(If you enjoy lists about books and things, here’s my offering of some favourite reads and listens in 2021)
In his poem, Enriching The Earth, Wendell Berry - farmer, author, conservationist - speaks of his own life's labours as contributing to the renewing of the soil, through planting, plowing and stirring back the land's produce. His aim being to mend the earth and increase its fruitfulness. Eventually, though, his own lifeless body will be offered back into the earth, too, having slowly fallen "into the fund of things".
What might sound somewhat melancholic or morose is actually not. He is writing of life as it is in this world and, in ways visible and invisible, of how God, who made all things in his wisdom, triumphs over the wretched and wrecking power of sin. We live, move and have our being, and then we decline and fail, being finally reunited with the earth from which we were taken. But the gospel of grace means that this is not without the potential for gain.
In John 12 our Lord Jesus speaks of his own life being given up to death, of being planted into the ground. It would be a tragic waste, the early loss of such a powerful man who did so much good. And yet it wasn’t. By offering himself to the death of the cross, being laid in a tomb, he would become the source of a glorious harvest - seed upon seed being germinated and blossoming into God-glorifying life.
And what would be true of him would also be so, albeit in different ways, for his disciples. Their lives - our lives - would contain all manner of things, some seemingly important and others less so. And everything, the whole of our being, will one day reach a terminus in this life. No more work. No more play. And what then? Will it all have been for nothing? Will there be no lasting impact from any of our words and ways, our actions and reactions?
As with the sowing of seeds in the ground, and due entirely to the foundational planting of our Saviour, our lives will one day be seen to have not been in vain. Each day, however apparently mundane, that is offered to him and lived in his Name will yield its own harvest, by the grace of God - in time, a harvest of righteousness and peace.
Through our lives, we can contribute to the mending of other lives. Not because we are the accomplished ones, with the skills and wisdom to make it so, but simply because we have become seeds in the Master’s hands, through which his life will be manifested.
With Berry, there is a proper sense of our neither knowing nor seeing how or what that end might be - “not knowing what I serve”. There is a hiddenness to the work of God that wisely warns us away from self-glory. In its place, an accepted humility gives “a wideness and a delight to the air”. There is beautiful freedom in serving such a God.
The whole of our life will trace the same arc as Berry’s, falling finally into the fund of things. And yet, because our Lord Jesus Christ rose again from the ground into which he was planted, our days “do not wholly pass”. Something will somehow last, something will come from every life lived in dependance upon the risen Lord. And on that final day, "what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song" - an endless chorus of praise, glorying in the majesty and triumph of the eternally worthy One.
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Well, enough of the musing. Here’s the poem. Enjoy!
Enriching The Earth
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
(Wendell Berry, from The Peace of Wild Things)