Sermon quotes on gardens
Douglas Adams (For Contrast)
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Maya Angelou
On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.
Wendell Berry
Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
Wendell Berry
One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
Wendell Berry
We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
Rudolf Borchardt
What the human being shares with nature, what we demand from nature and entrust to nature, what we long for and reject, this may all become song and poetry, or music and philosophy, or myth and religion; but in the visible world it must sooner or later become a garden, if it desires to make itself visible at all; and the achievement of visibility – as distinct from simple thinkability, and understandability – is its most irresistible drive, as an inherent part, like all the creative drives of the human race, of the one primordial drive to give birth to structure.
The Passionate Gardener (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 2006), 32.
John Calvin
The custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things which God has committed to our hands, on the condition that, being content with the frugal and moderate use of them, we should take care of what shall remain … let everyone regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses.
Commentary on Genesis, 1554.
Robert Pogue Harrison
History without gardens would be a wasteland.
Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), x.
Nicholas Lash
God’s garden, made “in the beginning,” does not lie behind us, but ahead of us, in hope, and, in the meantime, all around us as our place of work.
Believing Three Ways in the One God: A Reading of the Apostle’s Creed (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 124.
Claude Monet
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.
Norman Wirzba
The Garden of Eden, literally the “garden of delight,” is humanity’s original and perpetually originating home, the place of our collective nourishment, inspiration, instruction, and hope.
Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Wendell Berry
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
Leonardo da Vinci
Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.