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Sustainability

9 August 2023

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 Baker

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

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.

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Loneliness

2 August 2023

6 min read

Why do we feel so lonely?

Re-reading some classics of English literature leads Graham Tomlin to wonder what lies behind our epidemic of loneliness.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

These days I can’t seem to avoid the spectre of loneliness. Bob Geldof recently described Sinead O’Connor as ‘full of a terrible loneliness’ in the weeks before she died. Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, one of the world’s greatest social networks, was recently described as a cutting a lonely figure. Even more widely, over a quarter of all Londoners say they often or always feel lonely - and that in a city where you can’t get away from people – all 8 million of them.

Loneliness is an epidemic these days. In the UK we even have a Minister for Loneliness and a Department of Government offering ‘Loneliness Engagement Fund’ grants for groups coming up with good ideas to combat it. Loneliness, as Roger Bretherton writes, causes psychological and social damage and is one of the main threats to mental health in contemporary life. I would hazard a guess that if you’re reading this there are times you feel isolated, and would love to have a greater sense of community where you live, or richer friendships. If you don’t, then count yourself fortunate.

Underneath our immediate sense of isolation, our social unease, the ache in the soul that comes with feeling out of connection with others, lies a deeper sense of cosmic loneliness.

During the pandemic, looking around for books that would shed some light on that strange experience of isolation as so many did, I re-read two novels: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe published in 1719, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, published in 1904. In both stories, people get stranded on deserted islands. Somehow lockdown didn’t seem that different.

Everyone knows the story of Robinson Crusoe. You might have thought that being the sole survivor of a shipwreck, alone on a remote island, would lead to a crisis of loneliness and self pity. Well, he does have moments when he reflects on the possibility that he might die in that desolate place, and remarks how ‘the tears would run plentifully down my face when I made these reflections.’ But the self pity doesn't last long. He goes on to ask himself the question of why he alone was saved out of all crew of the ship that foundered. He sees some kind of providential design in this - that he has been saved, not just by chance, but for some wider purpose, which gives him a sense of comfort. In fact, the novel is the tale of a kind of spiritual awakening, as he gradually sees in his story something of the hand of God mysteriously guiding and preserving him through his trials. Seeing this enigmatic hand directing his affairs, and discerning some kind of purpose in his isolation, Crusoe sets about the tasks of building a kind of small civilization on his island, constructing increasingly sophisticated shelters, planting crops, capturing and taming animals, mapping the island, until his final rescue. He is alone (until Man Friday appears of course) but strangely not alone.

In Conrad’s Nostromo, it turns out very different. This is a story of attempts to protect a hoard of silver from revolutionaries in the troubled (and fictional) South American republic of Costaguana. In the course of trying to hide the treasure, alongside Nostromo, the main figure in the story, the politically ambitious and romantic journalist Martin Decoud, also finds himself stranded on a deserted island, albeit with the load of valuable silver for company. His experience however is totally different. He has no such belief in providence and so for him, the isolation bears more heavily: “solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without any sort of emotion whatsoever…” Unable to bear the isolation, the aimlessness of his life on the island, and the apparent failure of his plans and projects, he fills his pockets with silver ingots from the treasure, rows in a small dinghy a short way out from the shore, shoots himself with a revolver and falls overboard, sinking slowly to the bottom of the sea. And so, as Conrad describes it, in a cold, yet superb turn of phrase: “the brilliant Don Martin disappeared without a trace, swallowed up in the immense indifference of things.”

Even though they both faced isolation and loneliness, the fates of these two characters are very different. One is a story of spiritual growth, learning, meaningful activity and ultimate rescue. The other is a tragedy of lost hope and potential. It touches the heart, yet remains a tragedy.

Is it surprising that when we tell ourselves that we are alone in the cosmos, that there is no-one there to hear our cries or heartfelt longings, that the aching hole in the universe finds its way into our own hearts?

Of course, both are novels not historical episodes, yet the two books, separated by nearly 200 years, operate in very different frameworks. The first operates in a world which assumes a kind of providential ordering of things. The working of a divine hand of providence is, as Crusoe (and presumably Defoe) realises, hard to discern and difficult to distinguish in any one moment, and so leads many to doubt it is there at all. Belief in providence has always been a choice - an act of faith rather than a scientifically proved theory. And yet the story is framed within the overall belief that in the strange twists and turns of life there is a deeper divine order that leads towards a distinct purpose of good and which makes human activity directed towards that purpose meaningful.

The other story has lost that sense of divine order, and is left only with the “immense indifference of things.” This is a world in which there is nothing beyond what we can see and feel, no objective purpose, direction or goal other than that dreamed up by us. Human activity, in this case, the search for wealth and riches, seems strangely pointless. All that is left is human love and relationship and when that becomes impossible, due to enforced loneliness, there seems little point left to life.

Richard Dawkins famously wrote: ‘the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.’ For the moment I'll leave to one side the question of whether the universe does point in that direction, but either way, if we tell ourselves that story, as we have so often been doing for the last couple of centuries, is it surprising that often we feel dreadfully alone? Is it surprising that when we tell ourselves that we are alone in the cosmos, that there is no-one there to hear our cries or heartfelt longings, that the aching hole in the universe finds its way into our own hearts? It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the ‘immense indifference of things’ leaves a hollowness in the heart of life and the pit of the stomach.

Such a deeper cosmic loneliness might explain why we can still feel alone even in a city, even in a crowd or even sometimes among our friends. It helps us see our loneliness not just as a tragedy but as a pointer towards our need from greater sense of connection than any human being could give.

In Matthew’s gospel, the very last sentence depicts Jesus saying to his perplexed but bewildered disciples, scarcely daring to believe that he has actually risen from the dead: “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” This simple promise is one that has held and sustained Christians for generations, in prison cells, through dangerous voyages, through purges, in times of persecution, misunderstanding and sickness and, yes, times of loneliness in modern western societies. Of course, we need a sense of belonging, and the company of others, as we are made for that. But underneath it we need a deeper connection, a bond with something, or someone at the very heart of things. Such a promise doesn’t remove loneliness, but it makes it bearable, even meaningful.