John’s Notes: Parish Newsletter editorials
September 2019
What is the force that drives nature? What makes flowers flourish, what is the creative force causing health and growth in the crops and creatures we celebrate at Harvest time? It’s a mystery to us – which maybe only poetry can express.
Dylan Thomas explored this mystery in his classic verse, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. In it he makes deep connections between himself and the force behind nature: whilst keenly aware of how his mortality also disconnects him from that force and from the rest of nature:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Thomas (aged 19 when he wrote) says: there is a force behind nature. But ‘I am dumb’ to express it, I can¹t explain it, in my earthbound, death-bound body I can’t quite grasp it.
No lack of certainty, however, from the poet who wrote Psalm 104. ‘Praise the Lord, my soul. … The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent… He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind… He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.’ Observant Jews begin each day’s worship with these words.
Harvest can be a bit of a mystery to us in its invitation to us to find ways to give thanks for the force that drives nature, to celebrate the creative force which makes us, the crops and creatures grow. Harvest prompts us to consider how closely we ourselves are tied into nature and its cycles. How we are members of ‘the Community of Creation’ (a phrase of Richard Bauckham) alongside every other creature and plant and element on earth.
Whether we feel confident to name the force that drives nature, or speechless at this mystery, Harvest invites us to spend time wondering about it.
