In our reading today we heard Jesus tell us that we should look at the flowers of the field. Stop and notice. In his painting called Consider the Lilies, Stanley Spencer depicts Jesus as mountainous in comparison with the daisies (not lilies) that he contemplates. Archbishop Stephen Cottrell has noted that this Jesus is playful, "huge and humble", godlike. Mark Oakley writes that ‘Whereas lilies call for attention, in church or posh hallways, daisies are overlooked, or considered problematic in our neat lawns. Jesus relishes their beauty, and, at the same time, challenges the sad fact about human beings that "when it comes to the present moment, we're not present".’
Cottrell then cleverly refers us to the words of Nadine Stair: ‘If I had my life to live over . . . I'd relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been. . . I would do more walking and looking. . . I would pick more daisies.’
Simon Small writes that we find it difficult to do this because: ‘Our minds find paying full attention to now very difficult. This is because our minds live in time. Our thoughts are preoccupied with past and future, and the present moment is missed.’ But, he says: ‘To pay profound attention to reality is prayer, because to enter the depths of this moment is to encounter God. There is always only now. It is the only place that God can be found.’
This is very much what Jesus seems to be saying to us through his teaching on worry and anxiety as found in today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 6. 24 -34). When we are preoccupied with what might happen in the future, we are not living fully in the present and may well misunderstand or misinterpret what is actually going on. Jesus encourages us to live fully in the present because, as Simon Small says, that is where we encounter God.
When we genuinely encounter God in the here and now, we know that his love and forgiveness surround us and that his Spirit fills us. As Jesus prayed in John 17, he is in us and we are in him. When we know this in our hearts in the here and now, we can relax because whatever happens to us, we are accepted, forgiven, loved and gifted by the God who created all things and who will bring all things to their rightful end. We are held in the palm of his hands and, therefore, as Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.
Jesus says that the more we live in the present and the more we encounter God’s love in the here and now, the less we will be anxious or worried. Prayer is able to help us do both things and therefore helps us to reduce our sense of anxiety or worry. Not because we have listed all our worries to God and believe that he will solve them all for us, but instead because, through prayer, we encounter more of God’s love and, as a result, trust that he will be with us whatever comes our way.
Harvest provides a wonderful opportunity for us to do this in relation to the natural world around us including the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Harvest provides an ‘opportunity to reflect and give thanks for all the good things in our lives, especially the way in which the earth produces food for us to eat, to give thanks for all those who work to produce food and drink for us to enjoy, to say sorry for the times we are not grateful, that we don’t notice God’s work in the world, that we don’t look after the things God has given us.’ ‘We live in a different time from our ancestors where the harvest and bringing the harvest in would have dominated everyone’s lives’ but today we probably hardly notice it. What we can do, however, is pay attention to what is around us, whether in our gardens and parks or in our homes and town.
Pope Francis has written on the connection between care for our common home and paying attention in his encyclical Laudato Si. There, he wrote: ‘Those who enjoy more and live better each moment are those who have given up dipping here and there, always on the look-out for what they do not have. They experience what it means to appreciate each person and each thing, learning familiarity with the simplest things and how to enjoy them. So they are able to shed their unsatisfied needs, reducing their obsessiveness and weariness. Even living on little they can live a lot, above all when they cultivate other pleasures and find satisfaction in fraternal encounters, in service, in developing their gifts, in music and art, in contact with nature and in prayer.’ (Laudato Si 223)
He continues, saying, ‘No one can cultivate a sober and satisfying life without being at peace with him or herself…. Inner peace is closely related to care for ecology and for the common good because, lived out authentically, it is reflected in a balanced lifestyle together with a capacity for wonder which takes us to a deeper understanding of life. Nature is filled with words of love, but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances.’ (Laudato Si 225)
He concludes, drawing on today’s Gospel reading, that: ‘We are speaking of an attitude of heart, one which approaches life with serene attentiveness, which is capable of being fully present to someone…which accepts each moment as a gift from God to be lived to the full. Jesus taught us this attitude when he invited us to contemplate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air…. He was completely present to everyone and to everything and in this way he showed us the way to overcome that unhealthy anxiety which makes us superficial, aggressive and compulsive consumers.’ (Laudato Si 226)
Pope Francis quotes Patriarch Bartholomew as saying that we should look for solutions to the climate emergency in a change of humanity: ‘He asks us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which “entails learning to give, and not simply to give up. It is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and compulsion”. Bartholomew says that, ‘As Christians, we are also called “to accept the world as a sacrament of communion, as a way of sharing with God and our neighbours on a global scale. It is our humble conviction that the divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of our planet”.’
Such an attitude begins with our looking closely, attentively, at the world around us as Jesus encourages us to do in today’s Gospel reading and as Stanley Spencer shows him doing in ‘Consider the Lilies’. This Harvest, may we increasingly do the same.
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Barclay James Harvest - Hymn.
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