jabel

I always hated it when people told me not to take myself so seriously. Hated it. I’ve always been a painfully sincere person who wants to do the right thing. I heard that advice as suggesting that I was ridiculous for taking life seriously. And, to be fair, some people did mean that.

But now, as fifty approaches, maybe I begin to understand. Over the past ten years I can see more clearly the ways I pose and cope—and how others do the same. I see the pain hidden beneath these behaviors.

Does this mean I should not expect better of myself and others? Certainly I should. These behaviors have real consequences.

But this is what we do, isn’t it? It’s ridiculous and wrong and very, very human. It’s funny, in a way.

If I laugh at it, it’s not a mocking belly laugh. It’s not a joke that says “look at you!”—rather, “look at us!” It is half amusement, half compassion.

So on a morning of big, complicated feelings I look at my coping instinct with amusement and compassion and I’m able to dial it down a few percentage points. Silly old bear.

In Radiance of the Ordinary, Tara Couture opens the chapter “The Dance” with a truly cozy (there’s that word again) description of an early winter morning on their farm. Waking up, starting a fire, reading on the couch, standing barefoot in the grass to greet the sun. She continues:

It’s all lovely, yes? It’s as lovely as we’ve crafted it to be. And as much as I’d like to leave us there, cozied up by the hearth, I cannot. As romantic as the soft days of this country life may sound, they are only soft because of the hard days. There’s nothing wrong with romance—I quite like it myself—but to only show that side of things is dishonest, and it’s important to identify that dishonesty wherever it exists, especially in this time, in this world, where we are inundated with images of endless pleasures. Where our culture sells us on the idea that hard work is beneath us, or out of reach. Where entertainment is our highest calling. That strife and disappointment are wrong, frustration somethign to run from, discomfort something to avoid at all costs. None of these things are true, and they keep us locked in a perpetual chase with no fulfilling destination. They are romance as a gloss, a thin veneer of gauze and plastic roses meant to keep us eating without ever being satiated. And because of that, I need to pull us out of that warm winter nest of pleasures and into the reality of what makes it so profoundly and deliciously pleasurable—and that reality is work. Hard and demanding work.

Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age (thanks to Donny for the recommendation):

Just as mainstream left and right politics realigns around a joint commitment to tech-heavy liberal-modernism, so it’s possible to imagine, in the words of Stephen Quilley, ‘a realignment built on the overlap between libertarians, Burkean localists, and religious communitarians currently (sometimes unwillingly) camped out on the political right on the one hand, and green/anarchist anti-moderns on the left!"

This book represents an attempt by one particular writer inclined to green anti-modernism on the left to find the overlaps with those groups camped out on the right. An easy point of agreement is on the benefits of rich, local associational communities grounded in livelihood-making. Letting go of currently high levels of fossil-fuelled plenty may be a harder journey for both left and right, but if my arguments about our impending dark age are accurate, we don’t have much choice about that. Probably most challenging to traditional left or anarchist thinking is the need to let go of a sense of individualist freedom and self-fashioning, and to embrace the idea that self-realization is possible only within the limiting (but also enabling) structures of already given communities and families - and, what’s more, communities with spiritual underpinnings.

This has been my trajectory for a while now. “Left” and “right” are two drunks having a bar fight: sure, I walked into this bar with one of them but the whole thing is getting stupider by the moment. I’m far more interested in connecting with those on the side of life, against technological death.

Erik Davis reminded me of Finis Jennings Dake today:

My favorite relic of those months is a version of the King James Bible I picked up at a Christian bookstore at a strip mall near the coast. The store, which I visited a number of times and was more important to me than any particular church, was one of the many nondenominational Christian shops that popped up in the 1980s, paralleling the New Age stores of the era with their spiritual lifestyle blend of books, cassette tapes, bumper stickers, statues, jewelry, and inspirational wall art.

The Bible in question, which I still own, was a more old-school affair: a faux-leather-bound copy of the Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible. On its thin scritta pages, the 17th-century King James prose was copiously, almost talmudically broken down with over 35,000 notes and commentaries crammed into side columns and myriad appendixes. Its author was one Finis J. Dake, a Pentecostal evangelist from Missouri who, after violating the Mann Act in 1937, became the first Pentecostal to publish a scriptural reference work on anywhere near this scale. Imagine a listaholic fusion of Jack Chick and Charles Kinbote, the deranged literary critic who animates Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and you would not be far off.

My dad had one of those. In fact, I may have been the person who bought it for him. Even for us self-taught, Spirit-drunk fundamentalists with a rainbow coalition of bizarre ideas, Dake was a bit out there. He was never openly promoted. The people who read him tended to discover each other, like Freemasons noticing each others’ rings. We’d be deep into our Sunday night fast food burgers when someone would say, “what do you think about the pre-Adamite world?”

