"Agrarian Spirit" Excerpt

AGRARIAN SPIRIT

Cultivating Faith, Community, and the l and

NORMAN WIRZBA

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Preface ix

xiii

PART I. AGRARIAN FUNDAMENTALS

one On Not Losing Creation 3

two Why Agrarian? 10

three Placing the Soul 30

PART II. AGRARIAN SPIRITUAL EXERCISES

F our Learning to Pray 61

F ive Learning to See 87

six Learning Descent 109 seven Learning Humility 132 eight Learning Generosity 155

nine Learning to Hope 176 Notes 195

Scripture Index 235 General Index 237

Agrarian Fundamentals

On Not Losing Creation

Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God’s creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love into his with regard to all things here below.

An agrarian-informed faith hinges on the assumption that this world and its life are sacred gifts of God that are meant to be cher ished and celebrated. This sounds straightforward enough until one realizes how many spiritualities have been, and continue to be, premised on the exact opposite assumption. These spiritualities, though sometimes waxing eloquent about the beauties of this world, are fun damentally dualistic or gnostic. What I mean is that they assume ma teriality and embodiment to be deficient, and thus a lower order of reality that must ultimately be left behind, if not destroyed altogether. It’s as if God made a mistake in creating creatures that are finite, fal lible, and marked by need. The focus of these spiritualities is the ethereal human soul, and the point of their prescribed spiritual practices is to liberate the soul from places and bodies that are variously described as fleeting, frustrating, or foul. Heavenly bliss can’t be here or in this life. It is somewhere else, waiting to be entered after we die.

I believe all of this to be a massive mistake, a catastrophe really, because it despises what should be the unending source of our care, devotion, and delight. To understand why I believe this, it is important to lay out in clear and succinct terms what it means to affirm this world and its life as created by God. Again, one might suppose that all sorts of people affirm a divinely created world. Ask people what they think of when they think of God and they will often say that God is the Creator, the Supreme Being who made it all a long, long time ago. But if you ask what their affirmation means for their thinking about their bodies, neighborhoods, and watersheds, or how this thinking translates into specific economic and political policies, the responses either trail off or become so vague as to be useless. In other words, the idea of creation may have something to say about when or how it all began, but not very much about the practices and policies that order this life here and now. How else should we explain the contradiction in which people affirm God as the Creator while consenting to the destruction of what God creates and daily sustains? What difference does it make to affirm this world as created by God?

The idea that the places of this life are created by God rests on the conviction that every created thing—ranging from soils, waters, and clouds to earthworms, fish, and people—is loved by God. There isn’t a single creature that has to exist or is the source of its own being. That anything exists at all is because God wants it to be. If God did not love for something other than God to be, and then make room for it and nurture it, nothing would exist. As the opening poem on creation in scripture (Genesis 1–2:4) sees it, God loves creatures so much that God, while in the midst of creating them, regularly pauses to note how good and fitting their being is. This is a divine love so arresting and profound that it prompts God to observe the first Sabbath, which is the hallowed time to relish and delight in the beauty, fertility, and fecundity of everything around. On that first Sabbath sunrise, when God looks out onto a freshly made world, what God perceives is God’s own love variously made visible, tactile, auditory, fragrant, and nutritious. God’s creative activity, we might say, comes to its fulfillment in the Sabbath rest that is so deeply affirmative and joy-inducing that there simply is no other place that God wants to be.

If what I have said of creation is true, then it is crucial that we appreciate that created beings and places are not simply the focus or object of God’s love and attention. They are also, and in ways we do not fully understand, the material means and the embodied expressions of divine love. In scripture God is often named Emmanuel, Godwith-us. Now we can appreciate why. God is forever wanting to be with creatures because they are the embodied sites through which God’s love is always already at work in the world. It may be more accurate to say that God is with and within us, since that does a better job communicating the intimacy of God’s presence in creaturely life. No creature is a random or pointless fluke. No creature has ever been devoid of God’s affirming presence. Instead, every creature is precious, a sacred and gracious gift worthy of our respect and cherishing.

