View from the Vicarage

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.

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