I've been thinking about weeds in the garden of my soul.
Dag Hammarskjold was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953 through 1961, when he died in a plane crash on a flight to the Congo to negotiate a cease fire in a civil war. He was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963 for his work. After his death, friends found his private diary with entries from 1925, when he was twenty years old, until just before he died in 1961, and a letter from him permitting its publication. In single sentences and brief paragraphs, haiku-inspired poems, philosophical queries and spiritual notes, he explored himself and the world he lived in and tried so hard to pacify.
I first read Markings, which is the title given his diary entries when they were published as a book, in 1964. It has been a resource for reflection ever since. So when I was musing recently about the state of my soul, trying to update my view of myself as a person of faith, I remembered a quote from Hammarskjold and went hunting for it. Here is what I found:
He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds.
Huh! Weeds in a garden. By paying too little attention to my moral self, just coasting with a sense of certainty about the integrity of my spiritual life, have I left my soul untended? Without my knowing it, have I let inattention corrupt my soul with its weeds?
As I began to look at myself more carefully, I realized I’m not very comfortable with the notion of a tidy garden, one without weeds. My southern friend Ed used to say about meals in the south that you don’t have to order grits, grits come. So do weeds in gardens. So, like shaving every day or bathing regularly, gardens require tending to keep the weeds under control. Hammarskjold may have been a tidy man; I am not, either by nature or practice. So I have to tend to the weeds.
Granting this, I decided to take a careful look at myself.
For the past decade, there has been this moment in our worship service that leaves me quite literally speechless. I have nothing to say when the priest invites us to confess our sins. I think of confession as naming as much as I know of myself in the moment, with non-defensive clarity, owning up to the truth about who I am and what I do. And in this worshipful silence, my mind cannot conjure anything about me that rises to the level of sin.
True, there are moments when my behavior is less than stellar, but these transgressions don’t rise to a serious moral breach. I don’t consider it a sin when I jaywalk, or when a whispered shit is the only word that perfectly articulates my frustration with myself or someone else. I don’t consider it a sin when I exceed the speed limit, or yell in my car you goddamn idiot to the driver who just dangerously cut into my lane on the freeway. I don’t consider it a sin when I gaze too long at the women in the gym.
More importantly now, I’m not involved in social or political behaviors that discriminate against others, and I work hard to use my money and whatever witness I can share to improve the circumstances of marginalized people. Both personally and socially, sin is serious business, and right now none of my behaviors rise to its level, so I have nothing to confess in the silence.
I have nothing to say when the priest invites us to confess our sins.
There was a time, decades ago, when my moral life was out of control and I behaved in ways that were destructive to my Beloveds, to myself, and to whatever my relationship with God was at that time. But not anymore! I’ve lived my way out of that moral morass to this moment when I have nothing to confess to as I kneel in silence.
It would seem that my garden is relatively weed-free. But there’s more to this transformation in me than my moral development. Through decades of worship, teaching the Bible, talking with friends and musing by myself, I realize that the story I tell now about my faith is dramatically different from the one in which I was raised - in other words, I live in a very different garden these days. I’ve dismantled the old world of my faith as I’ve made my way to the faith that now sustains me.
My old garden, like the one in Genesis, was obsessed with sin, which I thought of in three ways.
The first sort of sin, it seemed to me, was crossing big red moral lines, breaking the rules on issues of serious moral consequence (the things that one is reminded that thou shalt not do).
Sin can also be a form of bondage. We persuade ourselves that something is true and necessary without recognizing that we’re trapped in a delusion that is destructive to ourselves and also to others. For example, I grew up with a view of husbands and fathers as bearers of authority in family life. I didn't think too much about how this disempowered wives and children who might have differing opinions of what is and is not acceptable but who were given no freedom to think and behave differently. We might take for granted rights and privileges not afforded to others, and take offense when they challenge our privileges. We don’t recognize our delusion, and therefore continue in our bondage to it.
I learned a third notion of sin from the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. In Judaism, yetzer hara is the congenital inclination to do evil, by violating the will of God. This is that notion that we’re born into sin, and it’s our nature to indulge ourselves even in opposition to our moral code or whomever we might think of as God.
In the story I grew up with but have now left behind, these sins of mine fell under the Divine judgement of God, to whom these sins are an egregious offense. His holiness requires purity in His presence, so my sin alienates me from Him. So how was I supposed to find my way back into God’s presence? What was going to pull those weeds?
I was taught that God needs a sacrifice; that something alive needs to die as the price of my sins. In my Christian story, that sacrificial lamb was Jesus of Nazareth. He came to reveal to us a loving and holy God who wanted to embrace us but could only do so if we were cleansed of our sin by sacrifice. So Jesus died to pay for our sins and to allow us to find ourselves once again in the presence of God.
This is the garden I've rejected. I cannot attach myself to any notion of God that requires the death of someone to satisfy His holiness. I cannot attach myself to any notion that this righteous Jewish rabbi should lose his life because I’ve sinned in various ways. And I cannot live with the notion that my moral – or immoral – behavior or thoughts are so heinous that they would require this kind of bloodbath.
I cannot attach myself to any notion of God that requires the death of someone to satisfy His holiness.
