Tending Our Living Garden Where the Tree of Life Blooms

Creation's Paths — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:00:56 GMT

What the Calendar Was Always Trying to Tell Us

Holy days and liturgical seasons used to be dates on a calendar to me. I resonated with some of them, and I understood the historical reason for others, but I didn’t understand what they were for. I didn’t understand formation.

Formation is the lifelong process of becoming more fully human, awake, compassionate, and grounded in purpose through learning, reflection, community, and lived experience. Religious formation shapes the soul and spirit toward wisdom, justice, love, and sacred relationship. My eyes were opened when I learned how the Nordic Folk School tradition understands it. To the Nordic Folk School tradition, formation is not merely about gaining information or credentials, but about cultivating the whole person through dialogue, creativity, shared life, and meaningful participation in the world. Both understandings see formation as transformational rather than transactional. It is about who we are becoming, not simply what we know.

We use a liturgical calendar for formation. We walk with it through the same cycles every year to root us deeper into the tradition, spirituality, and life we live.

A holy day is not merely a commemoration of a person or event. It is an invitation to enter more deeply into their mysteries so we can cultivate our hearts in the grace they have to offer us. I suppose you could say I see holy days and liturgical seasons as sacramental, and it changed my life. They offer us grace if only we would participate and partake in them.

The Work of the People: One Path Was Missing

The word liturgy means, “the work of the people.” It is the public work we do together in community for the good of ourselves and the world. For us, the work is formation into the life of God and the Kin-dom.

When we contemplated our liturgical year, we saw a correlation with the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, but one of the paths was missing.

Advent is the season of Via Positiva. Here we receive the original blessing, savoring the coming light, welcoming the God who overflows into creation. It is a time for awe and wonder.

Lent and the Paschal Season is the time of the Via Negativa. Here we empty ourselves, take up the cross, and descend into death and silence. Here we learn that the dark is not absence but fullness of a different kind.

In the Counting of the Omer from Easter to Pentecost, we practice the season of the Via Creativa. We walk from the creative emergence from resurrection, counting our way into the Spirit’s fire. Here the soul learns to trust its own images and gifts.

Something was missing. There was no season of the Via Transformativa, so we added it to our calendar from the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. We named this season the season of Viriditas. In this time we go out; we participate in the life of the world; and we actively tend the garden of our souls and the world.

What We Carry into the Garden

As we step into the season of Viriditas, the season of the Via Transformativa, we bring with us the awe and wonder we found in Advent, the spaciousness we found in the Paschal season, and the rebirth and the things we birthed as we counted the Omer out into the world to tend to the great garden of life.

In this season, we cleanse our eyes so we see the world clearly. We interfere with injustice and celebrate life with joy and within community. This is the time of year when we remind ourselves how we relate to our lives and to the world around us. We live the truth of being a co-creator with God we learned in the Via Creativa and bring that out into the world for our own return and for its restoration from glory to glory.

Satyagraha: The Courage to Hold Truth

The Living Word in the Via Transformativa is Satyagraha. This is more than nonviolent protest. It is the discipline of holding onto truth so deeply that you refuse to become what you oppose.

What is the truth we hold onto? Everything is created in Original Blessing, and while pain is real, it is not the sum of existence. Every life is sacred and we cannot throw anyone away because all life is valuable. We co-create this world through our creativity, interfering with injustice through joy and celebration.

The word was coined by Mahatma Gandhi from the Sanskrit words satya meaning “truth” and agraha meaning “holding firmly to.” Gandhi sometimes called it “truth-force” or “soul-force.” But I think of it as the courage to confront injustice without surrendering our humanity in the process.

It shaped movements like the Salt March, labor strikes, boycotts, fasting, and civil disobedience. But at its core, Satyagraha was never just political strategy. It was spiritual practice.

Gandhi believed that violence damages everyone involved, including the soul of the person using it. So the goal was not to destroy an enemy, but to awaken conscience, heal division, and expose injustice through disciplined love and sacrifice.

To practice Satyagraha is to refuse hatred even while resisting harm. It means telling the truth clearly, refusing cooperation with injustice, accepting suffering without retaliation, and remaining open to the possibility that even your opponent can change. It demands courage because it is easier to strike back than to remain grounded in compassion.

In everyday life, Satyagraha can look like:

speaking honestly when silence would be safer
refusing to dehumanize people you disagree with
resisting systems of exploitation without cruelty
setting boundaries without hatred
choosing integrity over domination
building alternatives instead of only condemning what is broken

Satyagraha is active, not passive. It is resistance rooted in love rather than revenge.

This is the heart of the Via Transformativa.

Viriditas: Staying Green in a World That Seeks to Dry Us Out

We keep ourselves strong and growing through the cultivation of Viriditas in our hearts so we can develop the Verdure we need to stay alive and greening in a world that all too often seeks to dry us out.

Hildegard of Bingen gave us the word Viriditas to describe the greening power of life itself. It is the vitality that pushes a seed through the soil, the force that turns bare branches green in spring, and the sacred energy that helps us grow into who we are meant to become. It is also the Green Wisdom that teaches us how to sustain and maintain life.

When we lose touch with viriditas, life feels dry, brittle, and exhausted. We go through the motions, but something in us is no longer flourishing. This can happen when we overextend ourselves, or when we struggle under the blistering heat of those who seek to control us, plunder our wealth, or coerce us into division or violence. All these things dry the land and require energy to stand still, much less push forward.

Viriditas reminds us that growth is not something we manufacture through sheer effort. It is something we participate in. Just as a garden grows when it receives sunlight, water, and care, our souls grow when we make space for wonder, healing, creativity, and love. We cultivate this in our hearts as Verdure.

Verdure is mature vital greenness. New shoots are verdant, but they are young and tender. Verdurous growth is strong, green, and healthy. As we connect in Viriditas, we develop this verdurous mind that allows us to stay vital even when the world and events around us seek to dry us out.

At its heart, Viriditas is the Divine’s life flowing through creation. It is the greening power that renews the world and invites us to become fully alive.

Two Hands for the Garden’s Work

As we grow in Viriditas and Satyagraha, the injustices in ourselves, and in our culture and world become clearer. God is love, and living in love is living in God. We have two tools that help us continue to move forward in a healthy and sustainable way: teshuvah and tikkun.

Teshuvah is the practice of returning. It really is that simple. It is easy for us to get distracted, to wander, or to stray from the path. More often than not, we do not do this for ill intentions. We are busy. We are able to be fascinated by things and ideas that look good, but that draw us away from the way of life. All we have to do is turn around and return to the path.

Tikkun olam, the restoration of the world, is both a mystical and practical work. As we walk the way of life, we restore the world through a myriad of actions we take in our spiritual practice. There is too much to say about tikkun for this brief introduction, but we will be talking about it more very soon.

The Heart of the Via Transformativa: A Path to Unity

We find the heart of the Via Transformativa in:

2 Peter 1:5-9
5. Yes, and for this very cause adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence; and in moral excellence, knowledge;
6. and in knowledge, self-control; and in self-control perseverance; and in perseverance godliness;
7. and in godliness brotherly affection; and in brotherly affection, love.
8. For if these things are yours and abound, they make you to be not idle or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
9. For he who lacks these things is blind, seeing only what is near, having forgotten the cleansing from his old sins.

This gives us the ladder of living qualities that grow in us as we live and practice our faith. While it is presented as a ladder, it is more of a web of traits and living qualities already present in the soul formed by the first three paths. Here in the Via Transformativa, these qualities begin to flower in the garden preparing to bear fruit.

Faith (Pistis/Emunah) is not believing despite evidence. It is the conviction that the greening is real, confidence in the path, the ground of Emunah from which all action springs. We experience this as the confidence we have in the practices, community, and work we do. Just as we trust our friends and family, we learn to trust the flow of the One Life and the effectiveness of the practice as we experience it. It has a skepticism at its root. We may want to believe, but we are honest about the results we see. If a practice is supposed to grow compassion in us but isn’t, we figure out what is causing it not to work. We might let go of the practice altogether if it is not repairable.

Moral Excellence (Arete) is not a path of guilt and shame; it is a path of discernment. It is establishing the virtuous course of thought, feeling, and action to develop the character of the gardener who tends with care. Jesus taught us that it is not what we take in that defiles us, but what we put out. Moral excellence is learned through teshuvah. We step out, and if we have wandered or strayed from the path, we return to the path and try something else. We are ever improving and will never be forever perfect.

Knowledge (Gnosis/Chokmah) is intelligence and understanding. It is not about being smart or memorization. It teaches us to see clearly what the garden needs and what is choking it. It is the wisdom of Chokmah at work in the world. This is the experience we develop through practice and action and learning from the fruits of our actions.

Self-Control (Egkrateia) is mastery of desire and passion, not suppression of them but right ordering. We need to have a practice of taking a breath between seeing, hearing, or reading something, to consider what it actually means and what action we should take in response to it. All too often we act like people who have built up a lot of static electricity in our bodies that we discharge wildly as we touch the world. When we are reactive, we are more likely to do things we would not ordinarily do and become someone other than who we want to be. We are what we do, not what we say or believe, so if we do not guard our actions, we can change who we are without realizing it. We should not sour our fruit for the simple pleasure of unregulated emotions.

Patience (Hupomone) is so much more than many of us were taught. It is steadfastness, constancy, and endurance. It is the long faithfulness of the gardener who plants what they will not live to harvest. Patience is both a foundation and fruit of most of the virtues we are talking about. Patience reminds us to look at the map so we don’t wander off course. It isn’t just waiting. Patience is the taproot of integrity because it bears in mind both who we are and who we yearn to become, and brings those considerations into the actions we take.

Godliness (Eusebeia) is too often confused with moral excellence. It is reverence and piety, both words that have lost meaning in the modern age. Reverence is the deep respect we have for things, people, and places. Piety is how we demonstrate that respect through our words and actions. The Greek word Eusebeia means good reverence. It is not simply believing in God or performing religious duties. It is living with reverence toward the sacredness woven through life. It is how we show our respect, gratitude, and right relationship with the Divine, ourselves, other people, and creation. It is spirituality embodied in the way we live. Godliness tends the garden as sacred work.

Brotherly Affection (Philadelphia) is the love of the community. It isn’t that we love the community no matter what it does, but that we love it and work to make it become the best it can be. We are a coalition of gardeners; no one tends the garden alone. This is the root of our mutual care and support for one another. Our love for the community is so much more than our love for the circle we draw around those closest to us. It is the love that connects us with all the cosmos as we live God.

Love (Agape) is the core of everything we are and do. It is the animating fire fed by the virtues we practice while it supports all their operations. It is the caritas, the heartfelt charity, that is the energy that makes every step of the path possible and meaningful. It is the Sacred Heart burning at the center of all transformative work. It is the basis of the three commandments of Jesus and the life of the community.

When practiced together, these virtues nurture the greening viriditas at work in us and the satyagraha we give to the world. They are the foundations of our joy and the soul of our community.

Into the Garden Together

This season of Viriditas opens us up to the life of God and roots us into the life of the world. As we learn to tap into the greening life of God, we develop the peace that passes all understanding and the life more abundant.

Many forces in this world seek to dry us out and silence our voices. Paul calls them the powers and principalities of the air, the rulers in high places. Mary’s beautiful Magnificat teaches us the path of God: to take care of one another and cast down the mighty from their thrones. This season reminds us every year how to root into God, Christ, and life so we reject this dryness and green the glorious greening to every corner of the world.

As we walk the Way through this season, we strengthen ourselves for all the trials and tribulations of life. Join us on the Way. He is the vine and we are the branches. Why do the branches keep insisting on doing the work alone when they have so much to gain from the interconnection at the basis of who and what we are?

Don’t worry about making every step perfect. We all trip and wander, but we can always return. If we go out together, we can make sure no one gets lost, and the march continues ever forward.

Creation's Paths: The Greening Gospel