The Garden That Brought a Massachusetts Community Together

The soil at Lighthouse Hill looked like powdered concrete.

A dozen raised flower beds had been installed on the back side of the parking lot in the hopes that residents of our church’s affordable housing partner could come outside, dig in, and grow something.

But the beds sat bare and weedy, filled with lifeless construction fill instead of fertile soil. When it rained, water pooled on the dry, cracked surface. Parched fissures ran through the hardened dirt, preventing the beds from doing the good work for which they were intended.

Climate Change Creates Fissures

Fissures in the Soil

Massachusetts has been living through what climatologists call “weather whiplash.”

We experience long dry stretches punctuated by sudden deluges of rain, then return to a long dry stretch again. The hardened ground can’t absorb water that falls so quickly, so the stormwater runs off and erodes the soil instead of sinking in and nourishing it.

Fissures in Our Communities

Just as climate change can dry and crack soil, it also causes fissures in our community. These impacts land hardest on people already living close to the edge.

Greater Boston already has one of the most difficult housing markets in the country. Climate hazards, including storms, intense heat, and flooding, add additional risk and cost to the affordable housing that families like the ones at Lighthouse Hill depend on.

So when I say the soil at Lighthouse Hill couldn’t hold water, I mean it both literally and metaphorically.

Ground that can’t hold water can’t hold anything else, either. It can’t hold nutrients or plant roots. And it can’t hold a season’s worth of hope for a single mom who just wanted to grow her own tomatoes.

Instability in the climate and instability in our communities are two versions of the same problem: Things that ought to be connected becoming separated, whether it be rain from roots, or neighbor from neighbor.

Responding to Climate Change Through Community

Bringing the Garden Back to Life

Our parish imagines something different.

Part of Trinity North Shore’s mission is to build the North Shore Pollinator Corridor, a chain of habitat gardens meant to give pollinators safe passage across a landscape that climate change has made increasingly inhospitable.

Lighthouse Hill’s garden club is one link in that corridor.

The prep work to bring Lighthouse Hill’s beds back to life was unglamorous yet surprisingly rewarding. We cleared weeds from the raised beds and procured a small mountain of fertile planting mix. One wheelbarrow at a time, we hauled it across the parking lot and into the garden.

As we did, a small group of young boys circled the parking lot on their bikes, regarding us and our pile with great curiosity. Their circles became smaller and smaller until they asked, “Can we help?”

Our hearts melted at the simple joy on their faces as they shoveled and spread compost into the raised beds. Stefan, a boy of about eleven, looked up at us and exclaimed, “This is the best day of my life!”

He told us he had recently immigrated from South America and left his grandfather behind. They had spent nearly every day together in their garden. Stefan must have asked us five or six times when our first meeting to sow seeds into the soil would be. He did not want to miss it.

Restoration Begins to Multiply

Our beautiful, thriving zinnia bed is the work of Stefan’s loving hands.

The zinnias occupy one of twelve raised beds at Lighthouse Hill. Four of the twelve beds, including the zinnias, are communal. Anyone who lives at Lighthouse Hill is welcome to come and harvest from these beds, regardless of whether they tend the herbs, tomatoes, strawberries, or zinnias growing in them. All are welcome to look for monarch eggs and caterpillars in our milkweed and native nectar bed.

On the same day we met Stefan, we talked with Josephine, a single mom of three who had moved into Lighthouse Hill after three years living in homeless shelters.

She was thrilled that we were restoring the soil. While we loaded in compost, Josephine shared with us that she had been the only one in the garden space last year, but she couldn’t get anything to grow. This year, Josephine is joined by about a dozen other resident gardeners.

And those communal cut-and-come-again zinnias? The more they’re harvested, the more flowers they give. What clear evidence that beauty multiplies!

Action Brings People Together

We hold gardening club on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. Trinity parishioners, Lighthouse Hill gardeners, and residents open our time together with this call-and-response acclamation:

Leader: We step out of our hurry and into the garden.

All: We are here together.

Leader: We come with different stories, different beliefs, different burdens.

All: We are here together.

Leader: May this garden receive our work and return it as gift.

All: We are here together.

Together, resident gardeners tend their own crops in the remaining eight assigned beds, bringing the work of their hands to their own tables. A team of Trinity parishioners learns alongside them as they share stories and tasks shoulder to shoulder.

The “we are here together” acclamation is embodied as the residents, many of whom didn’t know each other before meeting in the garden, help each other tend the beds. They weed and water the communal areas for all of their neighbors and pitch in to help with each other’s personal gardens.

What Restoration Looks Like

A Community Embodying Shalom

That the plants thrived in the restored soil didn’t surprise me, nor did it shock me that the vulnerable pollinators found our corridor in its first season. But what did come as a surprise was the community that rapidly grew between people.

Trinity’s ministry exists to repair relationships: to God, to community, and to creation. Lighthouse Hill is the learning lab where that theology became embodied with dirt under its fingernails. Like Jesus, incarnate.

So at Trinity, we think about the North Shore Pollinator Corridor in two ways.

There’s the literal way in which it’s an actual sanctuary along the North Shore for creatures running out of places to land.

And there’s the theological way underpinning it: We are ambassadors of God’s kingdom. This garden is one small waystation of that shalom for people the world tends to overlook.

When I think about the work we’re doing at Lighthouse Hill, I always come back to the image of a bee visiting a flower. As it buzzes among a patch of sunflowers, the bee is feeding itself and its young, but it’s also spreading life through an entire ecosystem.

All of us are bees buzzing toward the same beauty, nourishing ourselves and somehow also nourishing so much more than that.

May Restoration Keep Growing in Us

Though the Body of Christ is scattered around the world, we come regularly to one global table to remember and celebrate the body of Christ given for the healing of all creation. We leave that table nourished and sent to do the restorative work he’s given us.

Lighthouse Hill is a local expression of God’s restoration in action. Soil that couldn’t hold water now supports zinnias, milkweed, herbs, and vegetables. Neighbors who didn’t know one another now weed and water each other’s plots. A boy who lost his grandfather’s garden has now found another one, and a mother who once gardened alone now cultivates with a community of neighbors.

I can think of no better ending to this reflection than the words of hope we use to close our time together in the garden at Lighthouse Hill:

Leader: We have given our hands to something larger than ourselves.

All: We are grateful.

Leader: What we could not finish, we leave to sun and rain and time.

All: We are grateful.

Leader: We go now; may what grew here keep growing in us.

All: We are grateful.