Walls and roads

January brings bright, cold days when the whole world can feel like a fresh, clean start, the new year a possible paradise.

Historically, paradise framed the Christian understanding of time. It was the beginning of human life in creation and also the longed-for perfect end of time. We started in a verdant, Edenic situation and look forward to a time of return when God will again live among us, and the leaves of the trees will be for the healing of the nations. At this time of year, it’s easy to let ourselves get distracted by dreams of gardens.

Garden imagery abounds when we think about paradise, and this is fitting because the first paradise was quite literally a walled garden. We can trace the oldest roots of the English word paradise back through French, Latin and Greek into Old Persian which gives us parādaiĵah: “a place inside walls.” In the ancient world, enclosed places must have been radically wonderful. You could grow things and they wouldn’t be eaten up by animals. You could settle down with your family, safe against the wide, threatening world. Whether it sat in the distant past or in the longed-for future, paradise was a settled place, full of beauty and security.

But what if we haven’t got that right? What if paradise isn’t so much a glorious garden where we might rest in love and contemplation but a vegetable patch? Or a road? What if the best way to find our remembered roots and our promised future is to get our hands and our boots dirty?

Press on

During Advent, I reread Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. It is a book about the recent history of activism and social change through political engagement. Written as a window into the new millennium, this book highlights stories of activism that push beyond a kind of crisis response into rooted habits and everyday practice. We might call this kind of activism walking by faith. Solnit warns against viewing desired changes as an end goal or destination. “Paradise,” she writes “is not the place in which you arrive but the journey towards it.” Or as Paul puts it in Philippians, “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”

In these January days with the year stretching out before us, these thoughts resound with my pilgrim soul. I like the image of the road before us as the place where we begin to understand where our journeys started and where we are going. On the road of our days, we find the gifts of strength and grace that make us who we need to be. This month, the roads may be cold and icy, but the light is already shifting. Each day, the winter sun lingers a little longer in the bare-fingered trees. As the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges says: “There is no day without its moments of paradise.”