This means that material reality is never to be despised or rejected because in doing so one would also be despising the divine love that is constantly animating and circulating through it. Any and all desires that end with this world being destroyed and left behind are funda mentally confused (at best) or dangerously sick (at worst). Any and all hopes that people might finally escape from this created world to be with God somewhere else are misguided because they forget that this created universe is where God is present and where God’s love is active. If you want to be with God, don’t look up and away to some destina tion far beyond the blue. Look down and around, because that is where God is at work and where God wants to be. God does not ever flee from creatures. God abides with them as a gardener attends to her garden, preparing the conditions for fruitful life and then staying close in the modes of nurture, protection, and celebration. This is why Simone Weil is right to say that the fundamental human task is to train and join our love with the divine love that daily sustains the life of all the creatures of this earth.

It isn’t hard to sympathize with the yearning to be with God somewhere else. For too many people, life either is or has been made to be difficult, if not unbearable, by innumerable injustices and forms of abandonment. When this earthly life has been made so miserable, the desire to flee from it makes a lot of sense. Even so, this yearning should be resisted because if God is the Source and Sustenance of every place and creature, then God cannot be confined to any circumscribed place,

no matter how wonderful or far away. To want to flee from this earth is also to want to flee from where God always, already is. To locate God somewhere else would be to “separate” God from the very realities that God loves and where God is at work. The truly radical theological claim is that the Creator is constantly present to every creature as its animating power, and that what God most wants for each creature is that it realize whatever potential is uniquely its to achieve. As the great Orthodox theologian Maximus the Confessor once put it, “God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodi ment.”1 In other words, the eternal desire of God is that each kind of creature realize to the full all the capacities within it that are made possible by God’s love. The presence of God, we might say, is not ever somewhere else but is, instead, to be found here and now in the material and spiritual realization of life’s abundance.2

What I have been describing will come as a huge disappointment to many people committed to a spiritual life. This is because the idea of the soul’s escape to a disembodied, ethereal elsewhere is so attractive and compelling. But the idea needs to be resisted. Why? Because embodiment is not the problem. If it were, then the eternal, creating Word of God could not have become flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). If every place and every distinct body is the material medium of God’s love, and if our bodies are temples of God’s animating spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)—sites through which the love of God can be highlighted and spread—then people should, like God, only ever care for, cherish, and celebrate them. One of the clearest indications that embodiment is not the problem can be found in the Christian affirma tion (in Colossians 1:15–20) that “the fullness of God dwelled bodily” in Jesus of Nazareth. Not some fragment or limited degree of God, but the fullness ( pleroma as the Greek has it) of God. In this pronounce ment we discover that there is nothing about embodiment or the ma teriality of creation that is in itself an obstacle to God’s presence. Those who claim that embodiment must be overcome and left behind are guilty of what I call a failure of incarnational nerve.

God’s frustration and grief are not with the creaturely condition itself, since, as we have already seen, creatureliness is precisely what God loves and where God’s love is made real. Instead, God’s anger and sorrow are directed at the forces and ways of being that cause creatures

to suffer, hunger, or be violated. Injustice, abuse, and neglect are con demned by God precisely because they represent assaults on the in tegrity and sanctity of the created bodies God loves. As Jesus’s own resurrected life and his bodily ascension reveal, life with God—what often goes under the name of life in heaven—is not closed to embodiment. It is closed only to the destructive ways of being that do bodies harm. In other words, heaven is closed to sin, but it is not closed to embodiment.

This is why it makes little sense to think that heaven is attained by getting to a location somewhere far away. To be in heaven is to be in the places that God loves and to experience God’s love as the only power inspiring and animating the bodies that are there. The aim of a spiritual life, therefore, must always be on refining and making real in this world the divine love that creates, nurtures, and beautifies em bodied life. In a stunning passage that should put a stop to all versions of otherworldly flight, scripture ends with God descending to be with creatures in their healed habitats and communities. God’s desire is not to be apart from creatures but to be with them and to make a divine home among mortals (Revelation 21:3). People are fooling themselves (and others) if they think they can enter heaven apart from the exercise of love, because apart from spiritual transformation they will simply take to a new location the destructive habits and practices that do so much harm here. Put another way, heaven is not about one’s transportation to another realm. It is, instead, about the transformation of this life so that God’s love is everywhere incarnate and active. Love alone assures that a place created as paradise is not turned into another hell on earth.

