Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.
Proverbs 29:18

I suppose the purpose of our life is to find our way back to the garden, where we are told we began. In the beginning, we did not need to care for the garden–it was a gift. So it wasn’t really ours. We couldn’t stay there, except at the cost of never being fully human.

The way back to the garden is to create it around us. Then it will be ours, and we will be able to keep it because we understand it.

When God finished creating the earth, he said that it was good. What did he mean by that? I’ve been thinking quite a lot about what “goodness” means, or how to talk intelligibly about what it means, because I meet a lot of young people these days who do not have any very useful understanding of what it means, who are not even sure it is something they should want.

They tend to confuse “goodness” with obeying a list of rules. This is understandable, since teaching an understanding of goodness often begins with teaching rules.

But to understand goodness we need to go deeper than a list of rules. Goodness is a vision of the world–a vision of people living with each other in all the little and big ways that support happiness. Fully realized, the vision is a vast and complex ecological order, quite beyond the comprehension of children.

So we begin with signposts that point the way.  With children we teach little rules that both preserve the order and make visible its principles. Our rules are not meant to deprive our children of freedom. Quite the opposite–they are meant to be the stepping stones that keep us safe, that preserve us from the cold, swirling forces we traverse moment by moment as tiny, fragile beings in vast universe.

When my own children were small, exploring the world with hands and mouth, my wife, Valerie, and I kept a philodendron on the coffee table, within easy reach of the toddlers. Predictably, the poor plant got dumped on the floor or had its leaves torn off before we could intervene. Over and over we gently stopped little hands and said “No!” It would have been easier, no doubt, to simply to move the plant out of reach until the children were older, but that would be a controller’s strategy–to turn our home into a huge cocoon in which everything was either child-proof or out of reach.

Sure, we put cleaning solvents, prescription medicines, and other items that could cause genuine danger out of reach, but the philodendron was sacrificed to an ideal: it is better to awaken children than to pad the rooms where they are sleepwalking. We are teachers, not controllers. What we awaken them to is nothing less than the order that surrounds them, which is the order of our lives, which is our best approximation so far of our vision of goodness.

So it was that we sometimes encountered a gleeful daughter wildly shredding the leaves of our forlorn-looking philodendron. Such moments, we knew, were teaching opportunities. But what was it when I firmly slapped my daughter’s hand and said “No!” that I wanted her to learn?

I would have been disappointed if she had learned that plants are not to be touched, though from her child’s perspective that must at first have seemed to be my intent. In fact, I wanted her to learn things she could not then understand. “Thou shalt not touch the philodendron” was a signpost, a little rule that pointed toward a deeper law that might be expressed “Thou shalt respect living things” or “Thou shalt live in a house of order.” And beyond these laws were higher realities: Thou shalt love plants. Thou shalt love beauty. Thou shalt care for the earth.

In a sense, we wanted our children to learn to live in a garden, which is to say we wanted them to understand the earth and the processes of life, and we wanted them to care for the world in wise ways. We wanted them to recognize and desire goodness.

That’s quite a bit to learn. So we started with simple things: don’t touch the philodendron. We knew our daughter would question the rule, and we knew that as her questioning spirit became more mature, our answers, both implicit and explicit, would lead her toward understanding what we really wanted. In time, we allowed her to help with such tasks as watering the plant. As she grew, we negotiated new responsibilities and freedoms to keep pace with the endless dawn of her powerful understanding.

The philodendron rule became irrelevant and she discovered that plants not only could be touched, but they could be pruned, re-potted, fertilized and enjoyed. Within the philodendron rule lay profound principles, more difficult to understand but more liberating to live. Within the philodendron rule lay deeper principles of wisdom, which are identical with the principles of goodness.

Wise traditions teach goodness by giving rules, because life is complicated in much the way ecosystems are complicated, and inexperienced people are likely to make decisions that damage or destroy their chances at happiness without understanding the long-term consequences of what they do. Good rules help keep people safe while they are still learning how life works. But good laws given by a loving parent are not meant to destroy freedom–they are meant to reveal it. Someone lost and confused in a disordered place is not free. Order and understanding of that order are the basics of freedom.

The rules of morality are guidelines to long-term practicality. In many cases, they are summaries of centuries of experience about what sorts of actions tend toward misery and of what sorts of actions contribute to happiness.

Goodness is closely related to wisdom, since happiness in this world will be fleeting unless our thoughts and actions are in harmony with the way things really are.

“Truth” is our name for such harmony.

A happy life is similar to a garden–it is a thing of beauty made out of the materials of this life, arranged in harmony with both the laws of science and the principles of beauty. It is an emblem of care, and an embodiment of joy. It includes a long history of things learned and remembered, and a long future of things desired and hoped.

And it is here. It is now. A moment, but an eternal moment.