Isidore’s bad etymologies and the garden of liturgical life

Congratulations, you made it through Lent! It’s time to enjoy the Octave of Easter and reap the benefits of all that darn sacrificing. Or time at least to indulge in all the things you avoided for 40 days, because if you didn’t experience some grand spiritual transformation at least you have that.

Many if not most lenten resolutions revolve in some way around delayed gratification. I will not eat sweets for 40 days. I will only drink alcohol (or have cream in my coffee, or salt on my food) on Sundays. I will only eat after 3:00 on Fridays (a traditional practice that used to extend to the entirety of Lent for some medieval communities). Some argue that to the medieval Catholic peasant, we would seem weak and coddled for trying and failing at such simple resolutions of delayed gratification.

It’s hard enough for me to pick any resolution and stick to it for 40 days, let alone two or three. In past years I would read one or more spiritually weighty books during Lent; this year I barely remembered to reread a few chapters of Imitation of Christ. As a mother, I see my own struggles with delayed gratification reflected in those of my toddler. He doesn’t understand why I say “not now, the stove is hot” and can’t read him Llama Llama Red Pajama again for the fifth time. Our struggles with delayed gratification during Lent are indeed childish on one level. On another, they are characteristic of the human condition and our modern age.

Delayed gratification is hard. Thanks to capitalism, Amazon, and the constant cycle of conspicuous consumption on social media, the only reason people nowadays delay gratification is often budgetary–and services like Klarna are fast-eroding even that. Overall, there is very little sense that there is a “right time” and a “wrong time” for something. Ecclesiastes 3 tells us that for everything there is a season, but it’s all too easy to pretend there isn’t! Even seasonal decorating aficionados (i.e. suburban white women) have to purchase their wares weeks and months before the actual holiday…the shelves of Homegoods and hobby stores reflect a calendar a few months detached ahead of the real world. Who hasn’t seen the instagram reels about overstimulated moms throwing out the Christmas tree by 8 PM on December 25th? An influencer I follow put anything related to Easter into storage 2 days after Easter.

Without the liturgy to give structure to our holiday celebrations, there is no right or wrong time. Instant gratification, should we choose it, is at our fingertips. And perhaps that is why even little sacrifices during Lent feel hard. Especially when we are promised few tangible rewards during the Easter season. As this Lenten season drew to a close, I started reframing my struggles with consistent Lenten discipline by looking to the natural world rather than Instagram and strip malls for support. Naturally, I turned to my favorite St. Isidore of Seville (feast day: April 4) for wisdom.

In the Etymologies, St. Isidore begins his section on garden vegetables thus: Hortus nominatus quod semper ibi aliquid oriatur. Nam cum alia terra semel in anno aliquid creet, hortus numquam sine fructu est. “A garden (hortus) is called thus because something is always cropping up (oriri) there. For while other lands beget something once a year, the garden is never without fruit.”

(Pass over, for the minute, that this etymological reasoning is entirely wrong. Hortus derives from PIE root that gives us yard and garden. Oriri comes from the PIE root meaning rise.)

As often is the case with Isidore, while incorrect linguistically, he really gets at something here. In the garden, timing is of the essence. each and everything that grows there has its own unique time frame that must be nurtured and respected. Just recently I planted peas in the shallow, gravelly raised beds in the driveway of the home we rent. They are already springing up in verdant abundance, faster than I can find stakes for them to climb. Several months ago, I buried tulip bulbs in the mulch by our front porch. One of them has bloomed, the rest are bashfully awaiting the right moment.

Peas are best planted just before the last frost; they thrive in cool spring soil. Tulips require vernalization–a wintering period tucked cozily into the ground before they flower in the spring. Peas have a short lifecycle–they will (hopefully) be ready to harvest within two months, and then will die when hot summer temps take over. Tulips have a long, quiet life underground before they start peeking forth. In the dark winter months when nothing blooms, the tulip is cozy underground.

Our stalks are very straight and tall,
Our colours clear and bright;
Too many-hued to name them all—
Red, yellow, pink, or white.

And some are splashed, and some, maybe,
As dark as any plum.
From tulip-fields across the sea
To England did we come.

We were a peaceful country’s pride,
And Holland is its name.
Now in your gardens we abide—
And aren’t you glad we came?

Art and poem by Cicely Mary Barker

The quiet, slow-burgeoning lifecycle of the tulip is not without risks. Despite instructions to the contrary, my landlords’ landscapers moved half of the bulbs around when they replanted the nearby hydrangeas during a warm week in the winter. After all, one could not see the tulip bulbs, cozy under the ground. Of those that survived, several are poking up out of order and in disarray. The two perfectly matching rows I planted on either side of the porch are no more. One side is blooming in all its glory, the other has produced two leaves and no blooms. (All the same, the unexpected joy of an unexpected leaf in an unexpected place has provided a great deal of entertainment for myself and the toddler alike each day.)

Sometimes, Holy Week and the Triduum feel like an abrupt halt at the end of a long coast of sameness. I am reminded of ice skating straight into the wall when you want to get out and grab your hot chocolate and don’t mind the sudden “thunk!” After 40 days of gritting our teeth and holding back from the extra treat, the snooze button, or the wind-down glass of wine we are plunged into a series of long liturgies and…then? Resurrection, Cadbury eggs, and…what? Where are the fruits of our long Lenten sacrifices? Where are the pea sprouts popping up after their brief polar plunge in the frosty ground? Some of us tread a longer, riskier path, much like the Tulip’s

My Instagram feed and my inbox are full of testimonies to the fact that for some people, Lent is an incredibly profound time of transformation year after year. It’s easy to say “Why not me?” when confronted with yet another story of how 40 days of self-inflicted suffering resulted in new levels of divine intimacy. Why is it so hard for some with so little fruits, and so easy for others? Perhaps the delayed gratification of Lent goes beyond 40 days of self-denial in union with Christ’s sufferings–though that is surely a worthy practice in itself. Perhaps we need to practice delayed gratification as the norm, rather than the exception.

I think Isidore’s garden holds the answer. The liturgical year, like the natural world, has a comforting degree of predictability. Christmas follows Advent, and Easter follows Lent. But while the richness of the liturgy shinnes forth on momentous occasions, it is not absent in the inconspicuous feriae, the prayers and scriptures of which might provide badly needed spiritual food for one who failed to find a spiritual transformation in his or her Easter Basket. Some people find their interior life transformed faster than the lifecycle of the sugar snap pea, over the course of a 9-day novena or 3-day retreat. Others after trudging through Lent after Lent before catching a glimpse of the joyous fruits God has in store. The tulip lies dormant under snow, under false spring, under late frost, and blooms on her own time. No matter the pace at which one walks alongside the life of Christ and His saints through the liturgy, the garden is never without fruit.