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.