Planting Gardens In Prisons

I heard a quote in church yesterday, and it moved me. It is taken from the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, in which he described his long incarceration on an island prison.

I've never spent time in a real prison, but I am certainly a prisoner to certain formative themes in my life. I suppose we all are. I have escaped (or been freed from?) some of these prisons. Others seem very much to be a part of my present reality. This blog post is not the forum to delve into the details of these metaphorical prisons, but suffice it to say that I have had particular reason in recent weeks to reflect on the nature of them and my limited hopes for a full escape. Enter this story...

Nelson Mandela, leader of the anti-apartheid movement spent nearly 30 years in prison in South Africa. He would go on to lead his nation toward a better future after his eventual release, but that hope was not on his horizion while he rotted away in prison. Year in. Year out.

So what did he do while he languished in prison? Among other things, he planted a garden. Here are the words that touched my heart this morning:

“The Bible tells us that gardens preceded gardeners, but that was not the case at Pollsmoor, where I cultivated a garden that became one of my happiest diversions. It was my way of escaping from the monolithic concrete world that surrounded us. Within a few weeks of surveying all the empty space we had on the building’s roof and how it was bathed the whole day, I decided to start a garden and received permission to do so from the commanding officer.
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A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.”

I am not the first to have been captivated by what Nelson shared. I see this quote all over the internet, but for me it is fresh and new.

We are all captives to various forms of bondage, and most of those chains are buried in our souls. That being the case, these words challenged me to reflect again upon a simple question. "What, Pilgrim, do you want to plant in your prison garden?" One might reasonably exclaim, "Why plant gardens when you can escape?" I'd reply just as quickly, "Why seek grace and forgiveness when you can just as easily live a perfect life that doesn't require them?"

Yes, ideals are wonderful, but we live in the world of the broken. So what will we do within the confines of the walls we don't know how to scale? What Mandela did in his bricks-and-mortar prison is what we ought to do our figurative prisons. Plant a garden.

In planting a garden, we nurture life. We foster growth. We encourage all that is good, from a plant's perspective. Of course, plants don't have a great deal of perspective when compared to humans, but plants do want to grow, and when we garden, we enable them to do so. That's a good thing.

The fact that I found this quote from Nelson Mandela moving ought to be quite amusing to those who know me. Gardening is not on my short list of favorite activities. Or my longer list. But the thought of gardening as a metaphor captures my heart today. I want to encourage life. To foster growth.

I found this picture of the island where Nelson spent decades of his life. I don't know if Nelson had a view like this from his prison cell, but I suppose he had some view from time to time of the water and, on the other side, Cape Town. I share this image here because in it I found myself reflecting on what it would take to swim the distance.

Perhaps it's too far a swim, but my thoughts had little to do with the physical realities of Robben Island. I was thinking in metaphors. Before I share where my mind was going, however, let's first return to something else Mandela shared regarding his garden.

“Each morning, I put on a straw hat and rough gloves and worked in the garden for two hours. Every Sunday, I would supply vegetables to the kitchen so that they could cook a special meal for the common-law prisoners. I also gave quite a lot of my harvest to the warders, who used to bring satchels to take away their fresh vegetables.”

Nelson could not escape that island. But some of his vegetables clearly did, and the rest of them served to nurture and strengthen the bodies of other prisoners. Though I didn't hear this portion of the quote from the pulpit, it (on both counts) points where my mind was already going as I sat in that church service.

In my mind's eye, I found myself imagining a person raised on that island from birth. A lifelong prisoner who during key periods of childhood lacked the nutrition necessary to develop a full, strong frame. This stunted person has no hope of swimming to distant shores by his own strength. But what if there are others on the island? Little ones who can yet attain full strength tomorrow if only they are well fed today. My heart leaped to the eager conclusion. A garden for others can be a very beautiful thing, indeed. Even in a prison.

Some prisons are of our own design. Some forced upon us by others. Some perhaps decreed for us by the mouth of God for reasons we'll never understand fully here on Earth. But I am certain of two things. First, we all experience them, and second, it is the character of God at work in us to desire that we all be freed from them.

By God's grace we may ourselves escape some prisons. Perhaps not others. But there will always be gardens that we can plant. Souls we can nurture. We can express something of the nature of God by fostering life. Even in a prison. By God's sovereignty we can perhaps help others to walk upon those shores that we ourselves are destined only to see. Writing these words reminds me of a passage from scripture:

Deuteronomy 34:1-5
Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land—from Gilead to Dan, all of Naphtali, the territory of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Mediterranean Sea, the Negev and the whole region from the Valley of Jericho, the City of Palms, as far as Zoar. Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said.