A few years ago I was standing on the verge of the Jordan River at the time that a group of people from the Armenian Church had brought their funeral clothes for blessing in the waters of the Jordan and were immersed with them in the water at a re-baptismal ceremony. Our Anglicans, of course, brought our little bottles to take Jordan water home and also at the time had our little sprinkle and words for re-baptism. I am on the verge of producing a new book on gardening. For many years I have been immersed in the love of gardening which took on for me something like the Armenians might have felt at that time in the Jordan. I equate the garden to nature in all its glory. The magic of the garden for me could be expressed in liberal use of allegory, parable and fable. When Sir Thomas Browne, who graduated in Medicine in 1654, wrote this famous quote---" there are two books from which I collect my divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature. that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the eyes of all: those that never saw him in the One have discovered him in the Other". It discovered me. When a book review I read yesterday described the use of metaphor and allegory and elegiac writing as baggage, no one surely can deny that symbolically, a visible symbol is present to remind us all of an invisible presence and to deny this is to recognize only half of life. It's not difficult to find those that believe they have the wherewithal to describe things of the spirit as baggage!
RSS Feed