From The Goldfields
God-Talk: Green
The Revd Dr Elizabeth J Smith AM, Mission Priest, Parish of The Goldfields
When I was in primary school, the coloured pencils we all coveted were artist-quality, British-made Derwents. They came in packs of 12, 24, 36 or 72, though only the most fortunate children had the special tin of 72 different colours. Each shade was numbered and had exotic names, with browns like ‘burnt carmine,’ oranges like ‘deep vermilion’ and purples like ‘blue violet lake.’
When I grew up and could afford it, I bought myself a classic tin of 72 Derwents. I still use them occasionally, not so much for colouring-in or sketching, but for meditative scribbling and creative mind-mapping. Over the years Number 49, ‘sap green,’ has gone missing, while about ten other shades of green remain. But I would need a very different palette from that offered by even 72 Derwents, if I were to try to reproduce the greens of the Goldfields woodland where I walk each day.
There is the greenish-bronze of old gimlet trunks, the red-green of new wattle leaves, and the vivid lime green of newly-bared gimlet branches after their summer shedding. There are the countless grey-greens and silver-greens of the sensible shrubs like saltbush and sandalwood. They hide their chlorophyll sugar-factories away under reflective layers of dry, waxy tissue, protecting themselves through the long, scorching seasons of this land. There are pale, frosted shrubs, with tiny leaves more blue than green. There are leathery eucalyptus leaves, tinted somewhere between bottle and olive green. The salmon gums have a glossy, bright sheen to their high canopy, brushing the blue desert sky.
How many shades of God can I discern as I go about my ministry? How do I name them?
From my Sunday School days or Confirmation Class, from my favourite preacher’s sermons or the hymns and songs I hum, I possess a default palette of colours for describing God’s nature and God’s work. Eternal love, generous forgiveness, abundant blessing, honest judgement, gentle encouragement, grieving reproach, patient reminding: these are among the conventionally recognised shades of God’s activitiy. But there are many more.
There’s the colour of compassion, copper-brown, earthy, incarnational, evoking the wood of the cross, in someone’s suffering patiently accompanied.
There’s the colour of joy, campfire-warm crimson like the flame of the Spirit, who sparks the light in the eye of a child approaching her baptism.
There’s the colour of the robe that Wisdom gives to each of the guests at her feast: pearlescent, saltbush-silver-green, woven by experience, persistence and prayer.
There’s the steel-grey of justice in the thunderstorm clouds, as they rumble a warning, whisper a call to action, signal a choice for change.
There are true colours in the palettes we have inherited. But I want to be more than a child playing with a limited set of theological pencils or pastels. Beyond these constraints, God is working wonders. God’s activity happens across an extraordinarly wide and beautiful spectrum of grace, waiting to be noticed and named. There will always be something new about the Good News. I will bear witness.