Saffron

A Saffron Field

This may not seem in keeping with this blog for me to talk about a spice (this ain't a cooking blog, or Dune for that matter) but bear with me.

Saffron is the world's most expensive spice. Great fields of it are grown, and for every acre 1-2 kilograms of the precious spice are collected. Laboriously, by hand. The whole plant grows just to yield three flower stigmas, three threads. 70,000 crocus flowers are required to collect just one pound of saffron.

What is the purpose of the saffron field? For the owner of it, the answer is obvious: to collect saffron. For the passerby, it is a scene of beauty: fleeting beauty, but beauty nonetheless. If there are such things as saffron pirates (which I bet there are,) the purpose is a quick buck from someone else's labor. For birds, perhaps a place to rest. For the government, a place to collect property taxes from. But none of these other purposes would exist without the farmer's purpose.

It seems to me that Life is rather like that saffron field in a couple senses.  One, if Life has a Purpose with a capital P, that doesn't exclude you from doing other things with life if you want. You are able to do those things, that doesn't mean you escape consequences any more than the saffron pirate might escape consequences, but nothing prevents you from reassigning its purpose to suit yourself. You may look at the saffron field and say it is beautiful and that is its only purpose for you. Not its purpose with a capital P, but it's purpose to you. But its beauty like all things will fade. G-d might be the farmer, but many purposes may arise and fade within that field of existence. None last except G-d's purpose.

And it is perhaps like it in another sense. Once this world, this universe, is done and gone, what will last? After the harvest in the saffron field, the saffron itself remains in the farmer's storehouse. The flowers die, the leaves wither. Snow may cover the ground. What are the threads of saffron in this context? What is left?

Many Jewish scholars say that the Kingdom of the Righteous, The World to Come, will be quite like this world, but without evil. In other words, you'll sleep in a bed, you'll eat apples (or perhaps manna,) there will be skies and clouds and trees. As maybe pleasant as that thought is, I am very skeptical of it.

The Kingdom of the Righteous might be entirely humanly inconceivable. Our sensory apparatus and our human brains may be entirely inadequate for it. What "threads" of us continue then in that realm? Much indeed that is human may not, just as the farmer does not store the petals of the flower or the leaves of the plant in his barn, but only the saffron threads. In this context, many of the saffron plants perhaps had no saffron, so nothing of them continues. As Jesus suggests in multiple passages, there is the wheat and there are the tares, and the wheat is stored and the tares (a kind of weed I guess) are burned. There is the narrow road and the broad road, and few are on the narrow road that leads to the next world. And for those that do continue, some part of them pertaining to the previous world is left behind and only the wheat kernels, or the saffron threads in my parable, continue to the Kingdom. Metamorphosis. Only the part of us that is most valuable to the Farmer continues. The part for which the world exists to begin with.

According to most Christian doctrine, in this case deriving from Greek philosophy, the soul exists from conception. Human life does indeed begin then, but I tend to think the soul does not. Rather, the soul is grown, planted, watered, it is not there to begin with. It is like the saffron plant that must grow its flower and open it and then the valuable part exists. The part for which we exist, for which the world exists.

New Children for G-d.

And what those Children will be like in the after-time, I cannot say, except that I doubt any human mind can conceive of it.