Delight in the ordinary

In my theological college, at the head of the main staircase, was a door marked “Ordinary”. The plaque was made in varnished wood with gold lacquer lettering – in other words not a practical joke knocked up by a few students – and neither was it a comment on the person on the far side of the door who was far from ordinary. It took a while to find out that the Ordinary – the capital letter isn’t a mistake – plays an important role in any church organisation. It seems obvious, but it’s the Ordinary’s job to keep things running smoothly. In particular he (it was a ‘he’ back in the day) didn’t order the biscuits for brake-pad pudding, always a favourite in the refectory – I’m joking! – or the cabbage (someone once said to me that they knew it was an evangelical college the moment they walked through the door and smelled the boiling cabbage!). It was the job of the Ordinary to organise and supervise the worship, the liturgy and also to make sure that there were no unusual or possibly heretical interruptions to the daily flow of prayer and worship, although I remember one occasion when I was reading from St John’s Gospel and without warning a portly young lady came galumphing on to the platform wearing green tights and performed a liturgical dance around me. It was up there with the moment when I was reading the same passage from St John at a huge carol service in St Mary Redcliffe when I noticed the line at the bottom of the order of service “This page is sponsored by Pascoes Complete Dog Food”.

The Ordinary, then, supervises the day-to-day inner life of the church and keeps it on track, which turns out to be a vitally important role. Until this morning I had never thought of the ecosystem within which we live as a form of liturgy. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, the phases of the moon, the tides and the procession of solstice and equinox all seem to be written into the physical warp and weft of the universe as eternal truths, inviolable to human meddling. But if we take the seasons as an instance we can see immediately that whatever the astronomers and meteorologists define as the seasons, these entities are no more than marks in a calendar; because what we call spring is not an abstract concept but a complex human experience.

Madame is recovering from a knee replacement operation and so we have been pretty much confined to local walks. My regular walks to the supermarket have obliged me to stop and look at the kind of plants that are too lowly (weeds) normally to attract much interest. I stopped today to photograph a particularly fine example of hedge mustard, a plant which is often accompanied by a dried dog’s turd at its base, when the thought exploded in my head that the seasons could be considered to be a form of extraordinary liturgy; a kind of music which unfolds within simple rules but which is capable of great variation. Just to give a rather churchy example (last time, honestly) Ralph Vaughan Williams inserted a single extra note into the seventh line of the tune of “Abide with me”. I always find it almost unbearably poignant to hear that musical phrase played – usually at funerals it should be said.

If the seasons are some kind of liturgy, who – or where – is the Ordinary?

So here’s the takeaway point. The task of the Ordinary is to patrol the everyday worship of a community – think monastery or convent – and keep it within the agreed bounds – just as an umpire might oversee a game of cricket and determine what is and what isn’t within the boundary. The question I’m asking myself is who, or where is the Ordinary who oversees and patrols to keep the Earth from harm? The question arises because it becomes clearer every month that the earth is being harmed; not by any sort of malevolent supernatural force but by us. The great processional song of the plants, the insects, the birds and mammals is falling inexorably silent. The liturgy, the song of the earth, is being broken.

Every year we look eagerly for the signs of spring along the canal. Probably the earliest arrival is the Winter Heliotrope which spreads its faint almond perfume along the towpath. Then come Lesser Celandines, Lenten Roses in the park, Snowdrops, and then the pace quickens and we can barely keep up. The canal banks are surprisingly orderly – Cow Parsley, Hogweed, Bluebells all seem to know their times and places and emerge to use a few weeks of sunshine to complete their cycles before another more vigorous neighbour shoulders its way through. It’s anything but chaotic. This procession – in all its diversity – allows a space for every imaginable life form. This is not just a canalside bank, it’s a symphony if only we would but stand there for a whole season without moving and listen to the three dimensional unfolding – four if you include time. You may not be any kind of believer but I defy anyone who claims not to be moved to profound and deep gratitude for the experience.

