Ploughing and scattering

Hello again. I stopped doing daily blogs back in July with the anticipation that I would go down to one or two a week. But having stopped I realised that I was very tired and dry and didn’t really have a lot to say. To use the language of harvest the field needed to be fallow for a bit

Traditional harvest loaf at St Nicholas Woodrising

Well we have had a summer of services, some hybrid, some more straightforward. All have been risk assessed and so far we don’t seem to have been the source of infection. it’s been good to be back though who knows what the next weeks and months will hold.

Harvest reminds me that there are seasons, something that the consumer culture of the supermarket and instant availability hasn’t yet been able to undermine.

Can I also suggest that there are other seasons, longer ones, that may take place over longer than a portion of a year. More normally they are lived by individuals or families, through particular tough times, a bereavement, an illness, a redundancy, the failure of a relationship.

Collectively we are going through the season of Covid, it’s taking longer than we wanted or like. We are enduring it, and like the hymn title we may well feel, ploughed, dug into, damaged even; and scattered, imperfectly connected with those we love. Yet love is possible, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez puts it, even in a time of Cholera.*

We had another harvest loaf on Sunday, done by the same baker it depicts the five loaves and two fishes of the feeding of the five thousand. It’s not much, many people confronted with that in a restaurant would think of it as a starter for them alone. Well love only needs a small starter, a seed, from which all sorts of things may grow, a seed which can hide in the ground in the winter ready for the spring.

I am going to re-start this blog, I have missed it and was touched when others said they had as well, but it seems to me that our journey through these times is not yet done. Good night and God bless.

* I should confess that I have never read this book, just a synopsis of it so I am hoping that the literary minded of you (Deborah M I’m thinking of you) will come to my rescue if I have misappropriated it’s purpose.