A Garden of Roses
This week a package arrived in the mail: a rosary unlike any I have owned before. Each bead is shaped like a rose, and together they form a small garden in my hands—red, orange, yellow, purple, blue, green. When I turned it over for the first time, I thought of St. Louis de Montfort, who called the rosary a “wreath of roses,” each prayer another bloom, each repetition another act of devotion. For him, this devotion crowned Jesus and Mary. For me, it revealed something more immediate: prayer is a garden, and I am the gardener.
I do not call myself a person of faith. I do not pray to be heard, nor do I ask for blessings. My prayers are smaller and more ordinary than that. They are not about moving heaven but about tending the soil of my own life. They are acts of cultivation: fingering beads, tracing a labyrinth, repeating words with my breath. Like a garden, prayer does not transform in a moment—it requires attention, patience, pruning, and care.
Gardens have always carried meaning in Christian imagination. The Bible begins in a garden, where God walks with humanity in Eden. Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, whose very name means “oil press.” On Easter morning, he was mistaken for a gardener. Revelation closes with a garden city, where the tree of life bears fruit and the river waters the nations. Prayer, in this sense, is not far from soil and seed. It is the patient work of turning ordinary ground into a place where something new can grow.
I have walked real gardens that taught me the same truth. In Columbus, Ohio, the Park of Roses stretches across thirteen acres with over eleven thousand specimens. In Portland’s International Rose Test Garden, I watched gardeners tend their hybrids: planting, watering, pruning, testing which would flourish and which would fail. What looked timeless and effortless was always the result of steady work. Nothing was born sacred. Everything became sacred because someone cared for it.
So it is with my prayers. They are not declarations of faith but acts of devotion. They do not prove belief; they cultivate life. This essay is about that garden: how prayer, across traditions and practices, has become my way of tending what I cannot explain, living religiously without being spiritual.
Fill ‘er up, Brother
The first soil I knew was Baptist soil. It was not the slow, patient cultivation of a monastery or cathedral garden. It was more like industrial farming: efficient, busy, endlessly productive. Prayer was not a quiet tending of roses but a quick crop to be planted, harvested, and replanted again. Church itself was often compared to a gas station—you filled your tank on Sunday, burned it through the week, and came back empty by Saturday night. When the car broke down, a revival was called, a mechanic summoned, an engine overhauled. In that world, prayer was not cultivation but fuel.
Yet even here, there were gardeners. My Grandpa Ernie was one. A Southern Baptist to his core, he always claimed his pew and sang loudly from it. At home, I found him bent over his King James Bible, pages filled with his rough block handwriting. He planted seeds in the margins, his notes testifying to a faith lived out in patience and compassion. His devotion was not showy, but steady. If anyone needed help, he offered it. If anyone asked for prayer, he gave it. If prayer was fuel in the Baptist imagination, Ernie carried extra, pouring it freely into others.
My own experience of this soil was more playful. I sat in the balcony, sometimes ducking under the rope into the roped-off section just because I could. My friend Nate and I played King’s on the Corner while waiting for Sunday school. Around the coffee pot, I watched the men of the church—my grandfather among them—sharing fellowship as faithfully as they sang hymns. These were ordinary moments, but they became part of the garden nonetheless: seeds of belonging, even if I did not yet recognize them as such.
Prayer in this world was also a fence. To pray “from the heart” marked you as authentic. To read words from a book, or to repeat them, was to be guilty of “vain repetition.” Catholics, Episcopalians, and anyone else who prayed from written texts were judged as outsiders. And yet, the freeform prayers I heard every week followed their own liturgy: “Lord, we just thank you for this day…” was as predictable as sunrise. We denied we had traditions, but we tended them all the same.
Looking back, I see that Baptist soil was both fertile and fragile. It produced strong roots in people like my grandfather—steady, compassionate, generous. But it also exhausted itself quickly. Churches split over trivialities: the color of the carpet, the style of music, the choice of pastor. Without deeper cultivation, the soil grew thin. For me, prayer here was habit more than encounter. It was already practice, already repetition. The seeds of devotion were sown, though I would only recognize them much later.
O Lord, open thou our lips
After Ernie’s death and my falling out with the Baptist church, it was my other grandfather, Chuck, who drew me back toward religion. An Episcopalian, he was the kind of man who never missed a Sunday or a communion service. His religion was less like planting seeds and more like maintaining stone pathways—orderly, predictable, sometimes unyielding. Yet his invitation to join him at Grace Episcopal opened the gate to another garden, one tended differently from the soil I had known.