The divine love that creates, sustains, and heals creaturely life is not sentimental or naive. In large part this is because God’s love is not coercive or constraining. From the start, God gives to creatures the freedom to become themselves. No creature is simply the passive recipient of its life: it also plays an active role in the furtherance of its own life and the life all around it. As the Genesis creation poem puts it, God creates a vibrant world in which creatures bring forth new life and explore possibilities that have not yet been realized. In this dy namic world, fertility and fecundity are clear results and are evidenced in the beauty of the diversity of life forms that populate Earth. But so

too are suffering and pain, as creaturely freedoms and finitudes collide. Being with others, even in the best of circumstances, often results in frustration and harm. This is why love’s work is work that calls for the disciplines of attention, patience, repentance, gentleness, humility, and mercy. The crucial effort is the sympathetic one that comes alongside fellow creatures and is committed to places in modalities of respect and care. Knowing how often the intention to care brings about harm, confession of wrongdoing is love’s steadfast accompaniment.

We live in a world much abused and deeply wounded by us. It has, to use the words of the apostle Paul (in Romans 8), been subjected to futility owing to human waywardness and the refusal by people to live into their creaturely condition. As a result, the whole of creation is waiting for the true followers of God to come forth and live in ways that promote creaturely freedom and flourishing. This is what agrarian faith is fundamentally about. The “spirituality” that I develop in this book is not ethereal, otherworldly, or disembodied. Instead, it is fully incarnate and deeply rooted in the being of soils and neighborhoods, and the lives of chickens and children. It focuses on and develops the embodied, communal, and economic practices that draw us more in timately into life with others and, in doing that, also more practically into life with God.

As I develop what agrarian faith looks like, it is important to note that theologians have traditionally distinguished between two expressions of faith: fides qua and fides quae. The former refers to the habits and practices—what some writers refer to as “spiritual exercises”—that cultivate trust in and love of God: the ways of faith.3 The latter refers to the beliefs and doctrines that help people organize their thinking about God: the teachings of the faith. These two should be viewed as mutually illuminating, rather than as in conflict with each other. Even so, in this book my focus will be primarily on the practices and dispo sitions that people should cultivate to participate in God’s gardening and farming ways with the world. My hope is that, as I foreground several spiritual exercises and then develop them in an agrarian way, fresh insight into the life of God and this world may emerge, and people will be better positioned to witness to and participate in the love of God circulating through all of it.

If God is the primordial and essential Agrarian—the One who creates and sustains the world by planting, gardening, farming, and shepherding life—and if a spiritual practice refers to a person’s growing (yet always imperfect) participation in God’s ways of being with creatures, then the cultivation of distinctly agrarian spiritual exercises becomes a matter of the greatest social, practical, and theological significance.

Why Agrarian?

The demographic trends of the last several decades suggest that a book Agrarian Spirit is out of step with the times. Urbanization is now a global phenomenon, with the dawn of the twenty-first cen tury marking the first time when more people live in cities than live in rural or “wild” places. The pace and extent of urban development have grown dramatically as farmers and peasants, many of them fac ing hostile economic and political forces, leave climate- stressed and violence-stricken lands in search of shelter, employment, and subsis tence. The cities that receive them often lack the infrastructure—the housing, education, medical, and support services—necessary to pro vide for their needs. By the year 2050 it is expected that more than two-thirds of all people will live in cities, with several of these residing in high-density megacities with populations in the tens of millions. Of these residents, one in three will live in slums. By contrast, in the year 1800 less than 10 percent of people across the globe lived in urban centers.1

There is considerable debate about how best to contrast an urban versus a rural environment, with scholars contesting the definitions and characteristics of each. What is clear, however, is that the movement from country to city entails much more than a change in location. More fundamental are the changes in sensibilities and responsibilities that often accompany relocation and that affect how people think and feel about their world and their place within it. Never before have so

many people lived in ways that require little or no understanding of their embodied dependence on the land, its waters and weather, and all the diverse microbial, plant, and animal life they support. Can people care for and protect what they know little about?

For millennia, hunters, fishers, foragers, peasants, and farmers have worked out their lives in terms of what soils, watersheds, plants, animals, and weather made possible. To survive, let alone to live well, the vast majority of people needed to hone their sympathies and calibrate their desires to the habits and fertility cycles of animals, the ger mination, growth, and maturation of plants, the seasons of the year, and the movements of water. To do that, they needed to study what their places and fellow creatures allowed and then develop the practical skills to work within ecologically determined limits and possibilities. They didn’t always do it well, but sometimes they succeeded in devel oping the economies that did not violate or compromise the ecological contexts on which every economy depends.

