Liturgical Gardening: A Liturgy for the Celebration of Creation

Last Saturday we spent a couple of hours as a household out in the garden. It wasn’t the best day for it – though many would say it was pretty typical of Seattle – not too cold, rainy and definitely soggy. The good thing was that the rain had loosened up all the weeds and made them easy to pull. When we had finished we sat around drinking tea and coffee and eating apple cake (made from the fruit of our bumper apple crop this year.) Then we read the liturgy below.

Gardening is an important part of the rhythm of my life but this was the first time I had ever connected it in such a hands on way to the scriptures and the wonderful sense of God’s participation in creation and in our work in the garden. The sense of God’s presence with us as we read the liturgy was astounding for me. It made me realize how disconnected my spiritual practices usually are from my everyday life and how much more intimate my relationship with God can become when I connect my prayers to my daily activities. Something I know I will need to experiment with more in the future.