Retreating to the Garden: Monastic Gardens as places of nature, nurture, contemplation, and healing.
Because how else to get over a week like this?
Dear fellow traveler,
Some of you might be expecting the essay on toxic religion and harassment I promised last week. But it still lies in growing pains and needs some more labor to be pushed into the world.
Also I felt there is so much pain and anxiety going around given the state of the world and the election panic here in the US which just cumulated last week, that I did not want to add another difficult to face topic to the overload.
So, I ventured into our archives looking for some monastic wisdom to offer to you instead. I found a piece on the significance of gardens for a healthy and wholesome body and intellect that I wrote in the thick of the pandemic. It fits well into our current time and offers its consolation against fear. It also covers another promise of mine to share more on Hildegard of Bingen (and the paper I am currently finishing) who was not only a master gardener but has praised the garden in many vivid metaphors from God’s dwelling place to our inner life.
But see for yourself. Get yourself some tea or something stronger and retreat for a bit into the garden :-)
And may peace and wisdom cast out contempt and fear, Almut with Chuck and little one
Retreating to the Garden. Monastic Gardens as places of nature, nurture, contemplation, and healing.
Gardens are some of our most favorite spots in the monastery, and most European monasteries are brimming with gardens. There is the orchard at the south side of the monastery campus, a kitchen garden close to the kitchen, the medicinal garden close to the infirmary and another garden in the courtyard, almost at the center of the monastery, hugged by the cloister walk which connects the exterior and interior spaces.
Monastic gardens have for centuries secured the sustainability of the monastic community. They provide food from fruits to vegetables to herbs. And they provide healing spaces for both body and soul. Thus in a classic European monastery you will always find a kitchen garden, orchards, medicinal gardens, and contemplative gardens offering the visitor a refuge to walk the symmetric structures, to reconnect to nature and its divine powers, to sit and to ponder, listen, smell, taste.
Healing gardens and the garden as healer
Monasteries have been since time of old places where the healing arts have been practiced and developed. They have been the first places in Europe to run “infirmaries,” places to care for the sick, their own as well as people from the community asking for help. The first apothecaries came out of monasteries, using their knowledge of herbal medicine and their rich medicinal gardens, to create medicine for the common ailments of their time.
Saint Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, went to great length in his monastic rule to emphasize a healthy life style: He recommended a balanced diet, enough sleep, moderation in eating and drinking, a regular structure of the day, and the balance of vita active and vita contemplative, active and contemplative times throughout each day. But Benedict also saw care for the sick as a central function of the monastery. In this tradition, the medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen based much of her theology on our God-given task to work towards the restoration of a healthy soul in a healthy body in harmony with all creation. Thus, infirmaries have been the places to care for the ill, as the latin infirmus suggests, which means weak or sick. The infirmary was often situated outside the cloistered part of the monastery, so the sick could receive visitors, which was understood as an important support on the way to recovery.
Creating space to care for the weak and sick requires the cultivation of humility and patience in both the care giver and the sick person. It means creating space for healing, and space for dying and mourning. This has always been an important part of the monastic community.
We live in a time where the health and wellness industry prospers by promising perfect lives. We have outsourced the human vulnerabilities of sickness and death to the expertise of highly specialized medical complexes. We are in love with our illusion of unending health and happiness and do not want to be confronted with the finitude of our human condition, with the possibility of mental and physical hardships. The monastic approach to care for the sick reminds us that weakness, crisis and illness are an integral part of our humanity and thus needs places to tend to these needs.
Integrating body & soul. The garden as bridge between the exterior and interior
Thus, from the very beginning, monasteries have been places to heal both the body and soul. It is for this reason that monastic gardens are famous for both their beauty and their healing properties. They rejuvenate the soul and strengthen the body. They are places in which to walk or meditate which also provide medicine from God’s pharmacy, herbal remedies known from early times to keep body and soul healthy. They remind us that a central task of becoming whole and human is maintaining a healthy and wholesome life style. A way of life that cares about health but also about care for the sick, since illness is part of life.
How do we translate this into our inner journey? From the monastic infirmary we learn that weakness needs its room, that we must come to terms with, and even welcome, our vulnerabilities, our brokenness and our need for healing. We must allow ourselves to ask for help when needed. To tend to the imperfections of life, human suffering and hardship, we need empathy, compassion and mercy, for ourselves and others. We need to face, and to smile upon, those places in us which long for healing and those which have been broken and perhaps long forgotten. We need, again and again, to open the gate to our innermost being, the chamber of the heart, so the Divine light can break in and shed light on what has long lain in darkness.
From the monastic infirmary we learn that weakness needs its room, that we must come to terms with, and even welcome, our vulnerabilities, our brokenness and our need for healing.
The garden as spiritual place: The cloister walk
Indeed, on our spiritual pilgrimage transitional spaces are part of the journey. We walk through the dark of the night, waiting for dawn to break in. Thus, religious traditions incorporate thresholds into the rhythm of life, e.g. we celebrate Christmas Eve and Easter night. God comes to us in the middle of our night. Take some time to pause at that threshold.
The monastic architecture, which we have used as metaphor for our inner journey throughout these days has incorporated the threshold in its design. I was always fascinated by cloister walks, the quadrangle in the monastery which frames a courtyard and connects the different places of the monastery. In earlier times it was often the cemetery of the monastery, thus a cross sat in the middle. It is often also used as a garden for meditation and rejuvenation.
