The gold is out there, we are just not listening.

It is Advent and my thoughts are turning towards Christmas.

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
But in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive him, still
The dear Christ enters in.

Just reading these words from the famous Christmas carol makes me feel quite excited that Christmas is coming. But this third verse from O Little Town of Bethlehem contains a secret that easily missed at Christmas:
Silently.
Silence is very much in vogue at the moment. It began, I think, with an endurance of a film called Into Great Silence. This three hour documentary with no commentary or incidental music observes the silent lives of Carthusian monks for six months. Then there was Sarah Maitland’s Book of Silence. Recently, on BBC 2, three programmes entitled The Big Silence followed five not particularly religious people through eight silent days in a Jesuit Retreat House. They discovered in that silence something that was life-changing. Also, this year the Royal British Legion released a silent single for Remembrance.
So what is it about silence that’s so important?. It has been said that silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening. John O Donohue wrote that “Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits."
I do not think that silence leads us to anything supernatural. Rather, it leads us to the deeper natural, the parts of existence to which we pay little attention because we never stop to listen for long enough. I believe there is a deep human need for that deeper-natural that we find in silence. So where has this silence gone?
Between the years 1066 and 1800 England’s population grew from about 1 million to 8 million. In the two hundred years since, the population grew to just over 49 million. So for every person alive in 1801 there are now another 5 people. That’s a lot more chatter! The great growth in population coincided with industrialisation in this country. I want to argue here that for the greater part of human existence, the world has been a much quieter place, fewer people and no mechanical noise. The loudest thing most people heard before the industrial revolution was the odd clap of thunder.
Quietness, like trees and clean seas is just another part of our environment that we have lost through the process of industrialisation. We cannot turn the clocks back, and neither should we, for industrialisation has brought great benefits too. But just like other parts of our endangered habitat, silence should perhaps be sought out and conserved. Making time for this is difficult. I have suggested in the past buying an egg timer, turning it over and spending three minutes looking at the sands and just listening. That’s one way. Perhaps, also, we need to look for the natural silences, for instance, the tiny pause at the top of each breath. The silence that can be found in the midst of a busy supermarket, surrounded by people – yes, even this can be a place of inner silence in the midst of a busy Christmas. I think we urgently need to find silence as much as we need clean air and clean water.
How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
There is a gift to be found in silence, but this gift is one of which we cannot speak, we can but listen, look and silently behold.

Hazlenuts and Farmers

I have in my hand a little hazelnut which I picked up on a walk between Almeley Parish Church and the Friends Meeting House. As I picked it up during the Harvest Festival Season it became the basis of my thoughts for Harvest, which we have now completed.
Human beings in their present form came into being some 200,000 years ago. If you were to compress the whole of this length of time into a 24 hour day, then the last Ice Age finished around an hour before midnight. In all the 23 hours prior to that point there was no agriculture. People lived by hunting animals and gathering berries, roots and nuts like the hazelnut I have in my hand. It is around that point we find the beginnings of Agriculture at the start of the New Stone Age.
This revolution did not reach these islands until some 6000 years before present. It was during this time that our ancestors were able to develop the skills and technology to build the Megalithic tombs such as West Kennet Long Barrow and Arthur’s Stone. It is Agriculture that made this possible. No-one who spends most of their time hunting and gathering will have the leisure to organise society in such a way that these things can begin to happen.
Of course, our technology has moved on. I am writing this on a computer; my third! Something I would not have dreamed of, even in my young adulthood. None of this, however, would be possible without the thing that made the first technology possible. Our very lives still depend on Agriculture; on farmers taking the risks with their resources, sowing their crops, not knowing what the weather will be doing during the Harvest season.
All our human activities are wonderful things. But the sustaining energy for them all is provided by agriculture. So the next time you are passing a farm, take a moment to give thanks for our farmers.