By contrast, today’s urban dwellers are mostly insulated from these considerations as increasingly vast infrastructures composed of warehouses, distribution centers, stores, pipelines, electricity grids, trans portation networks, service providers, and the World Wide Web deliver the materials, food, and energy they need to live. In the most developed countries, the majority of people spend roughly 90 percent of their time indoors, working, sleeping, playing, eating, exercising, and learning in climate- and light-controlled buildings. For a growing number of people, dependence on the land has been eclipsed by de pendence on the Internet, while the skills of tracking, growing, harvesting, building, and repairing have been replaced by shopping. To appreciate the nature of our changed circumstances, consider that in the past people spent the bulk of their working days sourcing and storing up food and energy for their community’s needs, whereas in today’s fast-food economies people can feed themselves in a matter of minutes and with little more effort than it takes to swipe a credit card or turn on a microwave oven.

My point is not to condemn urban life or shopping as inherently or necessarily harmful. It is, instead, to highlight that as a species we have embarked on an unprecedented experiment in which the future

flourishing of multispecies life is at stake. The experiment, framed as a question, is this: Given the tremendous life- and earth-altering powers now at our disposal, will people deploy these powers to enhance the shared vitality of lands and creatures if they have lost sympathetic and practical touch with the ecological realities (and limits) that make their living possible? The question is especially urgent when we recognize that we now live in an Anthropocene world where the future of earth and life systems will be determined by the technological reach and economic priorities that citizens choose or condone. The track record of the past several decades of industrial development is not encouraging.

If it is fair to assume that people tend to care for what they care about, then it becomes all the more important that we attend to the conditions that foster honest awareness and genuine insight regarding the requirements of a decent and sustainable life. Information isn’t enough. What is needed is a felt, sympathetic, and practical connection with the liveliness of a place—what we might also describe as the birth ing and nurturing potential of a place—a connection intimate enough that one becomes attuned to its vitality and possibilities, but also its fragility and limits. What would it take for people to be so in touch with their places that they feel in their bodies the struggle and suffer ing, but also the strength and vitality, of the creatures they are with? As people understand the factors that promote soil fertility, for instance, things like cover-cropping and the application of plant and animal manures, they can become advocates for regenerative forms of agricul ture that heal eroded or denuded lands and that produce nutritious food at the same time. As people see the social and ecological effects of mountaintop removal (MTR) mining, and also understand why this has become the preferred method of coal extraction, they can then put themselves in a position to support renewable, community-building forms of electricity production. As people appreciate how vital, vul nerable, and precious fresh water is, they can become defenders of glaciers, streams, and aquifers, and advocates for clean, available, and affordable water in rural and urban communities alike.

From an agrarian point of view, there is clearly an aesthetic dimen sion to deeper and more intimate connections with the places and creatures that nurture us. If people aim to reverse the degrading and

destroying trajectories of the past, then it will be important for them to develop hospitable ways of being that create the time and space for the goodness and beauty of this world to appear. This is a slow and patience-requiring process. The future of a healthy and vibrant world depends on people seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting fields, forests, waterways, and fellow creatures as gracious gifts and not merely as units of production or consumption. This possibility rests, for instance, on people coming into the presence of soil and discerning its mysterious and miraculous generative powers, listening to birdsong and hearing invitations to relationship, catching the fragrance of a forest and sensing the myriad forms of relationships and life pulsing through it, feeling the flow of fresh water over one’s hand and delight ing in its cleansing, slaking, cooling, playful, and restorative possibilities, and savoring a bowl of vanilla custard and fresh raspberries on a summer afternoon and finding there one of the most satisfying expressions of God’s desire that creatures be happy (and not merely fed).

