Article
Comment
Sustainability
6 min read

The whole love song of the garden

Listening to a garden and its gardener, high in the Andes, has Anthony Baker recalling an old song.

Anthony is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

A Garden in the heart of the Andes
Image generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney

Saint Augustine taught that whenever we witness a true relationship of harmony forming in the world around us, we hear a new version of the oldest song there is: the music of the Triune God. In the mountains just east of Medellín, Colombia, I met a man whose ear was attuned to this music.  

Fincas of the silleteros 

I was there with my wife, visiting her many aunts and uncles and cousins who had remained in the homeland when her own parents immigrated to the United States. One Saturday when they were off work and out of school, the family said they wanted to show us the fincas de los silleteros, or country estates of the chair-bearers. That sounded confusing enough to pique my curiosity.  

On the winding road out of the city, Stephanie's cousin gave me a brief history of the fincas. The indigenous and mestizo peoples of the region have for countless generations farmed this rich mountain soil, specializing in flowers that, once the Spanish arrived, the farmers would sell at markets in the growing colonial city of Medellín.  

Through the centuries of Spanish imperial presence, a strange and unique tradition developed. The poor inhabitants of the region, mostly but not only the Indigenous peoples, would tie chairs to their backs and carry elderly, wealthy, sick, or pregnant Spaniards through the Andes passes and into the villages and city. A sure-footed peasant could offer a smoother trip than a mule or a cart. The famous linguist and world-traveler Alexander von Humbolt was among the first Europeans to document this practice. 

Moonlighting as silleteros, the local farmers of the region decided their backpack chairs could serve also as baskets when it was time to carry their flowers down to the markets. Properly stacked and carefully transported, they could walk the five or so hours to the market without losing many petals and so have plenty of flowers to sell. They would return to their fincas with chairs full of rice and beans and corn meal and other market goods.  

Listening to the garden 

The history of the region is even more complex than all of that, involving the closing of flower markets, a dramatic protest by the silleteros, and the beginning of Feria de las Flores, Medellín's largest annual festival. 

As we followed Don Fidel, the reigning patriarch of one family of silleteros, I got the feeling that all that richly layered history served as backstory to his primary occupation: caring for his beloved flowers. The festival was tradition, and the tourists like me paid the bills, but Don Fidel's first love was clearly his garden. 

Our guide led us on a meditative walk through the plots, apparently oblivious to the rain that was pelting us with increasing strength by the minute. As we walked, he pointed out to us the various species he nurtured. Geraniums, calla lilies, roses, hydrangeas, and many that I didn’t know the English names for: pascua (or "lovers’ flower"), astromerias (“lily of the Incas”), button de oro, claveles, campanitas, clavellinas

Walking the hillside that his grandparents once farmed, Don Fidel was deeply familiar with the soil, the slopes and waterways, the rhythm of sunlight and shade. He knew where to look on the mountain horizon for rain clouds that might make it to his acreage.  

Because of the way he'd grouped his flowers, he knew that the predatory bugs would be near their prey, and the system would find a balance. 

He even told us some secrets of his garden. He had both personal and ancestral memory of the various species, and knew to group certain communities of flowers together to keep them healthy. He told us that the word "pest" is just a consumerist term for a living thing that threatens economies. In gardens and farms, we tend to eliminate them with chemicals. Don Fidel told us that all those pests lived in his garden as well, but because of the way he'd grouped his flowers, he knew that the predatory bugs would be near their prey, and the system would find a balance. For extreme cases he showed us the simple mixture he made from the flowers themselves that he used to "fog" the garden, much like the pre-Columbian peoples did with toxic tobacco leaves. 

Don Fidel was listening deeply to the music of his garden.  He heard the refrain of the insects and flowers about what it was they most desired. And it wasn't chemical spray. 

The music of sunflowers and bees 

This circular living economy enabled a remarkable new birth within the garden. Toward the end of the tour, when the rain had driven most of the family back onto the wraparound porch of the house, Don Fidel was proud to show my wife and me what he’d learned about his sunflowers.  

