Silence, Secret Easter Garden
Langley in the Secret Garden at former College of Preachers
“What will your secret garden look like? The point is to begin slowing your life and focusing 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, Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence (Harper Perennial, 2009).
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 the story of an unloved ten-year-old English girl who, after her parents die, is sent to live with her grieving uncle in his remote country home on the bleak moors of Yorkshire. Her unhappiness, aloneness, and the heartache and isolation of those around her heal when she begins caring for and restoring a secret garden on the manor house grounds.
I watched the 1993 British film starring Maggie Smith with my daughter and granddaughters, and later saw the play with a granddaughter. This story resonates with the child within us, the creative part of us—the side we so quickly abandon for more pressing matters, which is a significant connection to the divine within us.
The Secret Garden also shows how nature’s sounds, smells, and sights can quiet 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 to gently reconnect with the God within ourselves and the divine in each other. It is a safe place where the Spirit’s presence is more easily felt, as Psalm 32:7 says: “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 within spiritual direction.
So many friends planted new gardens during the pandemic. Nurseries and garden centers were thriving. As we continue to plant and watch them grow, let us also contemplate our own secret garden, where a very holy part of us lives and grows.
Anne Gornatti’s Secret Garden
Joanna. Joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/