‘My beloved has gone down to his garden,/to the bed of spices,/to pasture his flock in the gardens,/and to gather lilies./I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.’ Song of Songs, 6: 2-3.
The garden of the heart
Some spiritual writers compare the heart to an altar at which the sacrifice of prayer is laid and at which the prayer of the Church is celebrated both ‘in secret’ and during the liturgy. In either case, prayer is always, as the Catechism teaches, ‘communion with the Holy Trinity’ (CCC 2655). But the heart can also be compared to a garden in which the Lord dwells, and to which he is invited by and during prayer. The heart, says the Catechism, is our ‘hidden centre, beyond the grasp of reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully…It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death’ (CCC 2563).
‘To pray’ says Henri Nouwen in his anthology Seeds of Hope, ‘ is to live’ and again, that prayer ‘is in many ways the criterion of the Christian life’. It is ‘the life of the new heart,’ reborn in the life of the Risen Christ which partakes of his Sacred Heart in drawing us further into the love of the Holy Trinity (See CCC 2697). It is where God comes with the tenderness of his mercy and the beauty of his forgiveness even amidst our pain and sorrow. It is where he longs to walk, as if with Adam again in the fresh fields of the Garden into which he placed all the splendour of the earth and the loveliness of Eve.
The mystery of love
‘How gently and lovingly/You awaken in my heart,/Where you dwell secretly and alone’ says Saint John of the Cross in his Living Flame of Love. If the heart is a garden, it is so often a secret garden into which only God can go, and into which we invite so few in our lives. It is a place of great vulnerability and nakedness which we reveal only in trust to those that we know will not trample its flowers and burn its bushes and trees with the fire of their indifference or hatred, who will recognise that to open our hearts to another can be both costly and healing.
But the beauty of a garden is that it can also invite recollection and reflection and can be a place in which what is planted in love, grows to maturity in fruitfulness. In such a place, again says Saint John of the Cross in the Living Flame, ‘in your sweet breathing/Filled with blessing and glory/You tenderly inspire me with your love’. For without love, a heart cannot grow, nor a garden without the tender care of a Gardener. In the Song of Songs which has always been read as celebrating symbolically the great mystery of love, and in particular the union of God and the soul, it is to a garden that the Bride is compared, and to a garden that the bridegroom goes in search of his Bride and the fulness of joy in her possession (see Blaise Arminjon’s The Cantata of Love).
In the Song, the words ‘enclosed’ and ‘sealed’ are repeated (vs 4:12) to emphasise the exclusive and intimate love between the Bride and Bridegroom, between God and man. The image of the closed end enclosed garden, or hortus conclusus, is an image of seclusion and privacy, but also of undisturbed completeness through which the Bride and Bridegroom can unite. The garden, throughout Scripture, is an image of life and here it suggests that the exclusive love between God and man - but also between spouses - is the source of true life and joy, a place where the fountain of God’s love flows into and through the heart ‘like a spring of water whose waters never run dry’ (Is 58:11).
The prayer of the heart
Prayer, as Henri Nouwen also reminds us, is a discipline and if the heart is a garden, it is not without the need for careful gardening to remove those weeds and tendrils, those beds of creeping dock leaf and knotweed that trespass upon the Lord’s work. The struggle to pray is all too real; we face distraction, periods of dryness, lack of faith and sheer laziness in maintaining a life of prayer. But here the Church is wise in giving us such help as the liturgy, that great prayer of the whole Church, the Divine Office and many other aids to prayer that keep us within the pastures of the Church. But it is in the secret garden of the heart, that place in which we are recollected before the Lord, that true prayer is born, taken in from whatever outward form it began with to become the means by which God renews us in hope and in love of Jesus Christ and his Church. Prayer, says Nouwen,
‘is the way to both the heart of God and the heart of the world - precisely because they have been joined by the suffering of Jesus Christ…Praying is letting one’s own heart become the place where the tears of God and the tears of God’s children can merge and become tears of hope.’ (Seeds of Hope)
The heart of Mary
There is an ancient tradition that identifies Mary the Mother of God and Ever-Virgin with the ‘enclosed garden’ in the Song of Songs. She is pictured in medieval and renaissance art as seated in a walled and enclosed garden adorned with fragrant flowers or roses such as those in Martin Schongauer’s Madonna of the Rose Bower (1473). In Schongauer’s painting in the Church of St Martin in Colmar, France, Mary is surrounded by angels and sits beneath a bower of exquisite red roses climbing upon a rigid trellis at her back. Her long hair is draped over her rich red gown as she holds the Christ Child tenderly in her arms. Her face expresses a great love and humility as she looks peacefully down to her right. Above her two further angels hold aloft a jewelled crown, as if awaiting to crown her Queen of Heaven.
It is as if the painter Schongauer wished to remind us that in the garden of the heart, Mary awaits us to bring us before the Lord as the one under whose gaze he grew from before birth to death on a cross. In the garden of the heart, Mary invites us to put our whole lives into his hands and to follow her in imitation of her Son. Through Mary, teaches the Catechism, ‘the Holy Spirit begins to bring men, the objects of God’s merciful love, into communion with Christ’ (CCC 725). As we enter the secret garden of our hearts in prayer, we will find that Mary is there beside us, bedecked in roses, Virgin of virgins, ready to kneel beside us in adoration of the Lord.
See Martin Schonguaer’s Madonna of the Rose Bower and watch Dr Steven Sucker and Dr Beth Harris’s video about it here.