Gardening the City of God

I've been on a course at Regent College since last week. Regent is in Vancouver, Canada, and my personal claim to fame was being born here while my parents were studying at Regent in the early eighties. The course is intensive over twelve days, and we are making trails, from the nearby Gulf Islands (think little islands between Vancouver and Victoria), downtown Vancouver, guerilla gardens, urban gardens, farmer's markets, university gardens, all exploring the theology of agriculture and city and agriculture in the city and food. It's a little hard to explain.

Vancouver is an incredibly expensive place to live, because it is incredibly beautiful and generally temperate and not so far by flight from Asia. And as the gap between the world's rich and poor widens, so is that represented here. This T.S. Eliot poem from "Choruses from The Rock," included in the course prayer book, seems best to capture what I'm learning:

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,
Though you have shelters and institutions,
Precarious lodgings where the rent is paid,
Subsiding basements where the rat breeds
Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors
Or a house a little better than your neighbour's;
When the Stranger says, "What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?"
What will you answer? "We all dwell together
To make money from each other" or "This is a Community"?

The paradox of the course has been high rises in the beautiful West End representing people physically isolated from each other, individuals alone. The Downtown East Side, though the addicts are visible and the streets smell like urine, because there are no bathrooms, is a place warm with people who know each other's names, don't judge, and do care for each other. They all need to eat, and maybe gardening can be part of their healing.