Here are my notes and highlights from the Kindle edition of Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening by Vigen Guroian
Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardeningby Vigen GuroianYou have 20 highlighted passagesYou have 2 notesLast annotated on October 15, 2012Yet only as I wrote about this experience did I begin to realize just how important gardens have been in my life and in the lives of so many other people, even colleagues in the academy, who otherwise might be imagined to spend all of their wakeful moments among books. Read more at location 38I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology.Read more at location 65I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends. Read more at location 68The mystical enjoyment comes not without the toilsome struggle of raking and sowing and pulling up the weeds. In my garden the thistle grows more easily than the primrose. Sin grows in my body more readily than purity, and the keys to my garden do not admit me back through Eden’s gate.Read more at location 81My son Rafi is enchanted with cyberspace. But we are not disembodied mind or spirit, we are our bodies – cruising the Internet won’t teach us that. It may even trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. Gardening teaches us differently. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming, I mean the kind of gardening that any one of us can do with his hands and feet and the simplest tools. Read more at location 102sacramental faith,Read more at location 106Contrary to environmentalists’ accusations of anthropocentrism, Christians believe that human beings are especially responsible for tending the creation.Read more at location 114Modern Christians have spoken a lot about “stewardship” of the earth. But I think we are overly practiced at the kind of management that this word easily connotes.Read more at location 138Gardening symbolizes our race’s primordial acceptance of a responsibility and role in rectifying the harm done to the creation through sin. Read more at location 141Note: really good Edit
The fruit of the garden is not restricted to what we eat. Every garden lends something more to the imagination – beauty. TheRead more at location 146Every experienced Christian gardener knows that there is a spiritual spring which comes just as surely as nature’s spring.Read more at location 179I send each seed into the earth from the tips of my fingers with love, and hope for new life and growth of rich green paradise. Read more at location 190The flower of repentance, however, grows only in the soil which has been enriched by the death of the old self that we have let die in it.Read more at location 195An important Lenten theme in Orthodox Christian worship is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of delight and our return to it through the Cross.Read more at location 207Henry Mitchell, in his book One Man’s Garden, observes that “it is not important for a garden to be beautiful” in everyone’s eyes. But “it is extremely important for the gardener to think it is a fair substitute for Eden.” Perhaps this is an overstatement, or perhaps it is a theological truth.Read more at location 264“falling asleep”) and translation into heaven. The Orthodox Church believes that Mary, like her Son, was preserved from corruptible death and bodily decay and lifted immediately to God.Read more at location 376Note: why? Edit
8:19-23). Michael Pollan comments in his book Second Nature that “every one of our various metaphors for nature – `wilderness,/ ‘ecosystem,/ ‘Gaia,/ ‘resource,’ `wasteland’ – is already a kind of garden, an indissoluble mixture of our culture and whatever it is that’s really out there.Read more at location 400The garden and I are both over-ripe and, frankly, “going to seed.” My middle is spreading and my muscles are shrinking. My hair is dry and turning gray. My children have grown large, like the seed pods on the milkweed, and I can no longer hold on to them. But maybe “going to seed” is not so bad after all – the seed falls into the ground and new plants arise in the spring.Read more at location 464We have spoiled Christmas – maybe lost it – because we have forgotten the meaning of Advent: of the light that comes into the darkness, of our need to repent and prepare ourselves to receive the true gift. Advent is a time to let our old used-up sinful selves die into the earth like the crumpled cornstalks in my garden. Let the reaper come and cut me down, and I will fall to the ground. Read more at location 495
We have tamed Christmas, and domesticated it. We have taken all of the terror and cold out of that night with our electrified lights; and real joy escapes us. We compensate, we cover our silent despair with gay Christmas wrapping. But we know all too well that at the appointed hour the wrappings will all be torn away and crumpled in piles, and our lives will be no different after the day is done. We want the joy of our life without the pain of his birth, or the agony of his crucifixion, or the judgment when he returns. But I ask you: “Why in this season does the holly bear its red berries?” Read more at location 511
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