Certain Gardens

A Bible story

There were serpents in the garden. I counted seven, and they all said the same thing:

You will not certainly die.

But something was dying, certainly.

The garden was beautiful once. Birds for hearing. Flowers for smelling. Fruit for tasting. Small timid animals and rough tree bark for touching. All of it painted and dappled in glorious color for seeing.

When the first serpent arrived, it was beautiful, too, seeming more beautiful than all the wonders in the garden, even. I thought how this serpent could only augment this garden, my garden. I did not know why it told me, “You will not certainly die.” It emphasized the you. I had not thought of dying in the first place, and in spite of its strange greeting, I welcomed it into the garden gladly.

The birdsong sounded fainter after that day, but then, the colors were brighter, perhaps? So when the second serpent arrived and said, “You will not certainly die,” I believed its assurances and let it in after the first one. I found I could no longer smell the flowers, and so when the third serpent arrived like an undulating garland of the most beautiful flowers in the world, I opened my garden to it even before it could hiss insistently, “You will not certainly die.”

Then fruit became like sand in my mouth, and I began to look about me for something that might satisfy my hunger while the fourth serpent slithered through my open gate and said, “You will not certainly die.” With the emphasis on certainly, everything sounded much less certain. I thought the only way to fulfill the serpents’ promise was to eat the small timid animals, and they fled from me until I was all alone with the serpents. The fifth serpent came and said, “You will not certainly die,” and with that final word, all the colors winked out.

And so I sat in the silent grey, surrounded by bare branches with no birds and dead flowers without seed, and nothing moved but the occasional undulation of a serpent. And a hiss whispered, all in one tone, “You will not certainly die.” A sixth serpent.

The seventh serpent arrived on a day of no sun, and no moon, and no breath of wind. The other serpents were stilled. The seventh serpent wrapped itself around the others and spoke not a word.

And I, who would not certainly die, looked around at my certainly dead garden and began to scream. I screamed and screamed until I was hoarse, and then I swallowed and screamed some more. I do not know if I screamed on the outside as well. Probably sometimes I did. Inside my garden, it was always. Always and always screaming. Until the Gardener arrived.

First thing, he sent the serpents slithering out of the garden gate with a word. I didn’t hear him say the word. I saw him be it. The word was Life. The word was himself.

Next thing, he helped me set up a gate so they couldn’t come back. Then he said to follow him, so I did, bringing my garden with me the whole time. There were others who came along, bringing their worlds with them, too. And the Gardener, the Fisherman, the Shepherd, the Rabbi—whatever he was to any of us and all of us, brought the color and the music and the fragrance and the flavor and the wholesome human touch back to our worlds—to the one world we shared with him.

There were no more serpents in my garden. Sometimes I went back in there to be sure. They were not there, but they were not gone. Sometimes I heard them hissing in the questions or the challenges of the crowds. There were no hisses in the honest questions, but not all questions were honest. Sometimes I thought I saw those serpents, weaving in and out among the soldiers, swirling even about our Rabbi’s body—shimmering, shifting, not quite visible in the light or the mist. But they were gone from me, and he had done it. They would never be a match for him.

Would they?

I cannot bear to tell you what the serpents did to him, but they were more than seven by then, and everything they had done to my garden they did to him, and much worse. Except for the color—serpentine rivers of red where royal-purple wounds broke open on his earth-brown skin.

There was no screaming from him—just a cry: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

Why indeed? I wondered. I could not enter my garden. It had been locked from the inside. I did not want to enter in any case, because he would not be there. I thought I already knew what it looked like, and I had no more screaming left, and he was no longer there to stop me if I started.

But there was a garden on the outside. I could go there and be with his body. I had heard there were soldiers in this garden, but no serpents. There was nothing left for the serpents to take or to kill. Soldiers, I thought, I could manage. One woman would be no threat to them. They would let me stay.

When I entered the garden, however, there were no soldiers either. There was no one at all. The grave where I saw them lay the Rabbi was open and empty—nothing left. I had done with screaming perhaps, but a garden absent of him seemed even worse than one full of serpents, and I began to weep.

There was someone. Someone said, “Woman, why do you weep?”

I thought I was speaking to the gardener of the place. “They have taken away my Lord,” I said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” It was easier than explaining about the serpents.

“Maryam,” someone said.

I spun toward the voice. He sounded different. He looked something different. But as he spoke it, I heard in my name what I had not heard when he cast the serpents out of my garden all that time before: Life.

“Rabboni!” I cried.

I thought he was the gardener. And I was right.

What a beautiful garden this is, I thought. The most beautiful garden in the world. And so, though my feet have taken me many places since, following him, I have never left that place where the tomb stands empty and the serpents are gone. And I certainly will not die.