Growing up in Calexico, my family attended the local Methodist Church. It was quite progressive, as Methodist churches go. They did fairly contemporary worship music with <gasp> a drum kit and guitar, and did bilingual services. However, at least once a service, they got down to their roots with some good ol' fashioned hymns.
And now, please stand and open your hymnals to page 356. We will be singing verses 1,3 and 5.
Then Mary Brubaker would strike the opening chords on the organ and everyone would sing together. For my older brother and I, it was the epitome of boredom. We usually amused ourselves by singing different verses, singing the words out of order, or changing them entirely.
On Christ the solid Rock I stand/All other ground is stinking sand...all other ground is STINK-ING sand!
If my mother gave us one of her looks, we would tone it down and sing harmony, instead.
Despite my best efforts to ruin the experience, those hymns have had a tremendous impact throughout my life. Not only did they form the basis for developing an ear for harmony, they have consistently reverberated in my memory during some of my most trying times.
So it has been no surprise that over the past year, I have heard the strains of those childhood services on a regular basis. By far, the one I have thought of the most is "I Come To The Garden Alone". No leaps of imagination needed to understand why. In the early days of my garden, I spent a great deal of time in it alone, whether I was working on it, or escaping to it. I was working on salvaging a marriage, searching for a relationship with God...but I felt completely alone. My family, though I knew they loved me, was doing a piss poor job of reaching out to me. What friends I had left were either unable to say anything to help me, or were not being given an opportunity to try, due to my self-imposed exile.
It would be fair to say that I was not getting past the first line of Verse 1.
I come to the garden alone...
As my relationship with Sharon progressed, the garden became more and more a place we shared. She threw me a private wine and cheese birthday party. She would go to the nursery to look at plants. She even spent the odd morning here and there weeding.
When a family emergency called, and she left the country, I decided I would put a plant in there for her. After much deliberation, I picked a Don Juan rosebush, a climbing rose with beautiful deep red blooms and an aroma that evoked Shakespeare: call it what you want, it smells damn good. I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea. It was beautiful, it was romantic...
...and it opened up that old hymn to me in a way I would never have expected.
When my brother Ben and I sang the hymn, we always focused on the chorus. Not because of the words. No, no...we loved that chorus because it gave us the opportunity to sway back and forth and act like sailors raising their mugs and singing a raucous drinking song.
A-N-D H-E...WALKS with me and He TALKS with me...
Whatever. I'm not proud, but it was pretty funny to us, and it made that hymn one of our favorites, one of the only ones we sang correctly...and one of the ones for which I remember the words most clearly.
So it was, that on one of the first mornings after I planted that Don Juan, I found myself drinking an early morning coffee, completely enraptured by the beauty of dew drops on rose petals. In the silence of the cool morning air, I heard Mary play the opening chords and I heard a song I can honestly say I'd never truly heard before.
I come to the garden alone/while the dew is still on the roses/and the voice I hear falling on my ear/the Son of God discloses
And He walks with me, and He talks with me/And He tells me I am His own/And the joy we share as we tarry there/None other has ever known
This was no silly pseudo-drinking song. This was a love song. This was a song about how God Himself was choosing to let me know I belonged to Him, even if I didn't feel I belonged to anyone else. This was a painfully intimate poem detailing the fact that God had made all this for ME...that no one else on the planet would ever experience this exact same overpoweringly humbling moment of pure and unadulterated joy. This was as close to heaven as I was probably going to get.
It has been almost a year, and the roses have been blooming again for a couple months. Sharon and I have our coffee by the rosebush almost every morning, together. But, once in a while I go out there alone and stand really close, breathing in deeply, realizing how far I've come and how GOOD God is to me...which brings to mind another hymn:
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.
Sometimes things are not working as forecasted, thats life....
regards,
Elli
Posted by: Elli.S | 12/18/2011 at 12:22 AM