Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia Retreat, Motherhouse Nashville Tn., July 18, 2026
The 1911 novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett tells the story of Mary Lennox, a neglected and soured orphan sent to live with her reclusive uncle at Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors.[1] There is an air of secrecy around her new home, with some rooms locked and parts of the estate off-limits. Following a friendly robin, rather like the beautiful cardinal birds I’ve seen on your grounds, she discovers behind a secret garden behind a door covered by a curtain of ivy. Closed since the death of her aunt a decade before, Mary starts visiting the garth, tending it back to life, and this quiet work builds up her own strength, appreciation, and joy. The lonely and acerbic child is no more, as the garden of her soul is transformed along with that on the moors.
In today’s Gospel (Mt 12:14-21) Jesus is again caught in the crosshairs of the Pharisees after another apparent breach of the sabbatarian laws. Rather than engage in contest with them this time, He withdraws from the district. But people were not easily put off, and many chased Him seeking cures or counsel. As so often, Jesus instructs them to keep it all hush-hush for now…
There has long been conjecture about this “messianic secret”:[2] why did Jesus so often speak in riddles or command silence after healings, exorcisms, or other revelations of who He really was.[3] It is paradoxical given that Jesus came precisely to be God’s self-revelation, the answer to ancient questions, light in the darkness. It is also ironic given that He told His own disciples not to hide their light under a bushel but let it be seen.[4] So, what’s going on in the secret garden of Jesus?
Some think Jesus was avoiding too much popular attention for fear that it would provoke confrontation with the authorities, and so truncate His mission and endanger His disciples. Some suggest it was because He knew His nature and mission would be misunderstood, and so a lot of catechesis was required before He could safely ‘go public,’ as it were. Some speculate that there was a deeper theological purpose to the secrecy: the mystery of God is simply too big for us mere mortals; everything God divulges to us conceals far more than it reveals; if we think we’ve got our heads around the Father, Son and Holy Spirit we are deluding ourselves!
On this last account, the commands to silence create a dramatic tension that underscores the complexity of Jesus’ identity and the limits of our own understanding. At least until after the Cross and Resurrection, human beings were bound to misunderstand Jesus and so it was best that we not go broadcasting our confused opinions. Like Thomas Aquinas, after his mystical experience at the Eucharist declaring that all his teaching was “so much straw” and going silent without ever finishing the great Summa Theologiae. Or like Ludwig Wittgenstein, at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), famously saying, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Our reverent silence is not because the mystery of God is unknowable, but because there is so much to be known about God that the more we grasp, the more we realise how little we know.
So, if the crowd only sees the spectacular miracle-worker, the inspiring teacher, the revolutionary leader, or the spiritual popstar, they have grasped so little of Christ’s reality that they risk missing the plot altogether. There had been wonderworkers, gurus and radicals before and there will be again, but Jesus is so much more. Matthew reads Jesus’ gradualism in revealing Himself and His will to us through the servant song of Isaiah:
Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him,
that he might bring forth justice to the nations.
But he will not shout or raise his voice,
or make it heard in the street.
The bruised reed he will not break,
the fading wick he will not quench.
He will bring forth justice in truth. (Isa 42:1-3)
Isaiah and Matthew’s portrait of Jesus is not of a typical wonder-worker, guru or revolutionary. No trumpet blast. No imposed wisdom. No martial bravado. A gentle servant, who bandages the bruised rather than breaking them, whose very manner of life testifies to gentleness, righteousness, and truth.
What a contrast He is to the ‘evildoers’ in Micah’s prophecy (Mic 2:1-5), who dawn to dusk seize upon what is not theirs: fields and crops, house and contents, people and heritage. They “lie on their beds plotting mischief,” like the schemers in our psalm (Ps 9B(10):1-14) or the pharisees in our Gospel. The time will come, Micah says, when the spoilers will be despoiled, the shameful shamed. We must be patient in the meantime. Jesus withdraws from the battle to allow things to unfold “all in God’s good time.”
Towards the end of The Secret Garden, Mary and her cousin Colin witness the blooming of the garden and so, too, of their souls, and Colin cries out “I am going to live forever and ever and ever!”[5] He recognises that something mysterious is at work there, something deep in nature, pushing us this way and that, and making things out of nothing. What Colin calls ‘magic’ we Christians call ‘grace,’ that transforming divine energy that Christ compares with seeds sprouting unbeknownst to the farmer, with yeast fermenting in dough, or with treasure long hidden in a field (Mk 4:26-29; Mt 13:31-33,44).
Like the magic in Burnett’s novel, grace is something we can’t summon on demand or regulate like a tap. It is sheer gift. But Christ did gradually reveal to us where to find those sprouting seeds, that expanding leaven, that hidden treasure. One such place is His Holy Eucharist which we contemplate in these days together.
Dear sisters, in this Votive Mass of Our Lady, Protectress of our Order, we join that quiet Virgin in pondering God’s great things in our hearts.[6] Your contemplative vocation places you in a secret garden yourselves, not just when you are formally on retreat, but in still moments of every day and week and year. And there in that orchard you are opened up to growth and fruitfulness. St Catherine compared your souls to gardens from which weeds of vice are gradually plucked out and seeds of grace planted and sprouting.[7] You till the soil of your souls through Sacred Liturgy and intercessory prayer, through study and teaching, through the conventual life and daily conforming your will to Christ’s. There may be times when, like Mary Lennox, you wonder if anything is really happening beneath the surface of your soul. But grace there is, pushing and pulling, uprooting and planting, harvesting and renewing. This is to fulfill what is spoken through the prophet Isaiah and the savior Jesus, spoken to your soul: “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight!”
[1] Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012).
[2] So called by William Wrede in The Messianic Secret (1901; transl. James Grieg, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971).
[3] Mt 12:16; 13:10, 13, 34-35, 44; 16: 20; Mk 1:43-44; 4:11-12, 33; 5:43; 7:36; 8:30; 9:9; Lk 8:10, 56; 9:21, 36.
[4] Jesus was sent as God’s self-revelation: Jn 1:1-18; 12:44-45; 14:9; Phil 2:9-11; Col 1:15-19; 2:9; Heb 1:1-4; 1Jn 1:1-3 etc. Jesus is the light: Mt 4:16; 17:2; Lk 1:78-79; 2:32; Jn 1:4-9; 3:19-21; 8:12; 9:5; 12:35-36, 46. Jesus is the answer to ancient secrets: Rom 16:25; 1Cor 2:7; 4:1; Eph 1:9; 3:3-6; Col 1:26-27; 2:2; 4:3; 1Tim 3:16. The disciples are not to hide their light under a bushel: Mt 5:14-16; Lk 8:16; 11:33-36; 16:8.
[5] Burnett, The Secret Garden, 262.
[6] Lk 1:29, 46-47; 2:19,51; Jn 19:25-27; Acts 1:14.
[7] E.g. St Catherine of Siena to Pope Gregory XI https://mycatholic.life/saints/saints-of-the-liturgical-year/april-29-saint-catherine-of-siena-virgin-and-doctor-of-the-church/her-letters/
