A Message from the Dean, The Very Rev. Stephen Williams

A Message from The Very Rev. Stephen Williams, Dean of St Peters Anglican Cathedral, Armidale

What lies behind the enjoyment and satisfaction of a garden? The proliferation of gardening shows on television would indicate many Australians are profoundly drawn to this enjoyment and are prepared to spend large sums of money to procure it.

When I was a student I spent a number of months working on a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley of northern Israel. A Jewish school friend and his wife were members of this communal farm. While I was packed off (before sunrise) to help harvest pecan nuts, my friend announced he was going to the ‘pardez’. On inquiring further, I was told he was harvesting grapefruit in a secure and guarded orchard – the ‘pardez’. The word is not Hebrew but Persian in origin, and from it we get our word ‘paradise’.

This brings us to the Bible whose story begins in paradise: “the Lord God planted a garden in the east, in Eden”. In it were all kinds of trees and, in a touch that ought to satisfy gardeners, the trees “were pleasing to the eye and good for food”. That garden was many things: a place to sustain life, a happy conjunction of order and fecundity, the scene of fulfilling labour and a place where all things, both environmental and personal, were rightly related. Particularly this meant enjoying unhindered fellowship with God who, in the language of Genesis, “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”.

I suspect most gardeners can identify with this in some way. If so, the Bible would encourage us to see it as speaking of the future as much as the past. For the Bible not only begins but ends with a garden in paradise – one where there will be a tree for “the healing of the nations”.

We might dismiss this as a beautiful, imaginative, but merely poetic story, were it not for another garden which lies at the heart of the Bible story. In this garden lies an empty tomb close by a place of execution. It is the link between paradise lost and paradise regained. It is the place where all that we know and love about gardens is given a concrete and eternal reality.

I expect this Garden Weekend to be a happy time of enjoyment for us. May it also be an opportunity to go deeper, to praise the Creator and embrace the life he offers us.

Stephen Williams