Holy Thorn & Holy Sacrifice: Remaking Boundaries in the Time of Corona

In recent days I have been hawthorn gathering; a joyous task indeed, but I have
also been thinking about sacrifice; both heartbreaking and holy, & how it is manipulated against us.

On Friday my lady employer, who is struggling to love the 'greedy' magpie who visits her bird feeder, was distressed to find that it had discovered the starling nest in her roof and had been taking chicks.

I absolutely understand that it is distressing to witness such things, & the alarm calls of the starlings will of course cause a response in our wilder, deeper, heart spaces which understand the older language beyond words, but magpies have babies to feed too & they need to teach their own children about food. They are scavengers & their chicks need to learn that meat is good.

Whilst we were talking it occurred to me that magpies have only one brood per year, feeding them for several months even after they've fledged. Starlings in the roof here seem to have two, or even three broods, per year. The magpies only appear to predate them when they have chicks of their own, not later when they are caring for fledglings, & so only the first starling brood is truly vulnerable.

In her book, 'The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, & Sustainability', Lierre Keith writes about the concept of 'kas-limaal', a philosophy held by the Mayan people which translates roughly as 'mutual indebtedness, or insparkedness'. Everything that holds the pulse of Life on this planet is indebted to everything else. Truly, there are no separate entities, only endlessly beautiful and evolving parts of a shiningly wild system of relationships. The starling I know does not want her babies to die so that the magpie's babies can live, but we are all indebted one to the other for our survival and sometimes that means sacrifice.

Sacrifice; the letting go of what we are or have so that others might live, always with the knowledge that in the great wheel of Life-Death-Life we will return again, is one of the fundamental principles on which life is made. To deny this indebtedness, to try to avoid it, which we so frequently attempt to do as individuals and as a nation, is to deny that we are a part of Life. The starling mother may wish that it were otherwise but she plays her role, as we all must do if we are wise.

Again, Lierre Keith writes that "for someone to live, someone else has to die."

"...he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again."

(2 Corinthians 5:15).

She continues that, "We are all made of the same substance, a substance animate and sacred. Because [of that] we are all siblings...The animating substance is more energy than mass, more motion that a thing. It passes through us, temporarily taking the form of a fish or a flower, and then it's transformed into a heron or a hummingbird, and then again into a coyote or an apple. And even though fish and flowers die, Fish and Flowers continue." This is Hildegard's 'viriditas', the 'green fuse that drives the flower', but it also drives us and everything. The grieving starling may one day be the magpie mother, and vice versa, but Starling and Magpie endure through it all.

Founder of community kitchen Three Stone Hearth, Jessica Prentice, has written that, "In ancient Greek there were two different words for 'life'; bios and zoë...zoë -life, life in the biggest sense of enduring life, Life with a capital L, requires the sacrifice of bios-life, the particular lives of living creatures. Zoë takes (kills, consumes, eats, sacrifices, requires) bios."

This concept is at the centre of many of the world's religious traditions; "Death extinguishes a particular life...but Life endures and transcends death," with death, of course, as one of the great engines of transformation.

"For none of us lives to himself alone, and none of us dies to himself alone."

(Romans 14:7)

These sacrifices which we are all called to make, whether consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, on behalf of Life are sacred. That they are required are the cross we all carry in service to the Tree of Life. We are holy servants of transformation, of Life-Death-Life, of destruction and resurrection, and our suffering is born of grace.

Which is why the attempts of the Right Wing press and our Government to force our youngest children and their teachers back to school, and mostly less well off and working class employees back to work, before even the British Medical Association considers it safe, is an unholy act against Life itself.

This anti-Life, Capitalist, cult will stop at nothing in its greed to feed itself. For them, we and our children are not sacrifices to the pulse of Life, but faceless fuel to power the machine which is strangling it.

They aren't asking for our sacrifice; they don't care about us enough to think about it in that way. The concept is not part of their conscious worldview. And yet, there are so many of us making knowing sacrifices now; keyworkers particularly are risking their lives (and often more so than they might if our Government was more caring), but each one of us who is living under lockdown is making a sacrifice of freedom, of not seeing our families, our grandchildren, or our friends, of holidays and long held dreams abandoned until who knows when. We are temporarily sacrificing life for Life. We have become hermits for the holy, and we have found blessings there as well as grief.

In our own small ways we have found that there is life on the other side of seeming death, and even within it. Our Government would like to wrench us out of this holy space, tear the children from our arms to make our own return to work easier, to cajole us into being 'heroes' in service not to Life but to their god of greed. We must not allow this to happen. Our lives are worth so much more than that, and we have the work of transformation to do.

This week is Rogationtide, an ancient season of the Church year and part of our agricultural heritage, at a time when so many of us are reconnecting, or newly connecting, with the land we live on. Traditionally, Rogationtide was the time for 'beating the bounds', or processing around the parish boundary to share knowledge of, and to ask for protection and blessing for, the land.

And the hawthorn is out; our fairy thorn so often planted at the edges of fields to keep us out of the common land which once belonged to us all, but also retaining a little bit of the wild that might otherwise have been lost, and providing much needed shelter for many.

Rather than coming to hate or resent the May, as well we might, we have instead embraced her, holding her ever closer to our hearts as a symbol of all that is wild and good in the earth and in ourselves, and we are sensibly just a little bit scared of her because we know our boundary markers and edge dwellers to be the challenging, tricksterish things that they are and should always be.

Just as we have insisted on our love for the hawthorn, we can do the same with the restrictions that are placed on us now; seeing them not only as limiting, but as also offering liberation from a way of being that has for many years been unsustainable, both individually and collectively. In service to Life, we can give ourselves the time we need to explore this strange new landscape; grieve with the starling, rejoice with the magpie, offer help and support to those who are struggling, financially or otherwise, leaving none behind. And we can 'beat our bounds', asking for blessing and protection on these boundaries that we know to be born of holy, Life-honouring, sacrifice just as our Government seeks to break them.

Stay strong. We are doing this for love. And we are doing this for Life.