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My dear friends
Deep roots
We grew a hyacinth in a glass container this year - you know, the kind which used to grace the windows of primary school classrooms, as a teaching aid in nature study. The bulb grew the most amazing roots, which we could watch slowly pushing outwards until they reached the bottom of the glass and then began to circle around one another. This forest of spindly, white roots drew sufficient nutriment from the water to support a crown of leaves and splendid flower stem. There’s a simply, homely parable of human life. We need good roots! I suppose rootedness is a universal human need if we are to grow to a secure maturity. In a society which is increasingly deracinated - cut off from its roots by geographical, economic and social mobility - I suspect that the interest, cultivated by many, in their family history is precisely an attempt to discover where we belong. The family tree may have many branches, but it also has roots going deep into the past. |
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A plot
to call your own
I’ve been reading a fascinating
book by Madeleine Bunting, who is a Guardian
columnist. Entitled The Plot, its tells the story of
one acre of English soil, called Scotch Corner, on the
remote edge of the North York Moors. Here Bunting’s father,
an art teacher and sculptor, built a Chapel as a war
memorial to boys from his old school, Ampleforth, just a few
miles away. The book is a search for what lies beneath the
surface, not only in her turbulent relationship with a
difficult and distant father, but in the plot of land which
he made his very own English acre. On the surface of this
landscape, all you can see is a stone barn-like building,
the chapel, with a strange sculpture of Noah above the
entrance door. But The Plot scrapes away the layers
as Madeleine Bunting describes the features of this acre:
the Neolithic burial mounds and earthworks, the land
constantly tramped over by cattle on the drovers’ road,
fought over by marauding Scots in the Middle Ages, and
farmed with thousands of sheep by the Cistercian monks from
nearby Byland Abbey. This is where John Bunting felt that he
was uniquely rooted.
Rooted
and grounded in love
You’ll be
reading this during the season of Lent, which is a good time
to think about our Christian roots and to give them some
extra nourishment. Paul’s letter to the Christians in
Colossae encourages the community there to ‘continue to live
your lives in Christ,
rooted and built up in him, and established in the
faith.’ To the church in Ephesus, he writes of the riches of
God’s grace, that ‘he may grant that you may be strengthened
in your inner being with power through his spirit, and that
Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, as you are being
rooted and grounded in love.’ We grow strong and deep
roots through prayer, by entering into the story of God’s
people in the Bible and by being nourished by Christ in the
sacraments. Our roots enable us to reach out in love and
compassion to each other. Bishop Alan is encouraging us to
‘go deeper into God’, in other words to strengthen our
roots. I have a feeling that if we can do this, through
God’s grace, we shall not only be able to take hold of
change, but also find that our faith is attractive to
others, who will want to discover the true source of our
rootedness in God.
Revd Canon Dr Christopher
Dent |