An adequate aesthetic, however, is rooted in kinesthetic experience as people work to satisfy their needs for energy, shelter, beauty, food, and building materials. Embodied engagement, along with the train ing and skill development such engagement entails, is crucial because it is through sustained working and living with creatures that one’s perceptive capacities are corrected and sharpened, one’s sympathies inspired, and one’s responsibilities better directed. To grow a thriving neighborhood, for instance, one has to understand its history, know its infrastructure and how it works (or doesn’t), listen to its residents, participate in its life, discern why some policy recommendations might work, and then commit to sticking around so that mistakes can be corrected and successes celebrated. A great way to do that is to come alongside neighbors and share in the physical labor of building homes, parks, and business opportunities. To prepare a delicious meal you need quality ingredients and thus also an understanding of the many elements—healthy soil, clean water, contented animals, good agricultural work and food processing, and appropriate distribution networks—that facilitate quality all along the way. A great way to do that is to grow and cook some of your own food or participate in community gardening projects.

By foregrounding the importance of a working relationship with a place I do not mean to recommend yet one more back-to-the-land movement. To argue for an agrarian position is not to argue for a reverse migration from cities to the countryside, nor is it to long for a bygone age in which the majority of people were farmers. For a variety of reasons, such recommendations are ill advised and practically un workable because (a) there isn’t enough land for every person to farm; (b) not enough people possess the intelligence, skill, and sympathy to farm in ways that honor the land and the creatures that live from it; and (c) the history of agricultural communities is saturated with abuse, slavery, racism, xenophobia, sexism, and neglect. An authentic agrarian position cannot be rooted in “nostalgia.”2 There is too much bad farm ing and too much injustice in that past. It must instead look to the past as a source of instruction and insight as people work to correct the mistakes and abuses it contains and then join with current scientists, ecologists, and practitioners to develop regenerative farming and energy systems that can be viable for millennia to come. The reali zation of an authentic agrarianism is a prospect that lies before us rather than behind us.

Given agriculture’s often beleaguered history, and given the de structive effects of many of today’s conventional agricultural methods, it is also important that we not equate agrarianism with farming. To advocate for an agrarian position one does not need to be a full-time farmer. What is necessary is that one be committed to the practices and policies that promote the health and vitality of lands, creatures, and people altogether. Practically speaking, that means supporting— financially with one’s shopping priorities, and politically with one’s voice and votes—the farming communities that do good work.

For too much of human history people have pursued paths of Development, Progress, and Glory that were at the expense of soil fer tility, clean water, species diversity, animal contentment, worker protections, and community vitality. Economies have been devised that not only occlude the ecological contexts upon which they depend but work against them, and thereby have facilitated the creation of a planet that in many of its regions is becoming uninhabitable for people and fellow creatures alike. Political priorities that exploit and then abandon

the communities that sustain (potentially) convivial life have domi nated too many of our societies. If our hope is to live long and beneficially in the land, then our highest priority must be to cultivate the personal sympathies, foster the practical skills, and commit to the eco nomic and political policies that nurture the world that nurtures us.

Given today’s global social and ecological realities, the pertinent marker of whether a person is an agrarian is not whether he or she lives in the country or the city. This is because plenty of people living in rural regions cannot grow a tomato or fix their own homes, while many others living in cities grow a great variety of fruits and vegetables, are engaged in energy infrastructure projects, and are dedicated to building just workplaces and thriving neighborhoods. Agrarians are distinguished by their commitment to work for the well-being of their places and communities, and they do this by developing the practical skills that cultivate the material and social goods—things like fertile soil, clean water, abundant green spaces, nutritious food, genuine health care, safe neighborhoods, beautiful homes, child and family support, youth empowerment, inclusion and honoring of the elderly, and worthwhile work—that promote a thriving world. To be an agrarian is to do the work that nourishes life in its many material, physiological, environmental, social, and cultural dimensions. It is to know and act upon the fundamental truth that people are landed beings and so cannot possibly thrive apart from the thriving of the land and its many creatures.

CULTIVATING MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE

Agrarian ways of thinking grow out of agrarian ways of being. In other words, something like an agrarian philosophy is rooted in the cultiva tion of the practical skills—like animal husbandry, home construction and repair, education and empowerment of people, plant production, and neighborly support—that generate the insights and sympathies that make an agrarian position compelling, even indispensable. Agrarian work is primary because it inspires, directs, and disciplines

whatever thinking accompanies it. Agrarian work is fundamental be cause it puts people in touch with what we might call the matter-offact nature of geo-biological realities—most basically, the dietary and health requirements of plant and animal bodies, but also the many ecosystem processes that support both—that people simply need to know and respect if they are to live well wherever they are. In the per formances of growing, making, gathering, and repairing, people ac quire what Glenn Adamson has called the “material intelligence” that agrarians find crucial to their position. By material intelligence Adam son means “a deep understanding of the material world around us, an ability to read that environment, and the know-how required to give it new form.”3 This form of intelligence has been eroded as people are increasingly encouraged to view their world on screens and shelves and so are in danger of losing a tactile, fully sensuous, and practiced con nection with the world that makes their living possible.

