Lydford Parish and Community Magazine
and Northmoor News
September 2012
‘Faith begins with questions’, says the poet Thomas Lynch. Lynch is an undertaker, and his writing is deeply informed by the insights gained in a lifetime of service to people in the grip of bereavement. The Church Times interviewer Jo Browning Wroe recently wrote, ‘As a poet, Lynch relishes paradox and mystery. Too much certainty about matters of faith seems to him almost sacrilegious. As a funeral director, he knows more than most about the mortal flesh-and-bloodness of humanity, and also that, when confronted with the limits of our physical existence, we inevitably ponder the nature of our souls. Curiosity and doubt are ingredients, not enemies, of faith.’
As Thomas Lynch puts it, ‘In my imagination, all the religious impulse of the species began with questions, and questions notably around the corpse. I think of the first Neanderthal widow wakening to the dead lump of a guy next to her, who's been a serviceable mate for 20 or 30 years. Suddenly, she wakes up and finds him still in a way she's never found before; she knows after a while she's got to get rid of the corpse, because he begins to rot.
‘So, she begins looking for some oblivion - a ditch or a cliff or a pond or a fire - some way to get rid of him. And I think it is looking into that oblivion, whatever it was - the grave, the tomb, the fire, the sea, the scavenger birds, the breeze. Looking into that is when she asked herself the signature human questions, and this is, to me, incipient religiosity. Faith begins with questions.’
This spirituality which Lynch describes, fostered by existential questions of earth, flesh and bone, is one shared by those who live close to the land and its creatures in our countryside. This insight comes at harvest-time, a time of endings, a time for taking stock. I question whether Harvest is primarily a time for those closest to the land to give thanks to the deity for his provision; I suspect that it is firstly a time of questioning. Having worked intensely for many weeks to bring in the crops, now is the time for the farmer to quantify the results, to judge whether it has been a good or bad harvest, and to begin to make plans and projections based on what he or she finds. Thanksgiving will come if the land has been generous; but if the farmer is facing a situation of loss, if the farmer is looking into a sort-of oblivion, then if they address the deity at all at that point, it is to utter urgent questions, to make petitions about survival.
This year’s harvest looks back on a wet summer, of slow growth and ruin, and a summer of protests in the dairy industry over the price that the processors pay farmers for their milk. These will be topics of conversations around the tables of our Harvest Suppers this year, and the questions raised there must inform the prayers we make in our Harvest Festival services, and in our homes, at this season.
These are deeply serious questions, provoking people of faith to support the campaigns for economic justice, and to stand alongside those in the farming community most badly affected by a bad year, keenly aware of their vulnerability in such circumstances. It is well known that agriculture has the highest level of suicide of any profession.
In his poem He Posits Certain Mysteries, Thomas Lynch writes of a young man’s clifftop suicide, received judgmentally by the Church, which offers ‘No requiem or rosary ... nor consecrated ground for burial’, but sympathetically by the people of the community, whose questions about the young man’s plight lead them to tell his grieving relatives, ‘Your boy’s no profligate or prodigal ... Only a wounded pilgrim like us all. What say his leaping was a leap of faith, into his father’s beckoning embrace?’
May our questions at harvest-time lead us towards such generous, empathetic, eternally hopeful answers.
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