Tag: worship

Four seasons in one day

Rock Samphire on a Roseland sea-wall

I wrote, only a couple of days ago, about having to change all my saved database dates to the American standard – month/day/year – and here’s why. If you look at the picture, I set my new Olympus TG-7 to time and date stamp my photos so it would be easier to reference them. It’s no big deal really unless it happens to be the 11th September when the associations with 9/11 spread like a dark stain on the calendar. Converting the dates keeps taking me back to the twin towers.

But there’s another anomaly about date-stamping. It speaks of the seventh of January as if time were frozen at that moment – and in one limited sense it was. At exactly 12.51 GMT I was sitting on a very wet seat on the sea wall, looking at the waves rolling in, when I turned around and there, was a whole botanical life story. The roots, the leaves and the senescent remains of last season’s flowers couldn’t be sliced up like a supermarket cucumber; they were – they are indivisible. A little to the left I found another plant which was (improbably) flowering, out of season. Entirely out of time and out of season these plants would – if he’d had any sense at all, have thrown Thomas Gradgrind (See Dickens’ “Hard Times”) into a rage of doubt.

Later in our winter walk we found Gorse obeying the rules and Knapweed breaking them shamelessly. Plants, as I never tire of saying, don’t read textbooks and consequently don’t obey our imposed human attempts to regulate nature.

There’s a line in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus where Dr Dysart, a psychotherapist who is attempting to understand/treat an adolescent man who has blinded six horses says “Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that. And when have I ever galloped?” Dysart, reflecting on his own timid suburban life is grappling with his envy. but also the cost to his 17 year old patient, Alan, of returning him to something that’s called normal but lacks all fervour and intensity.

That line, lament – if you like – “Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that. And when have I ever galloped?” has lurked in the back of my mind for many years. Occasionally I mark these posts with the tag “Green spirituality”, and a couple of days ago I used the word “soul” which I never feel comfortable doing because I couldn’t say exactly what they mean. Alan, the adolescent in the play, has built up a whole theology around his passion for horses, and there’s the problem. Religion attracts dangerous pathologies like moths to a flame. Why would I want to risk adding to that number?

So I seem to occupy the somewhat purgatorial space between the instinct to worship and the urge to run a mile from anyone who claims to have the secret; but the plants can still (quite literally) bring me to my knees. I could have chosen any number of plants to illustrate this. Yesterday we found loads of extremely infant Wild Carrots and – because sometimes the youthful forms of plants can be very different from their grown up parents, they’re hard to identify. But their presence in all their life-stages, mirrors our own so marvelously that I can look at the senescent remains of the old rock samphire amid the fresh green leaves of the younger and feel a powerful sense of belonging. The gulf between me and what the Taoists call “the ten thousand things” is bridged by that sense of solidarity. The same wisdom teaches that “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao” Any kind of theology to try to explain that unity is destined to fail. Like all theologies it is no more than suffocating waffle, and I’ve heard a bit of that, believe me!

In a previous post I wrote about dialects and suggested that the plants which grow in particular environmental niches are a kind of dialect which we – as observers and often users of landscapes can learn and understand. So today I want to take a small step further and suggest that the philosophical distance between ourselves and the plants, indeed all of the ten thousand things which has created an epidemic of blindness, must be overturned if we are ever to become fully human. Nature speaks, mostly inscrutably. You might think of the spring flush as a song of outpouring joy but I should say that the predominant tone of most natural history programming falls into the pathetic fallacy trap. We don’t feel like plants and animals and neither do/could they feel like us. We meet as strangers and we can either lock them into our own conceptual prisons, or make the effort to learn their language. The earth speaks in her own way and we respond in ours – for good or ill. That’s a conversation

What I am sure about is that the shock of recognition that comes with stumbling upon a new plant is as close to worship as I need to experience. Botany is not at all like trainspotting!

A lovely bed of wild watercress near Carne

More feasting please

1080681

There’s a line in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus that’s stuck in my mind. It sounds a  bit religious but it’s not – here’s the full quotation:

Have you thought of the fellow on the other side of it? The finicky, critical husband looking through his art books on mythical Greece. What worship has he ever known? Real worship! Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that…I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity.

Wow! “without worship you shrink”. I’ve used that quotation dozens of times because it seems so profoundly important; and perhaps never more so than this moment in the history of the earth. Now this is absolutely not about getting you to go to church or adopt any strange supernatural beliefs.  Worship comes in all sorts of unexpected ways, like at the end of a headline set at Glastonbury when the air seems to thicken and stand still; or when a barn owl flies silently within inches of your head as you walk home in the dark; or when you hold your newly born child in your arms and the air suffuses his skin and it changes colour from slate to rose pink; or when the sheer undeserved generosity of the earth makes you catch your breath over a basket of fruit.

For many years my life was punctuated by festivals. A whole year was a book. Advent, Lent, Easter and Pentecost were the chapter headings, but there were paragraphs, sentences and even words that could bring me to my knees.  On Easter Eve I would sing a long unaccompanied modal song called the Exultet that was so powerful to me I needed to lock myself in the church and sing it over and over until I could get through it without breaking down.   It was never the theology that attracted me but the channelling of the emotions.  Who doesn’t long to be liberated, brought to life again out of captivity?  It was the blues, it was Gospel music, it was an ancient form of music that had been sung for maybe 1600 years just once a year without a break.  For the four minutes or so that it lasted I was always touched by an overwhelming sense of the divine. Music is potent stuff – that’s why they always try to crush it.

Now I live largely without the big festivals because the meaning seems to have drained out of them. My own favourites among the dishonoured escapees from paganism were always wassailing, Plough Monday and the Rogation services; all of them celebrations of the earth. Then there were other renegades like Harvest Festival and Remembrance Sunday that managed to draw the community together precisely by remaining doctrinally agnostic, and of course Christmas carols which in any case had been dragged in from the pubs. I always saw the church as a kind of lost property office where you might go to look for something you couldn’t quite remember but know for sure you once possessed.

But it’s all dying and our opportunity to experience real worship is more and more compromised, just at the very moment we desperately need to rediscover and celebrate our creative connection with the earth. And here I want to unpick the idea of worship a little bit because I know that we can all individually, and in the solitude of our own hearts find inspiration and perhaps bliss or even ecstacy –

 – and I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

But I think we need more.  I think we need to rediscover forms of community liturgy; spoken word, poetry, dance and song; shared feasting and perhaps fasting as well. We need to liberate ourselves to worship the stars and the sun and the whole creation of which we are just a part, and which bore us and held us in its arms for millions of years. We need these community strengthening moments because there is no pleasure and no power in being isolated and right – we’re never right if we’re on our own. Individual salvation is a punishment for egotists.

So in the midst of the work we need to do if the earth is to become whole again we need to remember to add community building and worship to the recycling, the careful use of money, the growing and tending of crops and feeding ourselves with regard to the needs of the whole. Fasting (perhaps from meat) then becomes a gesture of solidarity rather than a demonstration of personal rectitude – it has some purpose beyond imaginary purity. And the liturgy, the work of the people, is an essential part of it.  It’s not as if we don’t have any precedents. Even a flower and produce show can be an act of public thanksgiving – it doesn’t have to be cringeworthy sub religious claptrap.

“Without worship you shrink”  – that’s the harsh absence that allowed them to call the despoliation of the earth and its peoples a “green revolution”.  It’s time to turn worship around and reclaim it for our own.