Thus it connects the interior and exterior of the monastery, the sacred spaces inside and outside, and reminds us that we are part of the bigger whole, the world around us, the creation we are called to care for, and the seasons, which give our life its rhythm.
I feel particularly drawn to the cloister walk because it somewhat connects the inner and the outer, marking the transition between time and space.
Thus walking the cloister walk, with four sides framing the inner garden, we are invited to meditate on the rhythm of the life of which we are a part. I feel particularly drawn to the cloister walk because it is a space between, a space that connects the inner and the outer, marking the transitions of time and space. Each has its time, the retreat inside oneself, just like the nun retreats in her cell, and stepping outside, in the garden as image of creation as a whole. Our life is deeply enmeshed in the rhythm and nature of the outside world, the givens of our existence, the seasons and traditions, the people with whom we are on the journey and those we meet on the way.
Walking the cloister walk reminds the monastic to cultivate their own inner garden, and to tend to their own seasons of life, as well as to their weaknesses and possibilities.
The cloister walk thus stands for grounding our life in the exterior and interior world, and for working the soil and the soul patiently. As humility is connected to humus, the human must remind us of our humaneness, which needs to be grounded in the soil of Mother Earth.
Walking the walk
Walking the cloister walk can be done as a practice of meditation. For this you do not need the quadrangle of the monastery. You can just walk through your inner or outer rooms, like you would square a garden. Attentively, openly, in a meditative way. I have done so sometimes by just squaring the inside of a church, walking a labyrinth, or our little herb garden in the backyard. Even the long and crowded corridors of an airport can become a cloister walk, a sacred time in transition.
Contemplating Viriditas
There is likely no better time to ponder Hildegard of Bingen's concept of viriditas, the greening power of all creation, than a Minnesota Spring. I am every year taken by surprise when dead looking branches finally, suddenly, purposely, sprout little green buds. And how full of potency do those red rhubarb heads look while pressing their new stems forcefully through the rock and cold mud? If we were patient, we could watch their first green leaves slowly unfolding.
The early threshold of Spring has always been a powerful metaphor for the new life, dormant, which has prepared itself under layers of dark and cold. Already, in the slow season of waiting, when it appears like winter will never end, even then, the new not-yet-green prepares itself silently and patiently for its coming.
“There is a power that has been since all eternity, and that force and potentiality is green!” wrote the sage Hildegard of Bingen nearly 1000 years ago on a wax plate. She wrote it in her German tongue and only later did her scribes translate it to Latin, the academic language of the time.
Hildegard names this greening force viriditas, the Latin for her original “das Grün,” the greening. The greening is indeed a rich Spring metaphor, but it reaches beyond Spring to encompass the power of life. With viriditas Hildegard captures the greening power, the living light, that breathes in all beings, flows through all that is alive: “Be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty – it could not be creation without it.”
Pondering viriditas helps us understand how much Hildegard's spirituality is embedded in her philosophy of human nature and its fundamental connectedness to “mother earth:”
“The earth is at the same time mother...She is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all.”
Hence Hildegard was an early pioneeress exploring the feminine Divine and also the relation between ecology and spirituality. Her teaching reminds us of our deep connection with the life force which sustains the cosmos and also every living being:
“Viriditas is the natural driving force toward healing and wholeness, the vital power that sustains all life's greenness.”
For Hildegard this life force is a “living and fiery essence ... that glows in the beauty of the fields.” It speaks to the one who is listening:
“I shine in the water, I burn in the sun, and the moon, and the stars. Mine is that mysterious force of the invisible wind.... I am the breath of all the living.”
When I was walking through my own long winter season, it was Hildegard that connected me again with what got lost in the midst of all-too-human concerns and expectations. She reminded me of the living presence which is breathing in me, and in you, and which moves us from within. Just as in Spring nature renews itself, also our soul has this capability to blossom again, this greening power of renewal.
In our age we have lost the powerful images our ancestors wielded to grasp the mystery of our souls, the breath that sustains us, the “anima” which animates us. Or as Hildegard pictures it:
“The soul is for the body as the sap is for the tree, and the soul's energies unfold as the tree unfolds its gestalt. ...Thus, the soul provides the inner solidity and strength of the body.”
Surely there are deep scholarly questions here to unpack, like what today is often called the mind-body problem. But I want instead to point to the powerful images of our forebears which can do what abstract argument often cannot: open our eyes, console our deepest worries, and offer comfort and understanding to our troubled souls.
Practice
Walk into the gardens. Or find your cloister walk. Get your hands dirty, kneel into the soil, look what comes up under the leaves of last year :-) Look at the garden in front of you. And visit the garden inside of you.
Have a seat. Breathe. Look around. Which season are you in. What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you feel?
Can you hear the whisper of viriditas? The greening life bubbling up in everything around you? And in you?
"Glance at the sun.
See the moon and the stars.
Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings.
Now think.
What delight God gives to humankind
with all these things..."—Hildegard of Bingen
Peace and blessings to you, Almut with Chuck and little one
PS: If you can, leave a heart, a word or a line which resonated with you in the comments, so we know you have been here :-)
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Thank you, thank you.
"From the monastic infirmary we learn that weakness needs its room, that we must come to terms with, and even welcome, our vulnerabilities, our brokenness and our need for healing."
Amen. Thank you for such inspired offering.
Almut- Your deep insight on garden as bridge between exterior and interior is music to my soul, which also was warmed by the cloister photographs (the culmination of which was of course the outdoor tea-drinking moment). This, is what life is about. 🙏