“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” So begins today’s Gospel – see Mark 4:26-34. What a peculiar way to speak of “the Kingdom of God”! But parables are like that. They present the imagination with a series of triggers that can awaken us to new and deeper truths. Consider the last phrase as such a trigger – “he does not know how”. It challenges our taken for granted understanding of what it means to know. It invites us to open ourselves to a much deeper knowing – one that might, in fact, look more like “unknowing”.
The renowned novelist and essayist, Saul Bellow, speaks of the main character in one of his novels who has a PhD in history: 'I meant the novel (Herzog) to show how little strength 'higher education' had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that he has had no education in the conduct of life …. Herzog's confusion is barbarous. …. In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves - to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether' (Saul Bellow, 'Foreword' to Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987, 16f).
The man in the parable is the very opposite of most adults who have been through our schooling systems of recent generations – perhaps most especially those with higher degrees. We know lots about how seeds sprout and grow and other such things. But what do we know of the soul’s longings? What do we know of what really matters in the end? The response of the man in the parable suggests he knows what matters in the end.
Human experience is a great teacher. It will teach us that the more we know the more we know we do not know. It will teach us that life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. It will also teach us about the Kingdom of God. If we know how to listen.
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