Love
[This is the expanded version of my “At the Gate” essay
in the Spring, 2011 issue.]
Love. Jesse, my oldest daughter, gave me a remarkable book this Christmas, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, by Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works with Latino youth in Los Angeles. Over his decades in one of the most gang-infested areas in our country, Boyle has helped thousands of young people find positive paths for their lives. He’s known immense loss, as well: He’s buried 168 young people killed by gang violence.
What a testament to love is Gregory Boyle’s work and the remarkable stories he shares. One incarcerated youth, 15-year-old Rigo, breaks down crying when he tells “G” (Boyle) how his father once beat him “With a pipe. With . . . a . . . pipe.” Then he points to his mother, who comes to see him in prison each week: “You know how many buses she takes every Sunday—to see my sorry ass?” Again he breaks into uncontrolled sobbing, for minutes, until he can finally gasp through his tears, “Seven buses. She takes . . . . seven . . . buses. Imagine.”
Now, that is love. To Boyle, it’s analogous to God’s unending love for us: “How, then, to imagine the expansive heart of this God—greater than God—who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us.”
Love. Perhaps the most famous of the stories Jesus told is the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the one about the son who takes his share of his family inheritance, squanders it in wild living, then goes back to his father, hoping just to get work as a hired hand—and is received joyfully, with open arms and a great feast by his father. Timothy Keller has written a remarkable little book about this parable, The Prodigal God. In it, he points out that there are two lost sons in the parable. The elder brother (who is analogous to a self-righteous Christian today) is even more lost than the sinful brother. And the real “prodigal” person in the story, the one who really is (as the dictionary defines it) “recklessly extravagant,” is God. We all need to accept, feel, and feast in God’s prodigal love: “to keep telling yourself how graciously loved and accepted you are.”
By the way, I sincerely apologize if my starting off this essay with Christian examples of love is off-putting for any of you who are reading this. This is the language in which I personally think, so I can’t help but express myself in it. It’s not meant to offend or be preachy and certainly not to appear self-righteous (see elder brother, above). It’s my way of saying that love is what matters; love does, indeed, make the world go round. Love is not “all we need” (as the Beatles sang), but we all do need all the love we can get—and share.
Love. Ah, but what does all this have to do with gardening? For 21 years, I’ve been sharing stories—from all over the country and other parts of the world—of people’s gardening experiences. I’ve published over 1,000 in this magazine. I’ve performed them for groups in many states. Perhaps more than anyone else, I’ve explored why people garden. And after all this time, here’s what I’ve learned. If you asked me to say in one word why people garden, I would say, “Love.” Sure, we garden for flowers and fruits, for exercise, to be outdoors, to create beauty. Most of all, though, I think we do it to nurture a relationship between ourselves and plants. Gardening gives us a chance to feel love for a whole different kind of being, to tend them, to care for them, and to feel them respond to us. Instead of looking at nature through a car window or from a mountain top, we get to have a real, give-and-take relationship with nature, one where we both get the opportunity to grow.
Love. You will certainly find love in the pages of the Spring Issue. There are many instances of gardeners who love a bird, a weed, a neighbor, a tool, an aging spouse, their seedlings, even a snail. To me, though, nothing in the issue chimes the chord so clearly as “Dandy Little Thing,” the story of a man with fingers so massive he can unscrew the lug nuts off of car wheels. A man who tends his strawberry plants, and his little girl, with such gentle and tender . . . love.
May we all, every day, become better vessels of giving and forgiving. May we all strive ever more constantly to encourage others, to listen to others, to still that disapproving voice inside our hearts, and hold in the words it wants to let out. May we look for ways to help everyone we encounter. May we ever more accept, absorb, and then share . . . love.
Read Other Stories From GreenPrints E-letter #1:
