Sowing seeds and nurturing them
Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
One of the questions I asked in Did Jesus go to School? and other questions about parents, children and education was ‘Are parents gardeners or carpenters?’. To answer that question we need to look closely at the nature of gardening and carpentry in the Scriptures and in life. I won’t rewrite my entire chapter here but I will reveal that my own answer to the question is that we are, in some senses, both gardeners and carpenters.
But it’s gardening I want to focus on here. Like gardeners, parents need to take the long view. As I wrote in Did Jesus go to School:
We need to take our time and accept that God will be taking his time too. We live in a world that demands instant results, but children are not products to be churned out at an industrial pace. The seed grows we know not how, but still it grows. Our children are shaped and changed by the slow processes of love, though we may not know how or always see the evidence. As gardeners – as parents – we need the virtue of patience, we need to learn to accept that our job is to plant the seeds and that God’s job is to see that they grow.
There’s also a sense in which wisdom is slow-growing. That’s one reason why at the start of the school year, I showed my 6th Form students a sweetcorn seed and told them how one of my daughters grew sweetcorn from seed. The seed was small but the plants ended up being taller than me.
The important point here is how my daughter grew them. In a way, she did nothing. The plants grew themselves. She simply provided the conditions in which they could grow: the soil and the water. But some other necessary conditions – like the sun – were out of her control. As teachers (and, to a certain extent, as parents) our role is as important and limited as my daughter’s was.
One way of considering this living metaphor either in the classroom or at home is to help children or students grow their own plants over the course of the year. We could choose sunflowers, corn or even avocados. Another way is to pay close attention to the natural world through nature journalling, a topic I will take up in my next post.
In the meantime, if you’d like to read a sample chapter from Did Jesus go to School, you can download one here.