Neither Thistle Nor Thorn

There's a lot of detail to a garden which the hurried eye misses. The rose isn't merely a flower, nor lavender merely purple, nor jasmine merely fragrant. Each possesses its own strange and secret character: the rose gathers colour into petal and thorn; lavender stands in its dusky ranks, breathing its clean, sober sweetness; jasmine, almost invisible in the dark, makes the darkness fragrant. Each thing is itself, and wonderfully so. One flower doesn't envy another. The rose doesn't wish to be lavender. The jasmine doesn't lament that it has no thorns. Each grows according to the nature given to it, and in that faithful becoming there's beauty.

And then there are the weeds.

The thistle thrusts itself upward, bristling and armed, as though the earth had given birth to a little green soldier. Couch grass creeps where it wasn't planted, insinuating itself beneath the soil, threading its pale roots into places meant for something else. The weed doesn't ask whether it is welcome. It comes, it spreads, it occupies. Some things in the garden aren't evil; they're simply not meant to be there. Others choke what was planted with care. And so, the gardener learns to distinguish. He doesn't hate the garden because weeds exist. He tends it.

Yet, here we are. People have a curious habit. When we enter the garden of the world, we often abandon the gardener's wisdom. We bend over the weeds. We examine them. We name them. We photograph them. We tell one another how ugly they are, and then return the next morning to look again. The rose may be opening three feet away, but our eyes remain upon the thistle.

Why?

What draws us towards disturbance? Why does the terrible always catch the eye? Why do cruel deeds travel quickly? The wicked person acquires a name, and the name is repeated until it becomes familiar. We read what was done, then read it again, and then tell someone else what we've read. We condemn the darkness while giving it our finest attention. We say we dislike it, yet we feed it with our curiosity.

And meanwhile, goodness flowers almost noiselessly.

The good neighbour unlocks the gate for someone whose hands are full. The mother rises while the house is still dark and begins another day's work. The faithful husband keeps his promise in the ordinary hours when nobody is looking. Someone leaves food at a struggling family's door, and doesn't wait to be thanked. Someone visits the lonely. Someone forgives. Someone chooses gentleness when anger would've been easier. Someone sees an animal in need and helps it. Someone else sees another person's burden and quietly lifts one corner of it.

No headline announces these things. No crowd gathers. No camera turns. No posts or comments are made online.

The good thing is that Heaven notices precisely what we choose not to see.

Goodness is often a quiet thing. It doesn't clamour for the eye. It has no need to make itself enormous. It grows like lavender: low, unpretending, filling the air with something the eye cannot see. It grows like jasmine: almost hidden, yet unmistakable when its fragrance reaches us. It grows like the rose, whose beauty is inseparable from the thorn.

And here the garden becomes more than a garden.

The mind has soil. The attention has water. The things upon which we continually dwell receive something from us. We may think we are merely looking, merely reading, merely listening, merely keeping informed. But attention is not empty. It enters us. It leaves a trace. What we repeatedly contemplate begins to inhabit the inner landscape.

We wouldn't wash our faces each morning in stagnant, filthy water and then wonder why our skin felt unclean. Yet, we may immerse the mind day after day in violence, cruelty, scandal, hatred, and degradation, and then wonder why the world begins to feel dark.

The problem isn't that we know evil exists. A gardener must know where the weeds are. The danger is that we begin to mistake the weeds for the whole garden. There's evil enough in the world without making it the chief object of our contemplation. There's sorrow enough without becoming fascinated by sorrow. There's ugliness enough without putting it continually upon the mantelpiece of the mind.

Look at what you've become. What has all that looking done to you?

Has your heart grown hard beneath the constant gaze? Has compassion withered there? Has empathy been crowded out by judgment? Has tenderness been strangled by the very weeds you've spent so much time examining?

Listen to your own words. Do they carry fragrance, or do they carry thorns? 

There are words that comfort like rain upon thirsty earth, words that soften a sorrow, words that make room for another human being's weakness. And there are words that prick and tear, like little verbal thistles, sharp at every point, leaving behind pain rather than peace, discord rather than understanding.

A thistle doesn't become a rose merely because we admire its thorns. Nor does cruelty become virtue because we've found a clever way of defending it.

It's a tragedy when we become so accustomed to ugliness that we begin to speak its language ourselves. We look upon bitterness until bitterness takes root in us. We feed upon contempt until contempt becomes our nourishment. We repeat harshness until harshness no longer sounds harsh to our own ears. And then we wonder why there is no fragrance left.

The garden of the heart requires tending, too.

Pull out what has taken root where kindness should grow. Cut back what has become excessive. Let silence sometimes do the work that another cruel sentence cannot. Make room again for mercy. For patience. For the simple dignity of treating another human being as someone whose heart, like your own, can bruise.

You don't have to pretend the weeds are flowers. But neither must you become a weed because you've spent too long among them.

There are still roses. There's still lavender. There's still jasmine waiting to release its fragrance into the evening.

And there's still, beneath all the choking growth, a small untrampled place in you where compassion can take root again.

Tend that place. Water it. Give it light. 

The questions you need to ask yourself every day are these: What am I looking at, and what is looking at it making of me? What am I listening to, and what is hearing it making of me?