Monthly Message
October 2025
SUNFLOWERS
I spent ten days in August at my son’s house in Marlow, with a heavy responsibility laid on me, for my grandchildren had grown over 50 sunflowers, which had grown to several feet high, reaching higher than the fence. I had to ensure they survived until their return from Majorca. They did largely thanks to regular watering, though some heads were beginning to droop! They are such bright flowers which are valuable from an economic as well as an ornamental point of view. The leaves are used for fodder, and the flowers yield both yellow dye and seeds that give us cooking oil, and oil-cake which is used for feeding both livestock and poultry, not forgetting our garden birds.
Sunflowers, however, seem to have another less obvious gift, and that is of absorbing radiation. So in 2011, when the Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred and high levels of radiation spread over a wide area, locals began to plant sunflowers, which are known to absorb radiation; they planted two hundred thousand seeds, and millions of sunflowers now bloom in Fukushima.
Sometimes, it seems to me, we are called upon to act somewhat like sunflowers, brightening up others with smiles and laughter, but also as absorbers of some of the evil and hatred that plague our society. Absorbing hurtful words and actions, but not returning, nor passing them on. For is that not what Christ did, on a cosmic stage, by absorbing the evil toxins of our world: “forgive them for they know not what they are doing” words uttered from the cross. “As he died that we might be forgiven” words from a well-known hymn by Cecil Frances Alexander, known by its opening line: "There is a green hill far away".
I end with a verse from that hymn:
“There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin;
He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in.”
Rev’d John Whittle