[Dialogue] 10/06/11, Spong: Phyllis' Garden Revisited

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Phyllis' Garden Revisited

We went to see Phyllis when we were in the United Kingdom this past summer.  Some of you will remember Phyllis for I have written about her before.  Phyllis’ Garden was the name of that column written in 2003 and she and I both had an enormous response to it.  For my newer readers let me introduce her briefly.
Phyllis Weller was well into her eighties when we first met her some eight years ago.  Her life was a simple one that had been contained within 25 miles of her village of Stoneleigh, near Coventry in England.  She lived in what we would call public housing, but what the English call “alms housing,” which meant it was assisted living for the elderly poor.  Her modest two-room flat opened on to a street called “The Green,” where a street sign bearing that name was located just outside her front door.  This sign was knee high and underneath it was a space no more than 36 inches wide and 18 inches long.  Into that space Phyllis had built her own personal “garden.”  She dug up that tiny piece of ground each year and planted flowers chosen so that there would be something blooming from the spring through the fall.  She tended this garden with care, weeding it and watering it daily.  It beautified this sidewalk along which many citizens of that village walked each day.
Our original meeting with Phyllis was quite accidental.  Christine and I were hiking through the woods in the Coventry area of England and came across the village of Stoneleigh.  It was about 11 o’clock, the time that the English stop for what is usually the first coffee of the morning, tea being the source of caffeine with which the day normally begins in that land.  We decided to come off the trail and enter the village in search of a pub where morning coffee might be available.  No pub, however, was to be found and the only person we came across in our walk-through the village was this elderly lady, bending over from her waist, weeding her tiny garden.
We thus enquired of her as to the location of a pub where we might find coffee.  “Oh, we do not have a pub in this little village,” she said, “but come into my house and I will brew a cup for you.”  We thanked her for her graciousness, but feeling that this was too much of an imposition, we declined.  We did stay, however, long enough to visit with her for a few minutes and that is how we learned about both Phyllis and her garden.
Phyllis had been born into a large family of minimally-educated working class English people, who lived near the poverty level.  Her formal schooling ended at age 14 when her family, in an economically driven decision, put her into what the English call “service,” but which means that she was “given” to a well-to-do family for training as a domestic servant in exchange for her room and board. It was a small step above slavery. Her family of origin thus had one less mouth to feed and the receiving family got cheap labor.  Phyllis remained with that family until she was almost 20 when she married a sheet metal worker and the newly weds moved into a modest flat in one of the poorer sections of Coventry.  By this time World War II was in full swing and the “Battle of Britain” was being waged in the skies over England.  The Coventry area, where automobiles and tanks were being manufactured, was a prime target for German bombs.  The flat into which Phyllis and her husband had moved was bombed within two weeks of their arrival.  They were not injured, but they were dislocated.  Soon afterward her husband was drafted into the armed services and Phyllis returned to domestic service, the only skill she had.  Her life thus continued to hover around the poverty level.  Eventually, her husband returned safely from the war, went back into sheet metal work, and their lives resumed some semblance of normalcy.  They had a baby girl and life seemed stable for a few years.  Her husband died, however, before the child was grown and Phyllis’ life returned to being a struggle for subsistence.  When we met her, she was living very modestly in that supported housing project on “The Green” in Stoneleigh.  Her daughter was still in the area with her family and Phyllis’ life was relatively happy.
That was the time when she decided to cultivate this 36 inch by 18 inch space underneath the street sign into what the people of the village came to call “Phyllis’ garden.” It was,” she said, “her contribution to the village,” her attempt to bring “joy and beauty to her world.”  She was obviously very proud of this garden
I was quite taken both by this garden and Phyllis’ story.  Here was an elderly woman, with very little of this world’s goods, making a gift to her village, a spot of wonder for all to enjoy.  This garden illustrated for me the fact that every person, no matter how modest, has a gift to give.  This tiny garden was Phyllis’ gift, her contribution, to her community.  So I wrote a column about Phyllis and her garden as an illustration of what an individual can do, an example for that numberless group of human beings to follow who constitute the ordinary people of the world.  That category of ordinary people includes the vast majority of us.  I tried in this column to call to mind what little things each of us might do to transform our world.  I closed that column by asking my readers to write Phyllis a letter or card and to thank her for beautifying her world with both her life and her garden.  I gave my readers her English address because Phyllis knew little of such modern miracles as e-mail.  The response was overwhelming.  Phyllis received about 500 letters and cards from around the world.  It took some effort for my readers to write out the address, get a stamp to the UK and post the letter.  I was impressed by and grateful for the magnitude of their response and of their interest.
Imagine the impact this mail had on the village of Stoneleigh!  Phyllis, who might previously have gotten a letter or two a month, now began to receive 25, 35, even 50 letters and cards a day.  On a number of days, Phyllis received more mail than everyone else in the village put together!  The postman who delivered her mail was dumbfounded.  He even enquired after the first couple of hundred letters if Phyllis was “into drugs!”  Phyllis kept all of these letters in a basket and they became a village story.
Over the years since that first meeting, every time Christine and I are near Coventry, we have taken what has become a familiar path through the woods and meadows to Stoneleigh to see Phyllis.  On one occasion, our daughter was with us, on another occasion, our sister-in-law, Doris, who lives in Coventry, joined us.  So, almost every year we went by to renew our friendship with Phyllis, who always greeted us with a smile and always showed us the basket filled with letters that had come from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Cambodia, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway, France and South Africa as well as from within the UK.  She was enormously proud of those letters and everyone in the village of Stoneleigh now knew the story of Phyllis and her garden.
This summer, we were back in Coventry and we made our five mile walk first to Stoneleigh and then to Phyllis’ flat.  The first thing we noticed when we arrived on “The Green” was that the little garden was overgrown with grass.  One could still see the outline and the imprint of Phyllis’ garden, but nature’s relentless power to reclaim space once cultivated had clearly been operative.  We wondered if Phyllis had died.  Apprehensively we rang the bell.  A workman came to the door.  “We are looking for Phyllis,” we said,  “She doesn’t live here any more, he answered, “I’m here getting the flat ready to receive its next resident.”  We enquired if he knew anything about Phyllis.  He said he had heard she had been in the hospital and was transferred to a nursing home in the area, he did not know which one or where.  “Her neighbor might know,” he concluded.  Her neighbor was not in.  We chatted briefly with the workman and discovered that he too had heard of Phyllis’ garden and told us that he had been instructed to give that basket of letters to her daughter to be moved into the nursing home with Phyllis.
We walked back to Coventry aware that we will probably never see Phyllis again and that even the outline of her tiny garden itself would soon disappear. Before many years have passed, according to the laws of our world, no one will remember either Phyllis or her garden.   Does that mean, I wondered, that life is nothing but vanity, as Qoheleth, the preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes, once observed? “Vanity of vanities,” he wrote, “all is vanity.” There is another message, however, in the book of Ecclesiastes that says that there is a proper time for everything: “A time to be born and a time to die.”  There is a time to beautify the world by cultivating a garden and a time for the grass to reclaim that garden. Which will it be for us? “All is vanity?” or “There is a time for everything- a time to plant and a time to reap.” Because we cannot stop the flow of time, are we then to make no effort to transform our world?  That is not the message that I have received from Phyllis.  This lovely woman believed that she could give meaning and beauty to her world if but for a moment.  Following her example we must transform our time and make whatever contribution we, in our unique individuality, have to make.  When life moves on, as it inevitably does, our gifts and our contributions will fade, but the world will be richer for a time because we have lived.  Phyllis tended a tiny garden and because she did, that little garden brought great joy to my life.  I’m glad she lived.  I’m glad I met her.
~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Gill via the Internet, writes:
Question:




I would like to know how you reconcile the story of Creation with the scientific view.  I find it impossible to believe that the earth and everything else was created in seven days, but if I don’t believe it I begin to doubt everything. 


 
Answer:




Dear Gill, 

I don’t try to reconcile the story of creation with the scientific view.  I see no reason to do so.  I do not know of any reputable biblical scholar who thinks the seven-day creation story is a description of creation.  That narrative is a production of the exiled community of the Jews, dating from the 6th century before the Common Era.  It is a hymn of praise to the wonder of creation, designed to justify the Jewish Sabbath day tradition as an essential part of Judaism since this writer is assuming that even God rested on the seventh day. 

My question to you who was it who told you that this was a literal description of the way the world began?  Who do you suppose was present at creation who might have recorded this?  Most scientists today believe the universe came into being somewhere between 13.7 and 13.8 billion years ago.  The planet Earth is no more than 4.5 billion years old.  Life developed on this planet about 3.8 billion years ago.  Human life is somewhere between 4 million and 100,000 years old depending on how one defines human life.  Abraham lived about 1850 BCE, Moses about 1250 BCE and this story of creation was written during the 6th century BCE. 

There is an abundance of religious ignorance in our world and I suspect you have been the victim of it.  I hope you can be in touch with some Christian pastors who have some knowledge of how the Bible came into being.  If you will do that, you will soon learn that literalism about the texts and accuracy of the Bible is an attribute of the uninformed, the unlearned and, increasingly, the closed minded. 

~John Shelby Spong







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