A medieval hortus conclusus: The Little Garden of Paradise, Upper Rhenish Master (c. 1410).
Outside, the mountains have been drawn into the garden, becoming a part of it. Aritomo was a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.
The Rev. James Bramston, an eighteenth-century English cleric, was known for his satirical verses. One of his targets was Archibald Campbell (Lord Islay), who wanted to improve his extensive gardens by removing some of the trees blocking his view of the world beyond his private Eden.
Old Islay, to show his fine delicate taste, In improving his gardens purloin’d from the waste, Bade his gard’ner one day to open his views, By cutting a couple of grand avenues; No particular prospect his lordship intended, But left it to chance how his walks should be ended.
With transport and joy he beheld his first view end In a favorite prospect — a church that was ruin’d — But also! what a sight did the next cut exhibit! At the end of his walk hung a rogue on a gibbet! He beheld it and wept, for it caus’d him to muse on Full many a Campbell that died with his shoes on. All amazed and aghast at the ominous scene, He order’d it quick to be clos’d up again With a clump of Scotch firs, that served for a Screen. [ii]
In those days, landscape design cultivated the idea of the “Picturesque,” in which a visual environment is composed like a painting. In a picturesque scene, whether discovered or constructed, every element presenting itself to the eye of the beholder plays a part in summoning a feeling, stimulating reflection, or creating a mood. “Views were created resembling paintings or recalling events from myth or literature with the aim of producing desired states of feeling in the observer.” [iii]
One of the more unusual elements of the Picturesque was the ruin. A decaying church or temple, a weathered pagan statue, a partially collapsed arch or a broken column—traces of human pastness amidst the greenness of the natural world—aroused “la douce mélancolie qui parle à l’âme sensible” (“the sweet melancholy which speaks to the sensitive soul.”) [iv] Since authentic ruins were few and far between, it became the fashion to build new ones, in either classical or medieval styles, fabricated to appear like ancient remnants. In 1767, Diderot described the intellectual and emotional effect this way:
“The ideas aroused in me by ruins are lofty. Everything vanishes, everything perishes, everything passes away; the world alone remains, time alone continues. How old this world is! I walk between these two eternities … What is my ephemeral existence compared to that of crumbling stone?” [v]
When the poem’s Lord Islay told his gardeners to “open his views” by cutting a couple of wide avenues in the woods around his estate, he was reaching for the Picturesque, though rather by chance than careful design. In the first instance he succeeded wonderfully. At the end of the first avenue, perfectly framed, was a ruined church, promising many pleasurable ruminations on time, history, and divinity in the days to come.
But when more trees were felled to make the second avenue, the results were less agreeable. Lord Islay’s eyes were met with a ruin of the worst kind: a human corpse hanging on a gallows. “Amazed and aghast,” he quickly closed off the terrible vista with a planting of tall firs.
I recently came across Bramston’s poem in Roy Strong’s marvelous anthology, A Celebration of Gardens. While I can’t vouch for the factuality of the story, it struck me as a vivid image of the challenge for spirituality in this troubled and suffering world. How can we enjoy our gardens—the necessary environments and practices for emotional and spiritual health—and yet remain vulnerable and responsive to the cries of distress from near and far?
Isaac Walton window, Winchester Cathedral (1914).
From the Garden of Eden to the medieval cloister, the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), a tranquil space of beauty and calm, walled off from the outside world, has been a significant image of the interior life. We all need the kinds of spaces, both physical and spiritual, where we can shelter from the storm, sink into the depths of holy Presence, and “study to be quiet.” [vi]
But we are long past the innocence of the first Eden. We know, all too well, of the terrors and horrors raging beyond the protecting walls which nurture our peace and shield our joy. We may, like Lord Islay, be aghast at the sudden glimpse of the victim on the gallows—or the cross—but we are long past surprise. A row of tall firs cannot protect us. The knowledge remains. How do we live with it—and act in response to it—and still guard our heart in its hortus conclusus?