I live now in a new garden. I realize that the story of Jesus and his God and my sin is a coincidence of where I was born, the culture and faith in which I was raised, and the traditions of worship and service I learned while growing from a child to a man. You have your own story, as do people whose faith is completely different from mine, and as foreign to me as mine is to them.
So I want to sketch for you the garden that now sustains me, not so you’ll mimic it but so it might encourage you to scan your own for weeds, and so that it might encourage you to consider whether it's time to update your own story so that it tells the truth about who you are now.
I wake up each morning believing I’m the beloved child of a Creator I’m not sure exists. I live in a constant ambivalence between faith and knowledge. This is the paradox for me: I hold a belief that I cannot defend with evidence that there is a Creator who offers me no proof of His existence. All I have is this in-erasable belief, this faith that is the sum total of my connection to God.
What moves me beyond simple faith to something more grounded in evidence is my devotion to Jesus of Nazareth. The stories in the four Gospels of the Christian scriptures lay out the stories by and about him that are enough for me to find solid ground to stand upon when I’m trying to anchor my soul. I’ve trained myself to read them without the theology that grew out of them and turned Jesus into the fully human, fully divine object of much of Christian beliefs. To believe Jesus is fully human and fully divine is to fall back on what I said about belief in God: you either believe it or don’t believe it, but it’s not something about Jesus for which there is any sustainable evidence.
Instead, what these stories provide me is a picture of Jesus that is inexhaustibly fascinating and worthy of my deepest devotion. It is a picture that offers new insights and raises new and important questions - not with every reading, to be sure, but often enough that I’m always on the lookout for the next surprise. I'm consistently bowled over by three aspects of Jesus' character that continue to stick with me.
The Taking of Christ From the Garden (Presta di Cristo nell'orto), Caravaggio, c. 1602
First, he was intellectually brilliant. One of the costs of seeing him as fully human and also fully divine is that his supposed divinity robs us of realizing just how smart he was. He told stories that will last as long as human history continues. He was so wise about our relationships to one another, so insightful about how we lose our way when we get all wrapped up in ourselves, and how necessary it is for the development of our how humanity that we take care of those around us, no matter their familiarity or differences. To read and re-read the Gospel stories is to get up close to a human brilliance that never loses its power to lead me forward.
Second, Jesus embodies compassion as a central characteristic of religious life. Many of us have a singular compassion for others who are like us in what they believe and practice. Jesus loved such friends of his, like his disciples, the wealthy women who supported his ministry, and those who shared in his vision of God’s beloved community. But beyond the parochial boundaries of so much religious and tribal compassion, he stretched his arms wide enough to wrap in all kinds of people his more tribal friends found uncomfortable. The disabled and the disgraceful and the delusional madman in a grave yard were the objects of his attention and affection. Where so many communities drove strangers to the margins, Jesus went to the margins to bring the strangers into the tribe. This inexhaustible compassion is perhaps his most widely respected virtue, and one that speaks deeply to me.
But for me, there’s one more aspect that I return to again and again as I seek to model my own garden after his: a type of indelible and radical courage. Again, the fully human/fully divine description of Jesus glosses over the sheer terror he faced as he lived out the vision he believed God had sent him to accomplish. No divine shield protected him from being driven out of his home town by those who wanted to murder him, those who constantly accused him of abandoning the traditions of his tribe and, finally, those leaders of his own tribe who conspired with their own Roman enemies to murder him for creating a political revolution that challenged both sets of leaders. Confused by the apparent failure of his mission, bereft of even his trust in God’s protective care, he died forsaken by his best friends and the Creator to whom he’d devoted his life.
On some mornings, I wish there were more to this story that now sustains me. I wish I had more confidence that the Creator I believe in actually exists and actually loves me. I wish I had more definitive guidance about how to live an authentic life than this freedom to choose, day by day, in moral matters small and large. I wish I had more evidence than I do that the Jesus I am devoted to was actually the brilliant, compassionate, courageous person to whom I have attached my life. The writer Frederick Buechner once described faith as wishful thinking, which is what my faith now feels like much of the time.
But I also recall that planting a garden at all is an act of hope and faith - it's a gesture of belief in a better future, and a testament to what's possible with time and rain and sunshine and care. I think Jesus knew this, and I strive to remember it as well.
So at that moment in the worship service when I can no longer find anything to say when asked to confess my sins, I think about my garden. I've given up on the idea that I'm inherently sinful, and I've given up on an idea of Jesus as a sacrificial exchange for me. I've also given up on that concept of God as Transcendent Moral Bookkeeper with a heavenly green visor and a Divine calculator Who takes delight in scrutinizing each of us. If that’s actually the One on the other side of the conversation, then I really do have nothing to say and I wish to have nothing to do with this relationship.
Ah, but if the priest wants to invite me to confess my gratitude for being alive, my delight in my children and grandchildren and the friends I love; if the priest wants me to recount the pleasures of food and wine and sex and exercise, my satisfaction in continuing to care about justice and using my money and my now-dimmed voice to speak up about the poor and marginalized; if the priest wants me to confess all of this to One who shares my delight in my life, to a God who rejoices in the vibrancy and life in my garden, then I’m a flowing verbal river that runs deep and needs a long time to find adequate ways to say Thank you.