Category: Reflection

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What mushrooms might reveal about the nature of God

Some chanterelles we hunted down last year

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Keith Giles called The Quantum Sayings of Jesus. It’s a commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, about half of which feature in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. He goes to great lengths to justify their authenticity and then reads them through a lens of our connectedness with the divine, noting that our real problem isn’t our separation from God so much as our failure to realise that we are already one with God and with each other.

Although his interpretations ask a lot of the reader, they fit well with the teachings of Richard Rohr and others on the limitations and dangers of dualistic thinking and our need to wake up to our profound union, in Christ, with everyone and everything else. One of my problems with this kind of thinking is that it is difficult to conceptualise. The image that comes to my mind is that of a mycelial network.

I have always been fascinated by mushrooms, by their strange shapes and smells, by the way they can feed you, heal you, or poison you – and you better be sure you can identify them! Looking for mushrooms feels more like hunting than foraging, you might have an idea of where they are likely to be, but, unlike the bramble you can reliably return to year on year, you cannot count on locating them. There are so many factors at play and a big dose of the mysterious (or since I hunt in the autumn, perhaps it’s a dose of the mist-erious?)

The mushrooms themselves are just a tiny part of the whole organism, they are the fruiting bodies that pop up above the surface at an opportune moment, while underneath the ground there is a huge fungal network connecting plants and trees through their roots, continuously exchanging resources and information.

I like to imagine that God might inhabit his creation rather like a mycelial network, with living beings emerging from God to flourish upon the Earth for a time and then returning into Him, like mushrooms sprouting up from the mycelium for a few days and then decomposing back into the earth. I tried to express something of this connection in my post on 1 Corinthians 2:9-16.

Acts 17:28 In him we live and move and have our being
John 14:20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

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Slugs, scissors and the denial of death

This lucky one escaped the slugs.

I shocked and horrified a colleague the other day by explaining that my approach to dealing with the overwhelming slug population in my garden was to snip them in half with scissors. Apparently, she will never look at me in the same way again. I admit that it does sound pretty horrible, perhaps she imagined me hounding the poor defenceless creatures and bloodthirstily relishing the moment of their demise? Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

As I tried to explain to my colleague, by then in a state of shock and not very receptive to reason, it’s surely more humane to kill them quickly than to drag out their demise using salt, poison or beer? What’s more, I leave their uncontaminated remains to be consumed by other members of the ecosystem (which are probably other slugs, given the fact that the remaining individuals are getting progressively bigger). And I do feel bad about it, it gets harder the bigger the slugs get, and it’s especially difficult when they raise up the front part of their body in an attempt to ‘look human’ and shame me into sparing them. At least I do generally apologise to them first (unless I am too angry about the damage they’ve just done), but when push comes to shove, it’s between them and my vegetables (and they’ve already had more than their fair share).

My daughter, a slug-sympathiser who NEVER lies to me, wound me up terribly the other day by pointing out that slugs had an emotional capacity similar to that of dolphins. After a few seconds of stunned silence, I came to my senses, and continued snipping.

I know there are other methods, I tried out elaborate plastic cones this year that claimed to prevent the entry of molluscs, but my slugs clearly hadn’t read the instructions. Other people collect their slugs and snails and deposit them miles away, to prevent them from returning – but is that kind? Deporting them to unknown territory where they will probably get picked off anyway? Plus, I’m not willing to spend my limited energy on that kind of shenanigans. You might ask where the hedgehogs are in all of this? Well, I saw a couple of them under the hedge earlier in the year, but now they’re nowhere to be seen, and I can’t exactly import new ones.

Why is slicing slugs so problematic? I think it comes down to a denial of death. Killing slugs in this very direct way makes me face the unpleasant fact that I am taking their life away, but it’s their life or the life of my vegetables, and by extension my life. Beyond my hobby gardening, many other organisms have to die for me to live –even if these are usually ‘only’ plants. You can argue that not all forms of life are equal, but the taking of one life to sustain another is just a fact of existence. Or maybe we can look at it the other way around, that life is given, relished and then offered up to another form of life. When my time comes, I look forward to feeding the mushrooms.