The sunflower (girasol: "sun-facer") is a big draw for the shops in the city. Everyone wants the classic, grand, bright yellow flower. The particular variety grown in that region is sterile, modified by many generations of laboratory hybridization.  But the gardener one day noticed something curious about the sterile male flowers he planted. A big group of them bloomed darker, nearly violet, and smaller, with multiple flowers on each stem. Why was this happening? It didn't seem to be disease, so he didn't worry. He just listened for a new melody. 

Soon he found the culprit: honey bees, flourishing in the garden thanks to Don Fidel’s aversion to chemical pesticide. The proximity of the lab-altered flowers to a cousin-species meant that bees could travel naturally from one sort to the next. The cousin was fertile, with both carpel and stamen. When the bees landed on the genetically modified girasoles, they brought the other pollen along with them. Remarkably, this landing changed the genetic makeup of the sunflowers and rendered them fertile once again. It undid generations of artificial selection to bring forth new life and new beauty.   

The music of the triune God 

When Saint Augustine contemplated the Trinity, he said that God is something like a lover and a beloved who find one another. Like a sunflower and its once estranged sexual partner, watching one another across a swath of shorter garden flowers.  

It's a flawed image in many ways, as Augustine himself admits. God does not "begin" as two independent beings, like the two flowers do. We might say that the triune God's image is reflected in the whole love song of the garden, the harmonious melody the organisms make together.  

At the heart of Augustine’s analogy is the observation that two can only become one if a third, a gift, passes back and forth between them. In theology, we call this third character the Holy Spirit. In Don Fidel’s garden, it’s the bees. They land on the faces of the one and the other, transferring the gift of being and life in the pollen clinging to their feet.  

  

Notice also how the three—the sunflower, its distant cousin, and the bee—are also one. The bee owes all that she is to the flowers: her habits, her communicative dance, the hairs on her feet. She is not just a bee looking to gather nectar from separate organisms called flowers. She is a living extension of the flower, the flower’s winged desire for life and fertility.  

The same holds for the flowers: they become what their apian lover asks them to be, in surprising ways that not even the bee, let alone Don Fidel, could have guessed. 

In other words: the love song of two is always a song of three. The lover, the beloved, and the gift of love itself that passes between them and forms a new celebration of their bond.  

This, Augustine says, is the song that God sings from all eternity. And it's the song, remixed a thousand ways, that creatures of earth come to sing.  

Because he kept listening, Don Fidel heard a melody few of us would have noticed. A less curious gardener would have uprooted the “flawed” blooms and replanted the flowers that the shops down the mountain were asking for. As the rain soaked my clothes, I said a prayer of gratitude for his patient curiosity, and for the love that binds the world together. A love whose proper name, according to the theologians, is God. 

 

Column
Comment
Ethics
Football
Politics
5 min read

PSG’s win signals politics over purpose – other institutions take note

When church and football feign neutrality, politics can ride roughshod
A footballer holds up the European cup, behind him fans are jubillant.
PSG fans celeberate.
PSG.TV.

There’s a new name on the Champions League trophy.  

In the most one-sided final in the competition’s history, Paris Saint-Germain trounced Inter Milan 5-0 to lift Europe’s most prestigious club trophy for the first time in their history. 

But this is not the PSG of recent years. Gone are the Galacticos: no Messi, no Neymar, no Mbappe. Where previously PSG resembled a 13-year-old boy’s attempt to win Football Manager by just buying all the best players, this year’s team looks like … well, a team. 

And what a team. Vitinha is metronomic in midfield. The game is played at his pace. He is the jazz instructor in Whiplash. “Not my tempo,” he says, over and over again, until reality bends to his will. Hakimi and Mendes are boundless balls of energy as the two wing-backs. They always threaten and it is no surprise that Hakimi gets the first goal. 

And then there are the forwards. 19-year-old Désiré Doué somehow looks the consummate professional at such a young age. Ousmane Dembélé has a quiet night by his standards, but the Barcelona reject looks born to play for this team. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is the kind of footballer you imagine yourself as when playing on school playgrounds. So unorthodox, but simply irresistible. The ultimate jumpers-for-goalposts footballer. He may well be the closest thing football has to a personification of what the sport is all about. He is joy and flare masquerading as a 24-year-old Georgian lad. 