Here I encountered the Book of Common Prayer, and with it, a new way of praying. Gone was the improvisation of Baptist services. Instead, there were prayers carefully cultivated across centuries, trimmed, and grafted until they endured. At first, I thought they would feel hollow. But when I heard the Collect for Purity—“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid…”—I felt the weight of words that had been spoken by generations before me. These prayers did not demand invention. They asked only for repetition, for joining.
Morning Prayer began with a call: “O Lord, open thou our lips. And our mouth shall show forth thy praise.” Evening Prayer ended with the Magnificat: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.” These were not my words, yet through use they became mine. Augustine once said that when Christians pray the psalms, they “speak with the voice of the whole Christ.” In those moments, I felt myself grafted into a larger garden, one that had been tended long before me and would outlast me.
What I discovered in liturgical prayer was freedom. In the Baptist world, prayer was a test of authenticity: were you sincere enough, spontaneous enough, Spirit-filled enough? In the Episcopal world, prayer was simply practice. The words were given; my part was to pray them. Philosopher James K.A. Smith has said, “We learn to pray by praying.” The Book of Common Prayer showed me this truth. Prayer did not require faith or feeling. It required cultivation, day after day, season after season.
Through Chuck’s influence, I came to see liturgical churches as lay monasteries—gardens tended by communities instead of cloisters. Here, prayer was not the occasional crop of a revival but the steady tending of psalms, collects, and hymns. For me, it was a revelation: prayer could be ordered, repeated, and communal without needing supernatural guarantees. It could be devotion in the truest sense—ordinary words, made sacred by care.
The Divine Office
When I first visited St. Gregory’s Abbey, I encountered the Divine Office in its full form. The Benedictines ordered their lives by the psalms: Matins at dawn, Lauds as the sun rose, Vespers at evening, Compline at night. Each hour was a season in miniature, tending the day the way a gardener tends soil—watering at the right time, pruning at the right time, waiting for growth. Nothing about it was spectacular. It was ordinary work repeated faithfully, until the ordinary became devotion.
What surprised me later was realizing that this rhythm had not disappeared into cloisters alone. In liturgical churches, the same pattern had been simplified for daily life. Morning and Evening Prayer, drawn from the Divine Office, made the monastic cycle available to anyone with a prayer book. Where the monks prayed seven times a day, the laity prayed twice, folding devotion into ordinary schedules. It was a way of extending the monastery into the parish, turning the whole church into a lay garden.
Morning Prayer began with praise: “O Lord, open thou our lips. And our mouth shall show forth thy praise.” Evening Prayer closed the day with Mary’s Magnificat: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.” These prayers marked time like sunlight and shadow in a garden. They were less about theology than about rhythm, less about belief than about daily tending.
Coming from a Baptist background, this was startling. Baptists have no monastic tradition, no common rule of prayer. Each congregation is independent, free to adapt to the needs of the moment. That independence makes them flexible—quick to embrace things like YouTube services and contemporary music—but it also makes them fragile. Churches split easily, often over trivialities, like weeds overtaking shallow soil. Without deeper cultivation, the ground erodes.
The Divine Office showed me another way. It was not about adapting endlessly or chasing novelty. It was about tending the same soil, season after season, until it bore fruit. Monks in their cloisters and laypeople in their parishes shared in the same garden, simply tended differently. And for me, learning this rhythm was transformative. Prayer did not need to be inspired or inventive. It only needed to be practiced, faithfully, like a gardener watering at dawn and dusk.
Tending the Garden
As I tended this garden of prayer, I began to notice that it was not limited to the soil I inherited. Other traditions had cultivated their own ways of prayer, and while I do not claim their faith, I found I could learn from their practices. Each was rooted in a different theology, but each shared the same human impulse: to order life through repetition, to cultivate presence through rhythm. I borrowed some of these plants and grafted them into my own garden.
From the Christian East came the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” In Orthodox tradition, it is repeated until it becomes ceaseless, woven into breath itself. For monks, it is mystical—a union of heart and God. For me, it became a simple discipline: words and breath moving together, teaching me that prayer does not need to be invented each time but can be cultivated through habit.
The Paternoster beads reached further back into history. Before the rosary was fixed in form, medieval Christians counted their prayers with cords of “Our Fathers.” London even had a Paternoster Row, lined with rosary-makers selling prayer tools to pilgrims. Historian Eamon Duffy describes these practices as the “prayer life of the ordinary.” Holding a reproduction Paternoster, I felt connected to that history—not as a believer in its promises, but as someone honoring the way repetition shaped daily life. It was another reminder that prayer is not only in texts but in hands, in objects, in rhythms carried forward.
