Sometimes it does not seem to matter how hard we try to weed a garden, the things keep coming back. There are times, even after doing what I thought was a thorough job at pulling up weeds I would come back even a few days later, still with an aching back and hands, to discover the garden once again full of weeds! Sometimes it just makes you wonder “do I really need to worry about these weeds? Why don’t I just let them grow in with my flowers or veggies?” That thought withers almost as quickly as your flowers if you leave those weeds in there.
If we continue with our analogy of gardening in relationship to the human soul, we will quickly discover that weeds are to gardens what passions are to the the soul. Passions are the result of allowing evil thoughts (in Greek, logismoi*) take root in the soil of our souls. Weeds come from planted and watered seeds, and passions come from encouraged evil thoughts. Once a certain thought is revisited and reinforced, it becomes harder and harder to control, and we realize that we start acting certain ways that we don’t like almost automatically – like we are on “autopilot.” The thought of lust becomes an affair and the desire for money becomes an all-out gambling problem. Our Lord warned us about this connection in His Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-29).
Weeds wreck gardens and passions (sinful behaviours) wreck souls. How do we ‘weed’ our souls? This process of weeding the garden of our souls has been called by the Fathers of the Church ‘purifying the heart.’ The solution in gardening sheds light on how this process works in our spiritual lives.
Firstly, you are going to have fewer weeds if you don’t let the seeds land in the first place, or you make the soil an inhospitable place for the weeds to take root. This is the function of mulch. Weeds have a much more difficult time in gardens that have mulch. How do we provide mulch for our souls and make them a place where sin can’t take root? By controlling the places we go and the things we see and hear. If we know that we will inevitably gossip if we hang out with a certain group of people at the office, maybe take some time to get to know a different co-worker today. If you know that you will wind up lusting after some of the magazine pictures at the till in the supermarket, use one of the self-serve checkouts, etc. Basically, if there is a bunch of dandelions growing on the edge of your garden and you let them stay there, you can be assured that dandelions will start growing in your garden too. Remove them before they become a problem. Seeking out these problems and dealing with them is what the Desert Fathers called watchfulness (nepsis). We need to be good at watching over our souls and protecting them from a distance.
* Evagrios lists the eight evil thoughts as gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, anger, vainglory and pride.
