23/04/2021

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with The Revd Canon Susanna Gunner

Good morning.

This time last year, the National Trust launched #BlossomWatch on their social media channels, encouraging people to share their photos of crab apple, blackthorn and cherry, for example. While we were diminished by lockdown, our lanes and gardens were a flowering riot of perfume and beauty in one of the most exquisite springs anyone could remember and the Trust understood what strength and solace it was bringing.

In the spring of 1994, a month after the playwright Dennis Potter had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer, he was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. The ‘nowness’ of the present had become, he said, “so vivid for me that, in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene.” And then he spoke about a tree he could see from his window, a plum tree in blossom. It was no longer just nice blossom for him, he mused, but “the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be... The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous... There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it… but the glory of it…”

Moses, we read in the pages of both the Hebrew Bible and the Qu’ran, was stopped in his tracks not by a tree but by a bush, flaming with glory rather like Potter’s plum blossom. It demanded Moses’ attention. He stopped, he turned aside, he looked. And in that looking, he knew himself on holy ground and found God, the eternal ‘now’.

Turn us aside, O God, to the beauty of the present moment,
that we may find you there in the nowness of things.

Amen