Practicing for Paradise
Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening
by Vigen Guroian
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1999
(95 pages; $9.00, paper)
by Marjorie Haney Schafer
For centuries, Christian writers have examined the garden as a symbol of the spiritual life. From the Book of Genesis onward, the garden has served as an image of the soul and its growth. Vigen Guroian in Inheriting Paradise continues this tradition as he ponders the myriad ways that gardening and gardens reflect and inform the spiritual life.
Before completing ten pages, the reader discovers the source of Guroian’s spiritual insights: “I am an Armenian Orthodox believer and theologian.” Guroian seeks in Inheriting Paradise to reflect on the connections between his labor in the garden and his labor in his spiritual life—specifically as that spiritual life finds expression in the liturgical seasons and feasts of the Orthodox Church:
Through these meditations I have endeavored to capture the earthiness and sacramental character of the Christian faith. I have tried to bring together the experience of space and time through the cycle of the church year. But it was the garden that gave me insight into the cycle of the church year and deepened my experience of the great feasts of the church, and not the other way around (pp. xiv–xv).
Guroian’s insights are often delightful, sometimes sobering, and at times profoundly moving.
Guroian’s wisdom emerges as he narrates the simple, daily tasks familiar to all gardeners, and plumbs their deeper meaning from a theological vantage point. For the gardener, the earthly realities are unavoidable: “In March I labor with spade and hoe and plant peas and cabbage in the cold damp clumps of earth. By June the peas and cabbage are ready, but the weeds have sprung up too and the insects have arrived. I can hardly keep up with these invaders of my impossible paradise” (pp. 4–5). Meditating on these realities leads him to reflect that
the fruit of sweet communion comes after the gall and the vinegar. The mystical enjoyment comes not without the toilsome struggle of raking and sowing and pulling up the weeds. In my garden the thistle grows more easily than the primrose. Sin grows in my body more readily than purity, and the keys to my garden do not admit me back through Eden’s gate. Nevertheless, my garden is a place away from that first home, a spot where labor lends substance to my living while I am in this mortal frame. Birth and renewal are signs, proleptic though they may be, of paradise (p. 5).
Inheriting Paradise therefore upholds a deep and spiritually based ecology, not one based on romantic notions of the perfections of uncluttered nature. Sin has affected not only human nature, but, through the Fall, the natural world as well. This sober but respectful view of the relationship between human beings and nature provides a balanced corrective to much radical ecological theory, replacing the vision of a pristine and perfect nature with a more realistic view of the fallen aspect present even there.
A similar fruit of Guroian’s meditations is found in his comments on technology. For example, he makes the following observations about the Internet:
[W]e are not disembodied mind, or spirit, we are our bodies—cruising the Internet won’t teach us that. It may even trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. Gardening teaches us differently. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming. I mean the kind of gardening that any one of us can do with his hands and feet and the simplest tools (p. 8).
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