Matt Miller. Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden. Belle Point Press, 2024. $17.95. 140 pp.
What would it have been like to watch Adam and Eve at work in God’s Garden, prior to the Fall? Can you imagine Adam tending tomatoes or Eve pruning rose bushes?
No matter how strange such a vision might seem, according to the book of Genesis, the first man and woman were indeed gardeners. Their first vocation—and our first calling, as a species—was a mandate to create. God called these first humans to be “fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth” not just with humans, but with all the fruits of life God had made. Adam and Eve were to spread Eden’s beauty to every corner of the planet.
When the Fall happened, it broke our relationship with God and with each other. But it also marred our relationship to the earth itself—our gardenly calling was thrown into error. To become a gardener, from that day forward, was no longer easy or perfect. Yet we garden still. Something elemental in us, perhaps, draws us back to Edenic cultivation.
An essayist, English Professor at the College of the Ozarks, and online friend of many years, Matt Miller has long pondered the connections between soul, faith, time, and garden. In his book Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden, Miller invites readers into the garden and the church’s liturgical year, reminding that seasons of heaven and earth are always inextricably intertwined.
Extensively quoting theologian Paul Griffiths, Miller explains in his introduction that there are two sorts of time. The first is the ceaseless ticking of the clock that the Greeks expressed as chronos, “the devastated and devastating clock-time of our fallen existence.” Miller explains that “Chronos never slows down, never gives us a break, and finds its period only in death.” Griffiths describes this time as “metronomic”: It marks the endless slippage of moments into mortality.
Yet there is a second experience of time, termed kairos in Greek. It refers to the right or opportune time—the moment for a decisive action, choice, or event. Kairos is qualitative, not quantitative. It is embodied in the moment when I prune tomatoes and smell their rich juices smeared across my hand; I remember what it was to smell this heady scent on my hands as a six-year-old, scavenging for backyard tomatoes. Kairos unfolds within seasonality, rhythms of being, and a vital sense of context. With kairos, time itself folds into pleats of shared experience, touching across profound temporospatial distances. As Griffiths puts it, kairos time is “systolic”: It weaves each shared cycle or pattern into a larger tapestry, ruching moments like the empty tomb and Easter Sunday together across centuries.
Both gardening and liturgy, Miller argues, are kairos spaces. Their interlacing themes of life, death, resurrection, and renewal call us out of chronos and into eternity.
Miller says he wrote this book as an expression of “delight” in the garden and the liturgical year. In reality, however, I find its message more fully expressed in the first chapter, which begins amid the chronos of Covid. While the introduction defines both gardening and liturgy as “cycles of glory” or “glorious repetition,” there is something very real about the way Matt expresses his relationship to gardening, place, and time in his first chapter. Here it is not glorious. It is full of weariness and bitterness. Here, the vision of Eden meets the Fall. As Matt puts it,
By the time the plague arrived … we ought to have been well positioned to take up a role as the perfect pandemic back-to-the-landers. We should have baked bread, picked vegetables, and laughed. Instead, I grew weary, utterly weary of my garden. With extra time at home, like many others, I worked hard on my garden through the spring and the summer. But by the end of the growing season I felt done. I felt frustrated, tired, unwilling to continue. I wanted to turn over the whole garden into grass. I wanted to move to the suburbs. I wanted to pack it all in.
This book thus unfolds amid a pandemic Lenten season and within a larger moment of communal and horticultural malaise for the author. It begins in acedia, that thorny vice so prone to those called to good work on God’s earth. To me, as the reader, therefore, the “project” of Leaves of Healing seemed most closely tied to its title: What does it mean to find Eden in a fallen landscape and amid broken communities? What happens when the gardener has lost his love of gardening?
In response to acedia and Covid isolation, Miller limits his work and himself. He focuses inward, seeking a time of “self-examination and humility, two qualities that Ash Wednesday commends to all. To amend my life, in banishing sin or renewing care for my garden, I would need to practice both.” He pares down his list of plantings, imposes a sense of creatureliness on his gardening vision, and then continues in the work he’s been given to do. He spends the rest of the gardening and liturgical year writing and gardening, seeking belonging and joy through the process. The volume moves from Lent to Easter, from Easter to Ordinary Time. But its frame is forever set by the weariness of the first chapter. And it is perhaps vital to start Leaves of Healing by reminding readers of the pains of chronos. Many people joke that time has not proceeded the same since 2020, and that 2020 itself was a year beyond years—a sort of time warp that trapped and mired us in its strange cadences. The pandemic itself, from a temporal perspective, was confusingly mottled and mixed. Each family had to learn new rhythms of being, and to inhabit ways that stepped outside of the metronomic nature of things.
For Miller, both liturgy and garden serve as memento mori—an admonition to remember one’s death, to embrace both contemplation and humility among the everyday cadences of work. While the garden “doesn’t kill us,” he reflects, it does remind us “that we will die.” Amid the pains of the Covid pandemic, he adds, “the work of the Lenten garden is to find out how that recognition is not a curse, but good news.”