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Sister Water

This is a reflection written for the start of Creationtide with the theme of water, based on the following passages: Job 37:1-13, Revelation 22:1-7 and John 19:31-37.

I love the book of Job, or at least parts of it. Interspersed between long speeches about Job’s suffering, and the possible reasons for it, are radiantly beautiful passages about the glory of God as revealed in the natural world. The passage I chose for our reading today is a beautiful reminder of the majesty of God’s gift of water in the form of snow, rain, ice, and moisture.

It was in the water that God ignited the first spark of life at least 3.5 billion years ago, bringing single-celled microbes into being near hydrothermal vents. By about 1.2 billion years later, a bacterium had emerged that could convert sunlight into chemical energy, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as a by-product, and preparing the way for complex life to thrive in the millennia to come.

We humans, along with fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and other mammals, have retained something of that primordial ocean within bodies, in the form of the fluid that surrounds our cells. Nearly two-thirds of our bodies are composed of water, and we are entirely dependent on it for our survival. Our blood, sweat and salt tears are another reminder of our origins in the primordial seas.

Human life still begins in salt water: the foetus grows and plays in the amniotic fluid of its mother’s womb, and we speak of waters breaking when the time comes to deliver.

Water is a remarkable molecule, quite unlike any other. It is made up of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, which gives it a particular shape and electronic configuration that lead to specific properties. It is these properties that make water a blessing that sustains life like no other molecule could.

Its chemistry means that lakes don’t freeze completely solid in winter, nutrients are transported to the top of trees against the force of gravity, sweat cools us down, and the temperature of ponds stays relatively constant from day to night.

Water cycles continuously throughout the planet; liquid water evaporates into water vapor, condenses to form clouds, and precipitates back to earth in the form of rain and snow. This dynamic flow is essential for the wellbeing of every living thing on the planet.

But our relationship with water is distorted. We have forgotten our oceanic origins and severed our connection with the water that birthed us. We treat water as a commodity, something to be used and abused to the point that rivers are being polluted by industrial farms and contaminated once again with untreated sewage. What is happening with water on a planetary scale exemplifies our alienation from the rest of the non-human world. The increasingly erratic weather patterns we are experiencing in this ecological crisis often feature water: too much when there is flooding and too little in times of drought, and the weakening gulf stream that warms western Europe is carried in the Atlantic ocean.

The consequences of our alienation from the rest of creation are increasingly dire for people in particularly climate-sensitive countries. Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, for example, have been badly affected by drought this year, with 68 million people needing urgent food aid.

For the sake of our brothers and sisters in these countries, and for many other good reasons, we urgently need to establish a healthy relationship with the non-human world, including the holy gift of Sister water, recognising, as St Francis did, our deep connection with her. In his Canticle to the Sun, he wrote “Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.”

The imagery of water flows through the Bible, sometimes as a symbol of judgement, as in the story of the flood or of the drought announced by Elijah, and sometimes as a symbol of grace, like the dew on Gideon’s fleece or when Jesus offered the water of life to the woman at the well.

We meet it again in our second reading from the book of Revelation. This apocalyptic text is full of strange images, and we aren’t meant to take them literally, but they are useful because pictures and images help us to make sense of our world.

This reading comes just after a description of the New Jerusalem, the perfect city in which God makes his home with mortals, where there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain. It is a vision of future wholeness where the union between humans and God is so complete that there will be no need for the light of a lamp or of the sun. In this hopeful image of a restored creation, we read of a pristine, unpolluted river flowing straight from the throne of God and of the Lamb. This river bears the water of life, which sustains the tree of life. This tree produces a different fruit each month and its leaves are for the healing of the nations: this living water brings fruitfulness to the earth and peace to humanity.

