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Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening

Vigen Guroian

4.03 · Rating details · 87 ratings · 9 reviews

The garden is a personal place of retreat and delight and labor for many people. Gardening helps us collect ourselves, much as praying does. For rich and poor - it makes no difference - a garden is a place where body and soul are in harmony. In Inheriting Paradise Vigen Guroian offers an abundant vision of the spiritual life found in the cultivation of God's good creation. ...more

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Paperback, 120 pages

Published April 14th 1999 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (first published April 1st 1999)

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Jun 20, 2015 Stephen Case rated it it was ok

The rain over the past several days has meant the plants in my meager garden have grow wild, chaotic, threatening to slip beyond the control of a weeding hand. It doesn’t help that I’m already a bit of a lazy gardener. It’s important for me to have growing things in the ground-- my ground-- every season, but I don’t spend time each day in the garden. I kind of let things-- cucumbers and tomatoes, mainly-- run riot.

I have two shallow raised beds in the backyard. This fall I may add a third. One o The rain over the past several days has meant the plants in my meager garden have grow wild, chaotic, threatening to slip beyond the control of a weeding hand. It doesn’t help that I’m already a bit of a lazy gardener. It’s important for me to have growing things in the ground-- my ground-- every season, but I don’t spend time each day in the garden. I kind of let things-- cucumbers and tomatoes, mainly-- run riot.

I have two shallow raised beds in the backyard. This fall I may add a third. One of them is devoted to different varieties of cucumbers with basil plants holding down the corners. There’s a long trellis I made out of old chicken wire running down the middle. The cucumbers are gathering themselves right now in a slow green boil, like they’re gathering momentum to leap up and over it, as they will soon, burying it in a long leafy wave. I’ve always had good luck with cucumbers.

The second bed is more unruly. Half of it is devoted to a weedy onion patch, though the long fingers of the onions still have a comfortable lead on the grass growing up between them, for now. I dropped onion sets into this side of the garden haphazardly and without plan, so the onions have come up in bedraggled rows. The rest of the bed is split between four large tomato plants that have fountained up as bushes, spilling languid green arms in all directions, and a row of potato plants that I’m not sure what to do with. I’ve never grown potatoes before, and as lovely and thick as they look above the ground, I don’t know what that means beneath the soil.

In one corner of this bed I have an uneasy alliance with a bunch of mint. At one time this mint spread across the back of the house and my wife spent a long afternoon pulling it out of the flower bed where it had thrived for perhaps decades. I have a soft spot in my heart for the plant though, because I pull a leaf to chew every time I walk past the garden and I boil it to make mint tea for my kombucha. I have it walled off in its own corner of the raised bed, though my walls don’t go deep enough to actually do anything to hold it back. That’s just me, pulling out the constant runners that keep creeping into the tomatoes.

You’re supposed to be able to tell something about a man from his garden, and if this is true then my garden says I’m enthusiastic, overly optimistic, and naive. I know there are supposed to be growing things on my land, so I plant them, but I’m never quite sure I have the hang of what to do with them once they go crazy, as they do each season. I like to watch the garden come to life, but I lack artistry. Fortunately, there’s not a lot riding on my gardening. I don’t rely on it to provide a major source of my food. If Vigen Guroian is right though, I do need it to provide food for my soul.

The garden is the oldest analogy. As Guroian points out, man was placed in a garden at creation. Whether or not this is “historical” truth, consider what it means as literary truth. Man begins in some kind of order, as some kind of caretaker in relationship with ordered creation. Wildness and wilderness only come later.

For Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian, gardening is more than a hobby or an ecological mission: it is theology, lived in the context of the soil. The annual death and rebirth of his garden is a reflection of the theological-- the cosmological, he would argue-- truths exemplified in the liturgical life of the Church. Indeed, in this slender volume the chapters are divided by Christian holidays, with Guroian reflecting on the beauty, significance, and meaning of what’s happening in the garden in time with what’s happening in the liturgical year. The garden is a way of participating with creation itself in worship, in bearing fruit joyfully before God. For Guroian, as he shares his own battle with depression, it’s also a means of healing.

The mirror for all this is the prayers and hymns of the Armenian Orthodox liturgy. Guroian pulls from this throughout the year-- as well as scripture and occasional quotes from the Fathers or other writers-- to draw the reader into an understanding of the cycles at work unseen beneath the turning of the seasons. This might be a central claim of anyone who gardens: for those of us who have lost touch with the land, the circle of the year turns largely unseen. We skim along the skin of it, but we don’t reach deeply and touch what it means.

For an Orthodox Christian gardener like Guroian, the claim might go deeper: most Christians today are like the non-gardeners, out of touch with the deeper turnings in the liturgical life of the Church. We see Easter and Christmas come and go like non-gardeners see certain fruits and vegetables appear and then disappear (though they don’t even really do that anymore) from the markets. But there’s a deep connection between the two, and Guroian believes-- in keeping with mystical Orthodox theologians-- that the story of the Church, the entire story of redemption and deification, is written in the soil. He would have you know this when you garden as well as when you sing or speak the liturgy.

