From The Goldfields
God-Talk: Lichen
The Revd Dr Elizabeth J Smith AM, Mission Priest, Parish of The Goldfields
It’s the same grey-green colour as many of the shrubs of the Goldfields woodlands, but that’s where the resemblance ends. It’s not a tree, a shrub, or even a herb: it’s a lichen.
I have seen eye-catching lichens flourishing in the eternally damp forests of southern Tasmania. But these hardy specimens survive wonderfully in our hot, dry climate, on red rocks and brown gravel that heat up to sizzling levels through the summer. How it stays alive is one of nature’s miracle partnerships.
A lichen is made up of two kinds of living things: fungi (think mushrooms and yeasts) and algae (think plants that live underwater in the sea or freshwater). Fungi can’t make their own food, so they live on the leftovers or other plants or animals : think of blue mould on a piece of bread, or mushrooms on compost). Algae, though, do make their own food from sunlight and water; but they have to have water.
Normally, with plenty of compost for the fungi and plenty of water for the algae, each goes its own way. But in difficult conditions, too dry for algae or too bare for fungi, sometimes they team up. The microscopic cells of each cosy up to the cells of the other. The fungus offers moisture to the alga. The alga passes sugar on to the fungus. The resulting creature may be thread-like or lacy, hanging from a tree, or flat and scaly, clinging to the ground.
Scientists call it ‘symbiosis’ – literally, living together. Alone, neither would survive. Together, they are tough, resilient and, over time, strong enough to eat away at solid rock.
In my spiritual life, prayer and praxis – practice, action – are the partners which cannot survive alone, but which can flourish together.
I pray so much better when I have been active in doing some kind of ministry. Perhaps I have been busy with pastoral care, or teaching, or leading a service, or sitting in a meeting, or even doing the admin that comes round regularly to a parish priest’s desk. At evening prayer time, I have much to bring to God from among the day’s encounters, annoyances, pleasures, insights, triumphs, griefs.
And I serve so much better when I keep to my patterns of daily prayer. At morning prayer time, I run past God my day’s appointments and activities, the people I expect to see, the daily news madness I’ve listened to over breakfast. As I do so, God reminds me that all this work and all these worries that crowd in on me are more the Spirit's tasks than my own, and that it will be in the Spirit’s strength that I will tackle them.
Without prayer, I’d simply be a driven human being, exhaustingly busy, trying to impress an uncaring audience or suppress my own inner perfectionist. Without praxis, I’d just be a fruitless philosophiser, obsessed with ideas or depressed by the miseries of the world. With both, in symbiosis, there is sustainable life in my ministry.