[Oe List ...] 6/15/17, Farrin/Spong: Land, Family, Failure, Prayer: Reflecting on Wendell Berry’s Farmers’ Manifesto; Spong revisited, pt III

Thu Jun 15 07:38:44 PDT 2017

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Land, Family, Failure, Prayer: Reflecting on Wendell Berry’s Farmers’ Manifesto
By Cassandra Farrin

June is planting season in Idaho. One can drive along rural highways past fields of corn shoots followed by the satisfyingly dark green foliage of mounded potato starts, fresh mint, and sugar beets. Small-scale and industrial farmers alike rush against the short growing season of the high desert to get plants into the ground after the last frost but before the July heat can kill the tender seedlings. This is the time of year I can’t help but recall Wendell Berry’s wonderful poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Now, I could have long conversations with Berry about some of his less appealing notions, but this poem speaks in a wonderfully anti-imperial, Christian voice that I can embrace. Here is how it begins, in an ironic tone:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

Historically speaking, religion has strong ties to agriculture. Rituals now associated with religion often have deep ties to the changing of seasons and complementary human life passages. But the religion-agriculture couple has a third bedfellow: politics. The specific political system Berry is critiquing here is capitalism and its cultural counterpart, commercialism, that is, the pursuit of what is newest, most convenient, and “cutting edge” in a free market that remains as unregulated as possible. A person who values capitalism might say, for example, that if being “green” is important to people, they will back green initiatives with their money. If education is treated as a free-market enterprise, as the current Secretary of Education suggests, people will vote for the style of education they prefer by sending federal dollars with their children to their school of choice. Don’t like the options? Create your own school and compete in the free market to attract parents and children with whatever unique value your school offers. Value in capitalism follows the dollars. Some elements of this you might like and embrace, and that’s fine. It’s certainly an exhilarating challenge: put your values into action and do the hard work of convincing people to invest in you. What you might not like is that the only investments that count in the competition are those that can be translated into monetary value. Berry is critiquing specifically the problem that if we become so predictable, that is, if we always follow the new and newfangled, our lives will no longer be our own. We will feed greedy men’s dreams and impoverish our mother earth. What does he suggest we do instead?

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Jesus’ parables come alive in these stanzas, and that is not insignificant given that Jesus’ parables and aphorisms are among the most historically reliable material we have from him. Think of the Parable of the Hired Workers from Matthew 20, where all the workers are paid the same wage no matter when they started: “I am not being unfair to you, friend,” the landowner says to the man he hired earliest in the day. “Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” Berry’s stanzas echo both Jesus and the Cynics, a philosophical movement that was popular in Jesus’ era, when he says, “Take all that you have and be poor.”
Where today we might experience a twinge is in Berry’s line “Praise ignorance, for what man / has not encountered he has not destroyed.” Many people today are calling President Trump “ignorant” as a result of his destructive actions, but I want to caution against collapsing Berry’s meaning and this more recent comment. For one thing, I’m not sure Trump is all that ignorant; I think he just doesn’t have to care about the same things as other people because he belongs to an ultra-elite class of society (valued, again, in monetary terms) that frankly has a very good chance of surviving even the worst environmental fall-outs and even benefitting from them. I will reiterate that Berry is calling upon the Cynic strains of Jesus’ thought, the willingness to learn from nature before man, to be less concerned with commercial standards of intelligence. This is not simple. It’s hard to take one’s cues from the land because it requires self-restraint even regarding causes we may cherish.
On my quarter-acre lot, mostly land engulfing a modest thousand-square-foot house, I’ve spent the past three years planting subsistence crops for my family. This has meant wrestling with what will grow in our clay-heavy soil and what can tolerate temperatures exceeding 100 degrees day-in, day-out, at the peak of summer. Where can trees be planted so as not to steal all the sunlight from the garden? Which varieties will ensure the nuts and fruits produced are edible and capable of flourishing in the high desert? Which flowers feed the birds and the bees, and which birds and which bees? Which plants replenish the soil, and in what order should they be cycled? When should I pick the pears so they won’t fall and rot, and how do I beat the squirrels to our walnuts and apricots?
I’ve failed more often than I’ve succeeded, but that’s only to be expected. Three years barely cuts into the finer points of raising enough to reasonably feed one’s family. As Berry says, “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.” Farming is and always has been a way of life that benefits from inherited, localized knowledge. It does not reward the new and newfangled, although it does embrace mindful, grounded experimentation.
Leaping to the other side of the world, families in rural Japan prior to the rise of the modern nation-state consisted of “an exceptionally large unit as the nucleus and with lines running between it and each of the others,” Thomas C. Smith explains in The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. “The central unit was (or had been) an extended family, and the whole group had formed by the pulling away of elements belonging to that family: pulling away very gradually, first becoming branch families and then slowly winning an increasing measure of social and economic autonomy.” In other words, in pre-modern (pre-capitalist) Japan you’d be likely to encounter whole villages made up of a single extended family or cluster of three to four extended families all working the same land. Longevity on the land was honored, with a line of distinction drawn between families who settled the land prior to reaching the land’s capacity for development and those who arrived after. The latter class of families was not allowed to develop new land and had to wait for a plot of land to open up in the natural ebb and flow of family generations before they were allowed to claim a spot. In the meantime, they earned their right to that land by working for the ancestral families, building up knowledge and experience, proving they could be trusted. Not coincidentally, new families were not permitted to invite the ancestral god of the village into their homes until they had lived as many as five generations there.
Yes, the struggle in this kind of environment is in the ability to break free of traditions that do harm either to whole communities or to individuals in them (and even today in Japan individuals regularly sacrifice themselves to communal desires and expectations, glorified in film but painful in practice). However, right now in modern societies we’re suffering from the opposite problem—an entitled society that frames everything, literally everything, in terms of individual rights and individual freedoms to the expense of land and community. Drawing boundaries around behavior is viewed as automatically oppressive. Religion notoriously was the locus of that activity. It would hem in behaviors either for the sake of the health of land and community or for the religion’s own perpetuation. The downside of this is that the original purposes for certain rules became masked and even harmful once the religion was divorced from the land and society that birthed it. Our challenge today is to accept some boundaries on our freedom for the sake of the earth, and to acknowledge that different communities have to set different kinds of boundaries because not all landscapes are the same.
Returning to Berry, and the conclusion of his Manifesto:

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

I love these final lines about losing one’s mind and being like the fox—what a wonderful recollection, again, of Jesus at his most historical and most politically damning! His is a resistance of the little ones, the ones who perhaps aren’t empowered to engage in a physical rebellion but whose actions quietly undermine the aims of the elite anyway. We “expect the end of the world,” but we also “practice resurrection.” This is not an easy teaching in practice. We live in an era in which resurrection happens to be tied with the death of plastic wrap, oil, and convenience. Our rebirth is in the very thing our Christian heritage taught us to view as evil: sin, better translated as “corruption”—manure, compost, dirt. The world’s corruption is the bedrock of creation. We must not confuse physical decay with moral decay, as the Apostle Paul once did. We can draw upon a touch of the fox’s sort of treachery, and I think Jesus even would have liked it: make more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction, and don’t settle for a life of ease with a window into our heads. Care for the sick, accepting only a meal in exchange. Share good news as if it were a pearl given away for free.
Here’s my good news of the season: If you plant vetch, the bumblebees will return. How wonderful to hear them buzzing happily after not having seen a single one since I was a child! How small yet powerful are some acts of resurrection!
~ Cassandra Farrin
Read the essay online here.

About the Author
Cassandra Farrin is a poet, writer and editor of nonfiction books on the history of religion. She recently launched the blog Ginger & Sage on religion, culture, and the land. Her writing can be found on the Westar Institute and Ploughshares websites, along with a poetic retelling of “On the Origin of the World” forthcoming in Gender Violence, Rape Culture, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan). A US-UK Fulbright scholar, she has more than ten years’ experience with cross-cultural and interfaith engagement. Cassandra can be reached at welovetea at gmail.com.

Question & Answer
John from the Internet, writes:
Question:
What are your thoughts about where progressive Christianity is going from here? In some groups I find it barely different than other evangelical sects, and other expressions seem to feel completely new-age without hardly a remnant of Christianity.