Here, Sister Water is freed from her bondage to the consequences of our sin, free to fully be the gift from God that she is. In the new Jerusalem we also will be the people that God intended us to be. This is an image of shalom – of wholeness, health, peace, safety, fullness, rest and harmony. This shalom is a restored relationship between us and the rest of creation, and between us and God. The world desperately needs to experience this; our times are marked by people alienated from each other, from God and from the rest of creation, with increasingly catastrophic consequences.

So how do we get from the reality of where we are today, with our polluted rivers, floods, and droughts, to experiencing life in shalom, sustained by the metaphorical river of life that flows from God’s throne?

There is one last water image in our third reading that bridges this gap. In John’s account of the crucifixion, we read that soldiers pierced Jesus’s side to make sure that he was dead. Water then flowed from this wound – it is a rather gory image, but it can be understood as a symbol of Christ releasing his divine life into the world.

Think of it like this: when a seed falls to the ground and is buried, in time it breaks open to release the new life of a seedling. Jesus on the cross is like a seed that is buried, dies and then releases his life into the world through the holy spirit. This divine life heals the ruptures within humanity, between humanity and creation, and between humanity and God.

This healing of ruptures, this all-encompassing shalom, is something we hope for in the fullness of time, but it also something we are called to live out in the present. This includes being at peace with water and with the rest of creation; but we can’t manage this in our own strength, as if the future of the planet rests entirely on our shoulders. Christ is the one who has broken the power of death and decay – he is the source of the water of life – and it is through him that shalom is coming. And yet, at the same time, we are his body now, and in the unfathomable mystery of God’s wisdom, he doesn’t do much, if anything, without our cooperation, and so we need to be radically open to whatever part he is calling us to play.

Returning to where we began, in the water, I encourage us to develop a deeper respect for Sister water, to conserve her rather than waste her. But there is more to this than switching the tap off when we brush our teeth; we need to look a little deeper and to use our imaginations. You’re probably quite familiar with the concept of the carbon footprint, but there is also our water footprint to consider. Everything we buy, use and throw away takes water to process and transport, we can use less water by making thoughtful purchases and reusing and recycling more. The same goes for food and, in this case, we can save water by eating lower on the food chain – so more plants and less meat and dairy products – by eating more whole foods and, very importantly, by not wasting food.

This is a call to live wisely, which brings me back to the image of the tree of life flourishing on the banks of the river in the New Jerusalem. It reminds me of Psalm 1, where we learn that a wise person who seeks God is like a tree planted by a river, whose leaves do not wither when the dry times come. By sinking our roots deep down into God, we can find our way to wisdom. There we can drink from the living water, which will make us fruitful and grow us into peacemakers, shalom-builders, in this world that is crying out for wholeness, peace and restoration.

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Elderberries, hens and societal collapse

Straining the juice

Beautiful patterns in the nascent jelly

We went foraging a lot when I was a child, for blackberries, elderberries, and even firewood on a couple of occasions; the fun continued when we got home, with hot cauldrons of boiling jam and jars of jewel-like sweetness. To this day I have a very soft spot for certain preserves, elderberry and apple jelly being one of them – it has a very particular taste that doesn’t suit everyone’s palate, but it reminds me of those happy days foraging.

Not long after we moved in to our current home, I planted an elder tree in the garden, and for the last couple of years it has had enough fruit on it to make jelly, so yesterday I harvested the berries. I looked up a recipe online and stumbled across a blog post entitled Taking Care of the Elders, which brought me up short. The author of this blog encourages her readers to forage responsibly, only taking a maximum of 10% of the berries from each tree, leaving the rest for the wildlife and giving the tree a good chance of reproducing itself. I, however, practically stripped my tree bare.

In my defence, this is a tree that I had planted, not a wild specimen, and I couldn’t risk letting the juicy dark red clusters fall onto my neighbour’s pristine astroturf – but that isn’t the point. Despite having read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants less than a year ago and totally taking on board the author’s mantra of reciprocity, respect, and restraint, I didn’t remotely reflect on that as I greedily, but at least gratefully, took all the ripe berries I could reach.

