Placemaking and the Garden

The yard that envelops my dentist's building is a shade garden that can only be seen from his treatment rooms. Deep green foliage bobs and sun beams play as breezes tousle the leafy canopies. Dental chairs in each room face tall, broad windows that look out on the garden. Each view is peaceful and verdant though the remaining sensations are clinical: the reclined leather chair, the focused light, the antiseptic smell of the room.

This separation registers in me as a dissonance, a counter-intuitive gift, that we live in view of an Edenic garden and remember its fruit as we suffer our failing teeth. We have tasted what creation can be in our work, our relations and with God, and we desire it be that way forever. Once it was all joy and now we must count it so. Once we lived where heaven touched the earth and now we gather in worship. Once we ate from the King's garden and now we work for it. Once as near-gods we walked with God, now we lift our common longing in the cool of the day.

Moses considered all this in his words to the Israelite people. The great creation stories that came before held a low view of humanity, save for its royalty. He knew those stories and understood their power to influence a people. So when he told the story of Yahweh's creation, he began in an ordered garden and the animals that had been the inspiration for Egypt's gods were under the dominion of mankind. And more, the One God of the earth and stars would be present in creation and still far above it. It was a polemical declaration of independence from the many impetuous, hungry tyrant-gods they left. And it conveys to us that it was the place where humanity lived in creative harmony with the Creator and where the people that labored in the garden were free to feast in it.

We sense its reality somehow, and likewise, we feel despair with Adam and Eve as they must leave it. We may imagine those days begin as a fast where they spend endless hours in a shadeless plain dirtying their knees digging and planting. We may watch them as they lie prostrate before the fiery swords of the cherubim, mimic the blood sacrifice that covers them still and offer a captured fowl in meager penitence. There they may pine into the night for restored intimacy with their Maker. And when they can no longer endure the pain of hunger, they may eat the burnt bird and suffer again its reminder of their sin. This, day on day, as they wait for the seed of the earth to bear, is not foreign to us.

Moses' great story taps the origin of our own emptiness and desires. Yet, is it true? Was a man made of dust? Does a snake talk? Did Eden exist? What does its mythology do to its truth? Might these details build a wall around the garden that limits its access?

There is a way in which the question of its literal nature does not matter in that we easily find ourselves whether in the garden or outside its gates. This does no harm to its historicity which we cannot know. But, in this way it is more real and present to us than any capability of fact could imbue.

In another way its other-worldly impossibilities help us focus on what's important. Moses' world is our world and what's extraordinary is its ordinariness. We long. We desire. We go on. We hope. And he invites us to enter the garden as our own place of beginning, seed it with our own details and tend it as it flowers and fruits.

Earth Day, Good Friday, and Wholeness

This month, we are approaching two national holidays. They happen to fall on the same day. But depending on your political, religious, liberal, conservative, radical, conventional standing, you may lean more towards one than the other, or even feel like you have to choose between the two.

Earth Day was instituted in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson, it was a political initiative, intended to enforce national environmental responsibility, and this new holiday birthed the modern environmental movement. Good Friday is annually observed by Christians to remember Christ’s crucifixion and death so many years ago. To the church, Good Friday, together with Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, is the culmination of history, fulfilling Scripture’s promises that a Savior would come into the world and redeem it.

This year April 22^nd hosts both Earth Day and Good Friday, and to many people, these holidays may seem to be at odds with each other.  In my experience, Christians are more interested in discipleship than reducing their carbon footprint. Female ministers and abortion can be hot topics, but global warming? Not so much.  Likewise, the people who champion green living march under the banner of sustainability, health, and animal rights. Talk of soul-saving doesn’t really hold appeal, because in their mind, they’re already saving the planet.

It saddens me that anyone would think these two ideals have to be pitted against each other as if in a bull pen. Because in my perspective, both holidays have to do with wholeness. Whole earth, whole redemption, whole life.

