Book Review: The Cross Gardener

After listening to Lincoln Hoppe narrate a recent middle grade read, I sought another audio book from his narration. When I noticed this title, The Cross Gardener, I recognized an author I've attempted and moderately appreciated before, Jason F. Wright (author of The Wednesday Letters and The Seventeen-Second Miracle). Given his other titles, I knew to expect an inspirational read. However, I found this one somewhat hokey and often irritating.

John Bevan lives a life of almost constant loss (one individual hammered by so much tragedy felt like a stretch). The tale opens with the story of his birth, on the side of the road, to an unwed mother who dies in an accident. Despite the good fortune of adoption, his life continues to spiral in grief when his teen brother drowns, his grandfather dies, and his adoptive father dies of lung cancer. After marrying his childhood sweetheart, he welcomes a daughter, Lulu. But, tragedy assaults again.

Reeling from grief, he meets a young man on the side of the road where yet another auto accident has torn his life apart. This messenger calls himself "the cross gardener," and feels a singular mission to teach John Bevan the foremost lesson that "no one dies alone." I'm sure readers struggling with grief will find these words comforting, but so much of the explanation veered away from my own personal beliefs.

The presented ideas conflict with a Christian perspective and offer a fluffy feel-good mentality of dead individuals returning to help the living cross over into eternity. Moreover, several of the author's concepts disturb me, especially the dead garnering eternal life for the lost (despite their lifelong rejection of God). According to the Bible, we each will stand before the judgment seat to receive what is due us for the things done while in the body (2 Corinthians 5:10). I cannot reject God, yet gain heaven by someone else's petition on my behalf. Salvation is a free gift, by grace through faith in the atoning work of Christ's death on the cross, not something earned through the efforts of others.

Even the emphasis on the crosses erected at grave-sites in this story perplexes me. Why would someone who does not believe in the validity of Christ's act on the cross, memorialize the dead with a cross? I Corinthians 1:18 says the preaching of the cross is foolishness to many people. This author seems to imply that we can gain salvation/eternal life through the activities and efforts/prayers of others. As a Christian, I believe that eternal life is a free gift through belief, by grace, not works. (Ephesians 2:8-9) Not only does the story require a herculean suspension of disbelief, it presents heretical thought in a pretty consolatory package meant to comfort the grieving. I agree our pain has purpose. I agree God holds a higher perspective over it all (like Wright's hot-air balloon example). Yet, I disagree with so many of the foundational arguments in this book that I cannot recommend it, even to comfort a grieving friend.