Over Christmas break, my family stayed at a kind neighbor’s house while we awaited the building of our new home. Amidst dissettlement and disorientation, the situation led to two marvels: a woodstove and some sheep. These, in turn, led me to the regular addition of two unlikely tasks: trudging a long path through the snow to retrieve wood from the shed and feeding the resident herd.
These years spent at college make it easy to forget just how good natural work is, specifically in how it helps make sense of the human experience. Reading Wendell Berry’s novels somewhat makes up for this absence in collegiate life, but even that, and I think Berry would agree, is a distant receiving of what labor with the earth has to offer the human soul.
After loosely discussing my thoughts on the therapy of natural work with my brother over break, I found a note he had left in one of my shoes with the last line of his long-favorite poem. This poem, attributed to Meade McGuire, in its entirety reads:
Father, where shall I work today?
And my love flowed warm and free.
Then He pointed me out a tiny spot,
And said, “Tend that for me.”
I answered quickly, “Oh, no; not that.
Why, no one would ever see,
No matter how well my work was done;
Not that little place for me.”
And the word He spoke, it was not stern;
He answered me tenderly:
“Ah, little one, search that heart of thine.
Art thou working for them or me?
Nazareth was a little place,
And so was Galilee.”
There is a lot to be learned from McGuire in these lines, most obviously the lamentable pertinacity of pride in nearly all that we do. But in this conversation of natural tasks, McGuire’s words also serve to remind us that no life is exempt from tedious aspects, and a life with Christ demands these situations be treated with patience rather than the increasingly common reaction of dismissal.
Growing up, we had many horses, and many horses meant many fences, and, of course, many fences meant many posts and postholes. As a result, I spent many an afternoon tearing at the ground with a posthole digger. As anyone who has done this can attest, the task is relatively fast-moving and straightforward – until it is not. The struggle a stubborn rock presents is nothing if not tedious, until at last the Pennsylvania ground yields unwillingly, and the four inches, which should’ve been gained in three minutes, is finally dug.
In doing natural work, even something as humble and tedious as posthole digging, there is a recognition of the unpredictability and often inefficiency of natural things. Such work is more representative of our nature than the inexhaustible, chugging advancement that technology teaches us to expect and demand, of others and of ourselves. An honest recognition of the earth we work with reveals that a part of the very task of posthole digging is tending to the stones. There is no way to skip over them – a call to dig postholes (at least in Pennsylvania) is a call to get down in the dirt and agonize with each rock as it is revealed.
We can all recognize the plots of tedious ground in our lives: people towards whom love does not flow as freely, situations that regularly try our patience, and perhaps even pitiful sins we wrestle with to no end. Truly addressing this person, relationship, or personal agitation takes attention that is disproportionate to the rest of what we do, and this breeds frustration and sometimes even a sense of guilt, as if we should not lay down such an expanse of our time at the feet of this one situation.
Recent surges in technological advancements present us with an unnatural perspective towards tedious struggles by imparting the habit that if any one task or situation is too ineffective – it takes too long, it requires too much energy, it is unduly straining – then it should be done away with. But this is not true of how the Lord interacts with us, and it should not characterize how we act in our relationship with him, with others, or with ourselves. The lifegiving demands of the soul often run contrary to the law of efficiency, and time is no wild beast to be taken by the horns and wrestling into confined and pristine order.
As it does to most areas of tension in life, comparison inflames the frustration of the tedious, and in moments of slow or imperceptible progress, the tended reaction is to look in jealousy, insecurity, and bitterness at your neighbor making tangible, significant improvement. But in glancing back, we see our savior, the Lord of the Earth and the Son of Man and Christ With Us, on his knees between the rows, and with his fingers he scrapes at deep-set Pennsylvania-born stone. He does not look at the neighbor but with love; he does not look in worry at the rows of holes yet to be dug stretching beyond him. The holdups in our lives that call us to consider more than mere efficiency often have to do with ourselves and our neighbors, humans made after the image of God. And Christ, who dismissed the grand to have intimacy with the simple, recognizes that we are hurried, hurried creatures with the need for patience without measure.
The efficiency that technology offers is often a gift – it’s why I can write this as fast as my brain can think on a laptop while flying over the Midwestern states in an airplane. I could never have traveled halfway across the country for a weekend without the blessings of time-saving, efficient technology. But as readily available as technology is to us, so is natural work with the earth, which is often more representative of our tedious human dynamics than impersonal technology. It reorients us with reality, not in that it brings us back to reality in the face of an utter alternative one, but that it helps us look at the needs of our humanity with experiential honesty. I assume we all need to touch a little more dirt, anyway.
So here’s to the plots of tedious ground in all of our lives – may the Lord guide us to tend them ever faithfully and ever patiently; for oh, what tedious ground we’ve been for him!
