Faithful to the wind, the hills, the olive groves...

There is an image that is often in my head. Unfortunately I can't seem to locate who first put it there. Something I read somewhere and can't remember where.

The idea is that the gospel isn't full of cities, grand buildings, red, gold, crowns, judges, priests, kings... It is full of domestic homes, gardens, green, dirt, fields, sheep, sparrows, mustard, fishermen, labourers.

I first got a tangible feel for it when camping out in Corsica years ago. We camped out in an olive grove with a friend, and because we were not lugging a fridge along, we carried food that didn't go off in the heat. Mostly dried cheese, dried meats bread and oil-based pesto. Each night we opened a bottle of red wine or two.

There was nothing to do but to look at the rolling landscape and daydream. That and find some respite from the heat under the not very efficient shade of the olive trees. I sat there one afternoon and I've rarely been this happy.

On some level, I thought that it was incredibly poetic. It felt like we were living in Virgil's bucolics, or in the early gospel narratives, out in Gallilea. On another level the heat dulled my thoughts and the hilly landscape opened my mind. I was operating on another level. Far removed from the petty moment-to-moment rattle which is my usual mental fare.

It all felt bigger. It all felt freer. Sitting under an olive tree with some bread and some cheese, and not even a book to read, I was happy. I could read the wind, read the hills, read the song of the cicadas, read the smell of warm scorched dirt, of pine trees in the distance.

Since then, I've always loved green as a liturgical color. Green like the hills, green like the fields, green grass where the newborn foals first learn to stand hesitantly and where sheep graze safely.

And when my thoughts get too oppressive and my life gets too small, I pause for a moment asking: is it faithfull to the hills? Not faithful to this or that bit of the Bible, just faithful to the rolling hills, to the smell of wild lilies and of thyme, to the clumsy new lambs, to the wind.