Day 3: A Garden, and What Grew In It
Dormition/Shoonoyo Fast: The Second Eve series – August 2026
A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. – Song of Songs 4:12
In the name of God the Father, Christ Jesus His Son and the Holy Spirit, One True God. Amen
Read the verse in its own place first.
At first glance, these words sound like nothing more than a bridegroom delighting in the beauty of his bride.
A garden enclosed.
A spring sealed.
They are not images of fear or defence. They speak instead of something precious, lovingly kept for its true owner. A garden is enclosed not because it is hostile to the world, but because it is treasured.
From the earliest centuries, the Church has read the Song of Songs as a song of divine love. The bride is the Church, the faithful soul, and in a beautiful way, the Blessed Virgin Mary, in whom God’s saving work reached its perfect flowering.
Among the Syriac Fathers, however, something remarkable happens.
When they call Mary a garden, they are less interested in the walls surrounding the garden than in the life growing within it.
Their eyes are fixed not on what is enclosed, but on what God causes to flourish.
The Rain That Came Down
Mary is a Garden, upon which
the Rain of Blessing descended from the Father;
she sprinkled some of its abundance
on the face of Adam
who revived and rose from the grave
where he had been hidden in Sheol by his enemies.
– Bride of Light, Soghitha 1 (Hymn 22), verse 16.
Notice where the poet’s attention rests.
Not upon the beauty of the garden.
Not upon its enclosure. But upon the rain that comes from heaven onto the ground that could not water itself. That is the image, and it is worth noticing what it does not say.
A garden cannot give life to itself.
It waits.
It receives.
Only then does it bear fruit.
The Fathers saw in Mary the perfect image of this holy receptivity. She did not create the mystery of the Incarnation. She received it with faith. Heaven descended, and the earth responded with joyful obedience.
Another ancient Syriac hymn greets her with a series of beautiful titles:
Welcome, O Garden in which is the straight Staff,
Welcome, most honoured of all women on earth,
Welcome, lovely Rose, beauty of the earth,
Welcome, the one invited to give milk to her Lord,
Welcome, Wheat wherein is Life for the earth.
– Bride of Light, Hymn no. 45, line 155.
The above hymn/verse homily (which has sometimes been attributed to be written by St. Ephrem the Syrian, but cannot be verified) tells us where Elizabeth greets her cousin, and the greeting is a chain of titles, one after another, each of them naming something the Virgin holds rather than something she is. Every title directs our attention beyond Mary herself.
The Rose. The Wheat. The Staff.
Each image points to Christ, who dwells within her.
The garden is beautiful because of what grows there.
A New Eden
Then one of the anonymous poets says something that goes much further, and it is the reason today’s reflection exists.
Mary is God’s very Eden;
no Tree of Knowledge is in her,
nor any serpent to deceive, or Eve to bring death.
From her the Tree of Life has shone forth
which will bring back the banished exiles to Eden.
– Bride of Light, no. 27 (Hymns on Mary, second series no. 3) , verse 30.
Let us sit with that, because it is doing something none of the other garden images do.
Let us ask ourselves what was actually wrong with the first garden.
This is a remarkable meditation on Genesis.
What was the tragedy of Eden?
The garden itself was perfect. Its rivers were pure. Its trees were beautiful. The fruit was also good, and which God Himself had made. Not even the wall, because there was no wall in Eden, only a guard set at the gate afterwards.
Its Creator walked there with humanity.
Yet in the midst of that perfection stood a choice. What was wrong with Eden is that there were two trees in it.
And we chose the wrong one.
Everything else about that garden was perfect. It failed anyway, because it was the setting of a real choice made by people with real freedom, and the choice went the other way.
Humanity reached for the tree that brought death.
The poet now looks upon the Virgin and sees a new Paradise.
Not because it is more beautiful than Eden. Not because it is better protected.
But because from this garden springs forth only the Tree of Life.
The One whom Adam lost in Paradise is now offered back to the world through Mary.
The exile begins to end.
The Garden Exists for the Tree
Now the turn.
Nobody has ever written a hymn on the soil or any other elements in the garden. A garden is earth, water and a boundary, and not one of those three is worth singing about. What is worth singing about is what came up out of it.
Again and again the Syriac fathers direct our gaze toward Christ, the Tree of Life.
Another of the poets says it without any decoration at all.
The Tree of Life, which lay hidden in Paradise,
has sprung forth in Mary, and shot up from her;
in its shade all creation sits
as it showers its fruit
on both those far and near.
– Bride of Light, no. 6 (Hymns on Mary, no. 4), verse 11.
The whole mystery is contained in those words.
Hidden in Paradise. Revealed in Mary.
That is the whole movement of our salvation in two lines, and she is the ground in which it happens.
Take the Tree out of the picture and there is nothing left to say about the garden. Nothing at all. Our Fathers never take it out, and that is precisely why these hymns can be sung in church without the slightest embarrassment. Every one of them is about her Son. Not one of them pretends otherwise.
And we know where that Tree ends up.
It grows out of Eden and it stands on Golgotha. The Fruit hangs from it there, and it is offered to us again, and this time nobody is forbidden to eat.
The tree through which death entered history has been overcome by the Tree through which eternal life is given.
The difference is who is hanging on it, and why.
What This Means For Us
As we continue our fast, the first enthusiasm often begins to fade.
The first two days have some novelty in them. By the third we are simply not eating, and the mind begins to make offers. This is the point at which most of us quietly downgrade the whole thing into a diet with a religious label on it.
So here is what the garden is for.
Abstinence is a wall. Fasting, holding our tempers, staying off our phones, whatever we have taken up for these fifteen days, all of it is wall. And a wall is a good thing.
It is also completely useless on its own.
A walled piece of ground with nothing growing in it is not a garden. It is a yard.
The whole purpose of a wall is to keep the ground undisturbed for long enough that something can come up in it. If this fortnight turns out to be nothing but subtraction, only a list of things we did not eat and did not watch and did not say, then at the end of it we will have built a very fine wall around an empty patch of dirt.
Our Lord said something about this that ought to frighten us more than it does. He described a house swept clean and left standing empty, and what moved into it afterwards was worse than what had been turned out.
God desires not simply an empty space, but a fruitful heart.
So let us plant something today. Not tomorrow. Today.
Read a psalm we do not know.
Ring the person we have been avoiding for a month.
Give away an amount of money we will actually notice giving away.
The Rain came down on this garden from the Father, and what grew in it was the Tree of Life. Nobody is asking us to produce anything on that scale.
We are only being asked not to leave the ground bare. We are asked to receive His grace and allow the Tree of Life to bear fruit within us.
I end with the Lkeebooso sung during the intercession to the Blessed Theotokos.
Bless’d are you, tabernacle
And paradise of virtues;
Bless’d are you, throne of the Lord,
Most bless’d among the saints;
Bless’d are you, fount of myst’ries
In whom the King of kings dwelt.
Your brother in Christ
Jobin
Tomorrow – Day 4: A wooden box, covered in gold, that a man died for touching. And the question of why.
