Spes alit agricolas
After three days of driving, tents, and cheap hotels, I arrived at the farm, nestled in the Berkshires not far from the New York-Massachusetts border. I pulled up beside the large black barn in which I will live and move and have my being for the next two and half months. The air smelled clean and fresh with clover and wild carrots. Down the hill sheep grazed; a few hens who'd escaped their enclosure pecked around the gravel drive.
For a while I'd been feeling a lot of anxiety about my decision to take off to a sustainable farm and put my adult life on hold for a few months. People have greeted my decision with raised eyebrows and surprised glances. "Oh... I'm sure that'll be so fun?" I'd begun to second-guess myself. But, when I arrived, I felt it in my gut and could barely hold in my emotion. This was what I'd been longing for--dirt and animals and trees. The enormous, black, barn cat rubbed against my legs and began to purr. I was in the cradle of the mountains; I would live in a simple cell and work.
"Ora et labora." Those are perhaps the first Latin words I learned when I was a child. "Pray and work." St. Benedict's rule. Labor. Not opus. But labor. Toiling, grueling work. The kind of work that has made up most of humanity's experience for most of humanity's existence. And, as a humanist, it always unsettled me that we academics (a group I still consider myself a part of, though I've been off the reservation for a year now) sat and read, and sat and read, and did not labor. How were we supposed to say anything meaningful about humanity, we who were so divorced from the majority of humanity's experience?
"Woah now, Rebekah," you might say, "don't go luddite on me! Why does it matter that we're disconnected from the experience of the past?" After all, human life has changed, changed utterly with the industrial revolution. Our experiences now are completely different from those of people living before us. Our use of cellphones and computers alters how our brains process information. Can we really even say we share a common human nature with our forebears? And, aren't we better off now? The mortality rate is the lowest it's ever been. Famine and plague are no longer daily concerns. Aren't things getting better?
Of course they are. After a recent medieval novel kick, I'm intensely grateful for living when I live (childbirth pre-epidural? No thank you. Crunchiness has its limits). But, let's set that aside. Certainly, things have improved, but is our inability to comprehend and relate to the life of those who came before us an improvement?
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| Yep, living in a barn--right above the chickens. |
For a while I'd been feeling a lot of anxiety about my decision to take off to a sustainable farm and put my adult life on hold for a few months. People have greeted my decision with raised eyebrows and surprised glances. "Oh... I'm sure that'll be so fun?" I'd begun to second-guess myself. But, when I arrived, I felt it in my gut and could barely hold in my emotion. This was what I'd been longing for--dirt and animals and trees. The enormous, black, barn cat rubbed against my legs and began to purr. I was in the cradle of the mountains; I would live in a simple cell and work.
"Ora et labora." Those are perhaps the first Latin words I learned when I was a child. "Pray and work." St. Benedict's rule. Labor. Not opus. But labor. Toiling, grueling work. The kind of work that has made up most of humanity's experience for most of humanity's existence. And, as a humanist, it always unsettled me that we academics (a group I still consider myself a part of, though I've been off the reservation for a year now) sat and read, and sat and read, and did not labor. How were we supposed to say anything meaningful about humanity, we who were so divorced from the majority of humanity's experience?
"Woah now, Rebekah," you might say, "don't go luddite on me! Why does it matter that we're disconnected from the experience of the past?" After all, human life has changed, changed utterly with the industrial revolution. Our experiences now are completely different from those of people living before us. Our use of cellphones and computers alters how our brains process information. Can we really even say we share a common human nature with our forebears? And, aren't we better off now? The mortality rate is the lowest it's ever been. Famine and plague are no longer daily concerns. Aren't things getting better?
Of course they are. After a recent medieval novel kick, I'm intensely grateful for living when I live (childbirth pre-epidural? No thank you. Crunchiness has its limits). But, let's set that aside. Certainly, things have improved, but is our inability to comprehend and relate to the life of those who came before us an improvement?
I am inclined to say that our movement away from labor has alienated us not only from the past but from ourselves and from God. After his resurrection, Christ exhorts the disciples: "πορευθέντες εἰς τὸν κόσμον ἅπαντα κηρύξατε τὸ εὐαγγέλιον πάσῃ τῇ κτίσει [having set out for the entire world announce the gospel to all creation]" (Mark 16:15). In the company of St. Francis, I take Jesus at his word right here. We cannot be content with evangelizing our human brothers and sisters; we must bring the good news to the sheep and cows and trees and flowers, to the stars and the sun and the moon, to the ends of the very cosmos itself. That is the task our Lord gives us, and it is entirely in keeping with Jesus' teachings in his life. Moreover, it is the fulfillment of God's first command to humans: fill the earth and subdue it. How then can we live fully if we live separately from nature?
Though a carpenter by trade, Jesus notably never uses carpentry in his many parables. If he is just a simple man using simple language for the simple people he's teaching (as has been argued repeatedly by scholars and theologians), I would expect him to fall back on his own personal experience. But, he doesn't. He talks about things like shepherds and vineyards and the planting of grain. Nearly all of Christ's parables are agrarian. There must be a reason for that.
The reason, I think, is that in agriculture and husbandry done well (read: sustainably), we see man's proper relation to nature. It is a relationship of growth, of fostering, of care--not one of creation or control. The farmer is not an artist according to the contemporary myth of the artist. Rather than creating something ex nihilo or forcing her own personality upon her material ("self-expression"), the farmer allows the native properties of her subjects to flourish; she promotes what Aristotle would call energeia, the actualization of the potential, dynamis, within each thing under her care. Ultimately, however, the farmer is no more than a handmaid; the real work is done by the animals and plants in her care.
Though a carpenter by trade, Jesus notably never uses carpentry in his many parables. If he is just a simple man using simple language for the simple people he's teaching (as has been argued repeatedly by scholars and theologians), I would expect him to fall back on his own personal experience. But, he doesn't. He talks about things like shepherds and vineyards and the planting of grain. Nearly all of Christ's parables are agrarian. There must be a reason for that.
The reason, I think, is that in agriculture and husbandry done well (read: sustainably), we see man's proper relation to nature. It is a relationship of growth, of fostering, of care--not one of creation or control. The farmer is not an artist according to the contemporary myth of the artist. Rather than creating something ex nihilo or forcing her own personality upon her material ("self-expression"), the farmer allows the native properties of her subjects to flourish; she promotes what Aristotle would call energeia, the actualization of the potential, dynamis, within each thing under her care. Ultimately, however, the farmer is no more than a handmaid; the real work is done by the animals and plants in her care.
Technology gives us a false illusion of control. We can tailor our phone's settings exactly how we want. We can order a book and receive it in 24 hours from Amazon. But, when working with nature, we can only make conditions as favorable as possible and hope. As Tibullus says: "spes alit agricolas; spes sulcis credit aratis / semina quae magno faenore reddat ager: [hope feeds farmers; hope trusts the seeds in the plowed furrows to return the field with great interest]" (Elegy 2.6.21-22). It is for this reason, I think, that Christ uses so many agrarian metaphors. Although he is the creator of the universe, he chooses to let the universe run its course, to foster man as man fosters the earth and never to force his will upon us. Yet, still he hopes that we will return with interest the seed entrusted to us. Jesus uses so many agrarian metaphors because he, as the author of nature, established in nature the perfect image for what he came into nature to reveal--the renewal of all creation.
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