As Miller’s essays enter the holy days of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, with their spring seasons and colors, the project steps further into the language of metaphor. Grafting, grapes, palms, and clear-cut forests—these gardening realities remind reader and author of larger truths. Miller tends to a bush or tree as he ponders ideas of beauty, brokenness, and belonging. A picture emerges of everyday objects, gardening habits, and living plants serving as talismans for a rich web of philosophical and spiritual realities.
Yet Miller’s work is not reductive; he does not “use” the garden to glean personal insights. Rather, he casts light on the deep interrelatedness of things. While some chapters do feel a bit rushed in making these connections fulsome (a chapter on “Christ the King Sunday” touches on ecosystems and hierarchy but does not plunge as deeply into specific gardening habits), each essay nevertheless shares glimpses of a new perception of the garden and of God. The separation between the two, Miller repeatedly hints to readers, is paper-thin.
Earthly and earthy as gardening is, gardens have been a part of God’s work and Gospel for a very long time. From the Garden of Eden to Gethsemane to the empty tomb with its resurrected Savior (who was mistaken for a Gardener), each garden beckons to soul as well as body. In a more personal sense, by uniting gardening to the liturgical calendar, we see a pattern in time that does not trap us but rather releases us from the woes of temporospatial absurdity. Gardening thus invites us into rhythms of embodied care that circumvent the solipsism and distraction of the age.
In the book’s final portions, the year grows cold as it proceeds from Ordinary Time to Christmas and Epiphany, and the reader cannot help but wonder: Will Miller’s efforts at inhabiting systolic time find success? Does the volume end with the delight Matt expresses at its beginning? Can we defeat acedia?
The answer, of course, is yes and no. Miller himself expresses some ambivalence over his successes by the end: “I began these essays hoping for a renewal of life and gardening,” he writes,
practicing my Lenten disciplines in confident expectation. As my gardening year draws to an end … I cannot say I have found the healing that I sought. Tending one’s own garden, whether metaphorically or literally, only gets one so far. Even the work I hoped to do in these essays has been called into question for me by the chaos of American culture today. Culture-building and long-term work like perennial gardening, writing works of literature, and creating a habitation in place can seem futile in a climate of suspicion and fear, callous indifference and preening judgment.
In the movements Miller takes from Lent toward Advent, from the brokenness of Covid toward the hope of a new year, one senses acedia rear its head occasionally. This, more than anything, seems to feed his sense of disappointment as the year draws to its close. It is a disappointment, the reader senses, not just in the trials of the garden—but in the bleak injustice and brokenness of the world itself, as it beats along in its metronomic rhythms. How to find contentment in the garden when the larger world proceeds apace in its chaos and cruelty?
These are hard questions to answer. “Gardening and liturgy are the answer” seems trite in response to the chaos, uncertainty, and evil of our world. Yet in Leaves of Healing—its vision of a humble garden well-loved, and its attendant determination to attend to the eternal and the quotidian—we also see those glimpses of hope and thanksgiving that promise health in both this life and the next.
A couple of times, Miller disagrees with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous claim that “beauty will save the world.” Beauty, at least in our everyday conceptions of it, is not enough to save the world, he explains. I wonder, however, as I conclude Leaves of Beauty: Perhaps this pull to garden in a broken world is the ultimate argument for beauty’s power over our hearts, bodies, and minds. In Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy offers this concluding poem to the jailed (and soon to be executed) philosopher:
“Father of earth and sky, You steer the world
By reason everlasting. You bid time
Progress from all eternity. Yourself
Unshifting, You impel all things to move.
No cause outside Yourself made you give shape
To fluid matter, for in You was set
The form of the ungrudging highest good.
From heavenly patterns You derive all things.
Yourself most beautiful, You likewise bear
In mind a world of beauty, and You shape
Our world in like appearance. You command
Its perfect parts, to form a perfect world.”
Boethius hints here at a systolic beauty that, as it draws our eyes to the Divine, Himself “most beautiful,” heals and restores all that is broken. In glimpsing Him, the Perfect Gardener, we too glimpse this “world of beauty” that lies beyond all brokenness, beckoning us out of despair.
Perhaps when we take up this first work of Adam and Eve, this ancient identity-shaping vocation, we are tapping into a little bit of Eden time, an Edenic vision of beauty. Though we may not always feel it, the garden beckons to its workers, assuring them “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
As Miller has noted in interviews, the end of this book marks a move away from the garden that formed its crux of self-discipline and attention. His family moves from their rural home to be closer to community, work, and church. One might expect sorrow in such a parting, but Miller himself expresses hope—for in this move, he writes, he must leave “my garden now with empty hands, offering it and all it contains as glory and honor and power to the one in whose ceaseless attention I will work out all my days.” This is where we find joy: in the gift and givenness, the offering up with empty hands. Acedia loses its power in the trust that, while our own intentions and efforts are forever flawed, there is One who attends perfectly. He alone knows all our needs.