Knowlton Circle Benefice
The Ministry Team
Reverend Angus Mayhew, Rector
Reverend Jan Brown
revjrbrown@kcb.org.uk
Finding the Humility of Sister Earth
Find your sunglasses, and a picnic rug too.
Find the shade of a tree, lie down and look up!
I hope you can delight in your summer. In the life around you. And the life in you. Drop your body close to the earth and let it resonate with the ground, with the habitat, with the earth.
In this moment of no productivity, this moment of radical rest, we find solidarity in the landscape. And we meet humility in being vulnerable and close to the natural world.
The word humility comes from the Latin for ground which is shared by the word humus: the soil.
As you lie there, beneath you is life. Each handful of soil contains more microorganisms than the population of the world.
In this place, lying beneath this tree, you have the chance to connect to the humility and wonder of the natural world of which you are one part.
Humility along with love and joy are virtues of living a Franciscan life. For St Francis, when we return to the level of the ground, we have no option but to acknowledge our solidarity with the created world. And it is from that place that we finally are able to perceive the love of God. To come to us as a child needing care. To come to us without power or wealth or status. To come to us, as one of us. And from that place, to love us forever by giving up his life for us so that we have life in all its abundance.
From the place of humility, the love Christ for us to suffer in solidarity with us on the cross is baffling and fabulous. When take a moment to step away from our status and privileges and entitlement, when we lie close to the humus, we find we are close to the love of God. And that is actually all we need. In that place of enlightenment, where nothing is beneath us or contemptible, we also have nothing left but love for everything.
As you lie there, think of the photograph of the Earth taken from Artemis 2. All we know is in that one frame: Sixpenny Best, the World Cup trophy, the WHSmith’s at Waterloo Station, my Mum, Iona, C minor, Sir Lewis Hamilton, the M25, Lardy Cake, soap and 8 billion people.
All this is all cherished by God and given life and freewill. Evolution’s freewill is chaotic and fantastic and painful. But in the gift of a free life in our humanity, the Creator couldn’t resist bubbling up into his creation to show us the meaning of life as The Christ.
All of that tiny blue dot of the earth in space upon which you lie is sacred to God.
‘Lord you are everything and I am nothing. But with your everything and my nothing we can do so much.’ [Archbishop Oscar Romero]