The gardens at the Hedgehog Vintage Inn in Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and today is the Sixth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity VI, 12 July 2026). Later this morning, I hope to sing with the choir at the Parish Eucharist in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford.
The calendar of the Orthodox Church today also commemorates the memory of Saint Paisios (1924-1994) of Mount Athos. Because of his close associations with Saint Sophrony the Athonite, Saint Paisios has had a strong influence in the monastic and spiritual life of the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of Sain John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights, founded in 1958. Saint Paisios was canonised by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2015.
But, before this day begins, I am taking some quiet time early this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, reading today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
The garden in the cloisters in Arkadi Monastery in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23 (NRSVA):
13 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. 2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6 But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8 Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 Let anyone with ears listen!’
18 ‘Hear then the parable of the sower. 19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21 yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 23 But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.’
A shaded corner in the Municipal Gardens in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Reflections:
Despite my enjoyable visit to the
Urban Farm in Wolverton a few days ago, I have to admit I am not good at sowing, not good in a garden, not good at growing plants or trees, and certainly not good at growing them from seed.
I try to explain this away with excuses such as heavy hay fever since childhood or claiming I do not have green fingers. But to tell the truth, it may be because of a combination of faults: because I expect quick results and because I expect perfection.
I enjoy sitting in a garden, reading, eating in the open, listening to the fountain, but not weeding the flower beds, tending the plants or mowing the lawn.
In short, I do not do gardening, I do not do garden centres.
But during the times I spend in Crete, I often find myself unexpectedly appreciating gardens and growing and growth.
Over the years, I have stayed regularly in places in Rethymnon like Julia Apartments or Varvara’s Diamond in Platanias, La Stella in Tsesmes and the Pepi Hotel on Tsouderon Street – places where I have enjoyed breakfast on terraces overlooking gardens with tall, leafy trees and a variety of flowers and plants, many of them over 100 years old.
Vasilis Vogiatzis and his family at the Taverna Garden in Platanias explained how it took over a century to grow the plants, flowers and trees at Julia Apartments. It was careful nurturing, a gentle and loving task handed on from one generation to the next in his family, with no expectation of immediate, personal reward for any one generation.
Platanias is a suburb and resort about 5 km east of Rethymnon. In the very heart of Rethymnon itself, the Municipal Garden is an attraction that few tourists visit or appreciate. But the garden is a welcome, cool and refreshing place in the middle of the heatwaves in Crete, when temperatures at this time of the year are often in the very high 30s, and can even hit 40.
The garden is near the city centre and close to the old city walls and the Venetian gates into the Old Town.
This is a green area that includes a playground, drinking fountains, the busts of writers and politicians, and a cafeteria. Originally, it was a Turkish Muslim cemetery. After the Turks left Crete in the 1920s, the city council decided not to build on the site. Instead, they created a garden that respected the dead and gave pleasure to the living.
Now it is a home to rare plants, a place for the people of the town to stroll in the shade away from the summer heat, and a venue for political and cultural events, including a festival that was running all last week.
This 100-year-old garden, dating from 1925, has taken a century, more than three full generations, to reach its present mature beauty.
It takes that span of time to plant, grow, develop and shape two gardens like these. The people who had the vision for them, who laid out the pathways, who sowed the seeds and tended the first saplings in their early stages of growth, knew they would never see their work come to maturity, they would never see the fruits of their dreams.
At times, they must have been frustrated. In the old graveyard, inevitably some of their seeds and saplings ended up being sown or planted on stony ground and never grew properly. In the summer heat and drought, many seeds and plants must have found too little water and been burned by the sun. Some must have been trampled on by people dining in the taverna garden or eager to see the new phenomenon of a municipal public garden.
But the planners passed on their vision, and in over the years I have benefitted from their vision, their persistence and their tenacity.
Too often we expect immediate results. And too often we judge whether a project is a success or a failure by asking whether it is producing immediate, measurable, visible, tangible results. If not, we dismiss that project as an immediate failure.
In the Old Testament reading this morning (Genesis 25: 19-34), Rebekah knows about postponed and delayed expectations. She is married for 20 years and Isaac is 60 before she conceives. To add to her surprise after all those years, she finds she is pregnant not with one child but with two, twin boys.
Their father Isaac does not expect Jacob to grow and become his heir.
Instead, Esau is the hunter gatherer, while Jacob seems to be the stay-at-home boy, the ‘Mammy’s boy,’ with a hint that he is good at stirring up trouble, cooking a stew (see verse 29).
Esau expects immediate results, to the point that he is willing to give up his long-term prospects, his rights and inheritance as the first-born son, for the immediate satisfaction of the lentil stew Isaac has been brewing up.
Esau expects immediate results. He lacks the patience to wait and see what may happen, he does not have the ability, the commitment or the endurance to stick with things.
The Psalmist too (Psalm 119: 105-112) is challenged to consider his own need for patience and endurance, to see not his immediate predicament but to look to the future. He thinks he is a failure because of his present circumstances, but does the rejection he feels today shape his tomorrow?
Perhaps the dominant theme running through this stanza of Psalm 119 is our need for patience and determination. The psalmist learns patiently in the face of the wicked, in living with deep troubles, insults, innuendoes and immediate risks to his life to remain in awe of God.
