A Garden Variety Heart

While I was reading Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, I came across a quotation from a fourth century monk by the name of Pseudo-Macarius:

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace - all things are there.

I was intrigued by this quote. As I thought about it I sensed a similarity to the description in Genesis of the Garden of Eden, how everything was there with which to figure out life - and to wreck it. We know what happened. Access to the Garden was denied after Adam and Eve made some bad choices. Pseudo-Macarius got me to thinking that that description in scripture may not so much be geographic as anatomical. All things are in the heart...the capacity to do good - and evil. The heart also responds to the choices we make. Make good choices and the heart sings and we sense and enjoy the beauty there. Make bad choices and the heart closes down and it is hard to get back in after we find ourselves outside the garden tilling the hard soil of our discontent.

As we discover in Genesis, that exile from the garden is but the beginning of a generations long search for the way back. In predictably human ways, the search has always been external. We can see it today. We search for peace and happiness, prosperity and security, in things outside ourselves - a different place to live, a change in life-style, a new fad designed - this time - to give us everything we ever wanted...in half the time. Yet, try as we may, we still come to that place where we rediscover the fiery sword barring us - again - from the way to the Tree of Life. As long as we search outside of ourselves, the pattern continues. The garden simply doesn’t exist "out there." It is within.

The return is possible, but we are confronted by the dragons and lions and poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil that seem to have gotten a foothold while we were away. So we turn back, seeking a less disastrous route. But as Jesus himself showed us many times, the way back to the garden is through the scary stuff - the stuff of our own making - the stuff of life, itself. It’s always been there.

Our journey back to and within the garden of our hearts is about discovering that everything is there - accepting it, and putting it all in the proper perspective. This is hard and sometimes painful work. But the joys are there, too. The Garden of Eden was the mythical birthplace of humanity. It was the place Adam and Eve discovered what it truly was to be human. It was a place of birthing into life...a birthing which is never quite finished but can only continue in that place. Anything else is less than we deserve.

Fr. Bo

6:22:26 AM
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