I’m going to talk about a parable, the one about the sower and the grains of wheat.
As a child I liked parables; I still do, but their meaning has changed significantly for me over the years. At my boarding school in Africa we enacted parables with a devout and gentle teacher and I just enjoyed their stories; a bit older, in England and newly confirmed in an Anglican Church, it felt special to think of Jesus telling a story to portray a general moral; as a teenager, learning about the editorial makeup of the Gospels for O Level, and then A Level Religious Knowledge, I became aware of the reasons which lay behind any story or account being included in the Gospels, of the motives the editors had had for choosing them, and how they had tweaked them for personal and doctrinal emphasis. Reading the Gospels with that scrutiny, it’s very hard to be sure what may be Jesus’ actual words (maybe those very few which are obviously directly translated from the Aramaic?) and this contributed to me growing away from valuing any Biblical stories. But in my thirties this changed when I became aware of the universal truths about emotions and choices hidden in FolkTales (which we in Britain misname Fairy Tales) and I began to see Bible stories as a bit like that. I became aware of C J Jung in my early forties and his writings had a profound and lasting impact on me; I came to see how the timelessness of Psychological and Archetypal Truths he spoke of are also encapsulated in Folk Tales, Myths and Parables.
Here is the parable:
Mark chapter 4 in the St James version.
Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow:
And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up.
And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth:
But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.
And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.
And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.
And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
When I read parables now, I think myself into all the characters; just as the personal significance of dreams can be teased out by identifying with all the characters, with the feelings they arouse, so I’ve found parables yield up new understanding in me of the emotions I’m feeling when the particular parable comes into my mind.
These days, I dread reading the News: news of Gaza, of Ukraine, of Yemen, of the Congo, of Sudan, of the new regime in the USA, of our own Country’s problems….of The Environment.
The parable of the Sower came to mind because I was thinking of the different ways I cope with the News reaching me. I was thinking how the News in these most troubled times falls on me and that made me think of myself as the ground on which the seeds fall in the parable:
As “the wayside”, am I leaving the News aside as nothing to do with me: leaving it to other people to take up?
As “stony ground”, am I responding with a superficial agitation, and in my situation how can I help but have “no depth of earth”, depth of understanding or empathy?
As the “scorch” of my attention “withers” the “roots” in me, how can I respond more deeply?
As the “thorny ground”, do the duties to which I am already committed in my life prevent me from responding adequately?
And as “good ground”, how am I fertile: how can I nurture myself without being complacent: how can I ground my understanding and enable a ‘good harvest’, adequate response?
Then I wondered, what if I think of myself as the Seed instead of the Ground, imagine myself as seed-corn? As seed-corn what responsibility do I have in sprouting, in bringing alive my concerns by speaking them in my day to day life?
How can I cope with the “falling by the wayside” of disinterest?
How can I act in the face of the “stony ground” of violence, aggression and antipathy?
How do I protect myself from the “scorch” of the dreadful violations and outrages being perpetrated and the failure of attempted or misplaced solutions?
How do I withstand the “stifling thorns” of stress and ‘donor fatigue’?
How can I possibly ensure I can “yield fruit”, “bring forth” anything?
All this is assuming that the parable is portraying a positive attitude to hearing a positive message; “he that hath ears, let him hear”: that Jesus told the parable as an encouragement for doing good: as a challenge to grow fruitful and be able to benefit the World. But, what if we think of the seed-corn as being poisonous, not positive: as not at all meant to grow to yield a benign harvest? What if such poisonous seeds being sown are like the distortions and lies broadcast, especially, in the Far Right Wing Press and some Social Media: “Fake News”, and Truth being deemed to be Fake News? How then do I imagine myself as each sort of ground, receiving malign, poisonous news in these desperate days?
How do I tell what is fake news being tossed around “the wayside”, and how do I tell who is gobbling it up and whether I am one of the gullible?
How do I admit the News is always inevitably subject to some sort of censorship, by different Bodies for different reasons: the distortion of truthful reporting as “stony ground”?
How do I know whether and which truths are censored, are ‘’scorched’’ before they can get to us, are ‘’withered’’ before any “roots” of response can grow?
How do “thorns” of corruption and lies being propagated by the powerful, to control and stifle, push through me? And how do I cope with feeling powerless, as ground?
In these desperate times, how do I face in the News that there are very many ways that our Society and Societies across the World are being threatened, that vicious outrages are being perpetrated on People and that ferocious damage is being inflicted on the Earth: this as the successful, “fruitful harvest, thirty, sixty, hundred fold”, of the poisonous seed-corn?
Each of these reveries has a different take on each imagining-as, and I don’t mean them to correspond, neatly, between my interpretations. My mood changes between each interpretation. But two things stay with me from my exploration of the story, one about Ground and one about Earth. The first is the metaphor of how the seeds all tried their natural best to grow in the various sorts of ground where they happened to have been cast, their fates independent of each other. The other is a similar metaphor, in that we also are all trying to grow as well as we can in our own earthly life situations; but crucially, our fates are NOT independent of each other. We know about the contemporaneous struggles in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, Congo, Sudan, USA, Great Britain… we know about the damage being done to the Environment, and this means that we have choices about the ‘Harvest’ we are bringing forth, both for People and for the Earth.
My prayer is that we can work together to be Nourishing Ground for Good yet to grow, in these troubled times.