My family lives WAY back in the woods, surrounded by 10 acres of swampland/forest, so the fact that we have a little Marian grotto by the house also means that the little Marian grotto is stormed by armies of bloodsucking mosquitoes in the humid summertime. Today, as I was doing some light weeding out there, I thought about the significance of weeding in a grotto in the woods, and what an apt analogy it is to our relationship with God!
I pulled up the leafy beginnings of a dandelion today whose root went far below the surface of the stones in the grotto. When I pulled up the rest of the root, it was HUGE compared to the leaves above it. The roots went deep, just like our sins. We can tear off the dandelion stalk, or the leaves, or pick off everything above ground, but unless we take the time to rip out the root, the dandelion will continue to flower, the weed will continue to grow until it pops up again!
This is not to say that ripping out roots is easy. Not only do we have to work to pull up the entire root from our unfortunate position in being unable to see underground how far the root goes, but we also have to put up with outside influence. One word: mosquitoes. The influence of evil in this world is not often talked about among popular media, but it's there. It's in our heads, infecting our peace and our relationship with God like a terribly contagious plague. There is a barrage of doubt, of anxiety, of despair and frustration that interfere with our ability to pull up the roots of our sinfulness, to discover where our primary weaknesses originate in our relationship with God.
And the funny thing about mosquitoes is that they love sweetness more than bitterness. Try carrying a bunch of fragrant flowers into the middle of the woods on a humid day, or wearing perfume. You know what I mean. You'll get eaten alive because you smell sweet, because the things you carry are beautifully fragrant! The mosquitoes have no need to bother with sucking out the lifeblood of those who do not smell sweet, because they are of no use to the mosquitoes. They want SWEET blood.
The same thing happens in our lives - as we get closer and closer to God, going to work in the garden to weed more and more, the mosquitoes come out. Every time. And the more fragrant the flowers we present to Christ as offerings, the more the mosquitoes are attracted to us. Demonic attacks are real, regardless of what anyone may say. That time you got extremely angry and violent and afterward had absolutely no idea why you were so upset. That time you fell into a deep despair over something trivial. That time you ripped yourself (or someone else) apart for making a small mistake. That time you wanted to do something but were deathly afraid that "people would talk." All those sentiments are not God's sentiments, so they have to have another source, and that source has to be Satan.
The mosquitoes are something that we can plan for. We can wear mosquito repellent. We can wear long sleeves to keep them from biting us. We can wear gloves - but then it gets harder to weed effectively. But we can't ever get rid of them. They are a simple fact of the garden, like weeds or bugs - they exist. What we can do is remember that they are small, they are trivial, and they only leave a bite that goes away in a few weeks with proper care. Our real work is in Our Father's Garden, and nothing can keep us away from that!!!
We must keep bringing the sweet-smelling flowers of our good deeds and sacrifices to Our Lord as offerings, regardless of how attractive they are to the demons present in our lives. Satan is going to try to screw things up always in the lives of ordinary, holy people, because misery loves company. The end. But, think: if we stay in the garden doing work through the mosquitoes, imagine how Our Heavenly Father will be pleased with us!! Not only can we offer Him the gifts of our merits and good deeds, but we can also show Him the marks on our bodies where we itch from mosquito bites, and we have a little physical reminder of the wounds of the Cross (granted they are nowhere near the suffering of the Cross, but everything is analogous, right?)!! We have little, humble battle scars to show God, and not only can we ask Him to heal them for us, but we can also ask Him to redeem us and others by them. Because just as Jesus came to teach us how to love by loving us first, God taught us how to suffer redemptively by suffering first. (Reference: Adam and Eve, original sin, Garden of Eden, the FIRST Biblical garden!).
It can be frustrating to take care of a garden, especially when certain flowers only bloom for brief periods, or when flowers die, or when the fast-growing, numerous dandelions seem much more appealing and easier to take care of than waiting for beautiful rare flowers to bloom. But if we remove the choking weeds from the presence of the rare flower bulbs, and we care for the tender shoots of virtue in our souls, what a beautiful garden we will have in our hearts!!! Simple and divinely perfect roses, sweet-smelling gardenia, exotic jasmine, humble daisies, little wildflowers, even!!! What a beautiful bouquet of life to present to Our Lord!!
This entire experience reminds me very much of the movie "The Secret Garden," in which a spoiled orphan named Mary (LOVE that name!!!), her sick, spoiled cousin Colin, and a boy who talks to the animals on the Moors named Dicken discover a secret garden, and bring life back to it (and, in the process, they bring life back to the heart of Colin's father, who fell into a deep depression after the death of his wife). They think the garden to contain a special magic, and the entire premise of the movie is that as the garden developed and grew into something beautiful, so did the children. The spoiled children became loving. That "magic" was in fact love - Christ's love. The garden died every year for many years before it was brought back to life by these three little children haphazardly sowing flower seeds in the ground they had tilled, on the land they had worked on. And then it opened up to them in the springtime like the piercing of Our Lord's heart on the Cross - an outpouring of love in Christ's creation!
May our hearts and souls forever seek to imitate the beautiful garden in the heart and soul of Mary, Our Mother, whom Jesus spent nine months perfecting and filling with the choicest gifts and flowers! May we open the locked gates to the gardens in our hearts and souls and begin to work at weeding them, however small the efforts, so that we can allow beauty, goodness and virtue to grow within them!!! May these flowers not be choked by the weeds of our sins, but rather may God help us to seek out the roots of these weeds and throw them over the stone garden wall, where they will get burned up in the furnace of His divine love surrounding our hearts and souls!! May we forever ask God's help in prayer, seeking growth and guidance in these gardens such that we can present Him with a humble but beautiful bouquet of flowers at the end of our lives!!! And may our Mother Mary be the rich soil which nurtures and cares for the delicate roots of our virtues, may she always provide the life-giving water and nutrients necessary to these flowers that they might not just survive but flourish under the warm sun of God's love!!!
Fides, Spes, et Caritas Christi per Mariam,
Christina :)
We're all so fascinated by clay! It can be molded to form whatever shape you want! You can spell with it, you can make bowls out of it! You can paint it! You can mush it about in your hands, you can knead it, you can roll it, you can flatten it!! It's so pliable, and it seems as though the simple act of holding it in your hand opens up so many possibilities for what you can make!!!
