Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

Window Gardening.  Today the majority of people live in cities, and many of us live in small apartments.  It can seem to us as if "gardening" requires a plot of soil.  The talk below, given by Britta Riley, a scientist and citizen activist, shows how gardening can be done in apartments, linking us with a worldwide web of window-gardeners. 

Spirituality and Gardening

In Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet, one of our advisors -- Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. - offers ten ideas for helping us live lightly on the earth and gently with one another.  Here's the link: GO.  He develops each of them in detail; here they are in a nutshell.

Professor Cobb's article serves as a conceptual foundation for the articles in the Planet Beauty section of JJB.  They represent what you can call a "process" or "Whiteheadian" or "constructive postmodern" approach to world problems.**  

A process approach combines philosophical theory and theological exploration with practical guidance for manufacturing, city design, community development, and education.  The article is now being used in many parts of the world: in college classrooms and in study groups in churches, synagogues, sanghas, and mosques. 

Where do I Begin?

After people read the article, they sometimes ask: What can I do to bring these ideas alive in my daily life?  How can I practice the ideas? 

The videos on the left make the strong case that a very good place to begin can be in gardening and cooking.  As you watch the videos, you will be struck by the seriousness of purpose and also the sheer "fun" that is involved in bringing creativity and hope into the world.   Just listen to Britta Riley on the left, and you'll see what I mean.  She combines science and fun and care and citizen activism in a way that embodies the spirit of Whiteheadian thinking.

For those among us who are spiritually interested, all that remains is connecting a few of the dots, showing a bit further how gardening is also a trans-religious spiritual practice. 

The Prophetic Imagination

From a process perspective, you have already seen a good bit of spirituality in the people giving the talks.  In their zest and creativity, in their intelligence and wisdom, in their desire to link the gladness of their hearts with the hungers of the world, there's a lot of what many people would call spirituality. 

The spirituality at issue is natural rather than supernatural, and it involves hard work and struggle as well as fun. 

Indeed, the spirituality of those speaking -- Roger Doiron, Jamie Oliver, and Britta Riley -- involves a willingness to protest: to say "no" to the powers that obstruct healthy living and local community, whether they are corporations or governments.  

People influenced by biblical traditions will rightly hear a little Moses or Jesus, Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. in all of this.  Doiron, Oliver, and Riley do what all prophets do: they say "no" to the status quo and "yes" to a world that can be and needs to be, if life is to flourish.  This combination of "no" and "yes" is what one biblical scholar, Walter Brueggeman, calls the prophetic imagination.  It combines protest and hope, something adding practical guidance on how to realize the hope.  The speakers are filled with this kind of imagination.

Garden Spirituality

But there's a gentle side to the spirituality of gardening, too, and it cannot be reduced to the prophetic imagination.  One way is to think of it as a kind of dancing.  Call it Tai Ji of the soil.

I have proposed that gardening is a human way of joining the creativity of the universe in a healing and healthy way.  The gardeners are not the only agents in the process.  The plants and the soil, the sun and the rain, have agency, too.  As the Chinese would say: There is something like creative energy - qi -- everywhere.  Gardening is qi dancing with qi.  The gardeners are trying to dance with the other dancers.

Dancing

God is in the dancing, too.  At least this is the case if, as process theologians propose, God is present in the world as a spirit of creative transformation.  The spirit of God takes the form of an ever-present yet omni-adaptive lure within human life and the whole of nature. 

The lure is deeply powerful, but not in a coercive sense.  It is the power of love: that is, of fresh and animating possibilities for responding to the situation at hand.  The love of God is that counter-entropic attractive force -- a cosmic lure -- through which, despite the tendency of matter to fall into pure disarray, there has been an evolution from atoms into molecules, molecules into stars, stars into galaxies, and, on our small planet, living cells into multicellular organisms such as plants and animals. 

Bubbling

One place we see the effectiveness of this lure is in photosynthesis: the creative transformation of energy from the sun into sugar.  Its melody goes like this: 6CO2 + 6H2O ==> C6H12O6 + 6O2.  There's a kind of grace in photosynthesis.

In human life an analogous kind of grace bubbles up from with our relationships to one another, to plants, and to the earth.  It bubbles up when we take the time to prepare meals, enjoying the creativity of mixing different materials and exploring different recipes.  It bubbles up when we enjoy each others company at a dinner table.  It bubbles up when we seek peace and justice, when we work to build what Martin Luther King, Jr. called "beloved communities."  The bubbling is deeply natural, deeply beautiful, and deeply graceful.  It's creative transformation at work.  

Meditating

There's a meditative side of gardening, too.  When we plant seeds and work with plants, one form of life is making contact with another form of life and we are touching each other.  The plants speak with their own language, growing out of the soil.  We touch them, to be sure, but they touch us as well.  We are touched by their colors, their shapes, their needs, their presence, their mystery. 

I have a son who observed that all plants are Buddhists, because they know how to be still and yet speak with their stillness.  We listen to their silent speech and we respond with touch.  We touch them with our eyes, our hands, and, if we are especially sensitive, with our hearts.  We come to know them in an intuitive way. 

This knowing has an apophatic dimension.  The plants and soil are more than us and have lives of their own, and part of our knowing them is knowing that we cannot completely know them.  This knowledge can be enriched by factual information gained from the sciences, but it does deeper.  It is life touching life. 

Praying

As I have said, there's a prayerful side of gardening, too.  Prayer is an activity of reaching out to the infinite, however understood, with heart or hands or mind, or all three.  People can pray with words, but they can also pray with gestures and movements.  Gardening is an act of praying with the hands, and it expresses a hope, not only for healthy food on the table, but more deeply a hope that life itself can flourish. 

This prayer of hope is answered every time we harvest a tomato or prepare pasta and share stories at mealtime.  If strangers are welcomed to the table, all the better.  Relationships are developed that did not exist beforehand.  Wings are sprouted.

Roots and Wings

I mention wings because they are as important as roots.  Moment by moment, day by day, we seek to be secure and planted in relationships with one another, in the places where we live; and also to enjoy a sense of adventure, of being able to see new things and think new ideas.   Peace and adventure, community and novelty, harmony and intensity, roots and wings -- these are the social and psychological dimensions of health.

Today many people are trapped in two undesirable options: a rootless consumerism in which we are always on the way toward a happiness that never quite arrives, and a wingless fundamentalism in which we cling to established forms of thinking -- political, religious, philosophical -- at the expense of being open to new ideas.  The first has wings without roots, the second has roots without wings. 

Gardening invites us to consider a third way: one that combines healthy roots and strong wings.  As we garden we are renewing our bonds with the creative "dust" from which we ourselves emerged; and yet, in the very practice itself, we are helping something grow and, along the way, growing ourselves.  
 
The garden plot becomes a "third space" or an "open space" in which we can set aside divisions but not differences, and learn from each other.  This learning is an example of what process thinkers call creative transformation. 

Creative transformation is like photosynthesis.  It lies in receiving influences from the past and allowing them to be compost for the future.  Even if the past experiences are bitter grapes, they can be transformed into sweet wine by the grace of the Breathing.

It begins, and maybe even ends, with the gardening.  The gardening of plants, to be sure, but also with a willingness to be gardened by the plants, by friendships with other people, by acts of welcoming strangers into our lives, in all of which, intimately and deeply, God's Breathing is present.  Want some tomatoes?