Tan Twan Eng’s deeply moving novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, suggests a way. The Japanese gardening practice, shakkei, is described (see the epigraph above) as “the art of Borrowed Scenery.” Sometime after the Second World War, Aritomo, a Japanese master gardener living in Malaya, agrees to teach his art to the Malaysian narrator, Yun Ling. But their collaborative garden project does not enjoy the innocence of Eden. Yun Ling’s sister had suffered abuse and death in a Japanese internment camp during the war, and she wants to create a memorial garden for her lost sibling. Years later, she returns to the garden while investigating war crimes by the occupying forces. Aritomo, who had participated in that occupation, carries his own secret burdens and sorrows.
Aritomo and Yun Ling are not insulated from pain, guilt, grief and loss. Even from their beautiful garden, they can glimpse the gallows. And yet, the garden’s beauty—and the spirituality it engenders—is not diminished by the pain outside its sacred enclosure. Yes, look just beyond the garden, and you will see immense suffering. But look further, beyond the gallows. Can you borrow what lies in the greater distance? Can you make the Transcendent an integral part of your view?
Are the mists, too, an element of shakkei incorporated by Aritomo? I wonder. To use not only the mountains, but the wind, the clouds, the ever-changing light? Did he borrow from heaven itself? [vii]
The rose garden in Portland, Oregon, “borrows” distant Mt. Hood for this view.
[i] Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists, (New York: Weinstein Books, 2012), 25.
[ii] Cited in Roy Strong, A Celebration of Gardens (Portland, OR: Sagapress/Timber Press, 1992), 105-106.
[iii] Diana Ketchum, Le Desért de Retz: A Late Eighteenth-Century French Folly Garden (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), cited in Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 224.
[iv] Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 158.
Balthasar van Cortbemde, The Good Samaritan (1647).
Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) is usually heard as a reminder to care for the needs of others, including strangers or even enemies. That’s why some hospitals have taken their name from the protagonist. I myself was born in the Episcopal Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles and, four days before my 22nd birthday, my father died in the Intensive Care Unit of the same “Good Sam.” So this parable carries some special meanings for me.
We all hope to be like the Good Samaritan, but the late Doug Adams, an extraordinary friend and professor of Religion and Art at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, proposed an alternative reading of the parable. Instead of asking us to identify with the Good Samaritan, he wondered, what if Jesus wants us to identify with the man in the ditch?
The Samaritan is the person with all the power in the situation. He has a donkey, oil and wine, enough extra clothing to make bandages, the strength to lift the wounded man onto the donkey, and money to pay for the man’s medical care. He gives, most admirably, out of his own abundance.
But the naked, beaten, half-dead man in the ditch has no power. He has no capacity or ability to help himself. He is entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. And who is the one who stops to help him? Not the priest, not the Levite, not one of his own kind, but a Samaritan. For a Jew, including everyone in Jesus’s original audience, a Samaritan was a bad person, a despised enemy.
Now you don’t need to understand the history of the cultural and religious enmity between Jews and Samaritans to grasp Jesus’ point here. Think of anyone of whom you disapprove, or someone you have a difficult history with. If you are lying helpless in the ditch, you don’t get to be selective about your rescuer. You have to accept their help, even if they happen to be your worst enemy. And that would mean you’d have to change your mind about them and, like it or not, be in relation with them.
Remember the question that prompted Jesus to tell this parable: “Who is my neighbor?” And the answer turns out to be: Everybody! In God’s alternative version of reality (which the gospels call the Kingdom), everyone—even my enemy—is my neighbor.
When I first heard Doug talk about this parable, it was during the first Gulf War. “Imagine you are lying helpless in that ditch,” he said, “and down the road comes Saddam Hussein. When he sees you, he bends down, offers his hand and says, “Can I help you out of the ditch, brother?”
Today we might substitute Vladimir Putin for the Samaritan to experience the same radical discomfort that Jesus’ first listeners must have felt when they heard the parable. Or suppose the person in the ditch is a white supremacist, and the Samaritan is a person of color? What if the victim is homophobic, and the rescuer is gay? What if a misogynist is the helpless one, and a woman comes by? What if it’s a Progressive in that ditch, and along comes a Proud Boy?
