I Come to the Garden Alone

 

This is about the Home Grown Faith garden I promise, but if you know me you know that I tend to take the long way around and meander a bit. So, grab a cup of coffee, find a garden, a window with a view of nature, or even just a house plant to sit by and take time to smell the flowers. 

We cannot help but be prisoners of our culture. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a reality, and that’s not just true of us, it’s true of all people everywhere throughout time. Culture is, at its core, the way things are where we are. The elements of culture definition are based on five main elements: values and beliefs, norms, symbols, language, and rituals. Within any culture there is so much inherent bias — the assumption that the way things are is the way things are to be. 

Within a culture there are things that go unspoken because they are so ingrained no one needs to be told — this is just how it is. All of these factors lend themselves to producing a predisposition toward being skeptical,  at best and critical at worst, of other cultures. It’s easy for the way “we” do things to become the “right way” to do things, and if you don’t do them the same way, that is a problem. But culture isn’t necessarily good or bad, it just is what it is and over time it changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

Further complicating the issue is the existence of endless subcultures within each culture. When I was in high school, nothing highlighted the various subcultures better than the lunch room tables. Walking into the cafeteria, you were immediately met with a sections that were labeled hicks, jocks, Goths, preps and band kids. Despite the fact we all grew up in the same larger culture, we instinctively splintered off into smaller cultures that we felt better defined who we were or at least wanted to be.

My culture is predominantly Southern, middle class caucasian Christians. While I know and interact daily with people who do not fit in some or any of these categories, the majority do. Lest anyone think the thoughts that follow are critical of my culture, let me be clear, I love my culture. That being said, I don’t love everything about my culture, but I do love my culture, though I did learn that it is highly beneficial to escape the prison of your own culture by experiencing others. 

The first time I experienced a truly foreign culture was on a visit to the San Blas Islands, home to the Kuna Indians. The San Blas Islands are a chain of several hundred small islands along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Panama. This was the first time I had encountered a language barrier, radically different dietary preferences, unfamiliar cultural taboos and bizarre rituals. Admittedly, it was discomfiting initially, but quickly became fascinating. This cycle was amplified many times over the next decade as I spent time in ten different countries. During our years with Latin American Missions, we spent time in homes, hotels, and churches in big cities, mountain villages and islands. It was on a plantain farm outside of Leon, Nicaragua that I traversed from cultural shock to cultural awareness. 

We were invited to leave the bustling city of Leon to visit a small church in the countryside. After a long ride in the back of a pickup truck, we arrived at a small community in the midst of a clearing at the edge of a plantain field. People seemed to appear out of nowhere, carrying an assortment of fruits and vegetables to share with us as welcoming gifts. They weren’t accustomed to getting visitors, especially ones that looked like me and my son, so they wanted to express their gratitude. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more humbled. It was obvious this community had very little in terms of material wealth, and yet they wanted to share what they had with us. Gestures like that will stir your heart is ways that are difficult to describe. The best I can do is to say that it helped to open my heart and in the vacuum created by that newly opened space, awareness came rushing in.

If you had asked me before that day how my culture had influenced my faith, I doubt I would have been able to understand the question, much less answer it. I probably would have said something along the lines of, “It doesn’t. I take my direction from the Bible.” I would have said it, and I would have meant it, but I was also ignorant of just how much of my faith was actually just my culture’s expression of our shared faith. Standing in that field, staring at what looked like our hay barn on Chicken Creek, that they called a church, I could sense the scales falling from my eyes as genuinely as they had for Saul of Tarsus when Ananias placed his hands upon him. To borrow a line from my beloved The Black Crowes, I was seeing things for the first time in my life. What I was seeing was just how much of what I called faith and church, was actually just the culture of the place and time wherein I was born. So many things that I believed to be biblical practices and teachings, were in fact expression of biblical practices and teachings within my culture, that looked radically different in a radically different culture, yet they were just as sincere and Biblical. 

The journey from that moment to this one has been long, and at times difficult, painful, and heartbreaking, but it has also been worth every step. In the process, I have shed many of my cultural expressions that I deemed to be a hinderance or harmful to growing my faith. I have also adopted other cultural expressions that I believe enhanced and strengthened my faith. And, I have held on to some of my culture’s expressions of faith simply because I find them to be nostalgically comforting or beautiful, and I’m still learning.

If you made it this far, finish off your last sip of coffee and settle in to make it down the home stretch. 

The culture in which the Bible exists had certain ingrained beliefs that are apparent in their writings, practices, and stories. One of those beliefs was that the gods, or God, lived in temples housed within gardens, often high up in the tallest hills or mountains. The Creation story depicts God as planting a garden in the East in Eden, in which he will dwell with humanity. Those humans were then tasked with participating in God’s work by going forth from the garden to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. When the tabernacle, and later the more permanent temple, were built, they were filled with garden imagery because they were locations where Israel would dwell in the presence of God. Even when they turned from God to worship idol gods, they did so in groves and high places. The entanglement of God, gardens and worship were simply part of their culture.

I am far removed from being an Ancient Near Easterner — which is the culture of the Bible — in both time, distance, and ethnicity, but I believe there is an abundance of fruit to be gleaned from their culture. For example, gardens were places of prayer and communing with God in private. In John 1 we get the story of Nathaniel becoming a follower of Jesus. The interaction went like this, “When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, ‘Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.’ ‘How do you know me?’ Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, ‘I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ Then Nathanael declared, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.’ This reference and Nathaniel’s bold reaction are likely a reference to the promise of the prophet Micah that when Messiah comes, “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4:4). Nathaniel had likely been sitting under a fig tree in private prayer that this day would soon come. Shortly thereafter, his friends tell him they have found the Messiah and Jesus makes it known to him that he heard his prayer. Jesus himself liked to retreat to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray.

This tradition can still be found if you look closely. Many health care facilities have small, private gardens where you can retreat to pray. Most of us have sang these words in worship on a Sunday morning, “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses, and he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other, has ever known.

I fear we are losing something valuable when we limit our communion with God to one physical location, a “church building.” Don’t misunderstand my point, I LOVE churches so much I even tour them on vacation. I adore massive stone cathedrals and tiny country churches and everything in between, but God is bigger than a building or a box. In the long ago, Israel fell victim to the fallacy of thinking God was confined to their temple or their ark, prompting him on multiple occasions to demonstrate that he could not be contained. The apostle Paul once declared, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.” Churches have their place, and I am grateful for them, but God does not live in a church building.

The epic story of scripture begins and ends in a garden, but we don’t have to wait until then. In the mornings, when I walk through the garden watering, weeding or harvesting, I am usually praying and meditating on scripture. Many mornings God surprises me with discoveries I didn’t even realize we planted. If you pay attention to the pictures of Home Grown Faith Farm, you will easily notice the entrance to the garden resembles a rudimentary church steeple. I’m not going to pretend that all of this was done with all of this in mind, but sometimes God points things out to you that you didn’t even realize at the time you were doing. This little steeple often reminds me of that simple, humble little church in the plantain orchard. This garden has become a chapel for me and Honey and our desire is to be be fruitful and multiply and fill the community with his goodness. What comes from this garden is designed to be enjoyed with gratitude and love at a table in fellowship with neighbors. This is our home, this is where our faith has grown. Like Phillip from John 1, this is where “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” And like Phillip said to Nathaniel, we say to you our friends and neighbors, “Come and see.”