The Gospel According To My Backyard

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, September 23, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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This summer I fell in love. I didn’t want to. I didn’t plan to. I didn’t even expect to. But fall in love I did. And fall hard.

How could I resist? Her skin was so rich, so textured, so gloriously moist. Her scent was intoxicating, a mix of musk and mulch and pine and dew. How easily I lost myself in her green embrace. I found such pleasure in her deep topsoil. I found new strength in the crunch of her grey stone gravel.

This summer I fell in love with my backyard. I fell in love with my backyard’s growing things. I fell in love, as Walt Whitman wrote many years ago, with “the brown soil here . . . the rain shower at night, and the fresh smell the next morning—the red worms and the latent life underneath—the effort to start something . . . in shelter’d spots . . . and there the dark fat earth . . . upturned.”

Now, I imagine that those of you who are long-time gardeners, those of you who are seasoned green thumbs, might greet my garden giddiness with bemusement. But you have to understand: last July, my partner Jim and I purchased our first house. After years of rentals, we had walls and windows and floors that were all ours. And outside, just past the sliding glass door, we had a backyard, a big fenced-in backyard full of . . . weeds and bare spots, broken branches, dead pine needles, rocky soil and old garden beds gone wild with overgrowth.

Last summer, when we moved in, I had plans. Plans to plant and weed and cultivate my own little Garden of Eden. And last summer, all those plans came to naught. I did zilch. I did nada. I unpacked moving boxes. I sat on the couch. I looked out the window. And watched the weeds grow and the grass die.

But this summer, ah, this summer was different. This summer was a season of cultivation. This summer was a season of dirt under the fingernails, mosquito bites on the arm,s and the tired, sun-stained, satisfied grin that comes from planting ones hopes in the earth.

Linda Lancione Moyer, in her poem “Listen” writes: ˙

Standing in the garden,
left hand laden
with ripe strawberries. The sun
beams off the glassy
backs of flies. Three
birds in the birch tree.
They must have been there
all year.

My mother, my grandmother,
stood like this
in their gardens,

I am 43.
This year I have planted my feet
On this ground
and am practicing
growing up out of my legs
like a tree.

Standing in the garden, kneeling in the grass, working with earth and trees and flowers can root us in something grander than our own life, in something larger than our own foibles, our normal neuroses, our personal concerns and sorrows. Our backyard pulls us out of ourselves and connects us to a broader sense of life. It expands our perception.

In July of 1838, the great Unitarian philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled: “This . . . summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. The cool night bathes the world as with a river. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. A human being under them seems a young child, and this huge globe a toy. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily.”

The mystery unveiled. To become intimate with growth reminds us that there is a greater power at work in our lives, there is a greater power at work in the universe. There is something more prevailing than our own plans, our own attempts to control and influence. Call it God, call it Spirit of Life, call it the universal impulse, call it natural law, or call it Scotts Fertilizer. But there are greater forces at work in our life than the eye can claim and define.

This became so clear to me in the rock garden I have begun creating around two huge boulders and an already existing large azalea. First of all, I didn’t place the boulders there. Creation, the movement of ancient tectonic plates, the upward thrust from deep in the earth’s core, worked to shape the rocky ledges and protrusions that now I call “my” rock garden. The earth herself planted this garden millions of years ago. I’m just a momentary caretaker, an inconsequential esthetician amidst the sweep of time.

Still, I carefully choose the flowers I would nestle among those rocks: the subtle orange of the hyssop, the slim purple finger of the gayfeather. As I tucked their roots into the soil, I noticed the barest hint of a fern trying to stretch out of a small crack in one of the boulders. I almost pulled it out to spare it the effort, because I knew it didn’t have a chance of holding on, of finding nourishment in the harshness of that rock. Plus, that little fern wasn’t part of my garden plan. It wasn’t part of my what I was trying to orchestrate. For some reason, though, I left it on its own. Now, in late September, that hint of a fern has grown tall and full and luscious. It is my absolute favorite part of the rock garden. And I had nothing to do with it.