I’m clearly not the only person with this problem, as in many parts of Switzerland there are strict rules, for example about mushrooms: when you are allowed to pick them, and how many, in order to protect them for the future, which is important as mushroom picking grows in popularity. This tendency to take too much is part of a much bigger problem, as described in the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive; why societies fall apart is obviously a complex question with many factors involved, but one analogy that stuck with me from this book was how often we choose to eat the ‘hen’ rather than sustainably eating her ‘eggs’.

Perhaps I can at least partly blame the culture I find myself in, with its very short-term perspective, fear of scarcity and the need to hoard to get through the winter? It pains me to say how very challenged I am by the Indian proverb “Store your grain in your neighbour’s belly”, as I am far more likely to fill up my freezer than to be generous towards others with any abundance from my garden.

I can’t promise to limit myself to only 10% of next year’s potential elderberry harvest, but I will at least remember this reflection and leave some for the birds.

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Does the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in it?

This year, my fig tree is producing lots of fruit. Unfortunately for me, the birds in my garden also have a taste for figs and so I have taken to picking the fruit before it is fully ripe, since the birds swiftly demolish any that I miss. Even then, about half the figs I harvest contain a grub or two who have eaten their way through a good part of the flesh.

And so, as I was reading the words of my daily prayer for Sunday morning: Come and shelter under the tree of life, enjoy the cool shade and taste its fruit my mind went straight to my fig tree. In my imagination, I picked a ripe fruit and settled myself down on a shady chair – but I stopped myself short, did I dare take a big bite? What if it were full of grubs? Could the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in? Surely not, since heaven, where the tree of life is found, is perfect! Surely there is no place in paradise for grubs, slugs, nettles and everything else that causes me trouble?!

Of course, this is a philosophical question, it being highly unlikely that the afterlife will resemble life on Earth, and perhaps I shouldn’t make so much of symbols anyway, particularly apocalyptic ones? But it did strike me that perhaps at least some of the fruit of the tree of life would contain grubs. The insects they will grow into have a role to play in the ecosystem, just like the birds who enjoy their figs as much as I do.

It’s interesting to notice that I can come to terms with sharing the fruit of the tree of life with the grubs and the birds, while sharing the figs from my own tree is much more problematic. I think that, since I planted and tended the tree, I see them as my figs, that I have an exclusive right to them.

It looks like the problem here might be my selfishness and anthropocentrism! Maybe heaven, the kingdom of God, is where I can share my figs with the birds and the insects without begrudging them their share, after all:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah 11:6

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1 Corinthians 2:9-16

My daughter finds deep symbolism in the stressed-looking mother opossum carrying her babies around, and felt the need to express this in clay 😉

I was pondering 1 Corinthians 2:9-16 on a train journey a few weeks ago – it’s rather dense text, and so my imagination took a bit of a leap. I’d like to share with you where I ended up. Once again, I wish I were an artist, because these verses conjure up a beautiful image that I struggle to describe in words.

Verse 10 talks about the Spirit who searches everything, even the depths of God, and so we start with the Holy Spirit reaching into the heart of God the Father.
Then in verse 11, we read that the human spirit, deep within us, knows what is truly human – our spirit reaches deep into our hearts.
Verse 12 tells us that we have received the Spirit that is from God, this makes a connection between our heart and the heart of God. The Holy Spirit joins with the spirit of our inner being, bringing us and God into union.

I imagine the Holy Spirit as a sort of dynamic loop of light flowing from the heart of God into our hearts, bringing love and peace. Once inside, the Spirit searches out our inmost being (Psalm 139:1-6), and then flows out of our bodies, bringing all we are living with into the heart of God the Father, where Christ is. This is an unbroken flow of the Spirit between our heart and the heart of God.

This action of the Holy Spirit changes our hearts and changes our minds, to the point that Paul dares to write in verse 16 that ‘we have the mind of Christ’. I am comforted by this intimate image of the love of God the Father being brought into my heart by the Holy Spirit, and that the troubles of my heart are then carried up to Christ in God, who understands me and transforms me.

