2 Kings 4:42-44
Psalm 145:10-18
Ephesians 4:1-6
John 6:1-15

To a Garden

Welcome to Sunday Mass during our sabbatical month. Sabbaticals are not vacations. They are spiritual responsibilities for which God holds us accountable, to be observed as surely as we observe the weekly sabbath. The Lord Jesus instructed St. Mary Magdalene, kneeling beside Him silently, to contemplate God with all her soul, heart, and mind as the "one thing [that] is needful" (Lk 10:42). By contrast, St. Martha's busy ministry of service is not the thing though surely an aspect of our faith lives. Being alone with God, from the manna-life in the Sinai wilderness to the Mount of the Loaves and Fishes, is the signature "Eden event," the one needful thing. Alone with God in the wilderness.

Even a poor organic farmer learns what the Hebrew Scriptures have always taught: that exhausting a natural system is no small thing, for long periods of rest will be required to restore it. This applies to soil structure, bodily health, and devoted laborers, too, for the road back from depletion or illness or "burn-out" is a long one. Here, we few ancient laborers have just completed our farm year: 7,000 lbs. of nurtured, picked, sorted, cleaned, and delivered produce. Just last week, we delivered nearly 1,100 lbs. of Lychee "number ones"! But spiritual retreat is a harvest all its own.

This past week I have reflected on the substantial garden in which we live. It is has its own rhythms and life. And while we have no television or radio, it is hard to ignore the spiritual temperature of the world far beyond our orchards and fields. Reports of hatred and rage filter in if only through headlines glimpsed on the Web: a withering attack on the U.S. President that never seems to end; Twitter flooded with death threats issued to our President and Vice President; death threats to Members of Congress; retirements being announced from the majority party, even the Senate Majority Leader in the prime of his career; one GOP congressman shot by a gunman while playing softball. Astonishing! Surely the sixties never reached these extremes. How did things get this way? Radical ambitions are voiced on the national scene — state socialism, libertarianism, nationalism, isolationism — all express a deep restlessness for something radically different. We at the Hermitage grew up with the terms fascism, communism, democracy, capitalism, socialism. And there were great masses of people and fearsome personalities to go along with these words: the Third Reich, Hitler, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Stalin, something called the Free World, then there was the United States and Franklin Roosevelt. We learned that in Spain communists battled fascists, so they must be very different kinds of people. And communists fought fascists in World War II, as our allies. Then, suddenly, we were told that an Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe with many poor, suffering people being shuttered behind its horrible and heavy hinges. Communism was the new oppressor, the new fascists. And soon we heard alarm bells in our schools and huddled in corridors with our heads held between our knees and our backs against the long school hallways, for the communists now had weapons to destroy our whole American world.

I would spend the rest of my adulthood sorting this out as we all have. The epic-scale terms still bounce around in my head. They don't make any sense. For a while I thought I was beginning to understand it. Democracy and fascism are forms of government, while capitalism, communism, and socialism are economic systems. But quickly these distinctions began to break down. Were not Hitler and his Nazi party elected to power? How is that not democratic? Did not Nazism signify the national socialist party, so how could Nazism be opposed to communism? And if communism were merely an economic system, then why is it always synonymous with totalitarian government and the loss of freedoms and one's private property? Even capitalism, which we (rightly) equate to individual freedoms and to human dignity (as Pope Leo XIII pointed out in is encyclical letter, Rerum novarum), must be inextricably bound to a governmental system or it cannot work. Moreover, many democracies are socialistic. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt was a socialist .... accounting for his inexplicable affection for a butcher who put Hitler to shame, killing 9,000,000 of his own people, with some estimates ranging between 20m to 30m, Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Uncle Joe."

But if these are false categories, why was World War II fought? Or the Korean War or and Vietnam War? They were about what every war in history is about: power and its twin, desire for influence or empire. To say it with one word, it is about statism, the claims of a power structure over the claims of individual freedoms and welfare.