Answer: By Erice Alexander

 I very much understand that perspective John. Over my time in progressive Christianity, especially over the past decade, I have seen it trend from a more mature and academically advanced group of people, into a much broader type of “Evangelical Lite,” where the defining tenets are to lean Democrat, sympathize with gay rights, and reject the idea of an eternal hell. But if you suggest something like the resurrection of Jesus as non-historical, some people still tend struggle with that and want you to leave Christianity all together.
As progressive Christianity has absorbed the Emergent label it has inherited a tension between those two macro factions. Mainly, those who still see Jesus as ontologically unique in comparison to every other human ever to live --  and those who don't. Those who lean very progressive are sometimes feeling pushed out and unwelcome within the big tent they founded as their sanctuary from closed-mindedness. And those who are less progressive are wanting to draw some lines within that sanctuary and ensure that other progressives don’t dismantle Christianity to a point that is unrecognizable to them.
I think that path of evolution will continue to take its course. Only time will tell whether we tend toward a huge tent that meets the needs of most left-leaning Jesus followers, or whether progressive Christianity stays true to its roots as a very theologically progressive bastion that explores beyond the boundaries of mainstream Christianity. My bet is that the big tent will prevail and that those who originally labeled as progressive Christians will become so uncomfortable that they will explore the next things (as I have begun to do with Jesism). My hope however is that as the new breed of progressives come into the fold they become humbled enough to learn from the veterans who have spent years studying and wrestling with this stuff.
~ Eric Alexander
Read and share online here 
About the Author
Eric Alexander is an author, speaker, and activist. He is a board member at ProgressiveChristianity.org, and is the founder of Jesism, Christian Evolution, and the Progressive Christianity and Politics group on Facebook. Eric holds a Master of Theology from Saint Leo University and studied negotiations at Harvard Law School, and authored the popular children's emotional health book Teaching Kids Life IS Good.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Terrible Texts:
The Attitude of the Bible Toward Women – Part III

"Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." (Gen. 2:7)

