In the classic children’s book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a grieving father locks away the garden of his dead wife, forbids mention of it and hides all affection and beauty from his sickly son who he locks in his room.
The secret of the garden and the loving mother who cultivated its roses remains hidden until a young relative named Mary is sent to live with the dysfunctional family. Slowly and not without pain and tears of her own, her curiosity and determination to find love opens a brand-new world for all the family. Each character experiences a sort of rebirth, blooming as they awaken to new life.
In the 1991 Broadway musical adaptation of the book, the ghost of the mother of the sickly boy sings to him and Mary:
Stay there in the garden,
Where love grows free and wild.
Come to my garden.
Come, sweet child.
In the garden of the soul where roses are prayers, love grows.
I have no doubt actual roses are prayers. My maternal grandmother had a rose garden which she cultivated diligently, pruning and digging on hands and knees. I wonder if her thoughts turned to prayers while she carefully turned over the earth and fed the rosebushes. My granddad never failed to point out the arrangements she would artfully place in a vase on a small, beveled mirror on her kitchen table when we visited. I can see them in my mind’s eye still, shades of pink, mauve, yellow and so fragrant.
“We must heal from the wounds of limiting our flesh from living fully in wholeness with the divine.”
The fertile garden is where our heart desires grow. Yet so often we deny ourselves entrance to its freedom, confused by preachers of fear of self-love and false purity. Retraining our minds to unlock the gardens of our souls, to open to the spirit with joy, will take patience and practice much like growing a rose garden. We must heal from the wounds of limiting our flesh from living fully in wholeness with the divine. Jesus stands at the garden door and knocks.
![](https://baptistnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Marble_relief_Flight_to_Egypt_or_Bethlehem_400_AD_ByzMAth_BXM_312_081079-300x266.jpg)
Detail of marble relief Way to Bethlehem. One of the oldest depictions of the Bethlehem scene from 400 AD. Note the trees surrounding the trio, indicating an outdoor location. (Wikimedia)
Mary gave birth to Jesus in a garden of sorts. The nativity often is portrayed as a lean-to stable or a cave with animals surrounding the manger where Mary laid the newborn Christ child wrapped in swaddling clothes. Even if the place of birth was an indoor-outdoor sort of room where animals were kept so there was a manger at hand, nature plays an important part in the birth story. There was no place in the guest room, so the woman-born baby Jesus Messiah is rightly close to the earth from which he is intimately connected to the Creator. So, we imagine animals with Jesus because of course they recognize his divinity. The traditional English carol “Jesus Our Brother, Kind and Good” says:
Jesus, our brother, kind and good,
was humbly born in a stable rude,
and the friendly beasts around him stood; Jesus, our brother, kind and good.
“The soul becomes a nativity,” says Sue Monk Kidd in When the Heart Waits. We, like the animals, welcome Jesus to be reborn this Advent. Advent is as much about rebirth as it is about birth. Our souls must make room again in the garden where roses will have room to flourish and grow.
In a modern country song, “Merry Go Round,” artist Kasey Musgraves plays with the old English nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary quite contrary” to explore the cycle of life in a small town:
If you ain’t got two kids by 21
You’re probably gonna die alone
At least that’s what tradition told you
And it don’t matter if you don’t believe
Come Sunday mornin’, you best be there
In the front row like you’re supposed to.
Same hurt in every heart
“Same hurt in every heart.” Our souls cry out due to norms imposed on all of us but especially women and others with less power. We cry out, “how long O Lord?” as the Psalmist did.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
We’re so bored until we’re buried
Just like dust, we settle in this town
On this broken merry go ’round
Merry go ’round
Some say the “Mary, Mary quite contrary” rhyme, which also occurs in The Secret Garden musical, is referring to Mother Mary but its origin is unknown. The oldest known example of the nursery rhyme is from Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book published in 1744:
Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With Silver Bells, And Cockle Shells,
And so my garden grows.
I imagine any outspoken woman is dubbed a contrary Mary.
I imagine our Mary, mother of Jesus, was called contrary. Just imagine what her community would be saying about her. She is openly given the lead by God and God’s angels, not Joseph or her father in a patriarchal society, which had to have been questioned loudly. If God had ordained the established hierarchy, “Mary would have been the last to know” of the miracle of the incarnation that grew in her body, says Shirley Taylor. Yet it is Mary who knows, who speaks, who sings, who teaches all of us.
I cannot help but notice this contrary, outspoken woman has a garden that grows.
The “hurt in heart” and “quite contrary Mary” serve to remind us we are not just souls, but souls with flesh and blood. Women have suffered abuse and are in need of healing because we have failed to recognize in our own holy Scriptures the value of women’s bodies and minds.
