“And the Lord showed him all the land”
How do we look upon the land, upon our world? Do we see it as something to be exploited and used to our benefit and interest economically and materially? Or do we see the land more spiritually and intellectually in ways that might condition our use of it? How can we separate ourselves from the land? How we look upon the land equally speaks to how we look upon ourselves.
In our secular or civil culture, this is Mother’s Day but in the liturgical patterns of prayer and praise it is Rogation Sunday. The word rogation signifies prayer but with a profound connection to the land and our world. In the great Eucharistic gospel for today, Jesus tells us about his coming into the world and about his leaving the world. Somehow the world itself is gathered into the spiritual motions of the Son’s love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” And this makes all the difference for the understanding of our lives wherever we find ourselves in the world. There is the possibility for our affection for our places in the land and for a real commitment to the good of the land. The world does not stand over and against us in terms of our relation to God. As Jesus says, “I have overcome the world.”
We are challenged about how we see the land and about how we see ourselves in the landscape of creation redeemed. That is the great message of Eastertide and of this Sunday. The lesson from Deuteronomy tells the story of Moses being allowed to see the promised land before he dies. He sees but does not enter into the promised land. In the lesson from Acts, Paul preaches the Resurrection in Antioch Pisidia by way of reference to the Exodus and the promised land. “And as they went out [of the synagogue], the people begged that these things might be told them the next sabbath,” (Acts 13.42). We can be changed by what we hear – again and again, it seems.
The Resurrection changes our relation to the land. How? By reminding us of the things which we so easily forget. By reminding us that the land where we are placed is first and foremost the world which God has created and redeemed. Our relation to God is bound up in our relation to the world. When we forget this we forget something about our humanity. Our hearing again about God’s redemption of our humanity and the world must shape our actions. This is the point which today’s epistle makes, “be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.” What we hear in the proclamation of the Scriptures carries into our activities in the world, to our lives as lived in the landscape of creation restored.
What Rogation Sunday especially reminds us is the cosmic dimension of the Resurrection. It is about how the whole world is gathered to God. It is about how our activity of prayer participates in that understanding. Rogation is the strong counter to our abuse and misuse of the land and our world.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. Not that God is to be confused with the world but that the world is inescapably part of our relation to God and to one another. But we don’t always see that and as a result our actions are often destructive of the land and by extension of ourselves. Hopkins comments on this in another poem called “Binsey Poplars felled 1879”, referring to the clear-cutting, one might say, of a stand of poplars in a rural setting. At once a reflection upon the ravages to the landscape of England through industrialization, the poem speaks to our current concerns about land use.
“All felled, felled, are all felled … not spared, not one,” he says, with a poignant sense of loss that prompts a kind of questioning about our relation to the landscape of creation. “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew – / Hack and rack the growing green.” What do we think we are doing? Do we think? How do we think about nature, about the land?
We confront in our own day the problem of assuming our domination of nature; it can lead to destruction. But how can we avoid acting and interacting with the natural world? After all, we too are part of it. But that is the point of Rogationtide. We are recalled to a theology of the land which challenges us about our use of the land and, perhaps, serves as check upon our abuse of the land. It is more than just stuff for us to manipulate. But what is that something more about the land? Simply this, it is God’s land. What does that mean? It means that the land, the world, participates in our praise and worship of God.
As another poet, George Herbert, reminds us, “man is the world’s high priest.” “Of all the creatures both in sea and land /Onely to Man thou hast make known thy ways. / And put the penne alone into his hand, / And made him Secretarie of thy praise.” This changes our attitude and approach to the land, I think. The world is gathered to God in prayer and praise. We give voice to creation’s praise of God. That is our vocation, our calling, but one which we have sadly forgotten in our thoughtlessness and careless ways. As Hopkins notes, “To mend her we end her, /When we hew or delve.” And something is lost that is spiritual and ethical. “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,” cannot know what once was beautiful and delightful. “Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve /Strokes of havoc únselve / The sweet especial scene, / Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene.” We wreak havoc upon the land but I especially like the word únselve which he coins to speak of how something is lost. It is no longer what it was, no longer itself. Such language of self and unself suggests how our relation to the land is about ourselves as selves and how we unself ourselves, if I can put it that way.
It is not just a loss of some rural scene; it is equally a loss of something about ourselves. While it may seem to be a kind of romantic protest about the profound changes to the rural landscape through the effects of the industrial revolution, it raises questions which we cannot afford to ignore. It is not just about loss and regret; it is also about the possibilities of redemption, about seeing ourselves and the land in another way that in turn contributes to the qualities of our interaction with the land, to what Wendell Berry profoundly calls our affection for the land. This, I suggest, is about loving the world in God, seeing the world as creation redeemed, and about seeing our labours as labours of prayer, placing us and the world with God.
Hopkins laments our ignorance of the world as God’s world only to recall us to that understanding. “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” not recognize the Providential hand of God in creation, he asks, only to capture in a wonderful image the sense of our disconnect from the world. “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared /with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:/the soil/ Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” The impulse of his poem, God’s Grandeur, is to awaken us to another perspective than simply the exploitation of nature’s resources.
“And for all this, nature is never spent;/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” This doesn’t mean that natural resources are infinite. What he means is that there is more at work than just us; there is the providence of God which is something greater and which gives true worth and meaning to our labour, particularly our interaction with the land. Why? “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright/wings.” It is a wonderful maternal image that speaks to Mother’s Day as well. It opens us out to the point of hearing again and again the biblical lessons here in Mother Church that teach us again and again about the spirituality of creation redeemed and the reality of our humanity as spiritual creatures.
Our work is prayer and praise in and through all that we do. To be awakened to this is the radical counter to the fearfulness and the thoughtlessness of so much of our engagement with the world wherever we are. It changes our outlook, our attitude. It changes how we see the land, reminding us that it is God’s land. Our challenge is to see the land that God shows us, to see the world in God. Only then we will learn to love the world aright.
“And the Lord showed him all the land”
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday, 2015