Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

New life comes from the earth of daily existence

My mother always had a garden. When I was a child, it engulfed most of our small backyard in order to supplement our family's food supply. As the kids got older, the garden got smaller.

In the last years of Mom's life, as her emphysema and osteoporosis took their toll, the garden was little more than scrub. But Mom always found a way to grow a few flowers, working in the backyard attached to a long tube of oxygen. If she gave life to the garden for many years, in the end, the garden sustained her.

With that heritage, it is not surprising that 22 years ago, I began my own vegetable garden. Living amidst the concrete of downtown Winnipeg, I daily drove to my plot past the southern edge of the city. All that driving was far from being energy efficient, but I nevertheless drew life from my 25 by 50 foot plot. Getting my hands in the dirt and growing those tomatoes, corn, peas, broccoli and other herbs and vegetables gave some purpose during a seemingly directionless part of my life. It helped bring me back to health after an emotionally period in my life.

When Nora and I bought our home in Edmonton, the first thing I did once the frost left the ground was to dig up some lawn and start a garden. It's a silent protest against the industrial production of our food thousands of kilometres away. Mostly, it's an opportunity to get into the sun and to stick our hands in the earth.

Earth is not much appreciated in our increasingly antiseptic world. Earth is dirty, it is home to creepy crawly things and it contains mysterious microscopic life. Earth is so close to the cycle of life and death that it can even remind us of our own impending demise.

Every year at this time, I slice open a bag of potting soil and start more plant life growing. (What a crazy thing that is - earth in a plastic bag!)

By October, most of the plants I start growing now will have passed through the full cycle of life. The kitchen scraps, leaves and other plant remains in the compost will have turned to dirt, dirt that will nurture new life in future years.

The day I planted those seeds this year, the First Reading spoke of the Israelites entering the Promised Land. No longer would they receive manna, the miracle food from heaven. Now, they ate "the produce of the land." God continued to provide for them. But henceforth it would be from the earth rather than from heaven.

God is in the earth as well as in the heavens. God is in the ordinary as well as in the spectacular. Healing comes through time and through the ordinary. New life comes from the earth of daily existence. Touching the earth with hope of the harvest is more than a symbol. It is a sacramental, an aspect of the material universe that is a sign of God's presence.

Glen Argan

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