Worship, Music, and Spirituality: Jesus the Gardener
One of my favourite Christian terms is a metaphor: Jesus the gardener. I am sure it has something to do with the random seedlings in my house. Truthfully, these seedlings rarely make it outside to the garden because they are almost all tropical plants from lush and beautiful Jamaica that my father, with great hope and tenacity, tries to grow in Canada. The Canadian environment is just not a hospitable place for most of these seedlings to bloom, and although they sprout, we don’t plant them outside because we know it would be an unfair set-up for failure.
This metaphor painfully reminds me of all the ways we as a society and a church set people up for failure by creating unnaturally hostile environments. It is a set-up so engrained that sometimes even our efforts to improve the environment, like Black History Month celebrations and anti-racism programming, work against our goal by feeding biases about Black Excellence, such as that it is an exception to the norm or that if others can make the inhospitable climate work for them, it is perhaps more about the person (and their individual choices) and less about the environment.
For instance, I received lots of scholarships in my youth, I went to good schools, and I excelled in extracurricular activities, and because of this, I was often told that I was exceptional at making good choices, with the subtext being that these same choices were available to my peers who did not make it into adulthood. I resent these types of statements because they are deeply rooted in privilege, and false.
I am in no way more special than any of my peers; I have been more fortunate.
The metaphor of the seed and gardener helps to illustrate the flaws in these biases. Just as a seed is not presented with a choice of where it will be planted and who will care for it, we are not given a choice about how we will be nurtured and cared for. We do not have the power in our youth or formative years to control our environment. We know this. A beautiful diversity of plants in the same flowerpot cannot all be expected to thrive because they have equal access to the same amount of water, soil, and sunlight—plants are different, we know this. We also know that people are different and we each require different things to create the environment we can thrive in.
But more importantly perhaps is that we would never chastise a plant that doesn’t thrive because it could not get what it needed. We wouldn’t say that plant made bad choices and shame it. No, we would judge ourselves, the gardeners, for not properly attending to that plant’s needs.
And yet, as a church, we have created and perpetuated harmful racist ideologies that intentionally set some people up for success while setting other people up for failure. It is systemic racism.
In God’s garden, we are all seeds, full of promise and potential. And while the world can be reckless and hateful toward the precious gifts within each of us, my hope is in Jesus the gardener, who loves us all and wishes for us, and all of creation, abundant life.
My hope is also in us, his disciples, who daily attempt to cherish and learn from each seed in God’s beautiful garden, so that we may one day each have what we need to blossom, grow, and bear good fruit.
May it be so.
Alydia
Alydia Smith, Program Coordinator, Worship, Music, and Spirituality
