BEING BENEATH

EACH Spring and Summer I would cycle with my mother through the green lanes that wound their way from the suburb’s edge where we lived, through the countryside, to the little village where she grew up and where she tended the grave of a child she had known. My memories are of sitting on the handlebars of her bicycle (until I was old enough to ride my own) as we passed through cool, green tree-tunnels until we emerged into hot, dry days and arrived at the wooden gate leading into the sun-burnt land surrounding the Norman church – a church which served a hamlet abandoned over the years in favour of the site of the present village a mile away.

Most of us can trace our roots back to that ancient farming world. The life of our ancestors would have depended on the natural world in ways we can hardly imagine and part of the attraction of the countryside might be that our roots remember the world from which we came. Clearly, many are attracted to spend time drinking from this spring; urban rush and noise fall away. The blessed silence, broken by the sound of birdsong or leaves rustling in the wind, sweet smell of air unpolluted by exhaust fumes can give a sense of entering a different world and touch memories stored deep within us. Unlike our rural forebears we of today’s suburb and city often forget the need to reverence our sustaining Mother, the Earth, reminding ourselves that the internet can never truly satisfy our deepest desires but can blind us – prevent us from penetrating further than what the screen before our eyes allows. Of course, it's easy to sense God in the glories of a garden and the beauty of nature, but saints find God in the weed growing through a pavement of a city street.

Yet gardens, when cultivated and not paved over, can reveal the beauty of bush and flower; allotments allow some to sink bare hands in humus enabling a connection with our Mother. Our roots can only be satisfied by that way of earthy humility. But even then, some fear the encounter and, responding to a developing generation increasingly separated from the world, shield skin with gloves preventing thus that encounter.

However, there’s a wonderful practice within the Orthodox tradition of Christianity which forever remembers our at oneness with Earth. In praying before an icon of a heavenly saint (or at other times) the Sign of the Cross – with Trinitarian fingers held together, one bent into contact with the palm – by touching the forehead and then bending low to the ground (on which our feet walk and into which we will be buried) before concluding with a horizontal marking of the shoulders from left to right, a final marking tracing the horizon of earth and sky and sea. Naming the Source of all life, the One who came to make all things whole, and the Spirit constantly – invisibly – moving through creation, that faith-full encounter with the ground and what lies hidden beneath, affirms that whilst we’re of the earth, we come from and are destined for glory.

Christian faith is Incarnational – it says: ‘I may be flesh and blood but to be fully human I need to be in touch with the Spirit which gives life.’ Maybe we sense an echo of an oh-so-dim memory planted deep within of the divine Spirit flowing throughout Nature; the Spirit who penetrates everything in Nature and binds us together – the divine ‘glue’ that helps make us whole. At every Mass when bread is taken and wine poured, blessed and given our Faith tells us that this blessed Creation can be transformed to reveal the divine – the yeast of Christ leaving the flour that made the Bread of Life.

I find the same sense of seeing through outward things into the universe beneath when I pray before the Tabernacle in a church. There, Christ is present beneath the fragile form of a wafer of bread. In that ever-so-ordinary form there is something extraordinary, and the Divine which inhabits and transforms bread is also present throughout nature. So I sit or kneel and am moved to whisper, ‘Lord, I adore you; lay my life before you, how I must love you’.