Silence, Secret Easter Garden
“What will your secret garden look like? The point is to begin to slow down your life and focus your attention. Listen, and in the quiet, you will hear the direction of your heart. The garden of silence is always there for us. Patiently waiting.” —Anne D. LeClaire in Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence (Harper Perennial, 2009).
Langley in the secret garden at College of Preachers National Cathedral
One of my favorite young adult novels is The Secret Garden, by the American-English author Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett, who also wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. The Secret Garden tells of an unloved ten-year-old English girl sent to live with her grieving uncle in his remote country home on the bleak moors of Yorkshire after her parents die. Her unhappiness and aloneness, and the heartache and isolation of those around her, heal when she begins to care for and restore a secret garden on the manor house grounds.
I watched the 1993 British film starring Maggie Smith with my daughter and granddaughter, and later saw the play with my granddaughter. This story resonates with the child within us, the creative part of us—the side we so quickly abandon for more important things, which is a significant connection to the divine within us.
The Secret Garden is another telling of how the sounds, smells, and sights in nature can silence and calm the grownup “wounded committee” in our heads—and heal and transform our inner child. We all should have a secret garden, a place where we can gently reconnect with the God within ourselves and the divine in each other. It represents a safe place where the presence of the Spirit is more easily felt, as described in Psalm 32:7: “You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.”
Talking about our secret garden, our hiding place—often a place of silence—can be an opening to the divine in spiritual direction.
I heard from so many friends during this pandemic about their new gardens. Nurseries and garden centers are thriving. So, as we continue to plant, let us also contemplate our secret garden, where a holy part of us lives.
Joanna. Joannaseibert.com