Farewell Izzy, Buffy and the girls. Thanks for the blue and brown eggs these past two years, not least those you left us among the feathers scattered in the coop like linen in a tomb. Confiteor, mea culpa: I was in Rome, my wife in Wales; the door to the run was left open after dusk. We might as well have hung up a sign for the foxes announcing a Pedigree Chicken All-You-Can-Eat Buffet.

This happened while I was absorbing an insight – a paradigm shift, really; it’s deep stuff – from Norman Wirzba’s great book This Sacred Life, about the frame in which we see ourselves and our interrelatedness. The early Christians spoke of this world as a harmonia mundi, ordered and integrated, the harmonising power being the power of God’s love. To re-enter into this “meaning framework”, Wirzba suggests, we need to abandon some of the technocratic ideas that have shaped our thinking and, like Jesus, “consider the lilies” of the field: that is, learn from the amazing life of plants what it means to be human.