by Mark Kazmier
At the commencement of this spring I had a very nasty flu. It was mostly the fever that was so unbearable. For about 24 hours, my fever was 103 degrees Fahrenheit. That night I was delirious; the ceiling seemed to be spinning for about 10 hours. It reminded me of the time when I was seven years old and my Mom let me watch the Disney film Dumbo when I had a fever. That night I was deliriously tormented by pink elephants. Dancing Pink Elephants are scary enough without delirium.
Have you noticed that it always seems to be the most glorious weather when you are bed-ridden? Well, this time I rebelled against my bed and forced myself to lie on the wooden porch of the Monastery (our community living house in which the abbot, myself, happens to have a wife) in the sun. After my fever was reduced to 99 I decided to do a bit of gardening. A logical decision, of course. See, I had been staring at our little patch of flower and herb garden from the deck that has not been touched for two years and was naturally (or perhaps un-naturally) overrun with dead leaves, dead grass, and weeds. It was kind of depressing to stare at actually. So I grabbed the only rake we have in our shed, a rake with sharp metal ends spaced rather wide, not your average leave-rake. I moved very slowly because of bodily fatigue, but after two afternoons I cleared the bed with my metal rake of most all of the dead debris. It was actually quite odd now that I think of it, how passionate I was about clearing the bed of dead stuff so that the living daffodils and rose plants and herbs could be free from it. I had not communicated with the outside world for about six days because of my illness, and yet the only thing I could think to do was to clear that little patch of ground of death and make it neat and orderly.
God put Man and Woman (she was not actually named Eve until after that whole fruit-eating thing) in a Garden. Not a palace. A garden. And they were commanded to tend to it. And that command was pure joy to them. Making things beautiful is the real job of every man and woman. That’s why gardens are so attractive to us: the atrraction is merely a remembrance of our original occupation. Even in perfect Eden, the trees and bushes and plants would get unruly if not attended. There is even a sense in which nature was wild before death entered the world. If it was not wild, then why would have God given us dominion over it?
But there were no rakes in Eden because nothing died. Principally, rakes are needed only to remove death.
Oh that the Master Gardener would now take up His rake and remove the death that is suffocating the new growth in my heart. After all, when Time worked itself backwards and the Second Man rose from the earth, Mary mistook him for a Gardener.
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1 comment:
Chris said...
There's a lot here--the question of whether the disorganization of physical nature was allowed by Spiritual God so that his physical image in man would be able to order things in the same way God ordered things, which leads to the question of whether chaos actually preceded God's creative act (as the Genesis account seems to imply). Then there's the subject of the name of Eve, the "mother of all the living," so named AFTER the Fall, betokening God's grace (spoken through the mouth of Adam, her husband, when he named her, which is beautiful), the naming of things and people through the first man, the question of whether leaves, plants, or animals died before the Fall (if nature was already chaotic it seems likely that such was the case, but I don't know, and you seem to disagree)...
But above all, pink elephants? Did you wake up the next day in a tree with a gang of (no-longer-appropriately caricatured) blackbirds? You know, I've seen a house fly, but...
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