Do you find any of these scenarios unsettling? Parables are meant to be hard. They are meant to break us open.
And as I listen to this parable in the Year of Our Lord 2022, it strikes me that America itself is in the ditch, wounded by its sins, torn by its conflicts, half-dead from innumerable unaddressed ills. White supremacists and so-called “Christian” nationalists seek a cure in the subjugation or even the elimination of those they consider to be “other”—that is, those who are “not our kind,” whether that be people of color, the LGBTQ community, empowered women, Muslims, Central American refugees, nonwhite immigrants, or whomever. That way lies madness and death.
If we are ever to be delivered from the ditch of our own national folly and sin, we desperately need the help of the “other”—the ones whose race, religion, class, gender and life experiences are different from our own. We need to listen to their voices, their perspectives, their pain, their anger, their sorrows, their hopes, their dreams. We need not only to learn from them and be taught by them; we need to receive their stories into our hearts. Otherwise, we’re just going to stay stuck in that ditch.
Post-game ritual with Coach Joseph Kennedy, Bremerton High School, WA, October 16, 2015 (Attribution: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals)
A recovering alcoholic reciting the Serenity Prayer, a Catholic nun telling her beads, a child crossing himself before a meal, a quaking Shaker, a meditating yogini, a Huichi Indian chewing a peyote button, a Zen monk in satori, a Lubavitcher dancing with the Torah, Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, a bookie crossing his fingers before the final race, Ebenezer Scrooge pleading for just one more chance, dear God, just one more chance: all this is the work of prayer. In this world one may sit, stand, run, kneel, fall prostrate, dance, faint, or whirl in imitation of the cosmic spheres. One may chant, sing, shout, mutter, groan, or keep silent. One may make use of nuts, beads, books, flags, wheels, shells, stones, drums, idols, icons, jewels, incense, flowers, blood, and fruit, for all these belong to the armamentarium of prayer.
“I wasn’t going to stop my prayer because there was kids around me.”
— Joseph Kennedy, football coach
If January 6th is the coup that failed, the Supreme Court is the one that has succeeded. The extremist majority, abandoning both precedent and good sense, has gone rogue, wreaking havoc with a barrage of malignant decisions. While the recent decisions on abortion and climate change are the most broadly calamitous, I want to address the case of Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, a poorly considered ideological gambit with unsettling implications for both politics and religion.
Joseph Kennedy was an assistant football coach at Bremerton High School, a few miles by water from my island home in Washington State. Hired in 2008, he began to kneel in silent prayer at midfield after the game. He got the idea from a televised movie about a coach at a Christian school who prays and witnesses with his team as he leads them to the state championship.
At first, Kennedy prayed alone, but over time he was joined by most of his players, as well as members of the visiting team. At some point he began to add religiously flavored “motivational” speeches to this postgame ritual and, it seems, his prayers were no longer entirely silent. It took seven years for the Bremerton School District to take notice, but when it did, it expressed concerns about upsetting the delicate balance between private religious expression and the religious neutrality mandated by the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
In September, 2015, the District instructed Coach Kennedy to refrain from religious talks and prayers with his players, and to keep his personal religious activity “nondemonstrative” while on duty, “to avoid school endorsement of religious activities.” At first he agreed to the terms, but while driving home after a game, he felt he had “broken [his] commitment to God” by not praying on the field after the game. So he returned to the empty stadium to kneel at the 50-yard line for a brief prayer.
But that would not be enough for him. On October 14, two days before the Homecoming game, he informed the District that he planned to resume his “private” postgame prayer practice, insisting that he would not invite or encourage anyone to join him. This was disingenuous, since he had been throwing gasoline on the fire through social media, complaining to the world that he was being persecuted for praying. And his choice of the well-attended Homecoming for his defiant display ensured maximum attention.
Predictably, he was joined in “prayer” not only by players and news cameras, but also by spectators who jumped fences in a rush to midfield (knocking over some band members in their stampede). This “prayer” circus continued for another two weeks, joined by the sort of politicians who profit from religious resentment.
