From The Goldfields
God-Talk: Grasses
The Revd Dr Elizabeth J Smith AM, Mission Priest, Parish of The Goldfields
Unlike the soaring salmon gums, the wattles with their seasonal bling, and the myriad of grey-green shrubs, the grasses of the Goldfields don’t always draw attention to themselves. But I do notice them in the early morning light as it catches their seed heads with trailing awns, elegant as an ikebana arrangement; or in the breeze, which bends and releases them like fragile flags on an appealing angle.
The leaf blades are tough, narrow, and tightly wrapped around the stems. I recite the rhyme that reminds me of the difference between grasses and their kin: ‘Reeds are hollow, and rushes are round; sedges have edges, and grasses are bound.’
Often the grass stems appear to rise out of the midst of one of those grey-green, spiky shrubs. I wonder whether the thorns have protected the grass, in its younger and tenderer days, from browsing kangaroos. Blown by an earlier breeze, the seed will have landed in the red dirt under the thorns and was lucky enough not to be carried away by ants or pecked up by a bird.
Eventually, after enough rain to dampen the sheltered earth, it germinated, finding just enough sunlight (there’s no shortage of sunlight out here, even in a shaded spot) to grow tall and strong. Its flower heads, pollinated by the wind, set their own seed now. They will soon dry out and grow brown and brittle, food only for the termites that do the hack work of breaking down almost every plant at the end of its life in this arid zone.
Many of the world’s cultures treasure one grass or another. The people of the ancient Near East bred barley and wheat for bread. In the tropics of Asia, rice still reigns supreme. Central and South America grew maize. The Aboriginal people of Australia harvested native grasses, full of protein, energy and flavour. Grasses also have a hundred uses after they die: woven into vessels, braided into string or clothing, stacked for bedding, stored for off-season animal fodder.
‘Surely the people are grass,’ says the prophet Isaiah in a wistful aside, while declaring God’s contrasting constancy. Jesus also likens us to grass. Though we are a little less ephemeral than the grass that grows today, only to be fuel for the fire tomorrow, we are both embraced by God’s gracious providing.
I give thanks for the abundant flowering of my life in its various stages; and, as I age, I also ponder life’s transience. I accept my kinship with the grasses, from our youthful growing shoots.
To our seasons of seed-setting and harvest to feed others, and our times of gentle fading. Not for me the cultural quest for immortality and eternal youth. Instead, I am grateful that my mortality connects me with all God’s other treasured creatures. With them I offer my praise to the God who made and loves each green shoot, each nourishing grain, each brittle, broken stalk of humans and grasses alike.