Eden was once whole, a perfect earth, perfect creation, and perfect humanity. God called it, “very good.” But sin crept into this good garden and fragmented it, introducing thorns and dry soil, pain and pride—toxic to both our bodies and our souls.

Good Friday marks a turn in our decaying world.   A man who was God sacrificed His life for the world, and this set into action a redemption that would work both backwards and forwards, pulling this broken earth and its broken people into a new heaven and new earth. One day, the effects of sin will be reversed, and the new heaven and earth will reign in renewed wholeness. Christ’s sacrifice on Good Friday set all of this into motion.

Scripture says that creation is in bondage just as are the children of God. “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22-23).

This April 22^nd, let’s groan and wait together, the earth and God’s children, the created crying out to our Creator.

Stephanie S. Smith graduated from Moody Bible Institute with a degree in Communications and Women’s Ministry, which she now puts to work freelancing as a book publicist and writer through her business, (In)dialogue Communications, at www.stephaniessmith.com. After living in Chicago for four years, traveling to Amsterdam for a spell, and then moving back home to Baltimore to plan a wedding, she now lives with her husband in Upstate New York where they make novice attempts at home renovation in their 1930s bungalow. She writes for www.startmarriageright.com and manages Moody Publishers’ blog, www.insidepages.net.

Skulls and Bones and Skeletons

A few years ago I spent a weekend at JPUSA, the community of Christians in Chicago who live together in the old Chelsea Hotel and call themselves “Jesus People.” And during my time there, I saw a lot of skulls.

Skulls adorn the hallways, the door frames, and the forearms of the people who inhabit them.  Five doors down from my room there was an unapologetic mural of a skeleton, squarely behind a baby gate and next to a sign that warned in loud purple Crayola, “Nursing Urijiah! Piz come back. ” All over the community, there were instances of this odd juxtaposition of life and death.

I wondered if the skulls were some kind of talisman, like some cultures have to ward off evil spirits, but when I asked one of the women on staff about their significance, she laughed. “Well,” she said, “People here are kind of obsessed with death.”

She explained to me, “The skulls and skeletons are representative of the knowledge that there’s more.  We anticipate death, in a way, because we are eager for our new bodies and the new life ahead with Christ.  We are living in a dichotomy between this world and the next, and we are very aware of that.”  So there are skulls: a reminder of our mortal decay.  She also told me that people at JPUSA tend to live in the awareness that, in the city, they are surrounded by the living dead.  They are among the spiritually destitute and dying.

I’ve often felt this restlessness, of living in the cracks between Eden and Heaven, which some call the age of the in-between, the already-not-yet of the kingdom.  It can be exasperating: is the kingdom here, or is it to come? Christ has come into our world and has promised victory over sin and death, but we still live under its affects while we wait for His return. And it can make us impatient in the waiting, while we see the world around us in such need of redemption.  We were created for eternal life, to bear divine image and have a face-to-face relationship with our Maker, but sin ruptured this paradise and now we live in the imbalance, caught between what was supposed to be and what is now utterly broken. Even the earth is a victim of this tension, “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Romans 8:22).  Even the earth and the roots of mountains straddle this gap between the kingdoms.

There is a dichotomy at hand. We are finite beings with eternal life or death at stake. Perhaps the reminder of our mortal frame, whether skulls and bones or just knowing that there is more to come, can lend urgency to our days to live well, to reach out to the dying, and to eagerly await the life ahead.

Stephanie S. Smith graduated from Moody Bible Institute with a degree in Communications and Women’s Ministry, which she now puts to work freelancing as a book publicist and writer through her business, (In)dialogue Communications, at www.stephaniessmith.com. After living in Chicago for four years, traveling to Amsterdam for a spell, and then moving back home to Baltimore to plan a wedding, she now lives with her husband in Upstate New York where they make novice attempts at home renovation in their 1930s bungalow. She writes for www.startmarriageright.com and manages Moody Publishers’ blog, www.insidepages.net.