One of the parables in the gospels is so simple it’s easy to miss. Jesus was telling ordinary people what the Kingdom of God was like. Here’s his metaphor:
It’s like a man who scatters seed on the land. While he goes about his business and even when he sleeps at night, the seed sprouts and grows. He doesn’t know how.
The parable came to mind when I was reading Scott Russell Sanders’s essay “Wayland,” which suggests that if you get to know a place, you learn to see details. But you also begin to see relationships among the details, and they suggest something more. We just catch glimpses. Here’s Sanders’s apology for wanting to glimpse:
I had moved too long in circles where to confess an interest in religious things marked one as a charlatan, a sentimentalist, or a fool. No doubt I have all three qualities in my character. But I also have another quality, and that is an unshakable hunger to know who I am, where I am, and into what sort of cosmos I have been so briefly and astonishingly sprung. Whatever combination of shady motives might have led me here, the impulse that shook me right then was a craving to glimpse the very source of things.
An earlier version of me was fascinated by geometry. A toddler sees lines on a page. A child learns to see triangles. A student of geometry catches glimpses of something more. The growth of a kid interested in math is as natural as the growth of a seed into a tree.
I like the parable and Sanders’s essay. It seems to me that one stands as commentary on the other.
• Sources: The parable is in St. Mark: 4:26-29. The free translation is of verse 28.
Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 190.
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