Vicarage Notes: Of wild gardens and 40th birthdays

Why I plan to celebrate mine in great, holy style...

Wash Day on the Maine Coast, N. C. Wyeth, 1934

‘For the people whose religious texts we have been examining, time was at the heart of Christianity… Time was viewed as the background to an unfolding programme running from the moment of the creation the Alpha, to the moment of the final consummation, the Omega, and the Christian’s task was to know that Christ as saviour was the key to this programme, and then to fall into place with it so that the time-pattern of his or her own life was nowhere out of harmony with the divine metronome.’

-Celtic Theology by Thomas O'Loughlin

Good souls and friends,

Last week, a kind hobbit of a man and his two assistants showed up in my garden to uproot whole beds of expensive shrubs and bushes. I’m ablaze with joy. Our vicarage comes with a glory of a garden, the sort small children dream about, haunted by birdsong and bluebells, with a queenly willow presiding over the weedy lawn (the weeds being primarily cow parsley, daisies, and primroses). But the garden beds were overseen for about twenty years by a series of bachelors who didn’t want the trouble of fanciful things like flowers, which led to all the borders being filled hardy bushes and shrubs which call for almost no attention. Since moving in, we’ve all craved just a little corner of earth for a garden plot, for a few roses, where we can get our hands earthy and our hearts rooted in the earth.

This week, we’ll finally get our bit of garden.

The timing could not be lovelier, for this month I’ll celebrate my 40th birthday, and the theme I’ve chosen for this rather landmark year is the making of a garden. I want to celebrate this birthday with mindful joy; in the last rollicking decade I have entered the worlds of scholarship, marriage, and motherhood. I’ve moved overseas. Written four books. The decade of my twenties was a kind of yearning, prayerful wander, my thirties were a wild gallop to the place I now stand. I want my forties to be a season of rooting, planting, and tending. I want to plant the sorts of seeds now that will bear a ripe and beautiful harvest in ten years time.

I've thought a lot in the last few years about the way that our experience of time is framed by our celebrations. I've studied this deeply. We really can root ourselves in the larger story of eternity by the feasts we keep and the hours we mark out as sacred. That’s the basic theology behind all the feasts of the church year, behind the biblical law of keeping the Sabbath, and in a lesser way, even in our choice for holidays that give us a widened sight of our lives. In the modern world, shaped by technology, by the online universe that has neither day nor night, embodiment nor limit, we often experience time as an unformed river of successive minutes, as essentially meaningless. But time, this spacious thing of which our lives are formed, is just one more space where the Spirit of God joins with us to call beauty from the void, substance from dissipation, order from chaos. I’ve been reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Sabbath and he talks about the way that taking a Sabbath day creates a cathedral in time, a wide space of prayer and wonder and gratitude that we may inhabit. Celebrations, Sabbaths, feast days, these make the chapels and cathedrals that give substance, sense, and narrative flow to the story we are making of our lives.

So I’m making the rest of this year, 2024, a sort of personal year of jubilee, a garden year of celebration, reflection, and rooting, a year in which to tether myself afresh to the story God is telling as his kingdom comes on earth… in my little corner of the world. I’ll be writing about  some of it here, and I’d love for you to join in now and then. These are the specific things (so far!) projects I’m working toward:

• I’m going to plant a garden. I definitely do not know what I’m doing and want all the advice you can give (though it has to be specific to England!). The soil is rich from yearly flooding, and we're trying for some good, hardy flowers, and a few vegetables and herbs.

• I want to do some work on reflecting on where life has brought me and how I want to shape my future, so I’m going to do the Monk Manual Life Atlas Course. The lovely people there have very kindly gifted me this course so that I can report on it as I go. They’ve offered all my followers a special coupon for any interested in also purchasing the course. You can use ‘sarahwanders40’ to get $150 off the usual price. Please, do visit their website! I love the Monk Manual and regularly use their ‘daily pages’. I want to specifically ponder the past years, the decisions, the grace, the people who have helped me to the place where I stand so that I can choose my future with wisdom and insight. I want to think about my goals, about the shapes of life I want in place in ten years time.