Beyond Christianity, Zen introduced me to zazen—the practice of sitting. No petitions, no upward gestures, no intercessions. Just posture and breath. In Zen, this is not preparation for something else; it is the practice itself. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, saw Zen as a partner to Christian contemplation because both respect silence. For me, zazen was not enlightenment. It was presence. It was the cultivation of stillness in a noisy world.
Hindu tradition offered another rhythm in the sohum mantra: inhale “so,” exhale “hum.” In its original context, it is a recognition of divine unity, the self with ultimate reality. I cannot claim that theology. But I can recognize the wisdom of listening to breath, of letting the body become the soil of devotion. It reminded me that prayer need not always be words. It can be the rhythm of lungs and air, cultivated with intention.
I treat these practices with respect. They belong to gardens not my own, but they have taught me how to tend mine. For me, they are not proofs of faith but tools of devotion. They do not make the supernatural present, but they shape the ordinary. Each one shows that prayer is larger than any single tradition, and yet always particular when practiced by a single person. In my garden, they grow together: roses, beads, psalms, silence, breath.
The Marketplace
My friend Fr. Steve Wilson once described the religious landscape as a marketplace. He meant it as a place where denominations compete like merchants, each selling its version of the truth. I prefer to think of it as a garden broken into fenced plots. Each plot claims to be the true soil, each insists its fruit is the only harvest worth tasting. But the fences grow taller, and the quarrels louder, until the garden looks less like a place of cultivation and more like a battlefield of weeds.
Division has always been part of Christianity. Cyprian of Carthage declared, “Outside the church there is no salvation.” But which church did he mean? By the eleventh century, East and West split, fencing off their gardens. In the sixteenth, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli rose against Rome but also against one another, uprooting common ground and planting rival fields. Even the Eucharist — meant as a sign of unity — became one of the deepest trenches of division.
In America, the pattern intensified. Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran plots multiplied, then subdivided again: Free Will Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Missionary Baptists; Presbyterian Church (USA), Orthodox Presbyterian, Cumberland Presbyterian. The fences multiplied faster than the fruit. Churches broke apart not only over doctrine, but over the color of carpet, the style of music, or the hiring of a pastor. Weeds overtook the soil, and harvests withered.
What struck me most was how prayer itself was often claimed as property. Freeform Baptists insisted their soil was the only fertile ground. Catholics defended their rosaries, Anglicans their offices, Pentecostals their tongues. Each plot insisted its plants alone bore the true fruit of devotion. Yet in defending their fences, they often forgot the garden they were meant to tend.
I think of Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple: “My Father’s house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.” His anger was not at prayer, but at its commodification — the holy traded as transaction. Looking at the fenced-off plots of Christianity, I suspect he would do the same today. True prayer is not a crop to be sold, fenced, or patented. It is cultivation: the steady tending of soil, the planting of seeds, the care that makes ordinary ground bear fruit.
I Am the Gardener
The Bible begins in a garden and ends in one. Eden at the dawn of creation, Gethsemane on the night of despair, the Easter morning where Jesus was mistaken for a gardener, and the New Jerusalem where the tree of life grows beside the river. Gardens are where Scripture locates both loss and renewal, both sweat and rest.
De Montfort imagined the rosary as a crown of roses offered to Jesus and Mary. When I turn the beads of my new rosary — roses of many colors, strung together in my hands — I see something simpler. Each bead is not a flower for heaven but a seed planted in my own soil. Every repetition is cultivation, a practice of attention, memory, and care. This is not faith; it is devotion.
My grandparents shaped this soil in different ways. Ernie planted seeds with his King James Bible and his compassionate prayers. Chuck laid out the stone paths of Episcopal liturgy. My grandmother taught me that hymns sung while making jelly could become as sacred as psalms. Each of them tended part of the garden I now inherit. Their plots were not always harmonious, but the ground they worked is the ground I now cultivate.
Prayer, for me, is not a transaction or a miracle. It is not about being heard in heaven. It is about tending life here: planting words, pruning distractions, watering habits, waiting for fruit. Science can describe this in terms of mindfulness and psychology. Tradition describes it as repetition and ritual. I call it devotion — ordinary acts made sacred by care.
This is the garden I have been given, and the one I choose to tend. My tattoos, my rosaries, my labyrinths, my prayers are not proofs of faith but signs of cultivation. I am the gardener. And in my garden, I pray:
May it grow in peace.
May it bear fruit according to its kind.
May love and compassion bloom.
Amen.