In The Garden

Copyright 2013 PJ Stassen

All Rights Reserved

Trying to convince an atheist that God exists is like trying to convince a fish that the ocean exists.

- Ray Comfort.

   They say that, as soon as one begins to feel unworthy and unimportant, one should just stop paying one’s debts … the backlash from the business sector will be so ferocious and swift that one will never doubt one’s monumental importance to society ever again.

   Mankind’s urge for personal significance in this Universe will probably never wane.  Nobody wants to be just a number; just about everyone craves significance and self-worth of some sort, some way or the other.  This of course never fails to remind us of the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps where humans, created in the image of God, were reduced to the bland serial numbers tattooed on their bodies.  
   Since I was born in 1947 in South Africa I was mercifully spared the horrors of the period, but I am nevertheless particularly reminded of those disturbing books about WWII I had read in my youth and adulthood, such as Spark Of Life, a 1952 novel by Erich Maria Remarque about 'Prisoner 509' in a Nazi concentration camp; Inside The Third Reich by Albert Speer; The Scourge Of The Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool; Enemy At The Gates: The Battle For Stalingrad by William Craig; The Last Days Of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper; The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom; The Diary Of Anne Frank and the many others e.g. on such topics as D-Day (the Normandy Landings) and other battles etc.

   Most people of my generation ought to be able to still remember the movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the Anthony Quinn rendition) from the 1831 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo.  From what I can remember is that the hunchback bell-ringer (Quasimodo) derived his significance as a person (and probably his upkeep too) by performing the back-breaking menial chores associated with life  inside the Notre Dame Cathedral (Notre Dame Cathedral de Paris), his pride and passion probably the ringing of the monstrous bells in the bell-tower upon which he seemed to first leap like a circus acrobat and then ride, swing and ring bodily from its precipitous heights.

   In a scenario completely different and of another era, I also read the interesting narrative of how, during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), also known as the Second Boer War, in South Africa, General Jan Smuts and his small band of Boer-soldiers were cornered by the British in the Stormberg Mountains of the Eastern Cape. In his book, Jan Christian Smuts, J.C. Smuts, son of Jan Smuts (Smuts: 73), writes:

   “This happened near Dordrecht in the Stormberg Mountains.  They were surrounded on a high plateau by forces under Colonel Monro with little hope of escape.  Here a courageous hunchback volunteered to lead them down a remote mountain path, bobbing ahead on a horse in the biting rain and wind, and bringing them out on a route as near the vertical as horses have ever had to negotiate.  They gratefully bade the hunchback goodbye and left him bobbing back in the darkness on his crutches.  Darkness luckily hid the abysses they negotiated and by daylight they had sprung the trap and for the moment hoped they had finally eluded the British.”

   Now I wonder:

(i)            What if that hunchback was born and raised for just a moment like this … nobody remembers his name, he was just ‘the hunchback’ who had saved the group from imminent death.  But, who knows, maybe he has already been inducted into Heaven’s Hall of Heroes, forever to be remembered with the dignity he deserved but never enjoyed on planet Earth.

(ii)          Notice how the Boer soldiers experienced the ‘darkness’ in particular on the precipitous and dangerous mountains (“Darkness luckily hid the abysses they negotiated … “).  On the one hand the darkness impaired sight and reduced visibility … on the other hand it mercifully hid from sight the fearful abysses they negotiated.  Do we not often as believers perhaps experience the awful ‘Stygian darkness of despair’ in our lives for the very reason … to hide and spare us the unsettling sights of the fearful abysses of life we are negotiating?

   Nevertheless, this song,  In The Garden, like its ‘sister-song’, Garden Of Prayer, will always remind me of the one place in life where one can seek the comfort and solace of God in prayer amid the hustle and bustle of daily life.  I have a prayer journal in which I write many prayers, reminiscences, disappointments, dreams etc. and if there is one place I retire to regularly without fail it is this little ‘garden of prayer’ of my secret old prayer journal … it is the only place in the world where I really (cosmically) feel safe, cherished and significant. 

Jesus reminds us:  
       

   “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.   But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

   But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.   Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”  (Matthew 6:5-8 KJV, www.e-sword.net).

  

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In The Garden

I come to the garden alone,

While the dew is still on the roses;

And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,

The Son of God discloses.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice

Is so sweet, the birds hush their singing;

And the melody that He gave to me

Within my heart is ringing.

I’d stay in the garden with Him

Tho the night around me be falling;

But He bids me go ‒

Thru the voice of woe,

His voice to me is calling.

CHORUS

And He walks with me and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own,

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

None other has ever known. 

Bibliography

1.     Andrews, Allen (1969)   Quotations For Speakers And Writers.  Newnes Books.  Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd. London.

2.     Peterson, John W. (1966)   Great Hymns Of The Faith. ‘In The Garden.  Singspiration.  Zondervan Publishing House.  Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
3.  Smuts, J.C.(1952) Jan Christian Smuts.  Cassell & Co., London.