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It’s high time I wrote something about compost.

My compost heap has gradually been working on me. I no longer pull out the pervasive weeds that invade my vegetable beds in frustration, rather these days I do it with gratitude, as they will soon be transformed into food for my plants in the warm, dark womb of the heap.

This morning I decided that it was time to cut down the stinging nettles standing guard around it. Since the neighbours have kindly consented to donating their kitchen scraps to my garden project, I thought I ought to at least make the area reasonably accessible. As I was stuffing the felled nettles into the top of the heap, I noticed a seedling that had grown at the bottom – probably a courgette or a pumpkin – and it made me smile.

Compost can also be a metaphor for life. Everything that happens to us, good or bad, can be put on the inner compost heap, broken down over time with reflection and prayer, and then be transformed into something new and life-giving. We have to trust this slow but steady process, perhaps that’s what the words I was reading in the letter of James this morning were talking about?

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Colossians 3:1-11

Limax maximus: slugs are my enemies, but this is a fabulous specimen, and, after all, we are called to love our enemies!

I was struck the other morning by the mysterious words at the beginning of chapter 3 of the letter to the Colossians. I had a sense of our inner beings being drawn out of a state of turmoil and darkness (3:1 you have been raised with Christ) into a place of warmth, light and safety (3:3 hidden with Christ in God).

Traditionally when we’ve thought of being ‘raised with Christ’ we’ve mostly talked about being forgiven our sins, about guilt and sacrifice, but as I read it, it feels like being raised up out of the consequences of sin – what has been done to us and how in our weakness and pain we have reacted – in an act of profound healing.

I had a good childhood, with a stable home and parents that loved me. But being a highly sensitive person, I took the inevitable knocks of life very hard. I became a very anxious child and suffered with inexplicable stomach aches that I now understand as an expression of my built-up stress. This later appeared in various forms such as free-floating anxiety and teeth-grinding. I tried to ‘leave it at the foot of the cross’ and ‘just trust God’, but it wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realised I had to do my part and stop turning things over in my mind; viewing them from every conceivable angle in a compulsive attempt to solve the problem was only making things worse. Trusting God meant properly letting go, and with that came great relief.

I made a conscious step of faith aged 12, which I see as the beginning of my healing, of my being raised with Christ. If I were an artist, I would draw a figure in the bottom left-hand corner of the page drowning in a murky quagmire, or entangled in a forbidding thorny forest, unable to escape from their anxiety and distress. Then in the top right-hand corner there is an area of pure light where God is, out of which reach the hands of Christ to grab hold of the suffering person and pull them into the light. The person’s true self is also made of light, and that becomes visible as they are raised up out of their distress.

Then I would draw another picture, this time of God the Father holding the figure together with Christ at the centre of a warm embrace. It is a place of utter peace, love and rest, of light and wholeness… and there is room for everyone in the all-encompassing arms of God (3:11 there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!)

My experience is that the move from being in the quagmire to being aware of our safety in the arms of God does not take place overnight. As with every relationship, it develops in stages and continues to grow. Verse 10 says [you] have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. This present, active process started, at least as I understand it, at the age of 12, and since then my faith in God has been growing and changing in a surprising (and very non-linear) journey of discovery, and there is still so much more to learn!

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God is a woman baker

Fenugreek seeds

The following is a reflection on Matthew 13:33 that I gave in May 2023, inspired by the work of Robert Farrar Capon on the parables of Jesus.

About 20 years ago, I bought this book about the parables of Jesus. Since then, it has been sitting on my shelf, periodically inviting me to return to it: I know it is full of great wisdom, but it is hard to understand and even harder to explain to anyone else. I find that rather ironic, as the parables themselves can be like that. Rather than giving us doctrines set in stone for all time, Jesus gave us parables that are wide open to interpretation. So, when I saw the Gospel for today, I thought it was high time I made an attempt to share with you some of the wisdom hidden in this rather challenging book.

Oh, and just to add one more layer of complexity, today’s parables are about the kingdom of God. Jesus talked a lot about the kingdom of God, but never really defined it; here he gives us five images to consider: a mustard seed, some yeast, treasure, a pearl and a drag-net. I’m going to look at just one of these images to see if we can shed any light on what Jesus meant: the parable of the yeast.

As I read it to you again, just notice what image comes to your mind: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’ What image does that conjure up in your mind? I see a rather domestic picture of a woman at home in her kitchen kneading a modest ball of dough ready for the family meal.

My husband bought a bread machine about a year ago. In typical fashion, I chastised him for the unnecessary purchase, but then, of course, I am the one who has ended up using it, so I can say with some authority that it takes 400g of flour to make our usual loaf.

The woman in the parable used three measures of flour, which doesn’t sound like very much, until we go back to the original Greek, where we discover that the word for measure is ‘sata’ and that three sata is a little over a bushel of flour – which, in today’s money, is 21kg of flour. Let that sink in, 21 kilograms. That’s enough to make 52 loaves of bread.

This is such a large quantity of flour, that we could understand it to represent the world, in fact it’s so disproportionately huge, that perhaps it represents the whole of creation?

Can you imagine trying to deal with enough dough for 52 loaves of bread by hand? It’s hard enough work kneading the dough for a single loaf, hence the aforementioned bread machine, but the mixing, the kneading, the handling of such an enormous quantity of sticky, heavy dough is a job for an industrial machine, not an individual person.

So, what might this tell us about the woman in the parable? Well, she has very strong arms and is extremely determined – despite the challenges of handling such an enormous quantity of dough, she gets the job done. This woman is far removed from the domestic goddess I had originally imagined!

What a fantastic image of God!

Not only is this one of those few female pictures of God hidden in the Scriptures, but it is a powerful one. God as a woman baker has a job to do and she is doing it with gusto. She has taken on a project that is not easy; the parallel between the unwieldy lump of dough and the current state of the world is obvious.

But back to the kingdom and what this parable can tell us about it.

Firstly, the kingdom has always been there. No competent baker would add yeast part way through the process, it’s mixed in right at the beginning. Similarly, God’s kingdom has been at work ever since the very beginning of creation, right from the big bang. The kingdom didn’t start when the Word became flesh in Jesus, but in the person of Jesus, God showed us his face and told us his name and sent us out to share that good news with everyone.

Secondly, the kingdom is everywhere. The yeast isn’t reserved for a special portion of the flour, it’s mixed into the whole. The kingdom of God is seeded throughout the whole of creation, not just in the church or so-called Christian nations. God has done amazing things through the church and the world would be much poorer without it. As well as nurturing the spiritual growth of individuals, the church has a rich artistic and cultural heritage, and in many places it is a lifeline for struggling communities, and I could go on.

However, it is also true that God’s kingdom has not been limited to the activities of the church. Just as the yeast leavens the whole dough, God is also at work in the wider world – think of the wisdom of Buddhism or of indigenous communities, the creativity found in cultures very different to our own, and the amazing knowledge and insights gained by peoples all over the world. What is more, not infrequently, the church has been dragged kicking and screaming into the kingdom that God has already been advancing in the world; just as an example, we are rightly shocked that women didn’t get the federal vote until 1971 in Switzerland, yet in the Church of England, women had to wait until 1992 to be ordained priests, and 2015 to be ordained bishops!

Thirdly, just as the yeast cannot be separated from the flour, so God’s kingdom cannot be separated from the world. Which takes us back to the very end of our other reading this morning from the letter to the Romans.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God – it might not always feel that way, but God’s love is as inseparable from his creatures as the yeast is from the dough.