By the end of October, Kennedy was out of a job. He likes to say he was fired for praying, but the record reflects a more complicated story. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor would note in her carefully argued dissent, there were a number of reasons for Kennedy’s suspension:
“In Kennedy’s annual review, the head coach of the varsity team recommended Kennedy not be rehired because he ‘failed to follow district policy,’ ‘demonstrated a lack of cooperation with administration,’ ‘contributed to negative relations between parents, students, community members, coaches, and the school district,’ and ‘failed to supervise student-athletes after games due to his interactions with media and community’ members. The head coach himself also resigned after 11 years in that position, expressing fears that he or his staff would be shot from the crowd or otherwise attacked because of the turmoil created by Kennedy’s media appearances. Three of five other assistant coaches did not reapply.” [ii]
The head coach’s fear of being “shot from the crowd” might have raised eyebrows in 2016, but it would surprise no one today. The rise of white “Christian” nationalism in the United States has made home-grown terrorism a significant threat. And given the Trumpian swerve of so many white Evangelicals, a lot of that terrorism is tied to twisted religious rhetoric. The Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy, along with its dismantling of Roe and other radical rulings, will only encourage the Guns-and-God crowd further. Inch by inch, we are slouching toward Gilead.[iii] Lord have mercy.
In his opinion for the Supreme Court majority, Neil Gorsuch began with a lie: “Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks.” But a lower court judge, in the ruling subsequently overturned by SCOTUS, drew a more honest picture:
“No case law requires that a high school teacher must be out of sight of students or jump into the nearest broom closet in order to engage in private prayer, but it cannot be denied that this football coach’s prayer at the fifty-yard line, immediately after a game, under stadium lights and in front of players and spectators, objectively sent a public message.” [iv]
Joseph Kennedy poaes with a football in front of the Supreme Court. (After a photo by Win McNamee)
Personal prayer, which Jesus called praying “in secret” (Matthew 6:6), has no human spectators, and any self-consciousness about one’s appearance to others is an interruption of prayerful attention. But liturgical prayer, performed with others in public, is meant to be seen. Worshippers are strengthened and encouraged by the knowledge that they are bound together in ritually shared speech and practice. At the same time, public worship makes a visible statement to the world.
But liturgical prayer requires a common language and worldview. In a pluralistic society, such specific religious commonality is rarely possible. Worship is most authentically and effectively situated within each particular tradition. In the United States, therefore, the government should neither restrict the diversity of worship practices, nor endorse or favor one religious expression over any other.
Given the importance of religion in American history and culture, and the large number of religious believers in public life, the separation of church and state lacks a firm and absolute boundary. There are Inaugural prayers, Congressional chaplains, funerals for public figures at the “National Cathedral,” and the frequent invocation of divinity by political speakers. Some of that is boilerplate civil religion, but no one can doubt the formative effect of religious belief and practice on our political life, for better or worse. For the record, all six justices who voted against abortion and for school prayer are conservative Catholics, although Gorsuch has been attending an Episcopal church. Sonia Sotomayor is also Catholic, with the remaining justices comprised of one Jew and one Protestant.
For a long time, public schools have had relative clarity about the Establishment Clause. Justice Sotomayor, in her Kennedy dissent, cited the precedents:
‘The public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny,’ meaning that ‘[i]n no activity of the State is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools.’ Families ‘entrust public schools with the education of their children . . . on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and his or her family.’ Accordingly, the Establishment Clause “proscribes public schools from ‘conveying or attempting to convey a message that religion or a particular religious belief is favored or preferred’ or otherwise endorsing religious beliefs.
I myself went to an Episcopal elementary school where every day began with worship. From 7th to 12th grade I attended an Episcopal boys school. We had religion courses, and two chapel eucharists each week. The popular chaplain, Father Gill, conducted a gorgeous Sarum rite, and our hymns were propelled by a youthful desire to make loud sounds in a resonant space. When I returned for my 40th class reunion, I found a school mostly secularized by its merger with a non-religious girls school. When we visited the chapel in a campus tour, I asked our student guide what remained of the school liturgies. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I’ve never been in here before.”
