The parable of the sower may be the most recognizable, the most familiar one of all the parables in the New Testament.  You can precisely follow every step of the sower, the way of the seed to death and to life.  In crystal clear words, Christ lets his disciples and us hear who are meant in this parable.  Everything comes to light.

But still, after I had thought for years that I had understood it all, only now do I realize where the good earth comes from.  How do I prepare the ground of my inner life, so that I can receive His word and let it bear fruit?  Actually, every person knows what needs to happen with the ground so that the seed will fall into good soil.

Dag Hammarskjőld described this soil in his diary with the words: “Remain open, still, moist humus, in fertile darkness, into which rain falls and grain ripens—regardless of how many there may be who walk across the fields in dry daylight, trampling everything to dust.”

But Dag Hammarskjőld does not describe what first has to happen.  First of all, the ground has to be plowed, turned, broken open, in order to take in the seed like a womb.  Without the ploughshare it can’t be done.

And that is how it also goes in the ground of our soul.  Only when it is ploughed does the soul become receptive.  The plough—that is destiny, fate, pain, illness, death.

But isn’t it the same worker who puts his hand to the plough and sows the seed?

Isn’t He, who sows new life in death, the same as the one who breaks us open?

Thus will it always be

The age-old custom:

Ploughing and sowing.

Never likely to expire.

How else will seed sprout

Than in ploughed soil

That like a mother

In pains

Has to bear children?

And we?

Thus will it always be:

Broken by destiny,

Like a black field,

To preserve new life

By the ploughshare

Of the pain.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, February 15, 2026.

From the earliest days of Christianity, hope was a support that offered a prospect of the future in all the storms of life.  We find the symbol of hope, the anchor, in the oldest inscriptions and drawings in the catacombs in Rome.  Even though you weren’t sure of your life, even when you were persecuted, tortured, and killed, the hope of a new existence was as an anchor you cast and that gave you trust in life that nothing and no one could take away from you.

We know the saying: When there is life, there is hope.  The first Christians would never have said that, because for them there was more hope in death than in life.  One of the early martyrs, Felicitas, said to her executioners: “Now I suffer, but when I am thrown to the wild animals, another will suffer for me, because I suffer for Him.”

As self-evident as hope was for the first followers of Christ, so doubtful is this quality for people of our time.  Where do you find hope in a world where people doubt everything?  To go back to the image of the anchor, we have lost the ground under our feet.  When we cast our anchor, there is no bottom that holds it.  We are traveling in a little boat in an endless sea, over groundless depths, through dark nights.  How many contemporaries aren’t adrift, aimlessly at the mercy of the waves, a plaything of destiny and fate?

A review of the past year shows an appalling number of wars and conflicts.  Worldwide, forty-five countries are involved in war one way or another.  The consequences are felt everywhere.  According to the United Nations, today’s conflicts are “more serious and more deeply rooted that ever before in recent history.”  Not to mention all the other threats and dangers that are besetting all of us: climate disasters, crop failures, pollution, disinformation, hate campaigns, espionage…  The list could go on and on.

Is it possible to have hope for the future in such a world?  When lies reign, fear for the future threatens to reign too.  However, whoever is afraid of the future has already lost half the future.  That threatens to become reality for many contemporaries in desperate circumstances.  But how can you draw hope from desperate circumstances?

Recently there appeared a book with the remarkable title Hopeful Pessimism, written by the philosopher Mara van der Lugt.*  A bigger contrast than this title is hard to imagine—you are either an optimist or a pessimist; you are either hopeful or desperate, but how can you be a hopeful pessimist?  The author, who made a thorough study of all the dangers that threaten us today, leaves no doubt that there are plenty of reasons to become a pessimist about the situation and future of our world.  Sometimes it drives one to despair—but also the courage born of despair can help us get out of an impossible situation.

Pessimism, says Mara van der Lugt, can have value, not as a virtue in itself, but as a way to give new meaning to old virtues in a changing world:

• Facing up to reality as it is asks for courage. At this stage it is necessary to leave all illusions behind.
• Not to turn away from this sobering reality asks for persistence.
• And yet rejecting that that is the end—that is true hope.

One of the first to express the principle of hopeful pessimism and practice it was the Czech dissident Vaçlav Havel.  During his imprisonment he wrote the now famous essay Effort to Live in Truth.  Even the word effort in the title is a gratifying relativity.  Havel indicates with this that you can’t possess the truth.  At best you can make an effort to live in truth.

After he had himself fallen to the bottom of the pit during his solitary confinement, Havel wrote: “There are times we have to sink down into the deepest hardship to understand truth, just as we also have to go down to the bottom of a pit in broad daylight to see the stars.”

It is now forty years ago that Havel wrote these words in outer circumstances we can hardly imagine, but his concept of hopeful pessimism seems as if it was written for our times when he contends: “Hope is not the same thing as optimism.  It is not the conviction that everything will be all right, but the certainty that something has meaning, regardless of its ultimate outcome.”

