coal mine. Perhaps in some very subtle way, my paternal grandfather contributed to my eventual drift toward gardening. We lived next to woods, where, when he visited, Grandpa loved taking me on his walks. He seemed to know the name of every tree. He pointed out growing things on the floor of the woods that I would otherwise have stepped on or over. Without my even knowing it, he probably planted in me a love of nature that must have found good soil somewhere deep inside my subconscious. It first manifested itself through a youthful affection for the Canadian bush, where, during my adolescence, I went to camp and fell in love with canoeing. I could not get enough of the woods and the lakes. Perhaps that early, youthful passion subliminally fed my enduring love of nature, the earth, soil, plants, and growing things.

This ardor did not really blossom until decades later. I had left the Vineyard and, with a new wife in a new life, unexpectedly purchased a home on Shelter Island, a small island wedged between the easternmost arms of Long Island. We called the place Second Site. The house desperately needed landscaping, but our budget was far too tight for such a luxury. So I began to garden. As the bromide goes, “It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.” At first, I dug holes for the dozen or so Japanese black pines we planted as a screen. Next, a corner of the land needed to have a bed dug and prepared. Shelter Island, I discovered, is the mother lode of rocks, and I quickly became an expert on the digging and removal of same.

Clearly, holes in the ground and garden beds are not made to remain empty. They cry out to be filled with trees, plants, flowers. But which ones? I did not have a clue. What I thought I knew was that plants grow in sunshine, but I had no idea that a vast number of plants, such as hostas, azaleas, astilbes, columbines, and rhododendrons, do better in shade. Nor did I know that the composition of the soil is important. Some plants demand acidic soil; others prefer a “sweeter” growing condition, one rich in alkaline.

Shelter Island had one excellent nursery, whose owner and on-site manager, Blaze Laspia, possessed a wonderful, wry sense of humor. If you caught him after the spring sales crush, Blaze gave freely of his vast wisdom. I did not know that, when, as a newcomer to the island and a neophyte, I cautiously approached, list in hand. He knew the property. (Word gets around quickly on a small island, and my immediate neighbor was a “hairy legger,” their term for one born and raised there. That meant that the locals knew far more about me than I did about any of them. I spent nearly twenty years on Shelter Island, and that imbalance never changed.) Blaze took one look at my list, a quick glance at me, and my first class in Gardening 101 began. An hour later, I turned up the driveway to Second Site, the back of my station wagon bursting with shrubs and plants, each one marked appropriately: “sun,” “shade,” “tall — rear of bed,” “short — front of bed,” “plant in lots of peat moss and leaves,” “feed with high-nitrogen plant food,” and so on.

Matters soon got out of hand. Land clearing, tree cutting to get some light and a view of Gardiners Bay, root and weed pulling — especially bittersweet root and mean, tough bull thorn (aptly named) — led to more beds and more planting, mainly of perennials, most of which really did bloom magnificently. Suddenly, I was trapped — addicted is the better word. There is nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a plant that you have in the ground actually bloom or flower. (Shrubs bloom; plants flower — don’t ask me why.)

I began to hear my grandfather telling me about the sanctity of the soil, and I began to believe it. I began to see earth and its capacity to produce trees, shrubs, and plants as something critically important. The predictability of nature, our capacity to discern its order and to plan gardens around that order, overwhelmed me with awe and respect. I began to feel that I had an obligation to at least protect, if not enhance, living matter. The more I saw the ecosystem and the environment around me deteriorate because of nothing more than human greed, the more important it became to enhance my couple of acres. I wanted them to be not just beautiful but also an example of what people who cared about the land could accomplish. It didn’t turn out that way, but I do believe we made a good start. There is a well-known rabbinic saying: “It is not incumbent on you to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from beginning it.”

Time and circumstance have had their way. Point of View, our family home on Martha’s Vineyard where my three children spent their summers from infancy through young adulthood, was sold long ago. I go to the Vineyard only periodically, and then it is primarily to visit the small Jewish cemetery on the island where, after her tragic death in an accident, we buried our daughter, Elisa, in 1973.

Second Site is also in the hands of another. The new owner tells us how much she enjoys the tree peonies and what a fairyland of blooms the place is in the spring. I like that. It helps make all the sweat that went into that garden seem most worthwhile.

I now spend the seasons in a home in the gentle, lovely Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. There, in the autumn years of my life, I have rediscovered my earlier passion for the land and nature. What started out as a small bed, which I dug one summer afternoon more to amuse myself than to beautify the place, has become in the past four or five years an extensive, cultivated, time- and money-consuming botanical arena. It has overtaken me. My companion, with whom I share Woods Whole and who sees things from a psychological perspective, thinks I have become obsessive-compulsive about the garden. She may be right. I seem to be unable to drive past a nursery, especially in the late fall, when there are plant and shrub bargains galore.

The more time I have spent in my garden, the more I have realized how much it has to teach me, to teach all of us. I began to see that some of my supposedly far-fetched ideas about how we know God and what law and order mean in the cosmos and to our world are validated by what happens in the garden. I saw how the cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay so evident in a garden are meaningfully mirrored in our lives. I began to learn more about reproduction, sexuality, what is truly miraculous (and what is not), dying, death and rebirth, patience, hope, how nature can and does heal. With every turn of the shovel, as the worms wriggled free of my spade, I saw how that microcosm was a perfect reflection of what was going on in the macrocosm millions of light-years away from and above me. I began to realize that if I looked up, I would better understand what was going on when I looked down, and vice versa. In other words, the more I gardened, the more I began to learn about life, about what religion tries to teach and what faith tries to deepen.