Sometimes beauty grows from the most barren and unexpected of places. Sometimes, our plans and efforts have nothing to do with things coming into being. Where in our lives are our barren places, our rocky edges? What amazing grace might be growing underneath the surface of that situation? Who knows what unexpected gift might be revealed when the time is right?

But even as the garden expands us, it pulls us deeply into our core.

The beloved American poet Stanley Kunitz nurtured his own masterpiece of a garden in Provincetown until his death in 2006 at age 101. Before his death he wrote: “I think of gardening as an extension of one’s own being, something . . . deeply personal and intimate. In the beginning, a garden holds infinite possibilities. What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.”

Our backyard, our garden, is a mirror, a reflection. To peer into a backyard, to glance upon a garden, is to see into one’s soul. What does your backyard, what does your garden say about you? What do people see there? What do you see there? What inner truth does it reveal?

Stanley Kunitz continues: “The garden is alive and it is created to endure just the way the human being comes into the world and lives, suffers, enjoys, and is mortal. The lifespan of a flowering plant can be so short, so abbreviated by the changing of the seasons, it seems to be a compressed parable of the human experience. Every cultivated lot of ground is symbolic of the surprises and ramifications of life itself. The garden instructs us in a principle of life and death and renewal.”

My mother-in-law, Dorothy, a long-time and skilled gardener, who taught for years in some of Boston’s toughest inner city’s schools, recently told me: “Coming home and going out to the garden for an hour, digging my hands into the earth, summoned tranquility. No one was arguing. No one was questioning. No one was making demands. It was quiet, so quiet. And for an hour I knew peace.”

The peace of green growing things, the peace of the dusky dirt, the peace of honeybee wings, the peace of—as poet Wendell Barry says,—“wild things” offers a pure and powerful meditation.

I have practiced and taught meditation for over seventeen years. I’ve explored many different techniques and practices from all corners of the world. I’ve sat at the feet of some of this country’s most accomplished and illuminated spiritual teachers. I’ve sought the guidance of Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, Pagan, Earth-Based, Taoist, and Humanist scriptures. And yet, few practices have offered the mind stilling clarity of the spade in the soil, hands pruning or pulling on weeds. Few teachers have whispered wiser words than the hum of the mosquitoes at sunset, the bark of a neighbors dog as the moon rises over freshly upturned soil, the almost imperceptible moan of the dying oak tree that shelters our garden shed.

The Buddha talks about stilling the mind. The gurus of India talk about releasing the inner light. Jesus talked about the peace that passes all understanding. The ancient Kabbalists talked about the gentle guidance of angel wings. But direct contact with the seed slowly sprouting, the blossom reaching skyward, the ivy creeping outward, the stump decaying downward, awakens within my human heart a connection to something equally timeless, equally real, and equally religious. Is it any wonder so many of the world’s religious traditions use the image of a great garden to represent the pure source of from which we all sprang?

The Italian poet Sibilla Aleramo, peering through her garden’s morning mist, reminds us:

So radiant in certain mornings’ light
With its roses and its . . . trees
Is Earth, or with its grain and olives;

So suddenly it is radiant on the soul,
Which stands then alone and forgetful
Though just a moment earlier the soul
Wept bloody tears or dwelt in bitterness;

So radiant in certain mornings’ light
Is Earth, and in its silence so expressive,
This wondrous lump rolling in its skies;
Beautiful, tragic in solitude, yet smiling,

That the soul, unasked, replies,
“Yes,” replies, “Yes” to the Earth
To the indifferent earth, “Yes!,”

Even though next instant skies
Should darken, roses too . . .
Or the effort of life grow heavier still,
The act of breathing even more heroic,

“Yes,” replies the battered soul to Earth,
So radiant in the light of certain mornings,
Beautiful above all things, and human hope.

The garden is a growing-ground for fragile and necessary hope, the hope we must have in order to claim another day. Biologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson, the author of the influential book Silent Spring wrote: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of 
strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something 
infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature— the assurance
 that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

The Gospel of Our Backyard, the good news of the garden, lets us touch and taste and treasure some tangible part of infinity. In the words of the great naturalist John Muir, the garden reminds us “this grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and glowing . . . each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

May it ever be so. Blessed Be. Amen.

©Copyright 2007 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.