The Constant Gardener: Homily for the First Sunday in Lent

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Christ Jesus. Just a few days ago, as the ashes were imposed on our heads we heard the solemn words:

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris

Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return

On that day, we also heard the advice of Our Lord,

when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.

In today’s Gospel, when Our Lord – soon after His baptism – goes into the desert to pray, He demonstrates to us what this advice means.

We can, however, go deeper into this mystery. The desert is a place of dryness, where water is lacking and this signifies the dryness of our spirits when, because of our sin, we are distanced from God. We should hold this idea in mind when we read the first lines of the first reading this Sunday, from the book of Genesis:

The LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground
and blew into his nostrils the breath of life,
and so man became a living being.

Reflecting on these words St. Augustine reminds us that we were made not just of dry dust, but rather from clay, or mud, which is “a mixture of earth and water.” In other words, God wet the dry earth, and infused this wet earth, this clay, with His spirit.

In the desert, and through His Passion, and now from the wound in  His Most Sacred Heart, Our Lord similarly irrigates the desert, of our souls, with his sweat, tears and blood. His entire Passion was undertaken, so that the dryness in which we found ourselves could be irrigated and then made a receptacle for His Holy Spirit.

If He provides the water and Spirit that makes us, to use the words of St. Iraneus of which I am very fond; “fully alive,” then it makes sense to understand that we are the ones who provides the dry earth, or humus, so that it may be irrigated, and planted with His seed, the Holy Spirit, so that we may bear fruit “a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Mt 13: 8). Psalm 104: 29-30 underlines the fact that without His Holy Spirit, we are just dry earth:

when you take away their breath, they die
    and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
    and you renew the face of the ground.

This dry earth, this humus, is the inner room that Our Lord referred to on Ash Wednesday. With the help of His Passion and death, and the gift of His Holy Spirit, He wishes that this desert be converted into a garden that will bear much fruit. (It was not for nothing that the first encounter with the Risen Lord took place in a garden, and He was mistaken for a gardener – Jn 20: 15).

Listen to the words of the prophet Isaiah (5:1b – 2):

My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.

He dug it and cleared it of stones,
    and planted it with choice vines;

This is the work that Our Lord would have us do, as he also suggests in the parable of the sower (Mt 13: 1-9, 18-22).

He would have us plough it deep, to remove the stones in the soil, the weeds or thorns, so that when He sows and irrigates it with His Word this humus will reap much fruit.

And how would we plough this dry earth? With the prayer, fasting, and penance of Lent. Understand prayer as the act of ploughing, and we get a sense of how we must pray; repeatedly, letting the tip of the plough go ever deeper into our soul. As many of you well know, I am fond of ejaculatory prayer, a single verse repeated over and over again, so that it becomes entrenched in our hearts. This is ploughing of the soul. The fast and other penance is the process through which we collect the stones in our hearts, those emotions, desires, attachments, that we realise we do not need, and can – or must – do without.

My dear brothers and sisters, in the opening words of the first reading I suggested that we find three things: flesh (dust), water, and the Spirit. The same combination of objects is to be found in the episode of the baptism of Our Lord. His earthly body (our flesh) enters the river Jordan (water) and the Holy Spirit descends on it to recognize Our Lord as the beloved Son of God. This is what happens to us at baptism, where our dry earth is irrigated with the sweat, blood, and the water from the side of Our Lord and the Holy Spirit gives us new life, and repeatedly at every sacrament, and Eucharistic communion. All we need to do is ensure that the soil is ploughed deep, something we also do at confession.

My dear brothers and sisters, Our Lord commands us today to go into our inner room, the desert of dry earth, and cultivate it so that it could become a garden. The Christian tradition recognizes Our Lady as the Hortus Conclusus, the enclosed garden. A garden that was cultivated through constant prayer and humility, patience and perseverance. On this first Sunday of Lent, let us turn to this Hortus Conclusus, and petition Her help so that we may convert our inner deserts into the enclosed gardens of the Lord through the rest of these thirty-six days.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.

(The homily was written exclusively for this virtual congregation I have the privilege to address.)

(Image reference: Christ appears as a gardener to Mary Magdalene (Noli me tangere), Maerten de Vos, 1585.)