“What is that?” asked Catharine.
“Purity,” answered Amanda sadly. “I often think these days of that short phrase describing Jesus’ childhood, that he grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. How sad it makes me now to realize I did not use the opportunity God gave me to do the same when I was young.”
Her words took Catharine by surprise and she did not reply. They rode along some moments in silence.
“I learned at the chalet,” Amanda continued at length, “that everyone has a story God can use somehow. The sisters were so different, yet each of their lives and all those differences helped me in some unique way. So I suppose what you say is true. But in another way, it is a terrible price to pay in one’s own life just to be able to have an experience to share with others. Once you give your purity away, it’s not something you can ever get back.”
Now it was Catharine’s turn to lapse into an uncharacteristic moment of melancholy. Suddenly their roles from only a moment ago were reversed.
“What is it, Catharine?” asked Amanda.
“I’m not sure I do have a story to tell,” replied Catharine. “It seems that all the sisters you’ve told us about had stories involving some kind of hardship or suffering. I’ve not suffered in the same way you have, except losing Father and George recently, of course, and I cried and cried afterward. But I mean with the burden of guilt you feel. I know it’s painful for you, what you’ve been through. But you have something truly valuable to give to others.”
“But you are living the best story of all,” replied Amanda.
“What story?” asked Catharine.
“A life lived without rebellion. I wish I could say that. You are a shining example of a life lived pleasing to God.”
Catharine nodded, trying to take in the new thought that her ordinary and normal life might actually be a testimony of God’s goodness more than she had realized.
“Yes, maybe God will use my waywardness,” Amanda went on, “but how much more can he use a life that has honored him without turning its back on his voice. I am so lucky to have you for my sister.”
Another silence followed. Both young women had a great deal to think about.
“Will you pray for me, Catharine?” Amanda asked at length.
“I always do,” smiled Catharine. “I have been for years.”
“You have?”
“Of course. George and I used to pray for you together after you left—sometimes in the secret room.”
The words were too poignantly painful for Amanda. Quietly she began to cry. Catharine reached out a tender arm of comfort. The two sisters drew close to one another, holding each other for several long minutes, then quietly began to pray.
“Lord,” said Catharine, “I do thank you for Amanda, and for what you are teaching her even through the pain of what she must endure. I ask you to use her life for you, and to help others. Use Amanda’s life, Lord, to turn other young people toward their mothers and fathers, and toward you. Continue to mature her and deepen obedience and wisdom within her. And help us both to move on with thankful hearts, even though we cannot help the grief of losing Papa and George. And we pray for Mother, too, and thank you so much for her.”
Amanda gave Catharine a squeeze of affection, sniffed through her tears a time or two, then began herself to pray.
“Help me learn to be a good daughter, heavenly Father,” she said. “Thank you so much for giving me a sister like Catharine, and for such a loving mother as we have. I am sorry again for not paying attention to so many things soon enough. But help me learn now. Show me what to do about Ramsay. And if you do want to use my experiences in some way, like Catharine says, show me what you want me to do. I would rather just forget what I used to be like. But if you have another plan for me, I am willing to do whatever you want, especially if I can help prevent other parents from having to experience what I put Mother and Father through.”
She stopped, and gradually they sat back in their seats. Amanda began quietly crying again. Catharine took her hand and held it in hers as they rode along for the next hour in relative silence.
They arrived in London and immediately took a taxi to New Hope Chapel. Timothy was expecting them.
“Hello, Catharine, Amanda,” he greeted them, “—come in!”
He led them inside the parsonage. “Let us have some tea and a talk,” he said. “I’ve asked Mrs. Alvington to prepare us a light tea. I thought you might want something after your train trip.”
After they had visited briefly, Catharine turned as if to leave.
“Where are you going?” asked Amanda in surprise.
“Into the city,” replied Catharine. “I asked the taxi driver to wait.”
“Why, aren’t you staying?”
“I thought it would be best.”
“But why?”
“You need to talk to Timothy alone. You will be able to share more freely without me.”
“But you can’t go into the city yourself.”
“Of course I can,” laughed Catharine. “I’m a big girl now too, Amanda. I’ll be fine.”
“But what will you do?”
“Mother gave me a message to take to Mr. Churchill. Afterward, I thought I would go to Hyde Park, or maybe the museum.”
“All right, but—”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine, I promise . . . I’ll see you at the hotel later.”
25
A Garden of Dormant Seeds
You look well, Amanda,” said Timothy once he and Amanda were seated. “How are you feeling . . . inside, I mean?”
“I don’t know . . . reasonably well, I suppose,” replied Amanda. “The memories are sometimes difficult to bear. Yet I am learning from them.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“Just as you said a while back, so many things about my father are returning to me. Everywhere I turn, it seems, I see him standing there in my mind, laughing, working on a project, telling us about something.”
“But it is painful?” asked Timothy.
“Occasionally,” replied Amanda. “But I am coming rather to enjoy some of these occasions more often than not. It’s something that is . . . well, bittersweet.”