In brief, in our threatened world we need a different form of hope to stay on our feet than the first Christians, who gazed into the infinite and faced the future, death, with unshakable trust.  Their hope was anchored in death, not in life.  In death they recognized the victor over death.  In this connection, you might think of the paradoxical expression in the insert in the Act of Consecration for the Dead, when it speaks of “deathless life.”

For us, our contemporaries and partners in misfortune, the future is dark as the night.  It is as if we are bobbing around in a deep, stormy sea.  No bottom to cast our anchor.  We need all our steersman’s tricks to keep our ship afloat, let alone to stay on course.  We left the safe harbor of our origin long ago.  The goal of our journey seems infinitely far away—so far that we run the risk of losing sight of our destination.

How is our distant destination expressed in the Creed?  “They may hope for the overcoming of the sickness of sin, for the continuance of the human being, and for the preservation of their life destined for eternity.”  This infinitely distant future (when will we ever have overcome our sickness of sin?) is not just given to us.  It is meant for “communities whose members feel the Christ within themselves…”

The future is not reserved for soloists who live according to the principle of “everyone for himself and God for us all,” but for individuals who join together out of free will in communities, in “one church,” as the Creed expresses it.  That is the one invisible church that unites in itself all “who are aware of the health-bringing power of the Christ.”

It is for good reason that, besides the symbolism of the anchor for hope, through the ages the imagery of the ship has been used for the church.  But this imagery has been materialized, just as the original image of the one church, the ecclesia, has become a rigid dogma.  The original meaning of the Greek word ecclesia was the invisible church, which unites in its “ship” all who experience Him, all who seek Him, all who follow Him.  To use an everyday expression, we are all in the same boat.  That is the most hopeful idea for the future: we are going together.

Long ago, when the stormy sea was not yet in sight, I wrote for a group of partners in misfortune the poem below which, in spite of everything, gives me hope for the future:

We go together on one ship,

We travel to the sea.

We go together with one light:

A star is going with us.

Darkness comes to meet us

But no one goes alone.

We will do battle if we have to,

No one will be lost.

No one knows the water that awaits us,

The sea, it will embrace us.

Destiny is darker than the night,

But we, we stay together.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, December 31, 2025

 

 

* Princeton University Press 2025.

Between day and night, night and day, there is a brief transition, that grows and fades again.  One moment the sky glows with mesmerizing colors, then again the colorful display fades—or the reverse.  Sunset – sunrise.  Evening twilight – morning twilight.

When the sun stands low in the sky, as at this time of the year, twilight lasts longer.  Sometimes, in a clear sky, tender, changing colors appear on the horizon during the transition between light and darkness.  Meteorologists call this the bow of twilight.  Not only there where the sun is low in the sky, but everywhere on the horizon, colors will appear.  That is what our epistle calls: “the bow of color that spans the sky.”  It is more than a poetic expression; it is visible reality.  Twilight weaves a color garment around us, a garment that weaves the visible and invisible worlds into one.  Even if the sky is covered by clouds for days on end, even if the days are grey and the nights dark, in the sky above the clouds stands, between night and day, between day and night, the bow of color.

“Divining grows from twilight…”  These words tell us that also above a covered sky a sunrise is to come.  Not only do we after midwinter celebrate the return of sunlight, but above all Christ’s coming, His Advent.

That is His sunrise, every year anew.

That He lets His light shine over our sick, infirm earth;

That He lets His love shine over our struggling, suffering humanity.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, December 14, 2025

When you really want to understand someone, you have to be willing to reverse roles with him or her.  Usually we look at things from our own standpoint, our own opinion.  We owe these to our closed personality, which has become a distant spectator of the world: I think… I feel… My opinion…  With all our opinions, we also lose connection with the world the way it presents itself to us.  One could say: if people didn’t have so many opinions, they would discover much more.

Imagine that the roles are reversed.  We are more or less blind to reality.  I do not see the world, but the world sees me.  I do not know the spiritual world, but the spiritual world knows me—better than I know myself.  Christ sees me; I cannot hide from Him.  He knows me inside out.

What does He see when He looks at me?  “You have the name of being alive, yet you are dead.”  That is the depressing reality of a spiritual world that sees us and sees right through us.  We act as if we stand in the midst of life, but before the countenance of God we are “the living dead.”

When you begin to live with the Act of Consecration, eventually you cannot remain a distant spectator anymore.  The roles are reversed.  Like the blind, we feel our way to the spiritual world.  But Christ, He sees us, with all our strayings, denials, weaknesses.  And in spite of that—or perhaps precisely because He sees us and knows us—He gives Himself to each of us.

Though I am blind, though I am as dead,

He cares about me.

Take me as You have given Yourself to me.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, November 9, 2025