Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Catholic
La Belle Eden

La Belle Eden

Last updated on: May 16, 2020 at 12:25 am by Mary Pezzulo

La Belle Eden 2020-05-16T00:25:37-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I should have been writing this week, but instead I was in the garden.

The cold weather finally left LaBelle in a burst of steamy mist; then it was warm. I went out with my shovel, to hack at the ground.

I had only dug a portion of what I meant to dig, back in early spring. I started on the rest Wednesday evening when it was dry, and then I finished it Thursday when it was raining. I didn’t want to wait any longer, because ground gets heavier to move the wetter it becomes, and the seedlings were getting too big for their pots. I didn’t want to lose any more seedlings.

A third of the yard went from dandelions and the remnants of lawn to slimy brown loam. I sprinkled the loam with an aperges of fertilizer made from chicken bones and chicken droppings; then I covered the loam with landscaping cloth and cardboard mulch. I cut holes in the cloth to plant my seedlings: Eight broccoli and six kale. Three peppers and a Japanese eggplant. The two limp squash seedlings that survived my clumsy attempt to grow them from seed, plus a choke-neck squash from Rural King. Five strawberries and one basil. Room for zucchini and cucumber that somebody else is bringing me later. Giant sunflowers. Two deep buckets of potato vines. I dug and I dug and I dug. I weeded around the onions and snap peas I’d already planted. I moved the planters of carrots. I turned over the compost.

According to Genesis, our father Adam was cursed, so that the soil would bring forth thorns and thistles. I wouldn’t mind thistles so much. Thistles have purple flowers. The plant I can’t stand is ordinary grass for an ordinary neighborhood lawn, because the roots are thick as basket weave. They’re hard to break up when I turn over the soil and smash them with my shovel. Ordinary lawn doesn’t leave me with anything to wash off and eat, like dandelions and violets do. Ordinary lawn doesn’t feed the bees like clover. It serves no purpose at all. God didn’t decree that everybody ought to live in houses surrounded by a useless plant. Sons of Adam did that. Once upon a time, a lawn was chosen as a status symbol, for the gentry to show they were so rich that they could leave a piece of their land with no crops growing on it. And now everyone is practically required to have a lawn. Everything you could grow in a yard to walk on, besides a lawn, is called a weed.

Here in LaBelle, people are especially particular about grass and weeds. They mow their lawns every couple of days in the spring and summer. A short lawn with nothing interesting on it marks that home’s owner as a “good” poor person, a responsible deserving one, and not the other kind. Our next door neighbor likes to growl at us that we’re “rats,” for not having short itchy monochromatic grass like hers.

If this house was my property and not a cheap rental, I would build a tall fence so she couldn’t see.

All God did was give us thistles with purple flowers. The punishments human beings measure out for one another are far worse. Human beings engineered lawns.

The first vegetable gardener was the first man born of woman, Cain, who murdered his brother out of envy. God demanded to know where Abel was, and Cain said “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and God didn’t answer Cain any more than He would answer His accusers before the Sanhedrin several millennia later. The answer was obvious, but God knew He wouldn’t be listened to. In every generation He sends us brothers and sisters that we are supposed to keep, yet we go on killing them. God pointed out to Cain that Abel’s blood was crying out for vengeance, and the blood of murdered brothers and sisters has been crying ever since. The whole world is blood-drenched and crying.

“Whoever sees me will kill me,” said Cain, the one who set the precedent of killing in the first place. God had a different idea. He put a mark on Cain so that the one who murdered a murderer would suffer a sevenfold vengeance. But we go on through all these centuries: murdering, then murdering the murderer and calling the second murder justice, reaping the sevenfold vengeance.

Sevenfold times sevenfold times sevenfold, the opposite of Christ’s command to forgive again and again through all time, we fail to be our brothers’ keeper, and the blood cries out.

Rosie leaned out the dining room window just then, eating an apple. This rental house didn’t come with screens in the windows, so we just open the sash and prop it up with a stick. She’s gotten accustomed to jumping out of the dining room window onto the back porch when it’s her turn to dump the kitchen compost, and sometimes just for fun.

“Mommy?” she interrupted my meditations. “You have no idea how dirty you are.”

“I think I do,” I said. I was muddy from the soles of my gardening shoes all the way up to my face. Some catechist I’d had as a small child mistakenly told me that a venial sin is a small blot on your soul, and too many venial sins can eventually grow together into one mortal sin. I had imagined my soul as a ghostly white sheet I wore over my skeleton but under my flesh, and sins were brown smudges that slowly grew up and colonized the clean sheet until it was a total loss. The sacrament of confession was God’s gracious act of bleaching the sheet. My body and my gardening clothes looked like that superstitious notion of a soul in mortal sin just then.

Rosie jumped out, deposited her apple core in the compost heap, and sat on the porch.

“You look like a mole that rolled in the mud and then fell in a puddle,” she remarked.

I am fat, and I squint, so I suppose I do look like a mole.