"Then the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.' So out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name." (Gen. 2: 18,19)
"But for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said ------ 'she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man'." (Gen. 2: 20b-23) 
These are all words from the oldest creation story in the Bible. It is dated around 1000 B.C.E. and thus is some 400 years earlier than the familiar six-day creation narrative with which the book of Genesis opens. It presents a far more primitive view of God and a much more negative view of a woman than is found in other places in the Bible. What makes it particularly important for our purposes, and what gives it most of its destructive power, is that Paul leaned on this more ancient tradition to justify his own prejudices against women. Paul thus lifted this negativity into prominence and incorporated into the Christian Faith an attitude toward women that has been the source of much pain. To understand the essential impact of this Adam, Eve and the Garden of Eden tale, it must be heard as the ancient Hebrew myth that it is. Too often we have listened to it through the stained glass accents and pious sounds of Holy Scripture. So gather with me around the campfire where the wisdom of the past was regularly recited to educate each generation, and embrace the origin of one of our major cultural definitions of women.
Once upon a time, before people were on this planet, the Lord God decided to make a man, and to place him in God's beautiful world to tend this world as God's steward. So it was that God came down from the sky and began to shape the dust of the earth into a human form, like a child might make a mud pie. When this human creature was fully formed, however, he was still inert. So the Lord God swooped down upon this lifeless dirt form to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, except that God breathed the divine breath into this man's nostrils.
When the breath of God entered this creature, the man came alive and God called his name Adam, which means humankind. The fact that God named Adam meant in the Hebrew world that Adam was known by God and was subservient to God. God then set Adam to work in a place called the Garden of Eden where plants, vegetables, fruit trees and shade trees were plentiful. Adam accepted this God-given vocation and tended this garden and so time went by. After some days or even months or years, Adam became dissatisfied. Perhaps he was lonely and so the Lord God, perceiving this need in the first human being for companionship, decided to make a friend for Adam, for as God said, "It is not good for the man to dwell alone." So the Lord God got busy and made the first polar bear. Bringing this gift with some pride of creation, God presented the bear to Adam. "It is a very nice polar bear," said Adam, "But it is not the kind of friend that I seek." Adam, however, demonstrated his superiority over this animal by the act of giving it a name.
So God tried again. In turn God made the cat, the horse, the camel, the cow, the pig and even the kangaroo and God brought each animal in turn before Adam. Adam did not want to discourage God's efforts. These creatures were lovely and unique and Adam dutifully named each one, securing his position as the crown jewel of God's creation and dominant over all other forms of life. But none satisfied Adam and God became a bit distraught.
"Adam, you are very hard to please," God said. "I have now created all the animals of the world looking for a helpmeet for you and none of them satisfies you!" It was a marvelous picture of a trial and error deity who was clearly not omniscient or omnipotent but was rather actively engaged in the world reacting anew to that world's response. God had shaped each of these creatures a bit differently from the others. Some had horns and some had long trunks. Some had tails that were curly and others had tails that were straight. Some produced milk and others had humps on their backs that enabled them to go for days without water. Some were mammoth in size and some were tiny. Some loved the arctic regions while others called the hot equatorial forest their home. Some could fly, some could climb trees and some could sit on top of the water for hours barely paddling their web-like feet. It was a marvelously diverse world but no matter how hard God tried, nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed to satisfy Adam. Since God appears not to have known any better than Adam just what it was that God was seeking to make, God said to Adam in great frustration, "Adam, I do not know what else to do!" In this day of intimate conversation between God and the first man, Adam simply pleaded ignorance, "I would like to help you out God," said Adam, "but how can I describe to you what I have never seen! It is one of those intuitive things, God. I think I'll know it the first time I see it but not before."
So God decided to try a new approach. This time God put Adam to sleep (God must have used an anesthesia that was not yet commonly known). God then opened Adam's chest and removed a rib from Adam's side. Then God closed Adam up again. From that rib, God fashioned a new creature - like Adam but not quite in God's image. It was a strange birth process. This creature was more human than the animals but not quite as human as the man.
Then with this creature shaped as only God can shape a creature, with curves and lines that Adam had never seen before, God stood this creature before Adam and gently wakened him from sleep. Having opened his eyes, and feeling no pain from the divine surgical procedure, the impression one gets as one reads the text is that Adam's eyes bulged out of his sockets about three inches as if they were on coiled springs. Then Adam said, according to the King James' translators, "Behold, Lord, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, she will be called women because she was taken out of man." When one reads the original Hebrew of this verse, however, it is a bit more effusive. Adam actually uses a slang expression, which might be translated thus, "Hot diggity Lord you finally did it!"
So the first woman was born or made. She, like the animals, was God's creation but she, like the animals, was also subject to the man. The man named her like he named all of the animals. She did not share his status, his glory or his divine image. He was made in God's image; she was taken out of the man. She was kin to the man in a way that the animals were not but she was to be subservient, obedient and aware of her second-class status. Her chief role in life was to be the male's helpmeet, to bring him pleasure, to relieve his need for sex and companionship. Sex incidentally was originally meant for recreation not procreation. The story hints that childbirth, with its resultant pain, was punishment handed out after the fall not something that was part of the original intention in creation.
So in this way the sexes, male and female, came into being, says the Bible. Theirs was to be the relationship of the superior to the inferior, of the master to the servant, of the lordly male to the submissive female. No one could argue with this order since it was written into creation as the very purpose of God. To do so was to subvert God's plan. One's sacred duty was to relate to this ultimate truth not to try to change it. So it was that the religious system called Christianity that grew out of this Jewish womb, carried with it this God-given definition of female inferiority and installed it in our civilization as one of its unchallenged presuppositions. Women were taught that they fulfilled their purpose by accepting this God-given definition. If they rebelled, the superior men in their lives could beat them, divorce them and even kill them without any fear of retribution. Women were defined as less intelligent than men and therefore incapable of being educated, entering the professions or voting. Long after this story was abandoned as literal history, the implications in this narrative would still hold sway. It was regularly reinforced by "holy men" who quoted these terrible texts from the Bible to justify keeping the oppression of women as an operating principle of both church and society. In the name of God, women were told that their sole purpose in life was to satisfy the man, and to obey their husbands in all things.
Since the scriptures were believed to be the "revealed will of God" and since the Church presented itself as the sole authority that could properly interpret the scriptures, Christianity grew more patriarchal and inevitably more misogynist. That behavior can be tolerated no longer. Terrible texts that destroy life need to be exposed, their power broken and the kind of Christianity that is based on that premise needs to be overthrown. My desire in this series is not to destroy the Holy Scriptures. It is rather to assert that nothing can ever be properly called 'holy' if it suggests that any person can be subjugated to another in the name of God.
So the Bible opens by defining the woman as a dependent second class citizen. Not content with that rough beginning, it then moves to blame her for the presence of evil in the world. To that part of the biblical story I will turn next week.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally published January 2004

Announcements

Fulda River in Kassel, Germany: Friday at noon a “Refugee Ship” with 80 copper sculptures of refugees will start touring the river. It is one of several art manifestations. The event marks the launching of the initiatives To Arrive Safely and Don’t Feed Your Inner Beast, along with the publication of the Manifesto on the Artist’s Role in a globalized world.

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