Each week since Ash Wednesday, CCA has featured reflections by CCA members who serve in diverse contexts as they bring alive the vision of the Appalachian pastoral letters within and outside the region. Our journeying together with each other’s stories has brought us to Easter. Hear this meditation by Molly Sutter from the inside the garden of the resurrection.

I found myself dancing in the garden this Sunday.

I had planted beets nearly two week ago, and I’d yet to see sprouts. I nestled the seeds in the soil, whispered a word of encouragement, and watered them in. And I waited. And waited.

Maybe the soil was too warm? Or that cold snap got them? Did I water the soil diligently? I found it difficult to lean into the hope that is required of any good gardener.

To plant a seed and ask the soil and sun and rain to collaborate, to nurture new life—this is a profoundly hopeful act. When we tend the soil, we co-create alongside God, intimately participating in the process of life. Immediately after creating humans from soil in the second creation story, God plants a garden. Adam and Eve are tasked with tending Eden, serving and preserving the soil from which they were formed. When we garden, we spend time with our roots, our family.

I always seem to forget to hope after the seeds are tucked in. I have done this many times, yet so quickly I doubt. I am very familiar with the resurrection story, yet it remains hard to practice. And this is why I found myself dancing on Sunday morning when I saw the beets had finally sprouted. Thank goodness I am not gardening alone!

On Easter morning, the first person to meet the risen Christ is Mary Magdalene. Before she is tasked with preaching the Good News, she supposes he is a gardener. I think she is right.

After rising from the dead, Jesus continues to appear as a human, quite literally—a gardener, a soil person! He is the Master Gardener, mirroring the story of springtime, offering the hope of new life where all seems barren. We doubt that there will be enough food to go around, but when we share our loaves and fish with our neighbor, it is enough. Though garden beds seem barren, the beet seeds still sprout. Jesus is executed and buried, yet Christ emerges from the tomb, soil under his fingernails, planting seeds of hope.

On Ash Wednesday we are reminded that we come from dust and shall return to dust. This Easter season proclaims the miracle in between—we are alive! We get to participate in this joyful mystery of living, of planting a garden, of dancing when the seeds sprout. We get to, in the words of Wendell Berry, “practice resurrection.” And we, too, will die, ultimately begetting more life.

Molly Sutter is a transplant to West Virginia, finding herself at home in the web of life when responding to the beauty of Appalachia through “paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it,” in the words of Mary Oliver. She currently serves as a Caretaker at Bethlehem Farm, a Catholic community in Appalachia that transforms lives through service with the local community and the teaching of sustainable practices.