It began for us in a garden, the Garden of Eden. But it was there, through our first parents, that we fell. Try as we might, we cannot go back to that idyll. Still, when the news turns to noise, when the pundits become ponderous, I head for my wife’s (mostly) vegetable garden.

She’s deployed a half dozen grow boxes and planted some trees. With her admirable efforts and careful reading of seed catalogues, she’s had notable results. We’ve had a full range of flora, from artichokes and blueberries to yams and zucchinis. Plus, tomatoes in January. The fauna has included songbirds and hummingbirds, and too many crows. Add mice, possums, racoons, and coyotes—along with scampering squirrels (really rats with good PR). Not half bad biodiversity for hyper urbanized Los Angeles.

A prudent division of labor assigned me the job of weeding, undertaken only after duly stretching to avoid unnecessary strains. Reflecting on my commission, I recall that John Locke, in his Essay on Human Understanding (1690), wrote that “it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish which lies in the way to knowledge.” Then philosophy could finally get reality right.

Sadly, Locke’s weeding distorted the concepts of substance and person. Later, in his political work, he would in effect jettison natural law in favor of a social contract. My own weeding, while not so calamitous, has occasioned deep concerns on my wife’s part, concerns about faulty vision and, more broadly, misdirected zeal.

My front yard weeding, open to the public, draws the special attention of dog walkers tending to their own awkward task. I tell them that by tomorrow the grounds will be “perfect,” since there are only 37 more weeds to pull. If they keep a straight face, I tell them that there are actually 237 weeds left. (Full disclosure: a Google Map of the yard shows lots more.)

To motivate all that weeding, I recall Peter Maurin’s urging early Catholic Workers to embrace “Cult, Culture, and Cultivation.” His point was that the Catholic faith gives rise to a rich culture and that if a culture is to endure it would always nurture the land. He was right on all three points. Right, and largely ignored.

Our own mismanagement of the land and the forests is destructive. Production increases while family farms disappear. Decades after Peter Maurin penned his “easy essays,” the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, a personalist and communitarian at heart, issued his Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front (1973). He charged us to

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Now, more than 50 years later, little has changed. Surely, we need to ask more and better questions than ever and, with the Church, explore ways to come closer to their answers.

First writing as a young seminarian, Angelo Roncalli—Pope St. John XXIII—in his Journal of a Soul (1964), came to see the Church herself as a “garden.” She is the garden which we are to cultivate for the good of all. With all his gentle, and fearless, persistence John XXIII led the way. Even as he did so, commentators called attention to the “garden of the soul” spirituality of the pontiff whose boldness his conclave electors had underestimated. Soon enough, people everywhere would speak of him simply as “the Good Pope.”

But no matter the sanctity of popes and the reforms they initiate, no matter the resolve of saints, the Garden of the Church has its share of cutting thistles and scarring thorns. Historians tell us that such has always been the case. The deadly combat of good and evil seems to be increasingly fierce. So how are we to endure?

The Church answers this question with her unflagging insistence that Christ’s amazing grace has transformed Eden’s Fall into a paradoxically happy fault, yes, the felix culpa. In the Easter Proclamation, the Exsultet, we hear the words:

O wonder of your humble care for us!
O love, O charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault that earned so great,
so glorious a Redeemer!

Let us listen, indeed, and take heart. And, gentle reader, why not try a bit of gardening?