Mice, Vegetables and Choices

At our ‘Music for Wellbeing’ group we often sing rounds or ‘quodlibets’ – songs that can be sung simultaneously. Yesterday’s included ‘Three Blind Mice’:

Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run!
They all run after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a thing in your life
As three blind mice!

A weird tale about tails… disabled rodents victimised by a cruel vindictive woman.

Yesterday’s best news involved twenty-one people running a half marathon dressed as vegetables. A sweetcorn and a potato were interviewed. Vicky Knight, dressed as a pea, is trying to break the world record for the fastest woman to run a half marathon dressed as a vegetable…

They’re running for ‘Cultivating Change’, a charity that works in schools and local communities promoting gardening to support mental health.

This morning, reading Joshua… The Israelites have entered their Promised Land; the nation’s at peace. An elderly Joshua calls together the national leaders, challenging them to serve their God:

‘But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’

It’s the individual choice – to love God and your neighbour… or to be the cruel vindictive farmer’s wife.

It’s the collective choice – to be enthusiastic, supportive vegetables together… or as communities and nations, to destroy our enemies.

There’s a theory that ‘three blind mice’ was about the Oxford Martyrs, bishops Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer. As protestants, blind to the truth of the Catholic faith of Queen Mary, the cruel farmer’s wife, they were executed.

Whether there’s truth in that speculation, the events of 1555 happened because of the individual choices of the three bishops and Queen Mary, in the context of national choices about power, politics and religion.

Today we make the same choices.