Gardens, Not Buildings

The life of a person of faith requires a great deal of imagination. But that doesn’t mean that we’re making all this up. On the contrary: faith begins with the apprehension of a truth so true that it cannot be expressed with mere sensory data. So we begin to flesh it out in stories.

Luckily, we don’t rely solely on our own storytelling abilities. Each religion has its own stories, handed down from generation to generation. The ones that are preserved are the ones that have served the most people in good stead. Even within the seemingly contained and frozen Bible, certain stories resonate more clearly with certain populations of people at certain times, while others fade into the background, possibly to become relevant again later.

The stories themselves are works of imagination, not because they are made up out of whole cloth, but because they speak clearly the deeper truth that cannot be otherwise explained. God created everything that exists and created people to enjoy it. Adam and Eve lived in a garden and walked and talked with God, but they broke the relationship and couldn’t stay in a paradise where everything grows and flourishes easily. Later people tried to build a tower to heaven, but God thwarted their hubristic work and scattered them.

God’s heart was broken by the scattering of the people, so God set about calling them back together, first by giving one specific people, the Hebrews, a mission: “It will be your job to show all the people of the world what I am really like. This will help you stay in relationship with me, but it will also help everyone to come back to me.”

The Hebrews set out on their mission but kept breaking the relationship with God themselves, and this slowed and frustrated the process. They abused one another and rejected God’s way of love. They looked for truth in power and ambition and conquest—places seemingly more convenient and efficient than God, who is the actual source of all truth. But God kept rescuing them, first from slavery in Egypt, and then consecutively from the oppression of many other nations. Every time it seemed that hope was lost and the deal was broken, God did something to reestablish it and inspired the Hebrews to try for a relationship with God again. The Hebrews carefully recorded even their own failures so they could learn from them. As a people, they suffered at the hands of other peoples, and that continues to this day.

Now look: Where in this story did we shift from imaginative speculation to historical fact? Where did we say anything that isn’t actually true? You might say, “There never was a garden with Adam and Eve living in it,” and from a scientific or journalistic standpoint, you’d be right. But the story of this particular people—the Hebrews—brings with it all sorts of stories that are told to get at the bigger truth behind them.

In our present age we value facts (or we used to, anyway—that may no longer be true in the United States). Scientists require facts in order to proceed. So a scientifically minded person may say, “Why can’t we just throw out all these old stories and proceed based only on facts?” Good luck with that. We all have stories around which we build our lives; otherwise we’d never be able to get enough rock-solid facts together to make any decisions at all. If we don’t value the stories of the ancients, we try to make our own. But the case for religion argues that we’re better off continuing to work with stories that have stood the test of time instead of relying only on stories we make up out of our own heads during the course of our brief lives.

That doesn’t mean letting go of the facts we have learned more recently—like everything science has taught us. It just means that the ancient stories get colored a different way. What does it say that when the people tried to build a tower, they couldn’t finish? What does it say that the whole story begins with a garden? When it comes to the life of faith, it’s better to cultivate crops than to build towers. When we make it a game of Jenga, the removal of one piece will cause the whole thing to crash down. But when we dig our hands into the soil, the failure of one crop—and the hunger that results—will inspire us to plant and harvest another.

I’m saying today, then, that it’s better to be a gardener than an architect. This, too, is a story. So on to the Christian story, which is the one in which I’ve chosen to make my own life. It starts with the story of the Hebrews and grows from there in a specific direction. A man was born—and this part is historically accurate. He was of the Hebrew people, now called the Jews, and he lived and taught among them. He called a small group of followers to be his students. He didn’t tell a new story, but the things he said and did breathed new life into the ancient Hebrew stories and arranged them differently. And his followers gradually understood that the God who had created them in the first place was walking among them and showing them how to love.

This realization became all the more real when the man Jesus was betrayed, arrested, convicted on a trumped-up charge, and executed. It seemed that everything was over—that the carefully constructed building of this new hope had come crashing down. But Jesus himself had said, “Tear down this temple and I will raise it up in three days.” Other than that, he hadn’t talked much about buildings, but only gardens. A sower went out to scatter seeds. A farmer found that an enemy had sown weeds among his wheat. Faith is like a mustard seed planted in the earth. Unless a grain of wheat goes into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain—but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

We build because it’s temporarily helpful, and it is a valid form of artistic expression, and it makes us proud. But sometimes we place too much value in the building and its dead materials of stone and brick. Real growth happens in the ground with living and dying things. Jesus went into the ground dead and came out alive—alive in a deeper way than before—and he appeared to his friends again to show them what had happened. The most audacious Christian claim is that this, too, is a historical fact: Jesus Christ is alive. The first task of anyone becoming a Christian is to acknowledge this to be a fact, even if we don’t fully understand it. Indeed, we need to retain the humility to acknowledge that we’ll never fully understand it. And attached to this bare fact—Jesus Christ is alive—are all the stories of Christians that have happened since.

The life of a person of faith requires a great deal of imagination. But that doesn’t mean that we’re making all this up. On the contrary: faith begins with the apprehension of a truth so true that it cannot be expressed with mere sensory data. So we do tell stories, stories that demonstrate to others: “This is the truth I’ve apprehended! How can we talk about it together? What middle ground can we find where we can compare our truths and find the love and the joy that are behind them?”

And while I can’t speak for other religious traditions, I can speak for the Church. We gather as Christian people to swap stories—the stories of the ancients as a shared, common language, and the stories of our own lives held up against those stories and against each other’s. Here we find joy and strength and we learn to walk the way of love.

Recently someone younger than I told me, “I can’t come to church these days. I just can’t be in a place with walls.” There it is again: buildings can indeed be limiting. And indeed, in the developed West anyway, young people are leaving the world of church buildings in droves. It’s the crashing down of an old world. Could it be God’s decree of the end of another Tower of Babel? Could it be that we need gardens now more than ever? What might the Church look like in a garden instead of a building?