That made me sad, since my religious schools had been so formative and joyous for my own faith. But I know that public schools are neither appropriate nor feasible venues for common prayer. Inclusivity and diversity are a part of their strength, and in matters of religion they must remain neutral ground. That is why the SCOTUS ruling in Kennedy is so unsettling. It opens the door to some very undesirable outcomes.
The overview provided at the top of the ruling states, “Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech.” I have no idea what is meant by “comparable secular speech.” Does it mean anything not involving religious language, or any human rituals—like football games, for example—which do not invoke the divine? The misleading fiction of competition here feels like an absurd whine: They get to be secular, but we don’t get to be religious!
The Bremerton School District was not trying “to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance.” I can’t judge the sincerity or quality of Coach Kennedy’s initial silent prayers, but once he became the presider at a public ritual as a school employee in a school setting, eager to display himself as a visible and symbolic champion of white Evangelical grievance, it was no longer a private act. Gorsuch argued that non-Evangelical, non-Christian, or non-religious students would be mature enough to feel no pressure to join the prayer circle, whether to please their coach (and get more playing time), or to blend in with their peers. Nope, no pressure at all to conform! Apparently, Gorsuch never went to high school.
There are many nuances to explore in this case and the Establishment Clause in general. If you want to dive deep, you can read the lower court decision here, and the Supreme Court decision here. But one question in particular interests me. When people say they want prayer back in the schools, what are they imagining? As a liturgist committed to eloquence, poetry and theological depth in verbal prayer, as well as the beauty of holiness in public rituals, I’m not sure I would want to trust an ad-libbing football coach with bad grammar to set the standard for spiritual expression in my community. I suppose that’s my elitism showing.
But seriously, where do you draw the line? If we sanctioned prayers in schools, who would write them and who would critique them? Can you imagine the state prayers if white Christian nationalists ever seize power? In any case, who would decide what could or could not be included in officially approved forms of prayer? Would there be a government liturgical commission? How would we arrive at the government definitions of such broad and inexact terms as “religion” and “prayer”? And should SCOTUS manage to reestablish prayer in public schools, would any and all forms of religious expression then be acceptable, or only the ones favored by conservative Catholics and white Evangelicals?
The best prayers are rooted in specific traditions. Generic prayers risk a bland vagueness. But there are occasions—mostly tragic—when some ritual spiritual expression as a nation is regarded by most as a good and necessary thing. President Obama’s singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, murdered in a mass shooting by a white supremacist in 2015, is a powerful example.
Might we draw inspiration from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist vision of “unlocking at all risks [our] human doors and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through [us].” [v] (Kids, don’t try this at home!) Or is it possible to emulate the broad sweep of Martin Luther King’s elegantly inclusive phrasing?
“Whether we call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahman, or a Personal Being of matchless power and infinite love, there is a creative force in the universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.” [vi]
But what about the “religious speech,” say, of Allen Ginsberg, who after taking acid in the Sixties burst naked out of Timothy O’Leary’s bedroom to declare: “I am the Messiah. I’ve come down to preach love to the world. We’re going to walk through the streets and teach people to stop hating.” [vii] How would that go over on the 50-yard line of your local high school?
The Supreme Court has lifted the lid on this rabbit hole—and many others. May we find a way to curtail the ambitions of that power-mad cabal before they drag us all into the dark.
Luckily for us, I’m not a government official, nor are you, dear reader, under any coercion whatsoever. After so much talk about prayer as a political question, let us simply consider the nature of prayer in the wise and powerful words of Native American poet Joy Harjo:[viii]
To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you And know that there is more That you can’t see, can’t hear Can’t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren’t always a sound but other Circles of motion Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty.
[i] Ann and Barry Ulanov, Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer (Westminster John Knox Press, 1982), 10.
[iii] Gilead was the new name given to the former United States after a violent takeover by a patriarchal Christian theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s harrowing novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Of course the original reference for my phrase is from W. B. Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” where an apocalyptic beast, a hideous antichrist, is “slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.”
The religious imagineer 