Eastertide, Springtime and Gardens.

Greetings,

After a very dry spell with few April showers we have been blessed with May rains, which nourish the earth, the trees, plants and flowers and which bring us all of the practical blessings of the earth as well as a beauty beyond the capacity of any human artists to create.  We are also reminded of our relationship to God.

You are an enclosed garden.

Isaac Watts wrote:

We are a Garden wall’d around,

Chosen and made peculiar Ground;

A little Spot inclos’d by Grace

Out of the World’s wide Wilderness

Like Trees of Myrrh and Spice we stand,

Planted by God the Father’s Hand;

And all his Springs in Sion flow,

To make the young Plantation grow.

Let my Beloved come, and taste

His pleasant Fruits at his own Feast.

I come, my Spouse, I come, he cries,

With Love and Pleasure in his Eyes.

Our Lord into his Garden comes,

Well pleas’d to smell our poor Perfumes,

And calls us to a Feast divine,

Sweeter than Honey, Milk or Wine.

Eat of the Tree of Life, my Friends,

The Blessings that my Father sends;

Your Taste shall all my Dainties prove

And drink abundance of my Love.

Jesus, we will frequent thy Board,

And sing the Bounties of our Lord:

But the rich Food on which we live

Demands more Praise than Tongues can give.

Anselm of Canterbury (Eleventh century) wrote with great spiritual insight:

“And you, Jesus, good Lord, are you not also Mother?

Would a mother not be one who, like a hen, gathers her young beneath her wings? 

In truth, Lord you are my Mother!”

In The Last Battle, of the Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis, there is a wonderful description of the garden (remember that the Stable is at once the symbol of the Stable where the Savior was born and the reality of God’s presence):

About half an hour later—or it might have been half a hundred years later, for time there is not like time here—Lucy stood with her dear friend, her oldest Narnian friend, the Faun Tumnus, looking down over the wall of that garden, and seeing all Narnia spread out below.  But when you looked down you found that this hill was much higher than you had thought: it sank down with shining cliffs, thousands of feet below them and trees in that lower world looked no bigger than grains of green salt.  Then she turned inward again and stood with her back to the wall and looked at the garden.

“I see,” she said at last, thoughtfully.  “I see now.  This garden is like the Stable.  It is far bigger inside than it was outside.”

“Of course, Daughter of Eve,” said the Faun. The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.  The inside is larger than the outside.”

Lucy looked hard at the garden and saw that it was not really a garden at all but a whole world, with its own rivers and woods and sea and mountains.  But they were not strange: she knew them all.

“I see,” she said.  “This is still Narnia, and, more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below, just as it was more real and more beautiful than the Narnia outside the Stable door!  I see ‘world within world, Narnia within Narnia’”

“Yes,” said Mr. Tumnus, “like an onion: except that as you continue to go in and in, each circle is larger than the last.”`

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Enjoy thinking about it.

Yours & His,

DED