While we sleep – 12 June 2015

He also said, The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. [Mark 4:26…]

There is a hymn we used to sing, once upon a time.  I haven’t heard it lately.  Perhaps its awfulness is now more widely apparent.  One stanza says:

                Rise up, O men of God!

                His kingdom tarries long.

Bring in the day of brotherhood

                and end the night of wrong.

Someone wiser and a little less stressed wrote an alternative:

                Sit down, O men of God!

                His kingdom he will bring

                Whenever it may please his will –

                You cannot do a thing.

In this saying of Jesus he teaches that the kingdom grows while we are asleep.  That is to say, it grows despite us, even without us.  It is almost as though it may happen better once we have relinquished power and control.  And that is precisely the experience of the contemplative believer.  The kingdom grows within us as we are still and silent, day by day, as wordless and imageless as we can manage, not making plans, forming goals, brainstorming, filing and compiling, setting targets, making lists, flowcharts and agendas, joining committees and calling for reports.  The seed sprouts and grows anyway.  It is a very deep affront to our personal competence, management skills and control of our lives.

We don’t build the kingdom.  The seed is already sown within us.  If you read the gospels you discover that Jesus was actually fond of this analogy of the seed and the soil.  Sometimes the ground we provide for this miracle of germination and growth actually actively inhibits it.  It is stony or full of weeds.  Our contemplative teachers say that the mantra we may use in prayer clears and prepares the ground.  It makes the space in which the seed will grow. 

And the corollary in this I am sure is that the only way the kingdom grows is within us.  It doesn’t grow anywhere else but in human hearts, and then between those who are being changed.  If we are not changed, the world is not changed.  The necessary features of a peaceable and just world have to germinate and grow in people’s hearts.  Sometimes, I think, one of the ways in which religious people get conditioned is that they can hear this kind of teaching and immediately think of others they know who could do with a bit of conversion.  Certainly in contemplative life and prayer it is always first a matter of the occupation of our noisy, restless, demanding egos by the peaceable and life-changing Spirit of Christ.  Karl Barth wrote: To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.  Even to that extent the kingdom is present and growing, and the world is changing.