Unfruitful?

Clare was up for breakfast before me, preparing for her study group meeting. When they arrived, I sat in the front room, prayed and read the news on-line rather than going out. We shared cooking lunch. She constructed the fish pie and I prepared veg for the steamer to go with it. It's funny how sometimes we can work together at the stove and not get in each other's way, and another time we can't. I have yet to figure out how and why.

After lunch I walked to Llandaff Cathedral and around the Fields for an hour and a half. The crocuses which supplanted the New Year snowdrops on the verges of the road across the top of Pontcanna Fields are now replaced by a prodigious growth of yellow celandines, in the past week. Later daffodil varieties still flourish but early flowering ones have largely faded away. Most of the flowering trees are covered in blossom now, and some have leaves breaking out of bud at the same time, producing an interesting mix of colours. I'm enjoying getting to grips with the Olympus PEN whose auto-focus is quick and sharp, except that occasionally it won't respond to a shutter press first time, as if it's making up its mind.

Construction work on the tennis courts to convert a quarter of the space into all weather cricket practice nets is now complete. It's an indication of just how popular serious amateur cricket is in Cardiff, with Asian, West Indian and British players. Groups play on well after the official match season end into autumn, and as long as the ground isn't too wet, a few go out and practice. A couple of astro turf strips marked with a wicket are placed in areas used for rugby as well, so a separate facility is going to be welcomed all round.

I returned home for an hour and then went out to St John's for the Eucharist, with a visit to Tesco's to buy our Foodbank grocery donation on the way. We were fourteen altogether. Fr Andrew guided us in a meditation on the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree, which was in the Gospel set for today. He asked us to imagine ourselves as a fig tree on a rural crossroad with Jesus passing by lamenting its unfruitfulness and condemning the tree to wither. 

I'm not comfortable with the idea that Jesus was a magician literally able to pronounce a death sentence on a tree, effective overnight. Interpreters see the fig tree as representing the children of Israel condemned to wither by their own failure to keep God's law, as happens in similar Old Testament parables. The evangelist portrays Jesus as divine judge acting out the parable. It's a symbolic rather than literal statement in my opinion.

I got stuck conjuring a single image, stuck between the fig tree sticking out of the garden wall of a house adjacent to Thompson's Park with branches hanging over the grass outside almost hidden by bushes, and a giant fig tree in the garden of a rural house I visited in Ibiza, so big it covered an area the size of a tennis court. You could walk around and through it but wasn't on any kind of thoroughfare. Apart from this, I got stuck with the notion of a fig tree with no fruit, as they tend to have fruit on them growing and maturing at the same time for much of the year, if my memory serves me well. 

The question is, do we see ourselves as unfruitful and withering away? Yes indeed, sometimes, but we can never really know how fruitful our lives have been. I couldn't imagine myself as a fig tree which symbolises a religious culture and its history. The question about fruitfulness does apply collectively as it's possible to review the past, but with a single person it's less easy. Think of creative geniuses like Van Gogh who died feeling a failure, unrecognised as the great artist he was. The service continued with laying on of hands for healing, then the Lord's Supper. I was left feeling bemused by this.

After supper when I got home, I did a little homework on the fig tree cursing story, then watched a couple of episodes of 'Locked up - Oasis' which has become more surreal and violent, suffused with reflections on the unforeseen consequences of treating others badly delivered by perpetrators. Is it some kind of effort to get inside the minds of cruel psychopathic people? Will I be any the wiser after the finale? Ya veremos.