At the helm of it all is Luis Enrique. Enrique’s teams are aggressive, fluid, and intelligent. “They pass forward with spite” Steven Gerrard says during the TV coverage of the match. What a line.  

In 2019, Enrique lost his youngest daughter Xana to bone cancer, aged just nine. To hear him talk about his loss is heartbreaking. At full-time the PSG fans unveil a picture of Xana with her dad in a genuinely tender moment of compassion and humanity. 

All this is to say that, wherever you look, this incarnation of PSG is a deeply, deeply likeable one.  

But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? 

PSG were taken over by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011. Qatar’s near 15-year involvement with the club has led to eye-watering sums of money being spent with the stated aim of winning the Champions League. In 2017, they sign Neymar from Barcelona, meeting the €222 million release clause in his contract. A fee so deliberately high no-one would ever meet it. A fee still unsurpassed eight years on.  

While the age of the superstars may be over at PSG, they still have European football’s highest wage budget by some distance (an impressive feat when you remember that Real Madrid exist). Their Georgian talisman Kvaratskhelia only moved to the club in January for a reported €70m. Hardly loose change. 

Paris Saint-Germain is a Qatari ‘sportswashing’ project. An attempt to make a political regime palatable to European sensibilities by assembling a football team that is deeply, deeply likeable.  

And it certainly seems to be working. Rio Ferdinand, on co-commentary for the final, declared that a PSG victory would be ‘good for football’. So did Jason Burt, chief football correspondent for The Telegraph in an article that unironically has a subtitle starting “They may be funded by a nation state but …”. 

This is why I find it so disingenuous when people demand we ‘keep politics out of football’. (And anyway, what people often mean here is that they’d like to keep left-wing politics out of football, like the ‘take a knee’ or ‘rainbow laces’ campaigns). Politics is already in football and has been for quite some time now. If you haven’t spotted it, you simply haven’t been paying attention. 

I like Luis Enrique. I adore Vitinha. Kvaratskhelia makes me misty-eyed about the very nature of football. But PSG winning the Champions League is bad for football, because it’s a political victory before it’s a sporting one

PSG’s triumph is a timely reminder to the Church that it must remember the political nature of the call placed upon its very existence.

As is so often the case, football and religion find parallels in one another. For the Church, too, all too frequently finds itself as a political football. Debate continues about the place of Church of England Bishops in the House of Lords with only 33 per cent of Britons keen for religious leaders to express political opinions.  

But while this would certainly make the Church’s life easier, it’s simply not an option available to it. 

‘Gospel’ is not a Christian term. Not originally. It was a term used to describe an announcement or decree made about the Roman Emperor, a practice the Romans adopted from the Greeks before them. It is, in other words, an intractably political term. It is the ‘party-political broadcast’ of the ancient world.  

In hijacking the term ‘Gospel’ as a description for Jesus’ life and teaching, the early Church announces itself as an irrevocably political entity from its very beginnings. A body of people called to proclaim a political message. Or, at least, a message with significant political implications. Christ is king; Caesar is not.  

This does not mean that the Church is inherently left- or right-leaning. The Church is far older than this simplistic understanding of politics and will surely outlive it, too. But it does mean that the Church has a stake in the politics of the day; that it cannot be politically disinterested without simultaneously compromising something of its most fundamental identity.  

PSG’s Champions League win is not the first by a nation-backed club. Manchester City – principally owned by Vice President of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan – won the Champions League in 2023 (also beating Inter Milan in the final; bless them). Depending on what we make of Roman Abramovich’s connections to the Russian state, it’s also worth noting Chelsea’s wins in 2012 and 2021, too. 

But PSG’s win – and the emphatic nature of it over one of the ‘old guards’ of club football – feels like a watershed moment for the sport. It is the culmination of the past 20-or-so years of both football’s internal politics, and the external politics acting upon it. It is a worrying statement of intent of its direction of travel, too.  

When Christianity and football feign political neutrality, they simply invite the dominant politics of the day to ride roughshod over them. Insidious politics will always fill any vacuum available to it. PSG’s triumph is a timely reminder to the Church that it must remember the political nature of the call placed upon its very existence. Otherwise it will find itself a mouthpiece for a kingdom to which it does not belong.  

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