“I think I understand.”
“Not long ago Mother and I were in the heather garden, and suddenly I noticed the bench we were sitting on, as if I had never seen it before. I made a comment to her about it, and we found ourselves talking about Father and his creativity. So I have come almost to welcome the memories, even though, as I say, they are sometimes difficult to bear.”
“You will continue to have moments such as you have been telling me about, Amanda,” said Timothy with a smile. “I do not doubt that you will find many memories coming back to you in just this way now that your heart is open to your father. If my example is any indication, it may continue for the rest of your life. It is a form of spiritual gardening in which I have been engaged myself for some years, ever since I discovered its necessity.”
“A form of . . . gardening?” asked Amanda with a puzzled expression as she turned toward him. “What do you mean?”
Timothy chuckled lightly. “An admittedly odd way of viewing the matter,” he said, “but one that helps me visualize the process more practically. Shall I explain what I mean?”
“Please do.”
“It began shortly after I took up residence at New Hope Chapel,” Timothy began. “I should say, my understanding of what I call spiritual gardening began then. Actually, the internal process had been at work within me some time previously. You probably did not notice when you visited before, but outside this sitting room, through those two narrow French doors there, is a small garden.”
Amanda glanced in the direction Timothy indicated.
“It sits at the back of the church, as you can see, surrounded by a wing of the building itself, two high stone walls, and my living quarters. It is only some twelve by fifteen feet. But I have always fancied gardens; therefore,
when I moved here to New Hope, one of the first projects I sought to undertake was to bring some order to it and plant it full of bulbs and flowers and thus brighten the view from my window.”
“It’s beautiful now,” said Amanda. “Was nothing growing when you began?”
“Oh, it was full of growth,” replied Timothy. “Weeds and grass, briars that were trying to take over, wild ivy, and several gangly shrubs of no value I could see. It was a positive jungle of overgrowth, some of it up to three and four feet high. My predecessor, and for all I know his predecessor before him, had done nothing with the space except let nature take its course—which is the worst thing for the development either of a human being or a flower garden. I could hardly open the French doors for the wildness encroaching against them.”
“What did you do?”
“I determined to reclaim the place and try to cultivate it into a little square of loveliness.”
“It is obvious that you succeeded.”
“It is nice now, I must admit.”
“But a lot of work from the sound of it.”
“Indeed,” nodded Timothy. “Once I managed to get the doors open and through to the outside, I began cutting and chopping and whacking, at first merely to prune back the wild greenery so that I could get at the earth itself. That alone took me several weeks of spare time. Then I burned the grass and weeds and shrubbery prunings, until at last I had the place cleared of growth. Even that was a great improvement, though all I had at that point was bare ground, the stubbly grass ends, and a small pile of ashes. But at last, I thought, I could begin to till and prepare the ground in preparation for filling it with bulbs and seeds.
“I should explain that I took up residence at New Hope at the first of the year, and this all took place in the months of January and February, as weather permitted. My aim was to have the garden planted by early March. I was anticipating the spring months with eagerness, and throughout the last two weeks of February, I dug and tilled with every spare minute, digging down some eighteen inches below the surface, removing roots, upturning and knocking at the hard earth and cultivating it into what I hoped in time would become soft, crumbly, moist loam.
“As a lad I had always marveled to observe the farmers near my home, how the hard-packed crust of the autumn harvest could be ploughed and reploughed and transformed into the softest, most luxuriant soil by the following spring, so light and airy as it awaited planting with the season’s new seeds that I could plunge my hand into it past my young wrist. Somehow I knew, even at that young age, that the soil itself was the key to growth, and that without proper preparation, growth would be stunted and would not bear its appointed harvest.
“As I began my project to transform my little jungle into a garden, therefore, my hope was to turn the hard, neglected earth into that soil I’d seen as a child, soft, crumbly dirt that would fall through my fingers and into which I could reach my hand six or eight inches, in which I could plant seeds and bulbs that would thrive.”
“It reminds me of Mother and Father in the heather,” said Amanda.
“My back paid a dreadful price,” laughed Timothy. “I developed painful blisters on every one of my ten fingers from the shovel work. I enjoyed it, of course. Nothing is as invigorating as a job whose hope is a reward you intend to enjoy yourself, as your father knew. His hands were rough too. It always took me aback when I shook hands with him, thinking of him as a member of Parliament, to feel the hand of what could have been a common laborer. In any event, after two weeks’ time, having turned and knocked and spaded the entire garden three times, as I said, in places to a depth of over a foot, I thought that I was at last ready to begin planting.
“Alas,” Timothy went on, “at exactly that moment, my mother fell seriously ill. I immediately dropped, not only the work on the garden, but my pastoral duties as well, quickly arranging for a supply minister to take my place, and hurried north to be with her.”
“Did she . . . ?” began Amanda.
“No, she recovered and lived several more years. But the illness was serious, and I was away for two months. When I returned, with spring well advanced—for by then it was May—imagine my surprise to see my little garden once again alive with growth.”