In our own time, the People's Republic of China has empire on its mind. The religion of Islam at its foundation is an imperialist movement, following the Sunnah of the Prophet: his deeds, sayings, and silent permissions, including military conquest and the building of empire. Is it a form of racism to refuse the patent Muslim desire to dominate the world? Visit London, and you will discover this determination in stark terms for this city and country have become (de facto) an Islamic nation, according to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. It is a fact that the most common name for a newborn male child in England today is not Ian or Nigel, but Mohammed. Recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury has advocated that Sharia Law be introduced into English life with Parliament's seal of approval. Leaders in Holland, Denmark, and now Sweden have said something most people would have thought unremarkable a few years ago: Holland has a right to be Dutch; Denmark has a right to be Danish; Sweden has a right to be Swedish. Certainly, on this Island any suggestion that the local culture be wiped out and replaced by a different one 8,000 miles away would not receive wide support.

Then what is the right thing to do? The truth is, we live in a muddle. As I have suggested, these various world movements morph into one another coming to the same thing — a struggle between individual freedom and oppression. It is a longtime muddle, evident in Jesus' time and before. And who can be surprised? From a Garden-life with its purity and unerring rhythms and clarity of life and purpose, we entered into chaos because we rejected God. I do not mean that humans were driven out from Eden back into the increate chaos from which God made all worlds .... but it is in that direction: from perfect light toward ever darkening darkness. Since the eighteenth century, scientists have accepted the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which teaches that every spontaneous action contributes to the increasing disorder of the universe. Imagine, everything that happens makes the universe more and more disordered.

Small wonder that in every generation, humankind longs to be free of violent chaos and return to perfect orderliness and pristine purity. During the seventeenth century, people were sick at heart all over Western Europe yearning for Utopia. They looked out to the west and felt sure that God was summoning them back to Eden with the discovery of New Worlds. So the Puritans (whose name declares their intentions to burn off Old World corruption) journeyed to the absolutely new and virgin land, as they saw it, in order to live paradise life. Founding Harvard College, they even debated whether they should destroy the language they spoke and design a new, Edenic language, fearing that the English language contained within it corruptions and impurities of the Old World life. Everything must be new. Even New World artifacts must be kept fresh, and each year a great fire was started on each town common called a "busk," where the old was burned: wooden spoons and bowls, unedifying books, pack-rat hoarding. It all went on the fire. Keep it new! Scour your insides and burn off all that was not worthy within you!

The Puritans in Europe, as we do now, were surrounded by competing forms of government — dictatorship, democracy, Bolshevik-style revolutionary government in France, and as many economic systems. At bottom, the struggle is always the same, from the beginnings of the first attempts at human governance up to the present day: statism versus the individual. And the struggle will never end, for the state claims to care for and protect the same individuals it historically has oppressed. Both premises, of course, are true! As we know, what the Puritans and Anglicans who also came to America founded turned out not to be Eden, but rather a ruthless, cruel, and violent machine that annihilated and destroyed native cultures and peoples. What are we to make of all this?

It turns out that God's wavelength is not nations and kingdoms and governments, nor was His Son born in Herod's royal palace nor the Roman Emperor's Imperial residence. Perhaps you know that city builders are the descendants of Cain and that God always calls his favored ones away from cities: Abraham called away from the glittering city of Ur of the Chaldees, Moses called away from the peerless civilization of Egypt, Lot called away from the "metroplex" of Sodom and Gomorrah. You see, His care is upon individuals, and cities dwarf and diminish the high dignity and focus of individual lives; they militate against kindly relationship and mutual caring. And, for these reasons, they are the scene for the lowest ebb of human morality, where people disappear into anonymity in order to descend into moral turpitude. He commands us to love one another, and he always calls us to the human-scale life where this might be possible.