To appreciate what material intelligence is, consider a slice of apple pie. What is it? A delicious and nutritious item of food, to be sure. But it is also so much more if you are a baker or grow an apple orchard. As a baker you know that a pie crust is a work of art in which butter, flour, and water, when folded together properly (keeping the butter cold), create the flakiness eaters love. Too much hand manipulation ruins the crust, making it doughy and tough. You also know that not all apples are the same. Which variety should you use, and how should you slice, spice, and prepare them? Of course, multiple excellent pie recipes will yield a delicious dessert (or main course!), but what an expert pie maker is able to do is work with the ingredients at hand, sense what is possible in them, and then craft accordingly. Good bakers know that they must make themselves the students of the ingredients and baking processes they use because apart from this complex intelligence they will not succeed.

If we turn to the apples themselves, we discover that there are endless varieties of apples to choose from (though grocery stores have consistently promoted only a small fraction of these). These apples don’t just grow anywhere or automatically. Some are adapted to specific regions and weather patterns, whereas others are the result of selective breeding that encourages specific qualities of fleshy texture or taste.

Orchardists know there is no guarantee that there will be an apple crop each year. A late frost or some form of blight can easily doom a year’s harvest. This is why they are constantly alert and responsive to changing ecological and meteorological systems. They understand that apples are ultimately gifts to be received rather than products to be controlled. They know that their most important work is to cooperate with geo-bio-chemical processes going on around them. Like bakers who appreciate the potential of the ingredients they use, orchardists understand the potential of a place and its trees and, through an effort that is best described as an improvisational dance, grow the apples that define a delicious pie.

Of course, eaters of the pie do not have to know all these things to still enjoy it. But their enjoyment and their understanding are undoubtedly deepened by the work of baking and growing. Moreover, their sympathies (for bakers and baking processes, for growers and growing processes) are enlarged because they appreciate the vulnera bility and noninevitability of a piece of pie. By having a more complex and nuanced understanding of what an apple pie is and how it comes to be, they might come to the stunning realization that the world has the potential to taste really good when the potential latent within human skill is applied to the flavor potential embedded within plants. The crucial insight, however, is that without the skills of baking and growing, the delectable character of this world remains hidden.

Using Adamson’s definition, we can now see how practical skill makes it possible for people to “read” their world in fresh ways. To read is much more than to register that there are marks on a page. It is to understand that the marks are words that communicate meaning and significance. When people lose material intelligence, they move through the world oblivious to where they are and who they are with. Places, creatures, and objects are clearly present, but they remain mute and indecipherable, carrying only surface significance because people have not engaged with them so as to discover their potential and limits. Imagine encountering an apple tree but not knowing that you can eat its apples or give them new forms by making applesauce, apple juice, and hard cider, or baking apple pies, cakes, squares, and strudels. How many of the world’s flavors, beauties, and uses remain hidden because

people have not developed the sympathies and skills that open its po tential?4 Reading the world with understanding, much like reading words on a page, is a skill that has to be learned. It takes instruction and practice to get to the point where the words take the reader beyond the page into worlds that can be explored and enjoyed. To see the difference, one can well envision a person reading the marks “I love you!” and remaining unmoved. The person doesn’t understand how these “letters” open a relation and invite a response. Is it possible that we are each moving through a communicative, meaning-generating world but don’t know how to read and respond to it appropriately?5

