Thought for the Week: Love-in-a-mist
Malcolm Edmunds reflects on love-in-the-mist
A few Sundays back the Friend who brought flowers to Meeting included in her small posy three flower heads of Love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena).
Love-in-a-mist has pale blue petals and delicate leaves and bracts, but these three flowers had shed all of their petals and the green seed capsules had each swollen to the diameter of a fifty pence coin with several branched horn-like projections. Because of this change of appearance the seed head is sometimes called Devil-in-the-bush.
Quakers believe there is that of God in everyone, which means that all of us can be kind and loving, show generosity and compassion: we all of us have Love-in-the-mist. And George Fox advised us to ‘Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone’.
But all too often, instead of encountering Love-in-the-mist in ourselves and in others, we encounter Devil-in-the-bush: feelings of resentment, dislike or even hatred, and wishing to get our own back.
The challenge is to be aware of the Devil-in-the-bush in ourselves and in others, but to concentrate on encouraging the Love-in-the-mist even when it is hard to discern.
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