“All the grass and weeds had come back?”
“They were there all right,” replied Timothy. “But the unexpected surprise was that flowers had sprouted everywhere as well.”
“Flowers—but I didn’t think you had planted any yet.”
“I hadn’t.”
“What could account for it, then?” asked Amanda.
“That was the wonderful mystery. My spade work, bringing light and air to the depths beneath the surface, had caused long dormant seeds and bulbs to explode suddenly out of the soil with new life.”
“But . . . I don’t understand how that could be.”
“It is a little-recognized fact that many of the seeds which lie buried in the ground, too deep and in earth too hard to allow for germination, strange to say, yet retain the power of growth. Some perhaps fall in their pods or shells, and before they are sufficiently decayed to allow the sun and moisture and air to reach them, they get covered up in the soil too deep for those influences to reach. It is said that fish trapped alive and imbedded in ice for a long time will come to life again. I do not know if that is true. But it is well known that if you dig deep in any old garden, ancient—perhaps forgotten—flowers will appear. They have been neglected or uprooted, but all the time their life is hid below.”
“It is a marvelous thought. I wonder if there are such lost or forgotten plants at Heathersleigh.”
“I think it very likely.”
They sat a few moments in silence.
“As I reflected on my experience in the little garden outside my kitchen,” Timothy went on at length, “I began to perceive a larger truth to which it pointed—that there are dormant invisible seeds in the soils of the lives of men and women too, buried deep and perhaps covered over by layers of earth hardened by self-centeredness and neglect. And like the seeds of my garden, these too are seeds that can sprout to life if we spade up these soils and bring sunshine and warmth to them. And who can tell but that it may perhaps also require the rain of our own tears to water them and give them life.
“And I especially thought how the Great Husbandman plants many of these seeds designed for our maturing and our growth and our understanding of life, indeed for so many eternal purposes, into the soils of our fathers and mothers. Some parental soils are rich; some are hard and appear as though nothing could grow in them. But God has planted seeds in all human soils. To enable them to sprout and then grow the truths God wants us to learn about him, we must upturn that ground and bring air and rain and the warmth of sunlight to bear on those seeds.”
“What about orphans?” asked Amanda, thinking of Sister Hope and Sister Clariss, and now Betsy. “And people with cruel fathers and mothers?”
“Even orphans have parents,” replied Timothy, “though they may not know them. Often orphans have wonderful ideas of who their parents might have been. There are seeds of truth God wants them to discover too. They will not be the same truths that you are learning. Betsy certainly has fond memories of her father, even though he may have been a rough sort of man. Every flower garden God plants in the soils of our lives is completely unique. He has planted different seeds for orphans to discover, and still different seeds yet for discovery by children of cruel parents. But the process is one every man and every woman in all the world shares.”
Timothy paused and thought a moment.
“It is natural, even in cases where parents live full lives, that their sons and daughters do not apprehend everything they are supposed to from those lives. It takes maturity to do so, and often parents are gone before that maturity comes.
“In any event, that is what I call spiritual gardening—upturning those soils to discover what invisible seeds God has for us to discover. They then become flowers of truth we can
transplant into the gardens of our own natures. How marvelous of God to enrich our lives in this way.”
Amanda nodded, trying to take in the largeness of the concept. “That is a beautiful picture,” she said quietly. “What you say reminds me of the last thing I ever heard from dear Bobby’s lips.”
“I would be interested to hear it.”
“He said that the legacies we are meant to discover are often hidden legacies.”
“How right the dear man was,” said Timothy. “You have already discovered the seeds of your father’s hidden legacy sprouting within you. The oiled hinge sprouted the truth that God is always doing the very best he can for his creatures. The scratched board in need of sanding showed you something else, then the bench you just told me about—all these were seeds that were, until those moments of revelation, invisible to you, but which had been planted long before by God in your father, the memory of whose character-soil you needed to upturn to bring them to life. Some of these are painful ploughs, tearing deep into the family soil, that seeds of lost virtues and forgotten truths may once more be brought within reach of sun and air and dew.”
“And you would call my father’s death such a plough in my life?”
“So it seems to me. God works good from all things. And through the pain of his death, the plough has driven deep into your heart. Yet through that breaking are the truth-flowers of his character and his teaching coming to life within you. You didn’t come home only sorry for what you had done. You’ve come home, sorry . . . yes—but also wanting to grow.”
Amanda began to cry. Timothy reached out a reassuring hand and laid it on her shoulder.
“I feel so horrible,” sobbed Amanda softly. “Now I want to know him. I am hungry to know everything about him, about what he thought and did. Yet I was with him all those years, and I wasted them. I could have had so much!”
Another long silence followed. It was broken by the entry of Timothy’s housekeeper from the kitchen.
“I have some tea things, Mr. Diggorsfeld,” she said.
“Ah, thank you, Mrs. Alvington,” said Timothy, rising. “Here, let me take that tray.”
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