We have met the enemy -it is us

Nature as liturgy is a new experience for me but above is the old expression repurposed on an Earth Day poster by Walt Kelly in 1970 five decades ago and paraphrasing a saying coined by an American naval commander in 1813, and it is still as important as it was 55 years ago. The disease of our failing civilization didn’t appear the year before last, it’s been lurking in the shadows ever since the industrial revolution. If I dare to use another religious concept (which does at least stand the test of time) the disease gnawing at our inner lives is the ancient granddaddy of all sins – idolatry: the sin of worshipping the partial, the fabricated and trivial gods we invent for ourselves instead of the whole which escapes us always because we are too fearful of the silence.

The ordinary, the everyday life of the planet is slowly dying from a kind of spiritual and intellectual heart failure after many lifetimes of abuse by us. The liturgy, that procession of music and words expressed in nature, is being broken on the one hand by bad actors who know perfectly well that they are doing wrong but persist in any case because they’re getting rich on the back of it, and on the other hand those of us whose silence is culpable because it is a form of complicity.

Madame and I have a couple of small allotments and we can vouch for the fact that this has been one of the most difficult growing seasons we have ever known. The seasons no longer seem reliable so even sowing and harvesting feel risky. Supermarket shelves are regularly patchily stocked and we read of many instances of sickness caused by the agricultural use of pesticides and polluted water. Even the seeds we have propagated ourselves in the kitchen are not thriving as they should when we get them into the ground. An old saying that – “the farmer’s boot is the best fertilizer” alludes to a remoteness from the earth that could as easily apply to working the soil from aloft the vast behemoth of a tractor as it does to urban life with its desert-like pavements. When we first lived in Wiltshire we would often pass a farm known as “Star Fall farm” which sounds at least a bit lucky for its owners. On the other hand when near Malvern we used to pass another farm – its homophone cousin – called “Starve all” – which doesn’t sound nearly so much fun. Where we live there is a great deal of social housing which shelters some very vulnerable people. One young man regularly seems to forget his medication and will stand out on the green howling “the earth is burning” at the top of his voice for a full hour at a time. He’s not wrong. I’m sad that people hurl abuse at him when his anxieties seem to have driven him mad. Star-fall becomes starve – all and brings us all to our wits’ end.

So driven by necessity and post operative recovery, we’ve been doing our botanising very close to home and guess what? the plants we find are vigorous survivors; bullies, thugs and supremely patient life-forms which can bide their time for an age and then seize any opportunity to grow. They are also just as numerous as their more glamorous country cousins. I counted up to forty species within the putting-out-the-bins range of the flat and a wider search could easily yield fifty. We can all stand and gawp at a Bee Orchid, but I understand how it’s harder to get that enthusiastic about a little Thale cress plant that seems to grow, set seed and die back in a couple of weeks in a crack between the wall and the pavement. However these little inconspicuous plants are just as much a part of the web of life, the processional symphony of nature as the wonderful and rather rare Hungarian Mullein at the top of this piece. While the sopranos and basses capture the most attention, the inner lines of the altos and tenors are the scaffolding for the texture and richness of the chord; the thankless punctuation of the liturgy without whom it would become incomprehensible.

I’ve spent years pondering on the much repeated idea that nature is somehow good for us; a sure remedy for depression and every other known disturbance of mind, body or even spirit. I’ve always concluded that a passive engagement with it is pointless and can bring no rewards. The Greek roots of the word liturgy mean a kind of voluntary work for the benefit of the people. It referred to the practice of rich Athenians doing a bit of volunteering. I’ve come to believe that only active engagement with the earth constitutes genuine liturgy – a communal and cultural response of thanksgiving. Is it any surprise that in these dying days of the Church of England a decent harvest festival will have a bigger attendance than an Easter communion.

I very much hope I’ll be able to enter and embrace my own period of senescence in a world that’s turned its back on all the madness and selfishness, and learned to listen and respond once again to the song of the earth. A tribute to the Ordinary we can’t name or even describe because the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao