It was a lovely surprise to discover this beautiful Michaelmas daisy blooming in a hidden corner of my garden a few weeks ago.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a very violent storm. High winds swept through my garden and seemed to have made their entrance principally through the gateway, which I suppose isn’t unreasonable. Over the gate, I had constructed an archway and planted a honeysuckle – six years on, the honeysuckle has enthusiastically grown up and over the arch with a series of thick stems wrapped around the, unfortunately, none too robust structure. When the strong winds blew, the weight of the honeysuckle was just too much and the whole thing collapsed. The sight of the jumble of stems and bits of metal pole was so discouraging – how was I ever going to disentangle the honeysuckle from the archway? Would I be able to repair it? Would the honeysuckle survive? I soon realised that the only answer was some serious pruning. Not only were the stems wrapped throughout the structure, but they were extremely tightly attached – so tightly that it was difficult to cut through the stems without damaging the metal structure beneath. After an extended period of careful cutting and untangling, I managed to release the archway and rebuild it with duck tape (what would I do without it? – Mend things properly?!) I then took the remaining 20% of the honeysuckle and rethreaded it through the archway. A silver lining was the fun of feeding the discarded branches into the shredder and returning them to the garden as mulch.
A number of lessons could be drawn from this experience, but what comes to my mind are the verses at the beginning of Hebrews 12, and in particular: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.
Recently I have feeling a bit like the broken archway, collapsed under the weight of the overgrown honeysuckle. My mind is totally preoccupied, my body is tense and aching, and my spirit seems to have checked out for the time being. And as for the great crowd of witnesses, these might just be the sparrows and bluetits crowding around our birdfeeder, apparently without a care in the world. What is going on with me?
Perhaps now that the winds of change in their various forms are blowing through my life, they are exposing the extent of the ‘weight and sin that clings so closely’ rather like the tightly-bound honeysuckle. ‘Sin’ is a word with all sorts of unhelpful connotations, but essentially it describes anything that separates us from God – anything that pushes us away from that place of awareness of our deep connection with the Divine. All those times when I feel bad about myself and how I show up in the world are fertile ground for the ‘bad spirit’ that Ignatius of Loyola spoke of to drag me down.
Rather than talk of the bad spirit, I prefer to blame my darker moods on the patterns that seem to be hardwired into my being – the default ways of interpreting my place in reality that served as a survival strategy at one point in time, but which are now well past their sell-by date. These ways of responding need to be pruned away, and that job might be easier if I can lessen their grip on me – perhaps by taking them a little less seriously?