Thursday, November 12, 2020

The Rev. Nathan Bourne

Calves and Hazelnuts

It was just after dawn and a bearded monk was hurrying me along towards a small shed next to the main building of the Jumati monastery in the hills of Western Georgia (the country of). “It is good that you are here” he explained, “We received a sign.” We crowded into the small, dark shed with a few other monks. Ahead of us one of the monks was bent down, his long cassock draped in the mud. In his arms he held a newborn calf, next to him stood its mother. I watched him cradle the small thing, spreading cornmeal over it – for the mother to lick off, cementing a positive association and bond between mother and calf. I’ll never forget the sight of that calf, the miracle it represented to the monks, and how fragile and tenuous its new life felt.

I’ve been dismayed by the recent and renewed uptick in coronaviurs cases, by the reminder that we have a long way to go to reach anything that feels like normal. Life feels fragile and tenuous, threatened by an invisible force that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, devastated families, and further fractured disagreements within communities. I’m exhausted by the constant reminders of my own mortality, the limits of our bodies, and their susceptibility to disease. It’s not an easy thing to live with. This year we’ve had no choice.

I’m certainly not the first to try to make sense of the world in light of human suffering. There’s a long tradition of it in our faith. I’ve been spending time reading Julian of Norwich, a 14th century mystic who lived through the black death. Through her own struggles with illness she became aware of the fragility of the human body, the tenuousness of life. It led her deeper towards God. At one point she was given the vision of a hazelnut in her hand. She wonders what it is and receives the answer “it is all that is made.” She writes, “I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was ‘It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God.’”

Julian marveled at the tenuousness and fragility of life – of all that was created. But rather than fear, it brought up for her the love of God, that creating and sustaining love that holds all things, both in this life and eternally. In that hazelnut she found a sense of peace – a reassurance of God’s presence in her life.

The poet Mary Oliver puts it another way:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
(from “In Blackwater Woods”)