Mustard seed

He also said, ‘What can we say the kingdom of God is like? What parable can we find for it? It is like a mustard seed which at the time of its sowing in the soil is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet once it is sown it grows into the biggest shrub of them all and puts out big branches so that the birds of the air can shelter in its shade.’

Mark 4:30 - 32

Words can be so useless in conveying the things that really matter. We struggle with the words that express affection, desire, intimacy, love in all its incarnations - philos, eros and agape, sadness, sorrow, condoling, joyfulness, enthralment, rapture. For although the words do and can exist, calling them to mind, articulating them at the right time and place can be very challenging. Little wonder that our ancestors in faith resorted to mythic retellings whose meaning could be unpeeled, poetry to please the ear, song to celebrate and mourn, epic narratives that establish God's hand in human history and in the prophetic yearnings of the post-Exilic period which ultimately gave rise to the Apocalyptic genre.

Parables are an oral literary device that Jesus employed to represent the Kingdom of God in a way that would break into the ordinary lives of those who listened. They appealed to his down-to-earth listeners who could easily relate to the rural, agricultural imagery and who could find the use of simile and analogyaccessible. Twenty centuries after these parables were first uttered, these parables still draw the listener, still challenge, still make us wonder.

There are movements, ideas, compositions, ideologies in our world today that began as the idea of one person and have mushroomed exponentially into extraordinary gifts (or curses) to humanity. Good things possess an innate capacity to flourish. As the mustard seed germinates in rich soil it takes root and grows into a great tree. And that is what the Kingdom of God is like. It begins small, it takes nourishment, rain, sun and slowly but surely grows into fullness. Here is something greater than anything constructed by a human being, a gift to us so profuse, so generous, so extravagant. Jesus' parablelising is a gateway to understanding the Kingdom, not completely, but the seed is nevertheless planted - in me, through me, with me and when it germinates its potential is almost unimaginable. To reach that potential I need to be nourished with the Word of God, be guided by the Holy Spirit and supported by a strong trunk of faith.

But one of 37 (different) parables to be found in the Synoptics, the Parable of the Mustard Seed reminds us to see God and HIs Kingdom in the ordinary and everyday - and - that if we wish to be effective bearers of Good News, that we can do no better than use the best means to communicate it to the world. If not parables then iPads, tweets, Podcasts - and most of all, lives lived in love, gratefulness and joy.

Peter Douglas

Francis' views on man's relationship with nature are uncannily prefigured in the works of Taylor Coleridge

by Malcolm Guite

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Laudato Si' and the Ancient Mariner

Since it was published on 18 June three years ago, Laudato Si’ has gained a wide readership well beyond the Catholic Church. It’s an astonishing document in many ways, and no global figure has offered a clearer or more compelling analysis of our current ecological crisis and of the possible ways forward than Pope Francis.

The Pope directs his words to all of us, not just Catholics, or even Christians. As he says at the outset: “In this encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home” (3).

What is largely neglected is that this dialogue is not only with scientists, thinkers and readers of our own time, but with figures from the past. I am struck in particular by an unlikely but uncannily fruitful meeting of minds between the twenty-first-century Argentinian Pope and a nineteenth-century English poet, critic and theologian, for the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge anticipates and confirms some of the most intriguing insights of Laudato Si’.

Indeed, one could see Coleridge’s most celebrated poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, first published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, when Coleridge was 26, as a parabolic or embodied expression of many of Pope Francis’ key ideas.

Coleridge tells the tale of a journey that starts in high hopes and good spirits, but leads to a terrifying encounter with human fallibility, with darkness, alienation, loneliness and dread, and then, through repentance and a transfigured vision, arrives at a new reverence for nature and a profound experience of prayer, before coming home to a renewal of faith and vocation.

This would prove to be the trajectory of Coleridge’s own life, but it also contains and illustrates many of the elements in the Pope’s account of what has become of humanity: how we have been alienated from and are destroying our common home, and how we might recover.

One of the most important questions that Coleridge raises, both in the “Rime” and in his later theological writing, is, “what is our proper relation to the natural world?” Is it a sacred web of exchange of which we are only one small part, or is it simply an agglomeration of “stuff”, which we can use at will for our own purposes?