The practical skills that make possible the material intelligence I have in mind have the effect of positioning people in their places and communities in new ways. Skilled engagement makes it possible for people to be more than tourists simply moving through places; it situ ates them within places and alongside the paths of life that are operating there. Physical work attentively and thoughtfully done puts people in contact with the beauty of this world. That beauty is not to be con fused with how people wish things were; rather, it is the beauty of how the world has been created and is continuously loved by God. It is, at times, a hard beauty because it puts people in touch with realities that can wound them, and with a world that is not tailored in all its aspects to making them happy. As Simone Weil understood so well, it takes the discipline of love for beauty of this sort to emerge: “He who is aching in every limb, worn out by the effort of a day of work, that is to say a day when he has been subject to matter, bears the reality of the universe in his flesh like a thorn. The difficulty for him is to look and to love. If he succeeds, he loves the Real.”6 The great danger is to mistake places and creatures for what one wants them to be rather than for what they in fact are. In the process, their God-givenness remains hidden, which is to say the truth of their being. To cultivate material intelligence, what people most need to do is learn to love precisely this world rather than some other, this world with all its frustrations, imperfections, and limits, but also its pleasures, beauties, and neverto-be-repeated incarnations of grace. Manual work is an indispensable apprenticeship in which this sort of love grows.

The work of making, growing, gathering, or repairing is mischaracterized if we think it is a person’s imposition of an idea upon the

surrounding world. This way of speaking is an (often destructive) mis take because it assumes that people stand apart from or outside of the world that they engage. Human embodiment, especially as revealed in our need to drink, eat, breathe, shelter ourselves, and be creative, teaches that we are always already stitched within places and communities of life and thus grow out of them (more on this in the next chapter). As Tim Ingold correctly notes, making is not reducible to something we do to the world. It is, instead, our growing within a world that is itself constantly growing and developing fresh expressions of life. In an important sense, what we are is a world growing in and through us. The question is whether we will in our creative activities learn to appreciate, respect, and honor—and take up a humble role within—the world’s transformation of itself.7

The activities of making and growing change the world, but they also change us because in the work itself two “openings” occur. First, to participate creatively and sympathetically in the world’s transforma tion of itself opens people to what I call the grace and sanctity of creaturely life. Making a meal or building a garden shed draws people into a deeper appreciation of the vulnerability and the wonder of the creatures and things they use. A bowl of salsa isn’t simply a product but a delicious combination of tomatoes, onions, peppers, and spices that (potentially) draws people into the miracles of plant germination, photosynthesis, pollination, and decomposition, just as a 2x4 isn’t reducible to a piece of lumber but is a beautiful, useful, material mani festation of a tree that is a member of a forest community that digests carbon, produces oxygen, stabilizes the ground, produces microclimates, and is home to countless creatures large and small. Moreover, salsa and garden sheds are (potentially) repositories and material sites that carry the memories of the skill, devotion, struggle, and care that went into their making or coming-to-be.

When people make things, they invest their attention and care in the thing made. They join their love to the divine love that creates and daily sustains a world that is good, beautiful, fragrant, pleasing, and delicious in so many of its manifestations, and so communicate that this world and its creatures and things are worthy of our cherishing. The importance of this insight should not be underestimated, particularly when we recognize how our world is awash with things we find

unsatisfying, ugly, and useless. Would we need to buy so much if the things we had were held as precious because they embodied the skill and love that well-made things communicate? Would we so easily throw things away if we knew them to be the effects of another’s, and thus also our own, cherishing and devotion?

Second, practices of making open people to a much more expan sive understanding of themselves as they discover more precisely how their living grows out of places and communities and realize that their being is a manifestation of the world growing through them. When people engage their neighborhoods and communities in a skillful and knowledgeable manner, they are more likely to discern how their living is made possible by the gifts and the generosity of others. They begin to see in a detailed way the myriad number of blessings that daily come their way in the forms of nurture, inspiration, and love and to recog nize that this world is a place where they don’t simply reside but belong. Put another way, the exercises of nurture and making enable people to know and feel themselves as social, ecological, and sacred beings that both depend on others and can, in turn, be a benefit to others. Agrarian work draws people into their places so they can perceive more clearly how this world is populated by creatures and maintained by processes that, when sympathetically engaged, can build and maintain a pleasing home. It helps people understand that the idea of a life alone is a con tradiction in terms and that the diverse forms of loneliness are a derelict condition. All people are sacred beings because they are, quite literally, the outgrowth of divine powers moving through soils, waters, raspberries, bees, chickens, farmers, gardeners, cooks, builders, and friends.

ON DESPISING AGRARIAN WORK

In highlighting the centrality of work to an agrarian position, a prob lem of great significance emerges almost immediately. Many aspects of agrarian work have been shunned and despised from the beginning. This, in part, is because the care of plants, animals, fields, and home places is exacting, difficult, and unrelenting work. Anyone who has