A turtle dove.
Loving attention to nature can teach us much about God, and ourselves, reflects Benedictine monk Br. John Mayhead. A keen birdwatcher and gardener, with an ‘obsession’ for natural history, Br. John has been a monk at the Monastery of Christ Our Saviour, Turvey, in Bedfordshire, England, since 1991.
My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise my love, my fair one,
and come away;
for lo, the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle dove
is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise my love, my fair one,
and come away.’
Song of Songs (or of Solomon): 2:10-13 (RSV)
This is a powerful expression of how God can speak to us through nature, but not without pain – for the voice of the turtle dove is no longer heard in much of England.
I often describe my intense interest in natural history as an ‘obsession’ because at times it can indeed be all-consuming, to the point where it seems to knock out religion entirely, and yet makes me feel more fully composed, more myself, than any other activity - but not without pain.
A few miles north of here is an area of land that has been allowed to ‘fall-down’ (or ‘grow up’ depending on one’s point of view) for over thirty years. It was a mix of arable and pasture which is now an area of almost impenetrable scrub which two years ago was teeming with nightingales, turtle doves, blackcaps and garden warblers, whitethroats, grasshopper warblers and lesser whitethroats — and even a few cuckoos — as well as such resident birds as song thrush, blackbird, robin, reed bunting and yellowhammer. The list is much longer than that but you get the idea.
In fifty years of bird watching I’ve never heard such a vibrant dawn chorus as I heard when I first visited in spring 2021 during the first COVID lockdown. I had time on my hands and was so entranced that I visited on another nine occasions to map the birds on some two thirds of the site, which covers almost 370 acres. It was a totally absorbing process. Among the highlights were at least ten territories of turtle dove and nine of nightingale
I went briefly again in 2022 and found only one turtle dove, and on two recent visits this year none at all. There were lots of nightingales still and most of the others, but no longer now that iconic bird which speaks of summer and the Mediterranean and God’s love for his people in Israel.
One of the wonderful things about nature, particularly in such wild profusion, is the sacramentality of it all, where everything speaks of God. Indeed, it has the power to ‘re-wild the soul’; being attentive to nature is being attentive to God.
I have also found that attention to nature becomes a contemplative experience in so far as it’s an act of love. This isn’t firstly about technique, practising one form of meditation as opposed to another, but learning to love, or to finding oneself lost, and found, in loving attention to what is other.
This is akin to allowing grace to have its say, to letting God get a word in edgeways, to suspending one’s own agendas and allowing other possibilities to arise which will almost certainly surprise us. It’s essentially about gift.
And a good place to start is in a garden.
My first experience of a garden was of a tiny patch of grass with two flower beds either side, and a shed and an apple tree at the back of our terraced house in the middle of what was once the most densely occupied city in Britain – Portsmouth. This meant that my knowledge of natural history was largely confined to ants, daddy long legs, woodlice, snails, the occasional house mouse and six species of bird. But it was enough, and sowed the seeds for a lifetime’s interest in natural history which continues to bring healing, and hopefully integration, even now.
Fast forward to the monastery at Turvey where we have the most wonderful late-Georgian walled garden, and in which my first job as a novice was to grow tomatoes in the two large greenhouses, which I did for half of most days for over eight years: alone, in silence, with no guidance for a man who had never been given the chance to grow anything before. It was a wonderfully healing process, not least because there was no one telling me what to do.
There was a beautiful book published in 2020 entitled The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart Smith, looking at the therapeutic quality of gardening, starting with her grandfather’s experience on returning from the battlefields of WW1. This is what she has to say about St. Benedict:
It was St. Benedict with his Rule for monastic living who officially lifted gardening from the realm of penitential toil by asserting the sanctity of manual labour. Benedict’s thinking when he first proposed it was revolutionary, not only within the Church but also within a wider context in which tilling the soil was associated with serfdom and a beleaguered peasant class. For the Benedictines, gardening was an equaliser, and nobody within the monastery was too grand or too learned to work in the garden for part of the day (We’re talking ideals here!). This was a culture of care and reverence in which the gardener’s tools were to be treated with the same level of respect as the vessels of the altar. It was a way of life in which the body, mind and spirit were held in balance and in which the virtuous life was an expression of our interconnectedness with the natural world. (p.27)
I’ve only just re-discovered the benefits of working in the garden myself after a long period of other duties, and I’ve found it hugely enjoyable being alone again, in silence and with no-one telling me what to do (or so I imagine). I’ve taken on the impossible task of controlling an area of Ground Elder threatening our compost heap, but we all need our illusions, as Sue Stuart Smith also goes on to explore.
My superior was wise enough to leave me to my own devices (or so I thought) and allowed the garden to teach me through the ‘natural’ resistance to another’s control.
There’s much more that could be said but this is a précis only of a recent talk so I’ll leave you with the thought that the material world will teach us everything in its resistance and its need to be loved, everything about God, and everything about ourselves – alone, in silence and with no one telling us what to do (or so we may think). In short, it’s love that does it: being attentive to what is other and allowing it to grow in its otherness, and to grow us.
This article is an edited version of a talk given at Benedict’s Well on 13 June 2023. Benedict’s Well is an outreach of the Benedictine Oblates of the World Community for Christian Meditation. The weekly event (Mondays) consists of a period of meditation followed by an inspirational talk. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0B3iPtjlYk