One of my favourite quotes from the Bible is the first verse of Matthew chapter 13:

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.

It’s followed immediately by the parable of the sower, a story much beloved by Vincent Van Gogh, but the parable is often the starting point for a round of analysis as to what the Church should be doing. I may be guilty here of subverting the bible, but it seems to me that in a form like the gospels where there isn’t really much “spare”, no sentence appears without reason. And all over the gospels we get told that Jesus went out to pray – Mark says that Jesus got up early, while it was still dark, to go to a solitary place and pray (Mk 1:35); Luke says he withdrew to lonely places and prayed (Lk 5:16). But here he didn’t go to the beach to pray, he just “sat beside the sea”.

What does it feel like to sit on the beach? – perhaps on a hot summer’s day with waves lapping and children’s laughter and sails flashing in the distance, or maybe on a brisk winter’s morning, wrapped up well against the elements and walking through a stiff wind to sit in the shelter of a large sand dune and watch the crashing waves. Jesus went down to the beach, not to pray, just to sit.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine came to stay in my house while carrying out a research project. One evening I was cooking dinner when the phone rang. While I was answering it I also nipped upstairs to see if my son was out of the bath yet, and then the doorbell rang, and after I’d dealt with that the phone rang again. I got back to the kitchen to rescue the dinner, to find that my friend had taken over. He put a glass of wine in my hand, pointed to the chair in the corner of the kitchen, and said with a smile, “Sit down! Now! Honestly, don’t you ever just sit and do nothing?”

I used to be better at sitting still, I think, before I began the juggling act of bringing up a child and holding down a job. But it’s not only single mothers who get drawn into a frenetic pace – it happens to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

Our culture likes speed: we like things to go faster and smoother and more efficiently. And in some areas of life speed is excellent. Clearing bureaucratic hurdles at speed is good, your computer running quickly and efficiently is good, the post arriving on time is good. But there are other ways in which speed is not so good for us. Fast food, ready meals, eating on the run, driving too fast, never having the time to pause and take stock, or look into someone’s eyes and really listen to what they are saying. Author Carl Honoré, in his book In Praise of Slow (Orion 2004), called this the cult of speed; not just speeding up things that need to go faster, but winding up of the whole of life until it’s like a centrifuge that pins us to its revolutions.

Even our spirituality can be subject to this tendency towards speed and drivenness. Jesus went to sit by the sea and get the space he needed, but soon found himself besieged by the crowds, who wanted more of him. So from his moment of stillness he pitched out in a boat and began to tell them his stories.

He told them about a farmer who walked about throwing seeds onto his land. The seeds went everywhere, and no doubt he knew that some of them would come to nothing, because if you’re going to grow things, some seeds are always wasted. And there were seeds that were eaten up by the birds in no time, and others that started well but grew too fast, and couldn’t mature for lack of depth.

The ones that did grow, though, were the ones that vanished for a while – went a bit deeper into good soil. They didn’t sprout so quickly, but this was good because they were putting down roots first. And when they eventually came up, they didn’t grow quickly at all. They grew at the proper speed, developing strong stems and good fat seed heads.

Spirituality that bears fruit is not a fast food business. You can try to make the Kingdom of Heaven more efficient if you want to; you can try and maximize effort and produce more fruit per hour of work. But in the end, like growing wheat, real spiritual growth has an optimum speed, and accelerating the growth and maximizing the harvest will be about as much good for the soul as fast food is for the body. Some things just take time.

The parable of the sower, then. Not so much a call to do more things, achieve more evangelistic goals, hunt for more spiritual scalps, get more bums on seats. More of a call to recognise that spirituality that lasts involves letting quite a lot of stuff go to waste, and having the patience to ignore the fast growing weeds and wait for the good stuff to grow. In the meantime, there is plenty of time to go and sit on the beach.