An early sloe

It feels like this is a long winter, locked down as we are, waiting for the days to lengthen and for a freedom that we hope will arrive along with spring and warmth. The seasons have become close to us. In our forced hibernation we are more attentive to the work of seasons than perhaps we have been before.

Seasons disarm us from our attempts to control. You can’t rush spring. There is only waiting. And they remind us that there are seasons to life that only waiting will bring to a close or open up. We live with the malaise of living too long in a culture that feels it can grab what it wants whenever it wants it, disconnected from the uncertainty of seasons.

Its the same I think in life of faith and in the life of the people of God. Sometimes there is only waiting and in that waiting trust. These are spiritual and communal winters which form us if we are minded to live in them and into which the stories of former communal winters play an important role. I have been living in 1 and 2 Peter this winter, listening to this letter as one to a scattered, persecuted minority whose hope was not in the next conference or church growth seminar, but in the promise of return of Christ. And I have been reading Belden Lane’s wonderful book ‘The Solace of Fierce Landscapes’ which opens up the long importance of wilderness and barrenness in the Christian tradition as places where real and deep spiritual growth happens. He quotes Gary Snyder: ‘Great insights have come to some people only after they have reached the point where they have nothing left’.

I wrote this poem as we moved into winter and as an awareness grew of the lengthening winter of Covid for society, for life, and for the church (which will surely emerge from this very different to how it went in). It is so tempting to feel there is some great thing we can do in this season to prepare for spring, or hurry it along. I suspect though we are being invited to wait and pray, trusting in the God of all seasons who invites us to be faithful in winter or in summer.

 
                                   An early sloe
  
 Close by the smothered ruins of the parish church
 The sloes are swelling early,
 Full blue promises of autumn
 With their patina of frost,
 Portents of the age to come,
 The dark hours in the heart of winter
 Waiting for the earth to tilt its hinge
 And fall into another year.
  
 In all things seasons.
 In all things flux,
 Between time dormant,
 Time flushed and verdant.
 Sometimes the meadows ring with hymns
 From village folk walking back through cattled fields
 To cottages and hearth.
 Sometimes a gravestone drowning in bramble
 An east wall sinking into stands of hazel.
  
 All is not lost
 The sloe blooms early, 
 The chiffchaff fall on the thickets round an old church gladly
 As the summer turns and winter feeding grounds
 Draw them southward,
 Creation groans and the Spirit
 Bends the grass, the trees, the sallow flax, 
 Which fills the gloaming
 With the promise of another time, another dawn. 

Into the Wild

I am still being overtaken by thoughts from watching Into the Wild earlier this week. The film tells the true story of Chris McCandless who gives his $20k savings to Oxfam, then leaves home and drifts around America’s wild places with the ultimate plan of getting himself to the wilds of Alaska. He finds his way to the wilderness of Alaska eventually and walks off the end of the tarmac into the unknown. There, utterly alone, he survives for some months, living in an abandoned bus.

Beautifully shot by director Sean Penn, the film is a compassionately told story of a damaged young man trying to find meaning and find himself in contemporary America. But it is also a study of the yearning in us all for the wild and lonely places that are fast disappearing from our overdeveloped landscapes.

We cannot help but admire McCandless’ brazen opposition to the assumptions of job, car, house, career etc that seem inevitable to him as he emerges from college. His story seems to provide encouragement to the hunger is all of us to get off this mad treadmill of wages and mortgage and busyness and live something of a simpler life, closer to nature, closer to ourselves.

There is something of a movement of literature on this subject too. The new naturalist writings of Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin et al are gaining popularity, reconnecting us to old ways, ancient rural practices and landscapes that are fast disappearing. These writings, of which I am something of a fan too, connect deeply with me in my search for space, silence, stillness and beauty in the midst of 21^st century life.

We seem to be living in a paradox, yearning for wilderness, nostalgic for a simpler life that has all but disappeared and yet, by and large, unable to break off from our crowded, materialistic, urban-dominated civilisation. MacFarlane’s own journey offers help though. After a series of journeys to some of the remotest places in the UK his journeys begin to explore a wilderness that is more about noticing and awareness than about purely geography. He explores the holloways of Dorset, hidden worlds that are lost to us unless we attend to them and begins to reflect on a perhaps more powerful wilderness that lies at the edges or even in the midst of our busy world. He quotes Deakin who said: ‘There is wildness everywhere, if we only stop in our tracks to look around us.’

The search for the wild is symptomatic of a deeper search, for meaning, for purpose, for ourselves and for who we are in the context of the universe. And to find it, we don’t have to break off from our lives and spend months in the wilderness – but we do have to do that on a small scale. We have to stop and we have to find something of that wilderness space wherever we are.  Sadly that does take determination and something of the countercultural courage displayed by McCandless. Perhaps that is the thing that most drew me, and others to him. He had in spades the kind of single-mindedness we all need to resist the pernicious allure of modern life with all its false promises of happiness and satisfaction.