The Girl I Mean to Be

The Girl I Mean to Be
lyrics by Marsha Norman
music by Lucy Simon

Paradise (noun), from the Greek paradeisos (an enclosed garden) . . .

Now, before we get started today, let me say right off the bat that I’m a sucker for anything that takes place at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. So, I’m fascinated by Theodore Roosevelt’s biographies, by the whole St Louis World’s Fair Exposition of 1904, by the Wright Brothers’ endeavors, and by G K Chesteron’s Orthodoxy, to name just a few examples. The film Harry and Walter Go to New York is one of my favorites, even though most critics were not so impressed.

And then there are the musicals. A clear majority of my favorites are set in this period: Ragtime, The Music Man, Mary Poppins, and the show from whence comes today’s song, The Secret Garden.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden is set in 1906 and tells the story of Mary Lennox, an English girl who comes to live with her widowed uncle and cousin in Yorkshire after Mary’s family dies of cholera in India. Her uncle Archibald is a morose, hunchbacked man, still intensely grieving the death of his wife, Lily. Archibald and Lily’s son, Colin, is confined to his bed, seemingly unable to walk. In the musical, Archibald’s brother Neville is the attending physician and has ulterior motives for keeping both Archibald and Colin in their debilitated states.

Mary learns of a secret garden, a walled enclosure that has been locked since Lily’s death. With the help of the gardener and the servants, Mary brings the garden back to life. The garden’s charms work their magic on Colin, as well. When Archibald hears noises in the garden and opens the gate for the first time since Lily’s death, Mary and Colin are having a footrace amidst the beautiful spring flowers. Colin falls into his father’s arms and the dark spell is broken.

The Secret Garden opened on Broadway on April 25, 1991 and ran for 709 performances. There were also companies in Australia and London’s West End, as well as a touring company. If you pay attention to this sort of thing, the show took home three Tony Awards. Eleven-year old Daisy Eagan became the youngest actor ever to win the Leading Actress in a Musical honor. Heidi Landesman garnered the Tony for Best Set Design, combining Victorian toy elements with those elaborate collages of Joseph Cornell. Marsha Norman brought Mrs. Burnett’s novel to the stage and won the Tony for Best Book of a Musical. She also wrote the show’s lyrics, which were set to music by Lucy Simon (Carly Simon’s sister, incidentally).

The musical departs slightly from the book in that it adds what are referred to as “The Dreamers”, who function as a sort of Greek chorus. The Dreamers might also be called “ghosts”, as they are played by Lily, Mary’s parents, the servants from India – all those who have gone on before. They comment on the action and give aid and comfort to Mary, then Colin, and then Archibald. I would call them “the Communion of the Saints.”

Act I of the musical takes place in the gray and dreary Yorkshire winter, set mostly in the cold and drafty Misselthwaite Manor, the windswept Yorkshire Moors, and in flashbacks to India in the time of cholera. As Act II opens, Mary is in the middle of a vision of what can be: we are in the Garden, fully realized, on a beautiful summer day. Mary is surrounded by all her loved ones – her mother and father, her Aunt Lily, her friends from India – and all of them, including Mary, are outfitted with white dresses, white suits, white parasols. Mary sings to us what is on her heart:

I need a place where I can go,
Where I can whisper what I know,
Where I can whisper who I like
And where I go to see them.

I need a place where I can hide,
Where no one sees my life inside,
Where I can make my plans, and write them down
So I can read them.

A place where I can bid my heart be still
And it will mind me.
A place where I can go when I am lost,
And there I'll find me.

I need a place to spend the day,
Where no one says to go or stay,
Where I can take my pen and draw
The girl I mean to be.

Especially during Lent, but always really, we are invited to spend more time with the Lord. As the Lord speaks through the prophet in Isaiah 30:15, “In returning and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength . . .” We also learn in the Gospels that Jesus spent a lot of time alone with His Father. If Jesus needed all that time apart, I don’t know why I’d think I could get by with anything less!

I also think our Jewish brothers and sisters do a great job of speaking to God more intimately. Think of how Tevye converses with the Lord in Fiddler on the Roof. All through the Old Testament and Psalms, there is an openness and candor that we would do well to recapture. In both the Jewish and Christian traditions, there is also the whole mystery of how a husband and wife “become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 19:5 and Mark 10:8 and by St Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:16 and Ephesians 5:31). I hope I am not going too far afield here, but note that it does not say they “become one mind” or “become one spirit”. No matter how intimately you know your spouse, or how close you are to a friend, or how much strength we can gain through fellowship with others, there are still times when the Lord calls us to “come apart for awhile” with Him. There, you can be just who you are.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” – Matthew 11:28

At one point in The Secret Garden, Mary asks her uncle Archibald if the house is full of ghosts. He tells her, “They’re only a ghost as long as someone is holding on to them.” At the end of the musical, the “Dreamers” drift among the people and the flowers of the garden. As Archibald proclaims his love for his son, Colin, and his niece, Mary, the Dreamers begin to leave. The last to exit are Mary’s father and Archibald’s wife, Lily. They are no longer “ghosts” but are now part of the “Communion of the Saints”.

The book ends with these words of Mary: “The spell was broken. My uncle learned to laugh, and I learned to cry. The secret garden is always open now. Open, and awake, and alive. If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”

"Open, awake, and alive." That's a great goal to have in mind. As we "look the right way", and notice that "the whole world is a garden", ask the Master Gardener to help you with your own "bit of earth": the enclosed park that is your life. He can help you make something beautiful inside. And then, please remember to leave the door open.