He has an inheritance that is not only for the here and now, but for future generations, for ever (verse 111), and for ever and to the end (verse 112).
In the face of adversity, this is his real joy, even though he may not see the fruits of his faithfulness, it will be of benefit to future generations.
Just because something works now does not mean it is right for the future. Just because something does not work now does not mean it is wrong for the future.
It is not the fault of the seed that it has fallen on rocky soil, or landed on the roadway, or been burned up in the mid-day sun. God scatters where he will, abundantly and generously.
On the other hand, we can achieve little by our own innate qualities or abilities. We are all inter-dependent – just like the seed, which depends on the sower and on soil, sun, rain and the right conditions.
Why does some of the seed yield better results? – some of it is immeasurably better than that other seed.
Growth occurs without us seeing or knowing it. Yet we can have such limited expectations of God.
Why does God allow certain people to do this, that or the other?
Why does God allow particular people or nations to prosper?
Why does God seemingly reward the wayward and the careless, those I would prefer to see left on rocky soil or would pass by on the side of the road?
If only God behaved a little more like I do, or like I want God to, would this not be a far, far better world?
Would this not be a far, far better society?
Would this not be a far, far better Church?
And so on.
Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob too, do not see the working out of God’s plans in future generations. Like the sower who sows so that others may reap, how could Isaac and Rebekah know what Jacob’s bowl of lentils would lead to?
Sometimes in the Church, we become very exercised about attendance figures and with this anxiety comes talk of Church growth, Church planting, and reaching the unchurched. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder whether we are neglecting our own inheritance, the harvest of the seeds that have already been planted by previous generations, the promises that were made to past generations.
Success in ordinary parishes like this is not to be judged by business models of rapid growth or charts that track increases in sales and profits. Our measures for growth must be so different. We are to be as salt and light in our communities. True growth may be found not in quantity but in quality: how we love our neighbours, how we encourage and help them to grow in their faith, how we are faithful witnesses to the love of God and the love of others.
And, as we know, love, hope and faith cannot be measured, because they cannot be bought or sold, and their true value bears fruit not in the now and the immediate but over decades, over time.
There is hope. There is hope for small or dwindling congregations. If we have hope in the seeds sown in the past, if we pay attention to the potential harvest, if we look with faith and hope to the future, then there is no reason to fret about present figures.
Like the garden planners in Crete who had vision in Rethymnon a century ago, we may not see the growth that follows our faithful attention to our own little patches today. But there is no need to dismiss congregations that are small in numbers as being small in the benefits that they bring to the wider community.
I like to think of small churches as having the real potential to be the spiritual gardens of our wider communities. As Thomas More once said: ‘The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden.’
Summer flowers in the gardens of houses in Platanias near Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Prayers (Sunday 12 July 2026, Trinity VI):
In
Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the theme this week, from 12 to 18 July 2026 (pp 18-19), is ‘The Land of the Highlanders’. This theme is introduced today with a reflection by the Most Revd Mark Strange, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church:
The Scottish Highlands are vast, amounting to an area roughly the size of Belgium, yet home to only 230,000 people. This is a land shaped by Gaelic, Scots, and English cultures, and by a long history of exclusion. After 1689, the Scottish Episcopal Church endured persecution, particularly following Culloden, when Highland culture and language were deliberately suppressed, leaving us as ‘the last remnant of the non-dealing Church of the North’.
The emptiness of the Highlands is rooted in land dispossession, especially during the Highland Clearances, when people were removed from ancestral lands to make way for sheep and estates owned by the wealthy. Though communities named the mountains, rivers and seas, those names were often erased. For example, Ben Nevis’ real name is Beinn Nibheis. Today around 80% of the land is owned by just 300 people, many of whom have never lived here.
Local people are increasingly priced out of housing and forced to leave; over 80% of young people from this diocese no longer live here, and communities face declining services and fragile local economies. The Church, too, is stretched, sustaining ministry across great distances with limited resources, yet remains committed to pastoral care, witness and being present.
Even so, we hold on to hope. We long to see the Highlands filled once more with Highlanders, communities renewed, and the land recognised not as the possession of a few, but as a shared gift; we ask for prayer that the Church may continue to serve faithfully, speak with courage, and stand alongside its people in seeking justice and life.
The USPG prayer diary today (Sunday 12 July 2026, Trinity VI) invites us to pray as we read and meditate on Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23.
Tables in the Taverna Garden in Platanias, near Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The Collect of the Day:
Merciful God,
you have prepared for those who love you
such good things as pass our understanding:
pour into our hearts such love toward you
that we, loving you in all things and above all things,
may obtain your promises,
which exceed all that we can desire;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post Communion Prayer:
God of our pilgrimage,
you have led us to the living water:
refresh and sustain us
as we go forward on our journey,
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect
Creator God,
you made us all in your image:
may we discern you in all that we see,
and serve you in all that we do;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s reflections
Continued tomorrow
Tall trees and a shaded corner by Varvara’s Diamond in Platanias, near Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Scripture quotations are from the
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
http://nrsvbibles.org
Saint Paisios of Mount Athos … an icon by Alexandra Kaouki in Rethymnon (Icon © Αλεξανδρα Καουκι, 2026)
