Planting acorns

I was wondering what to talk to the children about at the Sunday morning service when the worship leader sent me the list of songs she had chosen. I noticed that we would be singing Morning has broken after the kids’ talk.

I love that hymn. ‘Morning has broken, like the first morning’ – a reminder that every new day is a gift so fresh and full of possibilities that it might be the very first day.

I had been reading Making the known world new, a book of poems and reflections by the Perthshire poet Kenneth Steven centred on the garden at his former home in Dunkeld. The title challenges. Familiarity with an environment we think we know well can blind us to the wonder of everyday things, plants, animals, people - until something happens to remove our blinkers, thus ‘making the known world new.’

And so that Sunday, the children and I chatted about all the things we don’t fully appreciate because we saw them yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Often we catch sight of them without really looking, because we think we have already seen all there is to see. We talked about trees, flowers, leaves, dogs, wallpaper, patterns on carpets, the faces of people we love. And we encouraged one another to focus on each thing around us until we truly saw it.

And then I read a poem called Imagining things from Kenneth Steven’s book. It’s about a boy, and a wood. The boy isn’t much interested in the wood in daylight. It’s been ‘tamed’, Kenneth writes, tamed and domesticated – there are paths, fences, evidence of the foresters’ work, old men walking dogs. And precious little magic.

But after nightfall, magic returns as the wood’s wild mystery shakes itself free. ‘From the branches there are rustlings, whispers, calls.’ The boy discerns its genuine, enchanted character, and wonders if the old stories, so easily dismissed in daylight, might in fact be true, wonders ‘if through the wood there lies the world beyond.’

Some of us seem to want to tame and domesticate things, to explain away mystery, to credit science, given enough time, with the power to explain everything. And so we deny the existence of the world beyond the wood. Kenneth Stevens’ poem invites us to question whether after all enchantment lies just a step away through the doorway of the ordinary.

As Christians, we grow very familiar with words like God and Jesus, Church and Grace, and walk familiar paths through the wood of faith. But in the instant we think we have it sussed, the mystery evaporates. The Spirit of God departs like the doves in the poem who ‘slip away on pink-soft wings and disappear.’  When night comes, will the child within us hear again the call of the dark wood’s mystery?

The children and I read a second poem that Sunday morning, Awakening. The poet had picked up twelve acorns on a woodland walk and planted them in his garden. Thereafter, he was absent from home for several weeks, and returned to discover that Dunkeld had been shaken by thunder, battered by storm. In his garden, the grass has sprouted, the weeds seem in control. But there is, in the midst of this horticultural chaos, a sign of hope.

One of the acorns has germinated, and grown. The poet sees a tiny stem, hand-high, and three minute but perfectly-formed oak leaves, ‘crinkled things.’ While the other acorns still lay dormant, ‘One had become a tree.’

I read the poem as a description of our broken world, battered by a chaos of sadness and pain. Kenneth’s words remind me that there are signs of hope in the very darkest days. His description of the little oak tree suggests to me a wrinkly-crinkly new-born child, signifying new life, new hope, new possibility.

I don’t for a moment think that all of these thoughts will have crossed Kenneth Steven’s mind as he wrote the poems, but the lovely thing about poetry is that it can speak to us in ways the poet did not anticipate.

But there is a great Poet whose words sow seeds of hope and purpose in the fertile soil of our hearts, and this Poet knows exactly what the effect of his words on us will be.

How many of the acorns – the ideas and possibilities – which God plants in our hearts bear fruit? How many lie dormant, or shrivel up as we disregard them?

That Sunday, the kids and I wondered whether morning by morning we could look at ordinary things as if they were utterly new, and open our hearts when the Poet of the first morning comes as come he will, with his basket of seed.

So come on, let’s plant some acorns!