A Homily of Garlic

A prayer, a giveaway, and some fragmented thoughts on garlic, winter, book tour, and searching for hope amidst ambiguity

February 28, 2025
Grand Rapids, Mich.

A prayer for these tumultuous times:

God who spoke order out of chaos, be our resolute steadiness and our tender strength. Why do we do what we do, and why is the world as it is? Root us in humble righteousness, keeping us kind and curious.

God who embodied solidarity in the midst of empire, guide us in the way of love. What can we do to radiate mercy and forge justice? Empower us to be good companions, good neighbors, and good friends.

God who promised never to leave us, show us how to persevere faithfully. How do we bear witness through these trying days and in manifold ways? Open us to creativity and imagination, consolation and care.

Through all this, God of compassion, remember us, hold us, and remind us what it means to become whole again. Surprise us with laughter and energize us with hope. Turn our tears into rain for the fields of healing, our collective outcry a comforting breeze for those who labor faithfully, and our love into sunshine for your garden of grace.

Amen.

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I shared this prayer the other day with the Evolving Faith online community, where I lead the weekly prayers of the people. I thought it might meet you where you are too.

I wrote those words shortly after returning to the U.S. from Aotearoa/New Zealand, where I was reporting for Travel+Leisure. For two weeks, Tristan and I got to explore that beautiful country, meeting chefs, tasting food and wine, and receiving stories. That I get to call it “work” is something I never take for granted.

Though we tried not to read the headlines too much while there, inevitably news from home found. Often, that put me in a little funk. But it’s not like folks there inhabit a different planet. Even New Zealand, which some of us might imagine as an idyllic, peaceful, faraway land, is experiencing similar political struggles too. In the Wairarapa, on the North Island, I met a woman who is working to restore a depleted ecosystem near her home. She told me about going door to door in her community, trying to rally support for planting native trees. “Take your left-wing, woke bullshit somewhere else,” a neighbor told her.

Trees! She’s just trying to plant some trees! How do we remain tender in the face of that kind of response? What do we do or say?

When I got home, I went to check on my garlic, one of my favorite things I grow in the garden. As I searched the garden bed for green, it occurred to me that a snippet from “Good Soil,” about the garlic, might be worth sharing with you. The book comes out in less than a month. In it, I write about the testimony of the garlic—a quiet homily that might offer some encouragement amidst our American winter.

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There are so many things I love about garlic.

As a gardener, I appreciate how it grows on a different timetable than most other crops: planted in mid-autumn, harvested in early summer, hung to cure for at least three or four weeks after that. It reminds me that not everything matures at the same time. It disrupts my tendency to hew to a single calendar. It teaches me that seasons differ depending on the species.

As a cook, I applaud the supporting role it graciously plays in so many dishes. It can back up the basil in a good pesto, or enliven a wok full of stir-fried greens. Slivered and dried, it harmonizes with the poppy seeds, sesame, and salt on the outside of an everything bagel. Minced, it integrates beautifully into a simple egg fried rice. In all these dishes, it is rarely the star—and even when it might be considered one (roasted, for instance, until it becomes buttery, its in-your-face essence gentled by heat and time), it almost never shines alone.

On a cold afternoon just after Christmas, I went to the garden to do some work. I needed to shovel several wheelbarrows of finished compost to build the beds in the hoop house. When I got there, though, a wave of weary laziness overtook me. I looked at the empty wheelbarrow, and I just felt hatred. It had been raining for several days. I knew the soil would be sodden and heavy and I’d have to fight harder than I wanted to push through the mud. So instead, I mulched about half of our garlic beds.

To mulch garlic in the early stages of its growth requires both careful hands and patient eyes. You want to smother the weeds, but not the garlic. Assuming you haven’t weeded attentively—or, as in our case, at all—you have to search the weedy bed for the thick sprouts that have protruded through the dirt line in search of sky. Sometimes you see it right away. Sometimes you don’t. Even if you’re tracing the allegedly neat line of planted cloves, sometimes the fledgling garlic is just not ready to be seen.

This kind of garden work gratified me. It was similar to weeding, which likewise put me in a contemplative, almost meditative mood, but weeding sometimes sent me into thoughtless autopilot. Putting that first layer of mulch on a bed demanded a particular kind of attention. I had to focus so much, searching for evidence of the right kind of growth, seeking signs of the garlic’s slow protrusion above the soil line, that, at least for a few minutes, it crowded the neuroses from my brain. To let the mind wander too far from the garlic bed in front of me might mean smothering a shoot that was asking for my care.

Though it traveled far and wide in ancient times—cloves of garlic were mummified along with King Tut, and archaeologists have uncovered remnants of three-thousand-year-old garlic in the ruins of Crete—it’s believed to be native to the harsh steppes and foothills of Central Asia. I wonder whether some ancient forager, amid the beiges and browns of winter, searched for a glimpse of green. And there the garlic was, rebelling against the seasons and sprouting possibility.

As I mulched the garlic beds, I thought ahead to the late spring, when we’d harvest garlic scapes. These slender curlicues would provide early evidence that something else delightful was growing beneath the surface. Minced and scrambled into eggs or chopped fine and stirred into fried rice, they were milder than the cloves, yet unmistakably garlicky—a gentle suggestion of the pungency that was still to come.

In early summer, we’d pull the bulbs themselves out of the ground, still attached to the long stalks. We could cook them then, sure, but if we wanted the fullness of the garlicky intensity, we had to wait. Then we’d hang the bunches from nails high up in the barn so the air could wash over them and slowly dry them out, concentrating their flavor.

Of course, sometimes the garlic might rot before we could do any of that. Or we might leave it hanging for too long, until the cloves were just desiccated husks. We might have to wait longer than we liked to find out whether any of this had been successful. Sometimes it just didn’t grow at all.

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My garlic bed

I’m not much for telling a reader what they should get out of my writing, but I will tell you a bit more about why I love garlic so much. When not much else seems to be doing anything, I think of how it is gathering strength for what is still to come. Growth might not be visible, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Nothing is guaranteed, but look closely, and there might just be a hint of possibility.

Earlier today, I went out to the garden bed again and thought about all the weeding and mulching I ought to be doing. Our recent rains and snows had moved the soil around, exposing some of the cloves, so I made some fresh little mounds and tucked them back in; I probably ought to go to the garden center and get a little more topsoil. Nothing is guaranteed, but a helping hand won’t hurt.

Many of the cloves had sprouted green from the top—no worries, since it’s pretty cold-hardy. As I moved one clove back into place, I noticed that, though it was uncovered and had fallen onto its side, its roots had lengthened significantly in the months since I planted it. They were stretched in every direction. Nothing is guaranteed, but even in winter’s midst, one can find signs of growing strength.

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Giveaway: Convergent has offered five copies of “Good Soil” to give away to newsletter subscribers. If you’d like to enter the drawing, please comment below; I’d love to know where you’re finding signs of hope right now. We’ll pick the winners’ names randomly next Saturday, March 8.

Legal note: Per the folks at Penguin Random House, entries accepted only from the U.S. and Canada. Apologies to all other lands; I’m trying to make future giveaways more inclusive.

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“Travelers in the Mountains in Springtime,” unknown artist, Ming Dynasty (16th-17th c.) China. From the collection of the Freer/National Museum of Asian Art

Book Tour: A reminder of the upcoming tour dates for March and April, with deepest gratitude to the host venues and the participating indie bookstores.

Berkeley, Calif.: March 23, 11:30 a.m., with Barbara Brown Taylor. At the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, with A Great Good Place for Books. Tickets

Atlanta, Ga.: March 25, 6:30 p.m., with Amena Brown. At St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, with Charis Books and More. Tickets

New York, N.Y.: March 27, 7 p.m., with Austin Channing Brown. At Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, with Posman Books. Info

Grand Rapids, Mich.: March 29, 2:30 p.m., with James K.A. Smith and Spencer LaJoye. At Westminster Presbyterian Church, with Schuler Books. Tickets

Nashville, Tenn.: March 31, 6:30 p.m., with Margaret Renkl. At Parnassus Books. Note that this event is sold out, but Parnassus is keeping a waitlist. Tickets

Memphis, Tenn.: April 2, 6:15 p.m., with Barbara Brown Taylor, and April 3, noon (Lenten Lunchtime Series). At Calvary Episcopal Church, with novel. Info

Little Rock, Ark.: April 3, 7 p.m. At Second Baptist Church, Downtown, with WordsWorth Books. Info

Houston, Tex.: April 5, 3 p.m., with Sarah Bessey. At St. Thomas Presbyterian Church, with Blue Willow Books. Tickets

Austin, Tex.: April 6, 2 p.m., with Sarah Bessey. At First Baptist Church, with Book People. Tickets

Waco, Tex.: April 8, 7 p.m., with Jen Hatmaker. At Fabled Bookshop. Tickets

Cary, N.C.: April 13, 3 p.m., with Emily P. Freeman and John Lucas. At Crosspointe Church, with Quail Ridge Books. Tickets

Princeton, N.J.: April 25, 7 p.m., with Krista Tippett. At the Farminary, with Labyrinth Books. Tickets

If you would like to attend one of the paid events (Houston or Princeton) but just can’t afford it right now, please email makebelievefarmer@gmail.com and let us know. No promises, but I’ll see what we can do.

The team is still hard at work on dates for May and June, which I hope to share soon. And if you can’t get to an event but still would like an autographed book, don’t forget that Schuler Books is taking orders, through March 16, for signed (and personalized, if you want) copies.

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Whew. That was a lot. I guess everything feels like a lot right now. So, in closing, two things that are also giving me hope:

1. Pink’s 2017 song “What About Us?” I find I’ve been putting it on more often lately. It’s a clear-eyed cry for a better world—candid about a political system that has failed so many, yet also stubborn about the possibility of communal care.

2. J.M.W. Turner’s paintings. I love Turner. While best known for his watercolors of cityscapes and landscapes as well as his turbulent marine paintings, he also often depicted scenes inspired by Scripture. Among my favorites from this subsection of his work is “Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis.” Like me, he probably could have used an editor.

“Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis,” J.M.W. Turner, c. 1843, oil on canvas. From the collection of Tate Britain

There’s so much ambiguity in this painting—hopeful light but also the murk of melancholy. Is the snake-like figure in the middle a reference to enduring temptation, or is it an allusion to the healing bronze serpent? Destruction and possibility, suffering and redemption, power and humility—it’s all here. And in the midst of it all, we have the flawed figure of Moses, trying to pay attention to what God might be saying. That gives me hope.

Much love,
Jeff