Fourthly and finally, the kingdom is mysterious. The Greek verb translated as ‘mixed’ in this parable actually means to hide: the woman hides the yeast in the flour. Once it’s in the dough, yeast is invisible to our eyes, but it is there quietly doing its work, slowly but surely leavening the whole batch. Similarly, we cannot ‘see’ the kingdom, or even define it, but we can see its effects: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them (Mtt 11:5). God has hidden the kingdom in the world, he is transforming creation before our very eyes even though we cannot always see it.

We live in a time of great change, and our instinctive reaction is often fear. We see the decline of the church in the West and, understandably, lament. Is the yeast still leavening the dough?

Perhaps theologian Phyllis Tickle has something helpful to say about this. She points out that about every 500 years, the church goes through what she describes as a giant ‘rummage sale’ – what she means is that it cleans its house, which is a difficult process, but that something new emerges.

These ‘rummage sales’ are linked to what is going on in the wider culture and she cites the following events, each following on from the one before after about 500 years: we start with the incarnation of Christ, then the emergence of monasticism as the church went underground at the collapse of the Roman Empire, next the Great Schism that separated the church into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches, and most recently the Reformation. We are now 500 years on from that, and the time is ripe for great change in the church again.

We don’t know what will come next, but we don’t need to be afraid: the yeast of the kingdom is slowly but surely continuing its work.

So where does this leave us? It seems to me that the overarching message is to patiently trust God. To trust him in that holy ambiguity that our chaplain talked about last week. He has been at work in the whole world since the very beginning, is at work now, and will continue his work until it is finished. We needn’t despair, because although it is often a mystery to us, the kingdom is growing. It isn’t something we can drive and still less something that we are responsible for, rather we are invited to join in with it. And I know that you are already joining in the work of the kingdom in many ways, through your friendships, families, work, voluntary activities and much more, both through the church and elsewhere. So I encourage us to keep I up the good work and be open to whatever else God might be calling us to do.

One last thought about this parable; the dough is indigestible in its current form, and it won’t be edible until the yeast has finished its work and the loaf has been baked. So too, our world is indigestible in its current form, there are so many things about it that outage and upset us, that cause us pain. Despite the unwieldy, almost impossible task, the woman baker of our parable got the whole dough leavened. Let us trust that God will similarly transform the whole world through the work of His mysterious kingdom.

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Can we call a truce with nature?

Slugs 1 - 0 Inner Gardener

I am often tempted to idealise nature. However, after a recent trip to the forest I realised that I had brought a passenger home with me, a tick that was potentially bearing encephalitis, which got me thinking about the perfectly good reasons that set us on the path to our current alienation from the more-than-human world. Here are some musings.

Untamed nature has always tried to destroy us – think wild animals, pests and diseases. She doesn’t give up food for us to eat easily. We have had to tame her, to become gardeners, to clear the weeds and manage the fertility of the soil, to make a safe space to feed ourselves and to rest. It has been a constant battle against slugs and aphids, ergot and blight. But we mostly subsisted.

Revolutions agricultural and industrial raised many of us out of the mire into a, by many measures, far better standard of living. But they were also apocalypses of a kind, destroying ecologies, damaging mental health, and making us into cogs in a machine.

But even that wasn’t enough. We pushed on, wanting to protect ourselves entirely from the forces of nature. We further mechanised and digitalized. Those of us who could hid ourselves away in semi-sterile boxes, while the rest of humanity and the more-than-human world paid the price for our comfort. But nature keeps coming for us in dry rot and black mould, in vermin and viruses, in coughs, cancer and cholera.

We can’t escape our vulnerable flesh. Even though we have forgotten it, we are a part of nature, nature that is designed for balance, for birth, death and resurrection. Resurrection of our organic flesh means composting, as our bodies decay and feed the worms, the atoms that compose our bodies are brought back into the cycle of life. We resist the call of the compost bin before it is ‘our time’ – but who decides when that is?

Can we call a truce with nature? In any case, she won’t leave our efforts untouched, but keeps showing herself, as weeds breaking through cracked concrete, lichen on fences and sodden moss on untrod tarmac.

If you found this helpful, I highly recommend that you read Window Poems by Wendel Berry