I await the rich harvest of love and generosity

I had haggis, neeps and tatties on Burns Night; it was quite by chance, discovered at the back of the fridge.

They were delicious, I scoffed them down, savouring every delicious mouthful and longing for more when it was all gone.

A perfect winter’s dish on a cold, dark evening and despite it being my own personal Burns Supper, not a dram was taken.

Another Scottish poet, who occupies my mind at the moment is the Orcadian poet, playwright and novelist George MacKay Brown. He converted to Catholicism at 46 and wore his faith with a quiet reserve.

However, that’s not to say it didn’t suffuse his poetry; describing his conversion he wrote it “never had any cataclysmic impact on the way I thought or believed” but was a natural end of the long processes of reflecting on life.

His faith informed and made sense of the daily rituals of life and the calendrical cycle of nature – the perennial rites of passage of land and life; of sowing and reaping, of birth, love, death and resurrection.

Like me, George MacKay Brown was a country boy at heart, conversant and compliant with the natural rhythms of the seasons and the land, and in his case on Orkney of the sea too.

His poem A Country Boy Goes To School beautifully captures with great humour and insight the irresistible pull of nature and the land on the mind of the farmer’s boy on his way to school. His poem spans the changing seasons of the year, and the various observations that occupy our errant scholar on the road to school, and which invariably make him late.

In one stanza it’s the arrival of the first lark, in another the snow on the hilltop and birth of the lambs, then there’s bees and birds’ nests and oat fields and always the school bell to drag him from his rural daydreams.

Farming has its own consolation and deep rewards; walking the fields, scanning the horizon, checking the sky, the weather and the clouds; all these things root you in the land and environment.

On the farm you are deeply engaged and aware of the passing of seasons, the changes it brings, the promise of new growth, the anticipation of the harvest and crops to come.

In these dark days of February, we already feel the change; as days lengthen, darkness diminishes and light increases.

We keenly begin to anticipate the arrival of spring; it may be a few weeks yet, and snow threatens, but still our hearts quicken at the thought of better days to come.

This year, of course, it’s not just the flowers of spring we will welcome, but the return to a more normal way of life as most restrictions are lifted.

Many are worried about the recovery and how things will return to what they were before if that can happen. And that goes for the parish too, we wonder will our congregations recover and the pastoral and social life of the church return. In the Gospel Jesus spoke of the sower who sows the seed of God’s words; some fell at the edge of the field, some in arid ground and some among thorns none of these produce a crop.

But other seeds fell in rich soil and produced an abundant harvest – thirty, sixty even a hundredfold. The seed of faith and goodness is deeply sown in the rich soil of all our parishes and other civic and social institutions.

And so, it is with great confidence and expectation that I await the rich harvest of love and generosity to come.