This collective abusive trauma of patriarchy takes its toll often without us being fully aware of how it affects our bodies. The physicality of birth can have long-reaching health implications for women. Often women reach the age of menopause and are surprised to deal with additional problems on top of the difficulties of the changes of menopause like sexual disfunction, pelvic floor and bladder issues as estrogen levels decline. Many of these issues stem from childbirth, where women were not given proper care or time to recover. Our culture expects women to stay silent about issues surrounding birth, contraception, menstruation and menopause no matter our age. Add in the constant of sexual harassment, sexual abuse and the gaslighting of the medical field, and we must consider the sweeping harm we have done to women while our eyes have been shut to their physical and emotional needs.
I recently read only allowing exceptions for abortion bans when a woman is sexually assaulted in cases of rape or incest reinforces the assumption a woman only has agency over her own body once someone else has violated it. It grieves my heart we see women as disposable, bodies used and hearts sore, often forced into birth in many states.
Forced birth is violence. Somehow men have shifted all the blame and shame upon women for unwanted pregnancies when ejaculating irresponsibly causes 100% of all unwanted pregnancies, says Gabrielle Stanely Blair in her similarly titled book, Ejaculate Responsibly. Becoming pregnant following the recent abortion bans can be life threatening as we have seen doctors afraid to treat women with the care they need until at death’s door, and it can be criminal. Women have died from lack of care, women have been imprisoned for suffering a miscarriage in their bathroom toilet, accused of abortion. Sadly I believe more disrespect, violence and abuse will be in store for women as we enter the second Trump administration.
The ones who legislate these abhorrent injustices to women claim they do so in the name of Jesus, but they have forgotten the lessons of the incarnation. Perhaps they never learned.
Mary’s selfhood teaches us agency and consent are paramount in how God honors her. God trusts her in this divine collaboration, and the proof is in the roses that bloom and flourish in her garden.
“I was more able to accept the value of my physical self when I realized that incarnation occurred in connection with the body, that Mary birthed Christ through her flesh, portraying a marriage of matter and spirit. It was a dazzling idea to me, a healing idea, says Sue Monk Kidd again from When the Heart Waits.
“I was more able to accept the value of my physical self when I realized that incarnation occurred in connection with the body.”
There is an old joke I read in The Way of the Rose by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn, which tells of Moses asking God for one final gift as he nears his death. God grants Moses his unspoken gift and Moses goes on to ask to have his belly button removed. God thinks this is a bit strange, but Moses says he always has hated having a belly button and would really like to be rid of it before he dies. It is his last wish. God grants Moses’ wish with one caveat, “You must know that everything in creation I have made for a purpose, for a reason?” Moses isn’t deterred one bit and wants his wish to be granted, to be belly button free. So, God instructs Moses to go up to Mt. Sinai one more time and lay down naked and wait. Moses follows God’s instructions (this time) and is waiting in the nude when a large cloud shaped as a screwdriver overshadows the mountain where Moses lays and slowly unscrews Moses’ bellybutton and removes it. The cloud floats away.
Moses is thrilled! He stands up and his butt falls off.
In this far-fetched tale, Moses wanted to be rid of any sign he was connected to his mother, say Strand and Finn. He neglected to remember his humanity. Moses is human because he is woman-born — not quite in the same way as Jesus, for Moses had a human father, but he has a navel, which is the remains of an umbilical cord that connected him to his mother in the womb. A more modern joke or put down is “cut the cord!” and we do not even realize the reference is to our mother’s body and its connection to our own.
We cannot disconnect ourselves from our mothers any more than we can disconnect ourselves from God. Furthermore, “We are not just made by God. We are made of God,” says Julian of Norwich.
We are indeed made of our mothers.
Like mothers, gardens connect us. Like the secret garden, they have the power to heal us, to bring us back together. To restore us to walk among the roses again. We are living beings, like the ancient rose bushes set deep in the ground rooted in faith, grounded in divine love. When we cut the flowers from the vine, they are immediately dead; although they may bloom a while longer, eventually they will wither and die. Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches with many blooms in this rose garden.
May we remain in the loving arms of this Jesus who has a loving mother.
From the old 1912 hymn “In the Garden” by C. Austin Miles:
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.
The rose garden awaits you.
Come, sweet child.
Julia Goldie Day is an ordained minister within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and lives in Memphis, Tenn. She is a painter and proud mother to Jasper, Barak and Jillian. Learn more at her website or follow her on socials @JuliaGoldieDay.
Further resources inspired by themes from “Mary the Rosebud” will be provided by the author at juliagoldieday.comeach week. Click for poetry, prayers, music and more art to inspire you this season of Advent.
Previously in this series: