Asking to Receive Grace

There may be a few local folks who get this Monday newsletter from The Peasantry School but not Friday’s shorter Sand River News, so I am including Annie’s beautiful flyer for a dream that is just now landing on real ground—the first Barn Choir practice. If you’d like to get the more-logistical Friday updates from the Farm you can sign up HERE.

Might you consider helping to sustain the work here by pressing the heart button at the top of this email or sending this post along to others who might find meaning in these stories of disentangling food and feeding from the market?

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

This place is so full of possibility it can be hard to call a day done during this brief season of long days.  Nine to five?  Try five to nine with no need for a headlamp. 

A faint pulse of cricket song slips in through the open window.  Rooster crows in the distance, just once, well before first light.  Long days make for short, precious nights.  Mourning dove calls out for dawn with a song so full of love and longing it will break your heart if you let it.  A sudden breeze passes over and around tree leaves, setting one tapping against another.   South Wind whispers of the heavy press of heat, of corn and ripe tomatoes, of sweat beads and soaked shirts.  She invites us to be pressed upon.  But her gift of life may rest heavily in our hands.

Yesterday at the weekly Farm Frolic we spent three hours in the tomato patch--pounding posts, affixing a horizontal board above each bed, and dropping a length of baling twine down to support each lead stem.  Every year we direct untold person-hours toward this one plant, and yet we still tell a story that we’re the ones who domesticated them.  Tomatoes might tell it another way, if we let them. 

Something similar could be said about laws, money and markets—three of the cornerstones of civilization.  Were these relational scaffoldings necessary because we weren’t capable of behaving well, or did their arrival seduce us away from the grace and goodwill to which we are heirs? 

Are humans inherently greedy or just uprooted from our soil-borne generosity?

Two well-told essays I encountered last week nudged me toward these questions. In There is No Law Among the Wild Fruit Trees,

David Benjamin Blower

writes:

Law can be understood this way: we need law to precisely the extent that we lack relationships good enough to trust.  Every law that ever had any legitimacy existed to make up for an unfortunate deficit in good relations.  Where good relations grow, the realm of law recedes.

I read through the above paragraph substituting “money and markets” for “law” and found his proposal both sobering and compelling.  A song of love and longing will break your heart, if you let it. 

Then, a few days later I received The Kindness of Strangers from

Dougald Hine

, in which he wonders about the receding tide of faith within modern life, the decline in hitchhiking, and the lessons we might learn from Alcoholics Anonymous.  The essay makes a tight weave from some themes I’ve thought about separately, and I came away seeing my work in ways I hadn’t quite been able to before.  Dougald observes:

If we never find ourselves in the situation of needing the kindness of strangers, then we do not learn how much kindness there is out there, nor do we get much chance to exercise our own capacity for kindness. Another word for what is freely given is “grace”, and in a life which includes some exposure to the kindness of strangers, there is an experience of grace, which may appear as a clue to something larger that lies beyond the surface of these experiences, and this in turn may lead us into the territory in which faith begins to make sense.

Grace shares the same root as gratitude, and so upon reading these lines it struck me that only by needing others do our grace-full-ness and grate-full-ness have the occasion to arise.  We can walk past the homeless person on the street because we have carefully outgrown that hand-extended, prayerful stance.  In thrall to a story of self-reliance, supplication becomes undignified and faith recedes into the shadow of superstition. 

Addictive substances—or stories, or patterns of thought—function to make themselves more and more needed over time.  Real medicines—or leadership or wisdom for that matter—function in exactly the opposite way: by attempting to put themselves out of a job.  Self-reliance makes such a highly-addictive story precisely because it robs us of our ability to remember life outside of its lonely walls.  Once we don’t need the generosity of others, we stop pleading—or praying, or asking—for grace.  Less grace, less gratitude.  Less gratitude, less generosity, and a renewed commitment to self-reliance.

Trapped in an endless quest for self-reliance, our bone-deep longing to know ourselves as generous can send us down a spiral of judgement, comparison, shame, even self-hatred.  Stephen Jenkinson suggests, most heartbreakingly, “We are deeply addicted to misanthropy.” I can tell you from personal experience that the prospect of going cold turkey is terrifying.  Admitting that I might be an agent of grace invites me to begin mending and maintaining relationships.  Getting worthy means getting to work. 

In my experience, the practice of food gifting opens a window to a wild and willful world that has always been the wellspring of human life.  A wild and willful world that serves as a memory trigger for human generosity.  Food gifting invites us to see greed as a symptom of disconnection rather than a personality trait or personal, moral failing. 

Let’s head back to the tomato patch.  Last week I was feeling a bit stressed with the amount of work needed in the gardens.  Particularly, the tomatoes needed pruning and trellising.  With twice as many plants in the ground as last year, I asked the internet how commercial growers accomplish this task in a less-labor-intensive fashion.  The matrix delivered me to websites selling spools of synthetic tomato twine and metal T-posts, but just before I typed in my credit card information, I caught my breath, put my wallet away, and began pushing myself to remember the web of relationships in which I am already embedded.  You could picture me as an alcoholic lowering the glass from his lips and pouring it carefully back into the bottle.  Dougald writes, “Through the impersonal structure of the market, I can exercise my will by using money, and through the impersonal structure of the state, I can claim my rights to certain basic goods and forms of support.” 

This was already Tuesday when I decided not to purchase hundreds of dollars’ worth of metal T-posts and disposable twine.  I would have just four days to gather supplies before the Farm Frolic.  The Siamese twin of food gifting is request-making.  Here’s what ended up happening.  First, I remembered a conversation with Dave from the sawmill back in late March when I called him to order the remaining floor boards for the Barn floor renovation.  He asked me about the Farm and how I got here.  After a three-sentence version of my food-gifting and farm-receiving story he said, “Man, that is remarkable.  You never hear good news stories like that these days.”  By the end of the call that had begun with ordering lumber he was offering to show me some other boards that he would like to donate for Farm projects. 

Once I’d put my wallet away last Tuesday, I called Dave up again.  He suggested I stop by any time to find what I needed for the trellises.  I reminded him about the next Gratitude Feast and he said that he’d really like to make it next time.  Then I asked another neighbor if I could cut poles from a stand of straight young pine trees and made three calls about borrowing neighborhood chainsaws.  I received a yes from Ashlee on the pine trees and an another yes from Mike on the electric chainsaw borrow.  Then eight folks responded to the Farm Frolic invitation to help me install the labor-intensive, no-cost, neighborly trellises.  Making requests might be a way we moderns can remember how to pray.

If those tomatoes do indeed come ripe, I can assure you that the gift of them will rest heavily in my hands.  The list of folks I’d like to share them with grows longer and longer as the story of self-reliance loosens its icy grip on my heart and mind.  This project of remembering how to receive grace isn’t easy or painless, but it sure is delicious. 

Outside the window a chorus of bird song rides on a steady South Wind.  There’s plenty of work waiting in the fields and gardens.  Many thanks to you for reading.

With care, Adam