• I’ll be writing notes to a number of people who have specifically influenced and shaped me over the past twenty years.

• I’m going to complete a fictional story and a small body of poetry (which I may, may, publish here in instalments).

• I’m going to Ireland. (‘You’ve always wanted to’, said Thomas, ‘let’s make it our family holiday’. And that’s what we’re doing - leaving next week!)

• I’m throwing myself a garden gala. Probably literary themed. Definitely with lanterns hung in the trees and live Celtic music if I can swing it and tables heaped with good things and glasses full of sparkling drink and laughter and… as many good things as I can manage.

• I’m setting down and exploring the 40 books that have most shaped me. I wish I could re-read them all, but let’s be real, with four children six and under, that’s not going to happen. Instead, I’ll write about them. I'll post those lists here, but I'll explore them in more depth in a series of episodes over at The Book Girl Fellowship. And perhaps compose a list of fifty books I want to read in the next ten years…

• Finally, I’ll be doing a hobbit-style series of giveaways here through my newsletter. Hobbits, as I’m sure you all know, like to give presents on their birthdays as well as receive. And I plan to give away a few of my very favourite things.

The point of all of this is first, to simply celebrate God’s gracious presence in my life. Something I’ve realised in the past couple of years, through some really dark days, is that God has held me even though, in the words of Levertov’s beautiful poem ‘I could not hold’. My imperfect, but dogged faith, has blossomed into a sense of God’s kindness that has nothing to do with my effort and everything to do with the Lover of my soul keeping his promise to do far more in my heart and life ‘than I could ask or think’. Two plus two has not made four in my story, it has made a kindness far beyond my calculation. I want to mark that. I want to celebrate it wildly.

Second, I want my next ten years to be formed by a clear sense of vocation and divine direction. I want to plant this year for a harvest in ten. I don’t want to fall into the next years and stumble into my 50th year all breathless and dishevelled. I’m in a season of demanding, blessed, exhausting fulness with four living souls of children and a vocation to write and life in a vicarage as the wife of a gifted priest. A life like that can’t be sustained without order, without intent. I want to order it well. I want the garden at the end of another decade to be rich in good things that will bring life to my family, to my own soul, to the world.

Finally, I just want to revel. I love life. I love beauty. I think it’s a shocking gift to be alive. But I also think the brokenness of our world dims this knowledge every day. There is so much sorrow. There is so much that is fractured and fragmented and anguished in my own life, and in the larger world. To celebrate, to revel, to give thanks, is my defiant way of proclaiming, yet again (and again and again) that I think Beauty began us, and Beauty invades our suffering, and Beauty makes us whole. This is the story I will tell every day of my life, one we sometimes speak best by sheer joy.

So. I’m off to Ireland next week. I’m going to take those twelve days mostly away from the online world. We’ve found a house to rent deep in the country, with a giant, enclosed garden, and a sunroom and a woodstove and long fields nearby for walking and pubs nearby for music. I’m taking novels and my journal. I’m going to start my birthday celebrations there with spacious rest and family joy. (My actual birthday happens while we’re there.)

And when I return, the wider celebrations will begin… I hope you’ll join me.

Friends, may blackbirds sing you awake in the morning and the rain fall softly on spring flowers, may hush attend your nightfall, and good books your evenings. 

With love,

Sarah

PS - I usually include a section exploring a book, an item of beauty, and a theological quotes. I’ve decided to post this Books/Beauty/Theology section as a separate feature/post, as it works better with the piecemeal nature of my working hours these days. And you might even hear from me a little more often!

PS - This post contains affiliate links that allow me to make a small profit from any purchases made through them- all used towards books for the children, I assure you! 

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.

She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light.

― Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

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