If there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Philippians 4.8*
WE ARE made of earth. We are living, clever pieces of earth, earth that knows itself to be seeing and feeling, touching and tasting. We are earth that makes inward pictures and patterns from what its senses apprehend: earth that not only looks upon but imagines the world of which it is a part.
And then, with our imagination, we make our inner worlds, those worlds of the mind we need in order to make sense of the outer world of trees and flowers, fruit and insects, mountains and hills, rock and dust and great bodies of water, by doing a very strange thing. We pretend that we can stand outside ourselves. Our thinking being stands where a god might stand, and assesses the world as if its dust and water, its multifarious breathing life, were other than the mix of dust and water and life-breath that makes us, too.
That’s fine. That’s the place where Wisdom stands, just at the elbow of the great creator God.
I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race
sings Wisdom’s voice in the book of Proverbs.
The problem comes when we part company with Wisdom’s song of praise and go it alone. The problem comes when we think our separate imaginings are everything, a God’s-eye view without the God. Because when we forget to praise, when we forget that we are creatures within the world we imagine, when we forget that to imagine is to sit beside the Creator rather than to be the Creator — that’s the point when we forget what we are and what we need.
We forget that we are made of the world’s stuff, its earth, dependent on earth’s gifts for our very flesh, for food and shelter. We forget that we are bound into the world’s health, living with the world’s life. And then we become like children who have learnt to abuse their mother because they have lost the truth that her life is bound up with theirs; that she is also finite and fragile and requires care and respect; that hurting her hurts them, too.
TODAY’s service is a thanksgiving. It is full of songs of praise. Today, we rejoice in the Lord always, and in our Creator’s inhabited world.
Yet at the same time, this is a service of urgent intercession. We pray for the future of the world we human beings have exploited and damaged. We look towards the COP26 meeting in Glasgow next month with fear and hope and a deep sense of crisis. It was our policy of relentless extraction that has unbalanced the patterns of life rejoicing across and above and under the surface of the inhabited world; and, through that policy, over centuries, we have endangered not just the world, but ourselves, one of the world’s own creatures.
The world, taking the long view, will balance herself again one way or another, but we, human creatures made of its dust, might not. Greedy in our demands, we risk making our own place uninhabitable for our children. That greed followed on from the expansionist capitalism that accompanied humanity’s decision that to be human was to be sovereign — a limitless God rather than a finite, earth-dependent creature.
Can we really give thanks and recognise our climate crisis in the same breath — in the same act of worship? I think we not only can, but must. Thanksgiving and urgent intercession belong together. If we are not sensible of our blessings as blessings, we cannot value them. The great 17th-century mystic Thomas Traherne, in a passage praising the beauty of creation, said this: “It was no great mistake to say, that to have blessings and not to prize them is to be in Hell. For it maketh them ineffectual, as if they were absent. Yea, in some respect it is worse than to be in Hell. It is more vicious, and more irrational.”
It is the blessings we praise, that we also prize. The turning of the seasons is bound into the cycles of our lives: the fruits and fullness of autumn, the bite and darkness of winter, the first signs of spring in snowdrop and aconite, the slender rise of seedlings in the warming spring earth, the roses of summer.
Our lives are counted through those cycles: my 58 years are 58 springs (the season in which I was born), 58 summers; this is my 58th autumn. I don’t want the world to be one in which the snowdrops never come again because the soil no longer freezes. I could deny that possibility, or, thanking God for the gifts of my 57 winters, I could pray and work towards a different future of less greed and more creaturely care; for knowing our insecurity is part of what makes us able to give thanks at all — as the writer of Deuteronomy knew. We bring our first-fruits remembering a history where we had no land to till, no home, no freedom.
SO, “if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things,” as St Paul writes to the Christians of Philippi. Let yourself be a creature, and the world will fill you with blessings. Refuse to be a creature, and you are lost in a world of your own imaginings, at the mercy of your worst self and cut off from all that nurtures you.
Too many of us human beings are stuck with our worst selves. It is for us, as we give thanks for all that is, to pray for a better relationship between humanity and the world. For each one of us is no bigger than a small, mortal, and sentient piece of the wide earth: creatures looking to our Creator.
And now, to the God who created us, who redeemed us, and who sustains us through all his gifts upon this earth, be all honour and praise and thanksgiving, now and for ever. Amen.
The Revd Dr Jessica Martin is a Canon Residentiary of Ely Cathedral.
*The reading at the Harvest Songs of Praise service were Deuteronomy 26.1-11 and Philippians 4.4-9