Gardening and the whole God thing

Gardening in a slow process, one of waiting, watching and feeding. The joy at seeing the first shoots emerge, cleverly engaging the suns potential for their needs is fantastic for the gardener, yet we don’t really do anything except set up the conditions for the seeds to mature into plants. If we forget to water or feed, the plants die, the growing though, is done by themselves we really have no hand in it at all. This is the point when you might expect the old cliche – God is a bit like that, but I won’t bore you with the comparison. Rather some thoughts.

Left to their own devices will God…. no, hang on, ‘what is God?’ not ‘where is God’ or ‘who is God’ – I think we have got beyond such questions but ‘What is God?’ What is it that we are speaking of, is God the very stuff of creation that the writer of Genesis was trying to capture the essence of as he wrote about a spirit brooding over the waters of chaos, (or other translation!!) I can feel comfortable with that image, what sets me on edge and at odds with religious establishment is the ‘praying to God’ as if we were speaking to some other, distant figure who can magically fix things. No wonder some of the more evangelical churches prefer the image of Jesus, the human God a tangible experience, measurable, in our form. However, Jesus was the son of God, born out of the very stuff that is God, incarnate in Mary, a very human experience.

If what God is, is something other than a tangible personified being, then are we not all sons and daughters of God, born out of the stuff that gives life?

When we garden we are encouraging that brooding spirit, the essence of life to rise out of the dust, to grow to its full potential, not because we can do it, but because everything that is needed is already there – we just need to recognise that and try to connect with it.