My father is the gardener

On the face of it, vineyards are completely irrelevant to my life, especially as I am a non-drinker, but these words from the Bible spoke powerfully to me recently: ‘they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.’

When Perthshire-based poet Kenneth Steven was speaking at the Old High Church in Inverness earlier in the summer, he described growing up in a literary household – his parents were both writers.  He told us that he felt as a teenager that his writing was somehow more significant than theirs – their work was factual while the poems and fiction he created were called into being by imagination.

Of course we need both kinds of writing, but it’s a fact that the words, whether factual or fiction which have the greatest power to change us are those which capture our imagination.

Those lines about vineyards were quoted by a pastor in a book I was reading – through them, he had come to understand that his priorities were wrong. I immediately realised that the same was true in my life.

Now you could have said to me ‘Don’t be so busy doing stuff for other people that you neglect to cultivate a joyful openness to God in your own life,’ or ‘If you don’t take good care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of others,’ or ‘Be careful you don’t focus on what you think needs changed in the lives of others while being blind to the defects in your own life.’

But if you’d said these things, your words would most likely have drifted ineffectively through my head. I might perhaps have acknowledged the truth of them; at most I might have tried to make some superficial changes. Yet a few words about vineyards said all these things and more, touching something deep in me, changing me just a little by the very light they brought.

Which is why Kenneth Steven writes as he does in his book Making the known world new about some tyrannical regime seeking to root out dissent. It’s not the scientists, politicians or economists who are the first to be arrested, but the ‘poets and songwriters’ who ‘are reckoned to be the most dangerous of them all.’

The reason for this? Says Steven - ‘The others have the power to change minds with clever argumentation; the poets and the songwriters have the power to change hearts. ‘

His book is a series of poems and reflections centred round his garden in Dunkeld. Which reminds me of another powerful symbol in the Bible. Not vineyards this time, but gardens. For the Bible is a tale of four gardens.

There’s the Garden of Eden, where God comes looking for the man and the women who, in their shame at disobeying God, have hidden. There’s the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Jesus who came in God’s name to rescue humanity, prays alone, oppressed by enemies and abandoned by, accepting he must die to make the known world new.

There’s the Garden of Resurrection where Jesus bursts free from death. At first Mary thinks he is the gardener. Then her eyes are opened. Finally there’s the Garden City at the End of Time where all who welcome Jesus live in peace, where no-one hides from God.

But as well as powerful pictures which feed our imagination, I believe we also need facts – things we are convinced are true. Imagination is powerful. It can cripple us with fear as it conjures grim possibilities; it can beguile us with the deceitful allure of evil. So while as Christians we are glad that our imagination deepens and enlivens to our understanding, we believe that our imagination must be guided by our understanding - of Jesus and the Jesus story.

One of those poets, those far-seeing troubadours Kenneth Steven refers to who face the wrath of the establishment was Jesus himself, and yet they could not keep him down. Still he sings the same subversive song disturbing, challenging, liberating us.

Theologian N. T. Wright has suggested that in mistaking Jesus for the gardener Mary was glimpsing a profound truth. For Jesus is the gardener of humanity, plucking weeds of evil, sowing seeds of hope, pruning the branches of thinking, tending the flower-beds of imagination. A gardener who is so successful because his own, inner garden is an Eden of openness to God.

The fact that those words about the vineyard spoke to me more than any other words I heard that week wasn’t automatic. Either somewhere deep in my subconscious I discerned my need to the message they contained or else (and this is my belief) the energy which brought them alive in me was the breath of the Gardener himself.