Worship & Wonder 9: Fellowship

Once upon a bell-shaped knoll a North Yorkshire

station master’d mounded and moulded before

to show off his beloved town rail and its bell, of both

of which he was duly proud and upon which he or someone

had planted a linden tree even then surely the diva of its pedestal

but later the top-heavy crown of the whole of the knoll,

once one July, the linden, duly flowering as lindens do

and calling all bees by means of its bell

to come drink without money and without price,

drew me to the spot with the sound of its ringing,

a kind of music without melody but surely lyric-music-sound.

Hymnody of sorts would come to your mind if you too

stood at the foot of the knoll as people stand

at the foot of an altar rail where those who can and will,

kneel, and the perfume of the linden flower thick as incense

and the bees ecstatic, a whole psalter of honey that morning

chanting; and if we were to stand there,

just stand there listen and smell and look, do you think

that there could be anything more extravagant in our life than

to bear witness to this exaltation of bees, this condescension

of linden? as they say of god that he “condescends”

to be with us harmonious and loving, his roots deep

in our soil – not meaning for an instant that the linden

is god, only that it is, was, an olfactory or auricular window

onto the kind of presence god inhabits: bees,

doing their thing, linden, dangling its delight in their faces

as god delights in our faces; even, that a tea, tilleul, will too,

come from this encounter, extravagance outdoing itself

to implicate the taste buds for a moment:

do you think we can do any better than this?  Are there maybe

rogue bees?  Do a few rotten bees spoil the hive?  Or

have they got it figured out?  Do they really know how to live

together in some way we haven’t fathomed yet?  And is that

what music is?  a kind of foretaste of having figured out how

to be together?  I’d say synergy but it’s a tired word

and I want something I haven’t heard before,

as the sound of a whole linden tree singing

with the full throat the song of bees was a sound I’d never heard

before, and never dreamt I’d hear again once more,

until last spring

In May, not July, May the apple tree out of the bedroom window

filled with blossom, an exceptional year by any count,

packed as it was with flowers and word got out

and the bees came; from sun up to dusk (when they

allowed the brambles in) they came and came and drank and

made ring that Applewood psaltery of theirs full-throated, and

packed the pollen in, and I stood under it like a bee-keeper,

placed in the knowledge that they were far too busy

to bother with me, which is just as it should be, I being

nothing but a witness.

‘Ecclesiastical Peculiar: Apple Tree’ 

Mia Anderson

* Anderson makes this note: An Ecclesiastical Peculiar: (in the history of the Anglican Church in the British Isles) a chapel or church not falling under the jurisdiction of the local Bishop.  it mat call under some other bishop, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or directly under the sovereign, as does Windsor Chapel to this day.  Not many now survive.  For our purposes here, a place of worship not like your average neo-Gothic with the red door and the steep roof.

hymnody of sorts. iPhone image.