When it comes to our approach to Scripture, we can learn a lot from farming. Here is an insightful excerpt from “Eat This Book” by Eugene Peterson:
I begin with a poem by Wendell Berry, one of our century’s wiser guides, in which he uses the small farm on which he lives and works as a metaphor for form as formative. For forty years, in a succession of novels and poems and essays, Berry has been re-ordering our Christian imaginations to cultivate totalities, to live life as a spiritually organic whole. In his poem “From the Crest” he works his metaphor in a way that invites reflection on the form of Holy Scripture as it gives form to the Christian life.
I am trying to teach my mind
to bear the long, slow growth
of the fields, and to sing
of its passing while it waits.
The farm must be made a form,
endlessly bringing together
heaven and earth, light
and rain building, dissolving,
building back again
the shapes and actions of the ground. [1]
What Berry sees in his farm as a form, I see in Scripture as a form. Think of the farm as an organic whole, but with boundaries so that you are aware and stay in touch with all the interrelations: the house and barn, the horses and the chickens, the weather of sun and rain, the food prepared in the house and the work done in the fields, the machinery and the tools, the seasons. There are steady, relaxed rhythms in place.
I did not grow up on a farm but did grow up in a farming country and was often on farms and ranches. My father was a butcher and so we were often on the farms buying and slaughtering beef and pork and lamb. I’m sure there are exceptions to this, but as I have thought through my early memories of being on those farms, I can’t remember a farmer who was ever in a hurry. Farmers characteristically work hard, but there is too much work to do to be in a hurry. On a farm everything is connected both in place and in time. Nothing is done that isn’t connected to something else; if you get in a hurry, break the rhythms of the lands and the seasons and the weather, things fall apart – you get in the way of something set in motion last week or month. A farm is not neat – there is too much going on that is out of your control. Farms help us learn patience and attentiveness: “I am trying to teach my mind / to bear the long, slow growth / of the fields, and to sing / of its passing while it waits.”
If anything or anyone is treated out of context, that is, isolated as a thing in itself apart from season or weather or soil conditions or the condition of the machinery or persons, it is violated: “The farm must be made a form, / endlessly bringing together / heaven and earth, light / and rain building back again / the shapes and actions of the ground.”
Holy Scripture is a form in just this way: a fenced-in acreage of words and sentences of many different sorts and kinds, but all of them integral to the work that is being done, working in long, steady rhythms in which we, the readers, participate but don’t control. We meditatively enter this world of words and give obedient and glad assent. We submit our lives to this text that is “endlessly bringing together / heaven and earth…” [2]
[1] Wendell Berry, Collected Poems (San Francisco: North Point, 1985), pp. 190-91.[2] Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 38-40.
