Garden Dreams

Good theater always takes you to another place. That was the case for me when I got to see the Lake Nona High School student drama department perform “The Secret Garden” this week. If you didn’t get the chance to see it, you’ve got one last chance on Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. They are a talented bunch of students!

Of course, I couldn’t help making some theological reflections during this invitation to imagination. Among other things, the garden in the play is a place of death and new life. It becomes a lens through which we can see the world, full of sadness and death that it is. While at the same time the garden is also a lens through which we can see the world bursting with life and new possibility.

It’s no accident that the Biblical writers use the image of a garden to convey the beauty of God’s creation in Genesis and another garden called Gethsemene in the gospels to convey the bitter sorrow of God in the face of death (see Matthew 26:36, John 18:1). But even that garden of Gethsemene isn’t where the story ends. There is yet another garden (we assume it’s a garden because Mary mistook the risen Jesus for the gardener in this story – see John 20:15). In the greatest transport of imagination that the world has ever known, the risen Jesus meets the weeping Mary, symbolic of all the world, calls her by name and inaugurates a new creation/garden that we couldn’t have imagined if left to our own resources.

God has moved from garden to garden, from creation to new creation in order to bring new life out of death. This is far more than a metaphor to give us hope that all our dreams will come true. This is a gift from God which gives us different dreams than we had before. What are these new dreams? Here are two that God has impressed upon me. How about you? What new creation, new garden dreams has the risen Christ given you?

Peacemaking that wields the weapon of self giving love.

Treating creation as a gift to be cared for rather than a commodity to be consumed.