This is the very reason for the Hermitage and for countless other communities like it throughout history. Our first responsibility at the Hermitage is to each other and to God. We were in Haiti for many years. We did not plan on leaving. We thought we would die there, but we had to leave. Where would we go? We decided that at the end of each person life, time should be put aside to contemplate God, to kneel down beside St. Mary Magadelene before the Lord Jesus. Just a little time set aside at the end of our lives, for surely we are at the end of our lives.

What then is our proper relationship to the world? On the subject of civil governance, the Lord is crystal clear: "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" (Mt 22:21); "my Kingdom is not of this world" (Jn 18:36); and perhaps most remarkably, "I do not pray for the world" (Jn 17:9). We might pray for the U.S. President and Governors and Mayors, but the Lord Jesus prays only for those who have entered into that most beautiful of all love relationships, which is conversion to His mind and life. Without question, every person begins in that love, every person born into the world bearing God's image, granted a guardian angel, and being guided by the Holy Spirit. (That is my belief.) But our first Garden experience teaches us plainly that refusing God, rejecting God, means that while nothing in the world can separate us from His love, we ourselves can vacate that place of meeting and unconditional love, as surely as a husband walks out on a wife or a woman abandons her home and husband and children.

We recall God's mind concerning civil governance. When the people Israel demand of Samuel a king, as other nations have with all its pomp and glory, God tells the disconsolate Samuel, "They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them" (1 Sam 8:7). But the people want political kingship with all its grand trappings and the horses and the trumpets! God's vision is not a parade of proud horses, armor, and brass-buttons. His vision is about something else: to be among His people. Yes. Among us, and in a garden.

This morning we read of the Lord Jesus alone in the wilderness with His people. They are far from the towns and the cities. There are five thousand people present. Perfect! The scene is transcendent morphing into the scene at Sinai thousands of years before. Bread appears out of nowhere as manna did back in Sinai. Each man, woman, and child eats to the full. Here is the Eden moment! With one voice they might say kneeling reverently before Him, my Lord and my God. But they do not. This is not their vision. They want God on their own terms and try to mold Him into something which He is not. So He departs. And according to the greatest Christologist of our time (or any time), the Cistercian, Fr. Roch Kereszty, O.Cist., the Son of God realizes that His earthly ministry has failed, and fixes His face toward a Hill outside Jerusalem, where the muddle will come to a burning point: "Are You a King?" the Emperor's Governor asks. "What kind of government do you represent?" Be assured, my brothers and sisters, He is the only King. And the government shall be upon His shoulders. And His Name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. And He calls us to a Garden to be alone with Him in Paradise, He says at the point of His departure.

Yes, we live in anxious times. But be of good cheer. The Lord has overcome the world, and His eyes are only on you: your life, your children, your love relationships, your path toward Him. Each of us individually. Your life already is the garden, which is the only city-state that He recognizes. So mark out your plot. Draw the lines no further than what simplicity demands. Free this place of choked weeds and vermin. Plant it with beauty and fragrance and goodness and wholesome nutrition. Tend it and water it and guard it. Then, behold the miracle of life — comely, new life pushing up out of the ground within you. Go on watering it and feeding it with good things and protecting it. And one more thing: do not gaze endlessly in the direction of distant weeds, for this will paralyze you and fill you with fear and rob you of your peace, which is His gift to you. If you wish to pray for weeds, then by all means, do so. But remain rooted in your garden, and then lift it up to Heaven as an acceptable offering right and good in God's eyes. This we can do. The rest is beyond any of us and all of us in every way.

And (you Marthas!) take heart in knowing this. The goodness of garden-life will inspire others to leave weed-life. Those in the distance are also able to mark off a space no larger than their own lives, and weed and plant and water and fill this space with beauty and goodness. This is how God works, you see: garden by garden. This is where He will meet each of us in the cool of the afternoon. This is where we will offer Him our lives, and He will receive our deaths. For He is the master gardener, the owner of the vineyard, even the vine itself. And He bids each of us: bear good fruit!

Be of good cheer, for He has given us all that we need to change the world: