I also do carrots and tomatoes if asked, but I seem to have developed a special affinity for corn. The folks in St. Mary’s tell me they enjoy watching me weed in the mornings while they have a cup of coffee and do their private devotions. They also seem to enjoy eating the corn when it is harvested in August or early September.

I’ve enjoyed gardening ever since I was a kid in Maryland. When I was quite young, my grandfather was still keeping up a respectable size vegetable garden in our back yard, and I would be drafted into helping, along with the rest of the family. I would also put considerable time into caring for the summer flowers in our various plots bordering the lawn.

Our widow neighbor, Mrs. Amanda Holland, also kept up quite a flower garden. We would visit together as we worked adjoining flower plots. I would tell her that there seemed to be no end to garden work in the summer. To which she would reply with a twinkle in her eyes, "Well, Dave, you know what they say: no rest for the wicked!"

At the time I believed this was a Methodist proverb of some kind, as I had never heard any Catholic repeat it. However, she may have invented it for me personally, as she was the sort of elderly lady not above teasing a defenseless teenager watering marigolds.

Gardening brings a certain sanity to life, not to mention beauty to the landscape and food for the root cellar over winter. Through thirty plus years in MH, I’ve put in quite a few hours in our gardens, and so there are stories to tell, especially about people visiting us who have yet to develop a profound appreciation of the art.

There was, for example, the young lady from Alabama, who having gotten a bit bored with the tedious job of weeding carrots by hand, commenced doing cartwheels around the edge of the garden, exclaiming as she wheeled by, in a delicious Southern American accent: "I just don’t understand how you folks can weed so fast!"

Then there was my Palestinian friend from Israel, a genius in mathematics, who was helping me one day to pick string beans by hand. The beans were abundant that year, but the help wasn’t, so it was taking some time to make one’s slow way down the long rows.

The endlessness of the task probably reminded him of certain formulas that attempt to deal with the concept of infinity.

Finally, my friend stood up, looked up to the heavens, and cried out in a loud voice: "Jesus! Where are you?" He repeated this several times, so it seemed only prudent to stop for a little break and a cup of water!

Praying and gardening go well together, depending on what you mean by "praying while gardening." Once I was in charge of a crew that was, you guessed it, weeding carrots.

You may not realize it, but the next time you eat a carrot, you will be eating a beautiful, orange, vitamin-A rich vegetable that started as an almost microscopic seedling, with two frail little leaves held up by a thin little stem.

Growing them organically means a lot of thinning and a lot of very careful, attentive weeding, so as to not mistake them for newly sprouted lamb’s quarters or pig weed. My crew of fervent young Catholics wanted to know if they could pray the rosary while weeding.

I discouraged them, however, as I had noticed that, as pious devotions or heated theological discussions increase in a garden, attentiveness to distinctions between weed and vegetable decreases.

So I tried to tell them about prayer of the heart, the value of silence, and attentiveness to work as a form of sacrificial offering united with Christ’s offering for the Church and the world. "Oh," they said. "Okay. What time is the tea break?"

It’s funny how gardening pulls you into quite a rich and mysterious world. It includes sweat, labor, silence, biting insects, prayer, beauty, satisfaction in work, and an understanding of Christ that is its special gift.

Out in a garden, you remember the words of Genesis about man’s first days in a garden, and all the drama that entailed. You may also recall his being expelled from that garden, and having to work the soil by the sweat of his brow, even as it yielded thorns and thistles.

And you remember that one night, Christ entered a garden called Gethsemane to pray there, and to sweat there.

In Madonna House we are never far from that garden that Christ made holy by his suffering prayer. Maybe this is because our vocation includes the following reality: "Take up my cross (their cross) and follow me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me." (This line is taken from our Little Mandate, a concise summary of Madonna House spirituality).

Certainly the suffering of the world finds its way to our doorsteps in many forms, and certainly it exists among us as well. It is a reality about our vocation that began with Catherine Doherty and continues with us, her spiritual children.

Have you ever wondered why Christ chose a garden to pray in, the night he was arrested? I suppose various reasons could be proposed, but the one I hold onto is that he was teaching us even then something about suffering with him in this life.

That night, so say the theologians and saints, the horror of our sin overwhelmed him, and the weight of it crushed him.

Yet a garden is ever a place of promise and hope. No matter how hard the day, or how tenuous the harvest may appear, at some point that garden, lovingly tended, will produce beauty, will yield fruit.

So with the suffering of the Christian united to Jesus: no matter how dark, how endless it seems to be, the day of joyful harvest will come, and beauty will shine forth in splendor. We have the Lord’s appearance to Mary Magdalene, apparently dressed as a gardener, as a tender sign of that very hope.

Working in a garden means many things, but above all, it is a commitment to hope, for it is in the very nature of planting seeds to believe that the effort will one day be rewarded.

Meeting Christ in the garden takes you further yet. There, he teaches you that there is no suffering that he has not endured, so as to transform it into a passage to life and beauty, to Resurrection.

Even the Cross itself is a tree planted in a garden, yielding great fruit. If we eat of this fruit, which is union with Jesus, we find joy even in the offering, and not only in the harvest. Maybe there is rest for "the wicked" after all!