In the sepulcher of Lenten soil, seeds take their tenacious root. The Bible is clear on this point: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” recorded the evangelist, “it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Understood literally, this horticultural fact is self-evident, even to a brown-thumbed gardener like me. But Jesus surely intended for his listeners to dig a little deeper when he elaborated “those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Youch! Would that the metaphor were simply about seeds. But then again, neither are seeds—nor the people of God who sow them—simple.

Around the Diocese of California, we have entered a germinating season. The holidays are long past and most of the bills are even paid, the children have returned to the familiar rhythms of school—and yet the long shadows remind us that we are still many weeks away from the bright Easter season that presages summer. Welcome to Lent, the time for planting seeds.

The gardeners in our midst know that seeds cannot be hurried.  Although there is no benefit to digging them up to check on their progress, neither will there be any growth if we do not trust the generative capacity of the soil that we ourselves are made of. In a personal sense, might that be our invitation to plant something new—habits of prayer, of generosity, of service—in our daily Christian practices?  Programmatically, congregations around the diocese are engaging scripture anew, deepening their relationship to the Millennium Development Goals through Lenten study, while in Godly Play classrooms from Martinez to Mountain View children are listening to the Parable of the Sower and asking “I wonder what the harvest could really be?"

Or maybe Lent is our invitation to do absolutely nothing. Barbara Carlisle, a longtime parishioner at Transfiguration parish in San Mateo, describes how the Quiet Garden Movement—an international network of local opportunities for silence and reflection—influenced her congregation to create a space where it would be possible to do nothing at all. “The memorial garden serves as a place of prayer and reflection with benches located throughout, giving visitors quiet places to simply ‘be’.” Understood in this way, Quiet Gardens need no special landscaping or location. They are simply an acknowledgement of sacredness in time and space, with an invitation to pause and notice it.

When we allow the idea of “garden” with all of its literal and poetic meaning to call us into quiet and contemplation, we might just perceive anew the voice of God whose original act of creation was to call forth plants yielding seeds. And in the process, we prepare the ground within ourselves for the kind of astonishment that long ago greeted two faithful women who, upon encountering the risen Lord, had the perspicacity to ask “are you the gardener?”