When the Mariner shoots the albatross and the whole ship’s crew judge the deed, solely on the grounds of whether the slaying brings them good or bad weather, they have taken an instrumental rather than a sacral view of nature. The albatross is not considered to have an intrinsic value, or rights, in itself, but is merely an instrument that might assist human beings for their own ends. If the bird was useful for the human agenda then it would be right to preserve it: but if it hinders an immediate human goal then it is right to kill it.

In one sense, the terrible curse that falls on the ship and its crew and the dreadful experience of loneliness and alienation suffered by the Mariner are a consequence of this instrumental view of nature, but in a deeper sense the instrumental view is, itself, the curse, and there can be no blessing or release until the Mariner experiences a radical conversion of heart and mind, in which he can look out from the deck of the ship at the other living things around him and simply bless them and love them for themselves, without any reference to a private or even purely human agenda.

This transformation finally occurs in part IV of the poem, when at last the Mariner looks out at the other marine creatures that he had despised as “a thousand slimy things” and sees them, in the light of the moon and in the light of God’s grace, as they truly are, “Happy Living things”, and blesses them. We will suffer the terrible out-workings of instrumentalism at both an emotional and a spiritual level until we also have that moment of seeing creatures as they are and, like the Mariner, finally learn that:


He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Laudato Si’ makes precisely the same point, that each creature is an end in itself and an expression of God’s goodness, not something that is simply there to serve humanity: “Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection … Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things” (69).

In a passage that echoes one of the great Coleridgean themes – that all things can be perceived as part of God’s own language and utterance to us – Pope Francis says: “God has written a precious book, whose letters are the multitude of created things present in the universe” (85). In “Frost at Midnight”, Coleridge writes of nature as:


The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters,
who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Another essential point in the argument of Laudato Si’ is that everything we do is inter-related, just as all creatures are interrelated in the ecological system. It is an insight summed up by the phrase “integral ecology”. It follows that, as Pope Francis puts it, “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God” (8). The entire plot of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and much of its suggestive symbolism is a poetic expression of this very insight.

Indeed the following comment in Laudato Si’, where Francis quotes Pope St John Paul II, could be read almost as a commentary on the plot and meaning of the “Rime”: “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble, for ‘instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature’” (117).

A further crucial insight in the encyclical is of course that care for the environment and care for the poor and marginalised are inseparable: eco-justice and human justice must go hand in hand. This is true too of Coleridge’s whole approach. He was closely involved in the campaign against the slave trade, but what is less well known is that in later life as the industrial revolution took hold he campaigned against child labour in the new factories. And though the Mariner’s own repentance and conversion are achieved through his dawning realisation of his place in the web of other creatures, the mission he then takes up is to humanity itself, not just the wedding guest of the tale, but to countless others, calling for a renewal and a reverence for all God’s creatures, including our fellow human beings.

Finally, as Pope Francis calls us to turn away from a purely instrumental approach to nature to a deeper, communal relationship with it, he concludes that the proper focus, and fullest embodiment of such a return is in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist: “The Eucharist joins Heaven and Earth; it embraces and penetrates all Creation. The world which came forth from God’s hands returns to him in blessed and undivided adoration: in the bread of the Eucharist, ‘creation is projected towards divinisation, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself’. Thus, the Eucharist is also a source of light and motivation for our concerns for the environment, directing us to be stewards of all creation” (236).

Coleridge reflected throughout his life on the radical inclusion of all creatures in God’s love, and in Christ the Logos, as the one in whom, through whom and for whom all are uttered forth. And, remarkably, like Francis, Coleridge too found the focus of that inclusion in the Eucharist.

Coleridge imagined his Mariner as a man on a mission: passing “like night from land to land”, and searching for the person who most needs to hear his tale. Laudato Si’, too, is intended, to “pass like night from land to land”, and with “strange powers of speech” to alert us, and turn us in a new direction.

Coleridge’s wedding guest woke “a sadder and a wiser man”; the reader of Laudato Si’ will return to the world certainly wiser, but not sadder. Rather, they will be quickened with vision and hope. 

Malcolm Guite is a poet, singer-songwriter and Anglican priest living in Cambridge. He is also the author of Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Published in The Tablet on 6 June 2018.