{"id":10910,"date":"2025-04-16T02:49:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T02:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=10910"},"modified":"2025-04-16T14:32:13","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T14:32:13","slug":"leaves-of-healing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/16\/leaves-of-healing\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaves of Healing"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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In Due Season<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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A tour of a liturgical year in the life of a gardener invites readers to dwell in two sets of seasons as a way of drawing nearer to eternity.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Chris Gregorio<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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As someone who finds time spent outdoors in every season to be a source of deep spiritual nourishment, and as a priest whose life is shaped by the seasons of the Church Year, I was excited to encounter Matt Miller\u2019s Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden.<\/em> The book is a series of essays that form an extended reflection on the church year and gardening. They are rooted in Miller\u2019s own experiences, as a churchgoing permaculture gardener, of inhabiting both spaces over the course of one year. His reflections invite the reader to encounter the beauty and power of the eternal in the repetitive cycles of garden time and church time by dwelling within their respective rhythms, together: \u201cIf our passage through the year is grounded in a time beyond time, then the annual cycles we process through will\u2026 ground us ever more deeply in the peace of eternal things.\u201d<\/p>

Miller excels at showing just as much as telling throughout the book, greatly strengthening this central invitation. His vivid descriptions allow the reader to imagine joining him in the tedium of fruit tree pruning, gazing at the New Fire of Easter, or pondering the Tree of Life. Beyond mere words, however, Miller\u2019s ability to both show and tell is also embedded in the book\u2019s very organization.<\/p>

The essays are ordered chronologically according to the yearly timeline of his temperate Northern Hemisphere garden, starting with spring. From there, however, Miller divides and organizes the year not according to a gardener\u2019s way of keeping time, but according to liturgical time, by the seasons and holy days of the (Western) Church Year. In this way, he begins his year with Ash Wednesday, moving through Epiphany to the cycle\u2019s end. The experience of reading the book mirrors Miller\u2019s movement through and reflections on the rhythms of garden and church, drawing the reader into both cycles.<\/p>

As he reflects on each slice of liturgical time and the period of garden time in which it occurs, some themes naturally emerge: yearnings for a sense of place, rootedness, and community; the mysteries of life, death, Incarnation, and Resurrection; the world\u2019s brokenness and<\/em> the great and blessed hope for its renewal in God; the ascetic cultivation of Christian virtue; structures of justice and injustice, and so much more.<\/p>

But while common themes arise and run through the chapters, this unity does not feel artificial. There is a sense of openness, even playfulness with which Miller follows various associations to see where they lead, letting them direct his reflections. He freely weaves together a wide range of sources and experiences from different times, places, and disciplines\u2014from Faithful Elephants <\/em>to the Book of Common Prayer<\/em>, from a painting in an art museum to images of Miller\u2019s father by the hearth, from timeless buffalo stampedes to the New Heaven and New Earth. In the chapter \u201cPalm Sunday: A Greeting in Leaf-light,\u201d he focuses specifically on the significance of leaves in the Palm Sunday narrative and liturgy, connecting that to the manifold roles of leaves as sites of photosynthesis, as shade, as litter, and in permaculture gardens and forest ecosystems. The approach is refreshing, serving as a reminder that the entirety <\/em>of the created order is involved in the story of redemption.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The book conveys a truly sacramental outlook in a manner that a traditional theological treatise could not\u2014because it embodies<\/em> this outlook.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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One of the things I greatly appreciate about the book is Miller\u2019s sound approach toward the liturgy and the garden. In the introduction, he writes that the book \u201cis neither a devotional book which reduces gardening to a spiritual metaphor, nor a transcendentalist attempt to make gardening the sole act of devotion,\u201d for \u201cneither should ever be made a mere metaphor, because each is fully deserving of our full attention.\u201d In the same vein, Miller does not try to cast the liturgy like a sort of extended morality play meant to point us to (among other things) a better relationship with the seasons, gardens, and the rest of non-human creation. Not that the liturgy shouldn\u2019t <\/em>have this effect, of course. But there is often a temptation to seek \u201cthe meaning\u201d of the liturgy\u2014to assume it has a primarily didactic and virtue-producing end.<\/p>

But as Matthew Olver wrote in an article<\/a> in The Living Church<\/em>: \u201cLiturgy doesn\u2019t \u2018mean\u2019 anything: It is <\/em>something.\u201d Miller embraces the liturgy for what it is: a form of prayer that (to paraphrase Olver) is a disclosure of and unique participation in the mystery of Jesus Christ. Likewise, Miller treats permaculture gardening for what it is as a particular form of intentional, intimate participation in the rhythms of the seasons and in the life of the other-than-human world. Through this, he allows each to illuminate the other in a way that draws us more deeply into recognizing this world as one wonderfully created and yet more wonderfully restored by God.<\/p>

In this way, the book conveys a truly sacramental outlook in a manner that a traditional theological treatise could not\u2014because it embodies<\/em> this outlook. Sacramentality is all about participation. Appreciating the eternal within the repetitive cycles of church and garden to their fullest extent possible (this side of the eschaton<\/em>, that is) requires, more than anything, inhabiting <\/em>those rhythms intentionally and being shaped by them. Leaves of Healing<\/em> is clearly the fruit of this sort of participation, and it offers a picture of what this participation could look like, extending to us a compelling invitation to draw near to the eternal within the seasons of the Church and garden.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Chris\u00a0Gregorio<\/strong>\u00a0is an Episcopal priest living and serving in Hanover, New Hampshire. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and foraging, and hiking the beautiful terrain of northern New England in every season.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden\u00a0<\/strong>was published by Belle Point Press in November 2024.\u00a0Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates the provision of a review copy. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A tour of a liturgical year in the life of a gardener invites readers to dwell in two sets of seasons as a way of drawing nearer to eternity. 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