Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know

Host: The rain had just stopped, leaving the world drenched and trembling. The streetlamps flickered through the soft mist, their light cutting golden paths across puddles and broken reflections. On the outskirts of the city, an abandoned chapel garden lay breathing — half-wild, half-tended — where moss crept over stone benches and violets pushed through the cracks.

Host: Inside the garden’s cracked iron gate, Jack and Jeeny stood in silence. The sky was a bruised violet, the kind that smells faintly of wet earth and memory. Jack’s hands were deep in his coat pockets, his eyes shadowed beneath the dim glow of a hanging bulb. Jeeny knelt beside a patch of dark soil, her hair damp, a strand clinging to her cheek like a thread of night.

Jeeny: “May Sarton once wrote — ‘Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.’” (She looked up at him, eyes gleaming.) “Do you ever think about that, Jack? How our darkness and our light need each other?”

Jack: (quiet, almost to himself) “I think people romanticize their pain too much. They call it ‘darkness’ so it sounds poetic — but really, it’s just... ugly. Pointless suffering. I don’t see anything blooming from it.”

Host: The rainwater dripped from the edge of a rusted gutter, hitting a stone with a rhythmic echo, like a slow heartbeat marking the silence between them. The air smelled of mud, of beginnings that didn’t yet know they’d begun.

Jeeny: “That’s because you’re looking at pain like a wound, not as a seed. Things have to fall apart, Jack. The soil needs to be broken before something new can grow.”

Jack: (bitterly) “And what if nothing grows? What if the seed just rots in the dark?”

Jeeny: “Then the darkness still did its part — it held the space. You can’t force life, Jack. You can only prepare the ground.”

Host: The wind stirred through the ivy, brushing past the old stone cross behind them. The chapel door creaked faintly, as if the building itself remembered the sound of prayers. Jack shifted his weight, his boots crunching on gravel, his breath visible in the chill.

Jack: “You sound like one of those self-help poets — talking about pain like it’s some sacred ritual. People go through hell, Jeeny. They don’t need to glorify it; they need to escape it.”

Jeeny: “Escape to where? You can’t outrun what’s inside you. You can only face it — like a gardener faces the storm. You shelter what you can, but you can’t stop the rain. You just trust it’s feeding something beneath.”

Jack: “That’s naive. Some storms destroy everything. Floods, war, grief — they don’t nurture, they erase.”

Jeeny: “And yet — look at Hiroshima. The cherry blossoms grew again. After radiation, after ash. Can you explain that, Jack? Isn’t that both darkness and light at work — destruction and rebirth sharing the same soil?”

Host: The air trembled with the memory of her words. A faint ray of moonlight pierced through a break in the clouds, illuminating the small garden around them. Tiny buds, still slick with rain, shimmered under the pale light — fragile, unafraid.

Jack: (gritting his teeth) “Maybe. But I still think people cling to the idea that their pain means something. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s random — like a frost that kills the harvest.”

Jeeny: (softly) “Even frost teaches the garden when to rest.”

Host: The pause stretched, heavy and warm, filled with the sound of water trickling through gutters and the distant bark of a lone dog. Jeeny stood now, brushing dirt from her hands, her eyes unwavering, glowing like wet amber.

Jeeny: “Tell me something, Jack. When you lost your mother — didn’t something in you grow afterward? Some strength, some depth, some compassion you didn’t have before?”

Jack: (stiffens) “That’s different.”

Jeeny: “Is it?”

Jack: (voice rough) “She didn’t die so I could grow, Jeeny.”

Jeeny: “Of course not. But the loss — the dark — it changed you. It opened a room inside you that light could later fill. You became a better man, even if it broke you first.”

Host: The wind carried silence, and in that silence, Jack’s eyes flickered — a flash of pain, then something gentler. He turned away, his reflection broken across the puddle by his feet.

Jack: “You think too kindly of pain. You’d make a friend of it if you could.”

Jeeny: “Maybe I already have. Pain reminds me I’m alive. It’s the night before the bloom.”

Host: The moon broke fully free from the clouds, painting the garden in silver and shadow. The rain-soaked petals shone like tears turned to light. The contrast — dark soil and luminous flowers — seemed to mirror their very souls.

Jack: “So, according to Sarton, we’re supposed to be gardeners of the spirit. Faithful ones, at that.” (He lets out a dry laugh.) “I can’t even keep a cactus alive.”

Jeeny: “You don’t have to keep it alive, Jack. You just have to keep tending.”

Jack: “What’s the point of tending something doomed to die?”

Jeeny: “Because tending changes you. Every act of care is a prayer, even if it fails. Faith isn’t about success — it’s about constancy.”

Host: Her words hung like smoke in the cool night air, dissolving slowly. Jack’s gaze dropped to the soil again, to a small patch where new shoots struggled to break through the mud.

Jack: “So the darkness — the failures, the grief — they’re what, fertilizers?”

Jeeny: (smiling faintly) “Yes. And humility is the water.”

Jack: “And light?”

Jeeny: “Light is what you give others when you’ve made peace with your own dark.”

Host: The rain resumed — gentle now, a whisper against the leaves. The two of them stood in it, unmoving. Water ran down Jeeny’s face, glistening like sorrow that had forgotten how to hurt.

Jack: (quietly) “You make it sound so easy.”

Jeeny: “It isn’t. It never was. That’s why we’re asked to be faithful gardeners, not perfect ones.”

Host: The word faithful echoed in the air, deeper than its sound. Faithful — to what? To the struggle, the soil, the unseen roots. To the unseen part of the self that keeps believing in growth even in winter.

Jack: “You know, sometimes I envy your faith.”

Jeeny: “It’s not faith. It’s remembering. That light and darkness aren’t enemies — they’re dance partners.”

Host: Jack finally looked up — the moonlight caught in his eyes, turning them softer, almost humanly raw. He reached down, picking up a small trowel lying beside the bench, and began to dig at the base of a rosebush.

Jack: “Then maybe I should start dancing.”

Jeeny: (smiling) “Just don’t step on the roots.”

Host: The two of them knelt — the earth yielding beneath their hands, dark and alive. Each movement was slow, deliberate, sacred. Around them, the garden breathed, the night itself seeming to bend in witness. For the first time, their silence wasn’t tension — it was peace.

Jeeny: “You see, Jack — without darkness, nothing comes to birth. Without light, nothing flowers. But in the space between — in twilight — that’s where we learn to tend.”

Host: The rain eased, leaving behind only the drip of leaves and the faraway hum of city lights. A faint glow rose in the east — the first hint of dawn, fragile as a promise. The flowers shivered, catching the new light as though waking from a dream.

Host: Jack and Jeeny stayed there, their hands still buried in the soil, their breaths mingling with the scent of rain. The garden had no walls, no sermons — only two souls learning to bloom again through the dirt of their own lives.

Host: And as the sky lightened, the world seemed to whisper the truth May Sarton had known:
that the darkness is not an end,
and the light is not a reward —
but together, they are the rhythm of everything that grows, breaks, and grows again.