For all that I agree with Guroian’s message here, I was disappointed with the book. It’s a slender volume that despite the richness of his prose and borrowed texts felt woodenly didactic. The cosmic significance of gardening was spelled out writ large, but what was lacking was the specificity that makes such sweeping analogies and metaphors truly powerful. I learned the significance of gardening, but what of the significance of tomatoes? What of cucumbers or mulch? What of the back bent in labor? They’re all here but passed over, unexplored. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Chet Raymo’s Soul of the Night; whereas Raymo’s theological claims are far vaguer, his treatment of natural (in this case astronomical) phenomena are compelling, concrete, and sublime. For all the truth Guroian is touching here, the execution came off a bit too trite. ...more

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Sep 25, 2018 Paul rated it really liked it

Shelves: religion-personal

INHERITING PARADISE, Meditations on Gardening. Vigen Guroian. 1999

Dear Vera,
I sat down to read this book, which I did only because you gave it to me. Gardening, like fish, is [are?] alien to me for vastly different reasons. I kill anything green which comes near to me should the plant become dependent on me. But your sense of prayer led me to read this little book. It will not be among my favorites but every so often something struck me as God is wont to do with our realizing his presence in bit INHERITING PARADISE, Meditations on Gardening. Vigen Guroian. 1999

Dear Vera,
I sat down to read this book, which I did only because you gave it to me. Gardening, like fish, is [are?] alien to me for vastly different reasons. I kill anything green which comes near to me should the plant become dependent on me. But your sense of prayer led me to read this little book. It will not be among my favorites but every so often something struck me as God is wont to do with our realizing his presence in bits and snatches. So, herewith my being struck: [it took a while to get struck]

36 Henry Mitchell, in his book One Man’s Garden, observes that “it is not important for a garden to be beautiful” in everyone’s eyes. But “it is extremely important for the gardener to think it is a fair substitute for Eden.” Perhaps this is an overstatement, or perhaps it is a theological truth. It is important for threw Christian gardener to see beauty in the garden of his own self.
COMMENT: That touched me because if we cannot see any beauty in ourselves, we cannot see God. At the beginning of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, there are meditations which seem to trap us in the mire in which we are so often. That conclusion was not his but we do have see beauty in ourselves, beauty which is a gift.
38 Adam and Eve were cast out from Paradise, but the memory of Paradise remains. So gardeners try to recreate Paradise in their own yards. … “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./It will flame out, like shining from shook foil” …
COMMENT: That struck me because I had just sent that poem to a newly baptized member of the Chinese Cantonese Catholic community, of which I am chaplain. He is a very interesting individual, attracted to faith by Pascal’ wager, which I took pains to explain was not a great foundation. But we all are aimed at God by strange bowstrings. So at the end of an explanation to him of something or other which I cannot remember, I added this poem which I knew he would have a problem reading. Well, he got one of those aids to reading poetry of the web and got the point. We are meant to be God’s grandeur outside of God…
80 Where have all the flowers gone? The perennial beds have lost their raiment, no more wild summer gaiety of bright colors, the dancers are all undressed and their feet are frozen in the ground.
COMMENT: Great images. But it was the mention of dancers that struck me. In the days when I could hike outdoors, I would stand and watch the leaves dance with the wind. Signs of life…
83 We have tamed Christmas, and domesticated it. We have taken all of the terror and cold out of that night with our electrified lights; and real joy escapes us. We compensate, we cover our silent despair with gay Christmas wrapping. But we know all too well that at the appointed hour the wrappings will all be torn away and crumpled in piles, and our lives will be no different after the day is done. We want the joy of our life without the pain of his birth, or the agony of his crucifixion, or the judgment when he returns. But I ask you: “Why in this season does the holly bear its red berries?”

COMMENT: The first sentence got to me. When I was a young priest, just after I got here, I started with some lay friends a Christmas Eve Mass and celebrated it for some 35 years. Someone else does it now. But Mary, who was one of those with whom I joined would read some fitting poetry after communion. It was poetry which enlarges Guroian’s first sentence. See the poem which I attach, Christmas is Really for the Children.
And the use of Oscar Wilde’s story about the selfish giant is a marvelous ending. Or beginning.
Thank you.
...more

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May 05, 2015 Marc rated it liked it

Guroian's meditations on gardening are charmingly well written, warm and often heartfelt. This was a pleasant read but very much a missed opportunity.
I thought there'd be a lot more flesh on the bare bones of what is a welcome thesis.
I was expecting something more substantial and theologically rigorous, which I know regrettably that Vigen is capable of.

There are better works out there around this and similar topics- Wendell Berry's and Norman Wirzba's for example- so I'll rate this against th ...more

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Sep 18, 2017 Karen rated it liked it

I did not realize the author was a theology professor and so this book was not the gardening book I thought it was but more one of spiritual (or religious) thoughts on gardening. I was disappointed....wanted something more secular.