Periodically, I would scribble down some of my random thoughts. Those scraps of paper I left on a nail in my work shed at the end of a gardening day soon became a pile on my desk. Eventually, no longer able to ignore the pile, I picked up the notes and read through them. Tossing aside the doggerel, the clichés, the adolescent nonsense, I began to work on the kernel of an idea. What follows is the distillate of that refining process.

God is in the garden, and anyone can find God there. In fact, God is the Master Gardener. God plans, plants, paints with an incredible palette (we call them flowers), grows, harvests, and conserves. This book is my attempt to share with you what I have learned: how my belief that faith comes last and grows out of strict canons of critical thought and careful reasoning is confirmed by the laws of nature.

I know that in this conviction I am something of an anachronism. Most people have lost faith in reason as a way to find faith. Religious rationalism is not popular today. Emotionalism, feel-good faith, and so-called New Age spirituality are the new trends in religion. But in my view, we ought not abandon reason in our approach to one another and to our God. Discovering the lawfulness of the universe, seeing its orderliness, is the one way we really have to strengthen faith. Observing Nature as it unfolds in a garden makes that crystal clear to anyone who makes the effort to see it. The garden is a microcosm of our much larger world.

Gardening is dirty, sweaty, sometimes heartbreaking work, but when my hedge of ‘Bonica’ — a classic shrub rose, the first to win All America Rose Selections honors — breaks into its full, fragrant bloom, I begin to understand and feel spiritual pleasure as no theologian or philosopher has ever taught me. In this book, I try to share that pleasure with you. My hope is that these words will help you find your way down some new paths of spiritual confidence. Maybe you, too, will gain some new and satisfying religious and spiritual insights as something in this garden inspires a new vision. Perhaps that will generate in you a “Wow! I hadn’t thought of that before” or “I hadn’t seen that before. Isn’t it awesome?” That is what gardening is all about. That is what spirituality is all about. That is what this book is all about.

CHAPTER I

Eden: The First Garden

Eden is that old-fashioned House

We dwell in every day

Without suspecting our abode

Until we drive away.

How fair on looking back, the Day

We sauntered from the Door —

Unconscious our returning,

But discover it no more.

Emily Dickinson

How can one write a book on gardening and God without starting in the most obvious place? Eden is the first garden described in any Western religious literature, and if one accepts what is written about it in the Bible, it must have been an incredible place. But what did it look like? Where was it? No one knows or could ever have known. The Eden described in the Bible probably never existed. I think of it as being like that mythical village of Brigadoon — a lovely imaginary place, repository of all our yearnings.

But was there ever such a place as Eden? Could there ever have been? We may find a hint of an answer to such questions from the word itself.

Linguistic scholars tell us that while the Hebrew word eden means “delight,” the word actually derives from the language of a Middle Eastern civilization, the Sumerians, who predated the Hebrews in that part of the world by some fifteen hundred years. We find in their vocabulary the word edinu, meaning “steppe” or “plain.” So Eden, a diminutive or corruption of edinu, might have been a plain or steppe nestled somewhere between the two great life-giving rivers of the Middle East, the Tigris and Euphrates, the possible sources of our garden’s water.

By the time the Hebrews appeared on the scene, the phrase “Garden of Eden” came to signify some mythical after-death place for the righteous, and it lost all geographic meaning. It ceased to be a place and became instead an idea, even an ideal.

As a professional religionist, I know how theologians through the ages have used the story of the Garden of Eden either to create or to justify their own religious views. Later in this chapter, I will deal with one of the more powerful (and damaging) of these ideas, but for now it is as a gardener that I approach this tale. From that perspective, I am uplifted spiritually by the story every time I read it. A garden — and surely that first, most perfect garden — fires the imagination. Imagine its beauty. Imagine its serenity. Within our deepest parts, there seems to be a drive to seek and surround ourselves with beauty, whether through art, music, or great literature. And that is precisely what brings us to appreciate a beautifully designed, exquisitely executed garden.

Rare indeed is the person who does not resonate to a garden. I have seen hundreds of people who did not know a petunia from a privy walk through both public and private gardens enthralled by what they saw. They may have had no knowledge of bloom time or sun requirements; they may have been totally ignorant of, and oblivious to, what it takes to make a plant bloom. But none of this is required for the sheer enjoyment of that combination of shape, color, size, and spatial relationships that helps our senses respond to a garden. I have watched the most cynical people melt into silent wonder as they viewed a mature quince or crab apple tree in full spring bloom. A couple of years ago, I planted a young one, Malus‘Indian Summer’, along our drive, and it has become a spring traffic hazard. Drivers can’t seem to take their eyes off it as they approach our house.

What is there about a garden that generates so much pleasurable response from so many? Perhaps we see the garden as a symbol — a place, yes, but more than a place, a space that represents some fulfillment of homogeneity lacking in our too frequently unsatisfying societies. Perhaps it beckons to us with a simple goodness, a lovely innocence to which we would lik. . .