Human Culture

When I was working on the butterfly garden, digging and sweating, I remembered some times we had at the church in Winchester. Well, it was not in Winchester, it was in Trapp, but you know what I mean.

Melissa and I were digging up a part of the garden for asparagus. We were really working the ground over—double digging, it’s called. It loosens soil in about the best way possible. But it is hard work. I would turn over a chunk of ground with a shovel, and Melissa, at a right angle to me, would start to break it apart with a grape hoe. We’d go over it that way a few times, and move each row of soil over into the one next to it. If you do this over a period of years, the soil gets totally moved around and it leaves a richer soil. It is hard work.

But it is human work. It may not get anymore basic than that. This is the work that humans have been doing from before civilization—it was the groundwork of civilization. There is a reason that culture and cult (worship) are tied linguistically to agriculture.

This was the work that God gave Adam and Eve. This is the work of Jesus’ parables. We have more or less lost this in the modern world, and its replacements are few and far between. That is to say, what ties a man and woman, a family, together? There is hardly any substitute for sweating together, doing the work of survival together. When on some fundamental level you realize you need each other, there’s a deep quality to the relationship, something beyond attraction, “love,” mutual compatibility, whatever. Fidelity becomes more probable in this kind of home economics. Or maybe it’s that we feel the loss of this human culture so completely that when we taste it or feel it for a moment, we sense that we have found some bond more binding than what we say and more permanent than what we “feel.”

We knew we were not going to be farmers. But if we had been, we knew we would have been the types whose work was a complete family affair, with all the work dependent on love and fidelity to each other and to the work. And so it was a gradual realization for us that we were “at work in the fields of the Lord,” as we put it. That the earth was souls, and the seeds were the Word and the crop was faith. So when we prayed as a family to be preachers together it was with a serious intent—on one hand knowing that the illusions of the world can easily take us away from plain human work, and on the other, wanting to strengthen the work of our hands.