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Apr 27, 2012 Fr. Ted rated it really liked it

I did find his thinking through faith within a year of a life of a garden to be refreshing and poetically appealing. I've enjoyed other things Guroian has written. Truth can be expressed in the mundane life of a garden - or perhaps like at the Transfiguration of Christ, we can see eternal truths revealed through the garden because God intended it that way from the beginning.

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Apr 24, 2011 Steve rated it really liked it

Recommended to Steve by: Krista Tippett On Being

Shelves: uborrow

This book has some really great sections that grabbed me. I now have a better appreciation in my understanding of why gardening mirrors the seasons of life. I hope to experience this in practice the coming spring, summer, fall and winter.

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Jan 26, 2016 David Kern rated it it was amazing

This is a relatively brief, but entirely beautiful book of meditations, a book that even non-gardeners should read. spiritual meditations through the metaphor of the garden, and deeply moving at times.

First read.

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Jan 12, 2010 Marilyn rated it it was ok

I read this book in about an hour's time. It was an interesting concept: putting gardening within a parallel spiritual analogy.

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Feb 06, 2012 Nicole rated it it was amazing

Shelves: gardening, spiritual-growth

I loved this. As a gardener, I found myself saying, "Yes, exactly!" so many times. A wonderful little book.

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About Vigen Guroian

Vigen Guroian

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Vigen Guroian resides with his wife June Vranian in Culpeper, Virginia, where he mostly tends to his large perennial and vegetable gardens. June is an Interior Designer. Vigen and June have two children. Their son Rafi is 28 years of age, a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, and employed at Cox Newspapers in Washington D.C. Their daughter Victoria is 24 years old, a graduate of Washington and Lee Vigen Guroian resides with his wife June Vranian in Culpeper, Virginia, where he mostly tends to his large perennial and vegetable gardens. June is an Interior Designer. Vigen and June have two children. Their son Rafi is 28 years of age, a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, and employed at Cox Newspapers in Washington D.C. Their daughter Victoria is 24 years old, a graduate of Washington and Lee University, and employed at the NRA.

Dr. Guroian received his B.A. from the University of Virginia (1970) and his Ph. D. in Theology from Drew University (1978). He is presently Professor of Theology and Ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Guroian was an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia from 1978-81 and held a post there as well in the Center for Russian and East European Studies. He has been a visiting lecturer at St. Nersess Armenian Seminary in New Rochelle, New York, and was the Seminary's Director of Academic Affairs from 1990-92. Dr. Guroian has served for many years as a member of and consultant to the Armenian Religious Education Council of the Prelacy of the Armenian Church of North America.

Since 1986 Dr. Guroian has been a member of the faculty of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary and University teaching courses there regularly. For the academic year 1995-1996 he was named the Distinguished Lecturer in Moral and Religious Education at the Institute.

Dr. Guroian has been on numerous editorial boards including The Journal of Religious Ethics, Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, and Christian Bio-Ethics. He has served terms on the Board of Directors of the Society of Christian Ethics and the executive committees of the American Theological Society and Christians Associated for Relations with Eastern Europe. He has been active in both the National Council of Churches and in the World Council of Churches.

He is Senior Fellow of the Center on Law and Religion of Emory University; Permanent Senior Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan; Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum; and an ongoing Fellow of the Wilberforce Forum under the Prison Fellowship Ministries founded by the honorable Chuck Colson.

Recent significant consultations and projects on which Dr. Guroian has served include: "The Alonzo L. McDonald Family Project on Christian Jurisprudence," Emory University (2004-2009); "The Vocation of the Child," commissioned by the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University (2005-2006); A Consultation: "American Orthodoxy or Orthodoxy in America," sponsored by the Institute on Religion and World Affairs, Boston University and Pew Charitable Trusts (2003-2004); Christian Jurisprudence Project on "Law and Human Nature: The Teaching of Modern Christianity," sponsored by Pew Charitable Trusts (2001-2004); and "Consultation on Ecclesiology and Ecumenism," sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology (2000-2003).

Dr. Guroian has published more than 150 articles in books, journals, and encyclopedias on a range of subjects including Orthodox theology, liturgy and ethics, marriage and family, children's literature, ecology, genocide, and medical ethics. He has authored a monthly column entitled "Really Human Things" on the Prison Fellowship Ministries' BreakPoint site. Dr. Guroian's books, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening (Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1999) and Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1998), received national press and media attention. Feature stories on his books have appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Richmond Times Dispatch, and more than a dozen other newspapers around the country. Dr. Guroian has been a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation," "T ...more

Books by Vigen Guroian

Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination

Rallying The Really Human Things: Moral Imagination In Politics Literature & Everyday Life

The Melody of Faith: Theology in an Orthodox Key

Life's Living Toward Dying: A Theological and Medical-Ethical Study

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“I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends.” — 4 likes

“My son Rafi is enchanted with cyberspace. But we are not disembodied mind or spirit, we are our bodies - cruising the Internet won't teach us that. It may even trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. Gardening teaches us differently. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming, I mean the kind of gardening that any one of us can do with his hands and feet and the simplest tools.” — 1 likes

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