Rosie ran around the backyard, filling the bird feeders and providing color commentary on the garden. She’s most excited about the strawberries, and most concerned that I might make her taste basil. She’s desperate for me to allow her to drag the wading pool out to the patio and fill it up with the hose. We have to keep reminding her that the weather only seems hot by contrast; it’s too cool out yet to fill a pool. She’s been playing with her water guns and plastic fishing set in the bathtub, waiting in joyful hope for summer.

The neighbor who hates us popped in and out a few times, but mercifully said nothing.

All I’ve wanted is to get out of here, to a house I own on a bigger lot where I can grow an orchard and a grape alley, and raise bees and chickens. But at that moment, in the garden in the back of the detested rental house, under the disapproving eye of our neighbor, I was at peace.

I am trying to be my brother’s keeper. No doubt I’m doing it badly. But the reason I had the harebrained idea to expand this garden so unmanageably big was so that I could share some produce with the Baker-Street Irregulars. Their grandmother goes to the downtown food pantry weekly, just to keep them alive in that ridiculous little house on the corner of the street. I’m told that grocery prices are just going to keep going up, and the supply chain will continue to create shortages in the grocery stores. I can’t do anything about that, but I can do something about my backyard. I can cut the infernal grass with my shovel until it turns into mud, and I can make food grow out of the mud. Rosie and Michael and I can grow dandelions and clover to nourish the bees, we can run around filling feeders to nourish the birds, and we can make vegetables grow out of slimy mud to feed ourselves and the Baker Street Irregulars. We can go on doing this whether the earth brings forth thistles or grass or angry neighbors who call us names, and that will be a good life.

The last seedling went into the ground just as the rain kicked up. Rosie gathered up the plastic pots for the garbage. By the time I finished showering off all that dirt, I was ravenous. We ate lunch with the gusto that only comes after a good long stint of hard work in the garden, as the rain nourished the plants outside.

I was wrong. Cain was not the first gardener. Our Father in Heaven was the very first Gardener. He watered the paradise of Eden with four rivers and set Mankind inside of it to be happy, but we hid from Him. We have been hiding ever since.

Perhaps it was never so much an expulsion from Eden, as a running away because we were ashamed.

Some days gardening feels like finding my way back.

Image via Pixabay

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.

Interpretation of Scripture

Previous Post

May 12, 2020

Courage, Cowardice and COVID: Contra R. R. Reno

Next Post

May 16, 2020 It's Time For "First Things" To Consider the Last Things

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Abuse Advent America American Christianity angel angels Annunciation Appalachia apparition apparition chaser apparition chasers apparition culture art art review babies baby baby Jesus Bad Lip Reading bad statue contest bath beauty Bible story blog blogkeeping blood book review Brandon Sanderson breastfeeding bus Catholic catholic conspiracy alarmism Catholic Oppositional Disorder Charismatic Renewal Charlie the Cat chastity Christ Christian idenitity Christianity and Judaism Chronic Illness clean clothing COD piece comedy compassion conscience conspiracy theory conversion cop-on-black violence Crucifixion cry of the poor culture Daesh Daily Saints death death penalty devotional diaconate diaper diapers dirty disability Donald Trump Dorothy Day dream drugs Eastern Catholicism Eastern Christianity education election election update Elsewhere on Patheos empathy environment Fear feminism film review fish flashback fluffy buns food Franciscan University of Steubenville Friendship Room fun Gabriel gardening gospel hair-splitting Heaven hell heresy Hillary Clinton history Holly the Witch Holy Spirit holy war Homeschooling homosexuality horror human dignity humor Icon idol immigrants infection inter-religious dialogue Interpretation of Scripture Islam Jesus Jihad Joseph joy laity and lay vocations lamb dinner laundry lent lgbtq literature love manners Mary Medicine and Science Meditation mercy mess milk misogyny Missouri monasticism monster motherhood mourn with those mourn movies movis music mystery nature neurodiversity New Pro-Life Movement news nonsense nostalgia O antiphons obituary objectification Ohio Valley Ordinary Time ordination Ordo Amoris parable paradox Passover peanut butter personal beliefs pets philosophy Planet Charismatic poetry politics polls poop Pope Francis Pope Leo power in the Church prayer prayer request prayers preferential option for non-violence president presidential election priest primary private revelation pro-life prophecy Public face of Catholicism Pure Flix Q and A race racism random rape rape. sexuality reader's request Reckoners refugee religious trauma ressurrection Right to life Saints saints and celebrations same-sex same-sex marriage satire scandal secular feasts seder Seven Joys Seven Last Words sex sexual ethics sexuality silencing six months skid row slavery social justice Speculative fiction spiritual abuse spoon stain story suffering suffrage suffragette Sunday Gospel temple Tenebrae Responsories Terror the exorcist The Friendship Room The New Pro-Life Movement Things I Learned on the Internet tin cup traffic true story tv review Uncategorized USCCB vice and temptation violence Virtue virtue and vice war Way of the Cross whimsy whole life women's ordination work of mercy Year A

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

According to Hebrews, what two things cannot be shaken?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Faith and love A kingdom that cannot be shaken The word and Spirit Heaven and earth