Leaving aside my nagging worry about what this meant in terms of pollution, the following is beautiful simply as a piece of prose personifying the river flowing through the Clairvaux Abbey. From Lewis Mumford (The Myth of the Machine), as quoted by Michael Updegraff (“Transitions of Power,” Mortise and Tenon tenth anniversary issue):

The river enters the abbey as much as the wall acting as a check allows. It gushes first into the corn-mill where it is very actively employed in grinding the grain under the weight of the wheels and in shaking the fine sieve which separates the flour from the bran. Thence it flows into the next building, and fills the boiler in which it is heated to prepare beer for the monks drinking, should the vine’s fruitfulness not reward the vintner’s labour. But the river has not yet finished its work, for it is now drawn into the fulling-machines following the corn-mill. In the mill it has prepared the brothers food and its duty is now to serve in making their clothing. This the river does not withhold, nor does it refuse any task asked of it. Thus it raises and lowers alternately the heavy hammers and mallets, or to be more exact, the wooden feet of the fulling machines. When by swirling at great speed it has made all these wheels revolve swiftly it issues foaming and looking as if it had ground itself. Now the river enters the tannery where it devotes much care and labour to preparing the necessary materials for the monks' footwear; then it divides into many small branches and, in its busy course, passes through the various departments, seeking everywhere for cooking, rotating, crushing, watering, washing or grinding, always offering its help and never refusing. At last, to earn full thanks and to leave nothing undone, it carries away the refuse and leaves all clean.

Rachel and I drove around the Amish settlement in Daviess County today and came across this guy spreading manure. (Poor quality, I know.) It was still cold today but the strong sunshine felt like a promise.

After looking around the Odon Locker, we walked across the parking lot to a shop with a sign saying something about Amish goods, with the requisite buggy image. Turned out to be one of those faux Amish shops meant for tourists and church ladies. There’s a certain style of religious kitsch that you always find in these places. Signs made to look hand-lettered that say things like “gather” or “it is well with my soul.” Cookbooks with pictures that are typically described as “quaint.” A little section for the men with beard balm displays and shirts that say “Man of God.” You know that “wine mom” aesthetic you see at wineries? This is the evangelical version of that. We took one step inside the shop, looked at each other, and walked back out.

We visited more genuinely Amish/Mennonite stores in the country south of Odon. Groceries stores and variety shops and a shoe store that sells so much more than shoes. You can tell these places are meant to be the sort of place that sells everything one of the plain folk might need: groceries and bulk goods, herbal remedies, and copies of Ausbund, Luther’s German Bible, Rules of a Godly Life, and Raber’s Almanac.

The kitsch shops are frustrating because they represent that malignant power of the marketers to sell you the form of godliness while denying the power thereof. It’s fashion for those whose values run skin-deep.

The more substantial lesson we can learn from the Amish is the power of life under vow. I’ve been considering this a lot lately because it is a hard lesson, and one I’m not quite sure what to do with yet. Thankfully, it is neither marketable nor available for sale.

This post is a little long and rambly, but I think I’ll leave it.

A few days ago I posed a question for Christians: “How would you square a belief in the inherent dignity of honest work with the idea that hard work was the curse of God on Adam?”

I got some good responses, which you can see in the comments to that post. Caleb’s response, in particular, sent me back to the recent Plough issue on “Why We Work,” where I found a helpful piece by Alastair Roberts. More on that momentarily.

The background to my question is my recent reading about the Amish and other Anabaptists–a tradition with a long history of weaving together their daily work with their faith. This is attractive to me. It’s essentially been a lifelong goal of mine, stretching from the time I left the Holiness churches through my time as a Lutheran, Episcopalian, and, now, a pagan. I have no interest in an otherworldly faith that cheapens this world. I am interested in how I can live a fully integrated life here and now.

Many years ago I read that deeply problematic C.S. Lewis passage (from God in the Dock_) where he divides religions, like soups, into “thick” and “clear”:

By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly.

Surprising no one, Lewis says Christianity is the best balance of Thick and Clear. When I first read it, however, I was instantly attracted far more to the Thick than either the Clear or some balance of the two. That has remained the case in the decades since. There have been times when I perhaps drifted more toward the Clear, but I always come back to the Thick.

“Good work is our salvation and joy,” says Wendell Berry, and I agree. This is a Thick principle. Earthy and solid, like the Amish. As I was thinking through this, my mind went back to the Garden of Eden, as it does surprisingly often. I find it to be a fruitful(!) myth; I posted one of my theories about it here. How can good work be essential to our well-being if work is the curse of God on Adam?

As a few people pointed out, that is a mistaken way of framing it. There was indeed work before the Fall. Here’s where Alastair comes in. He says humanity’s work was meant to be “continuous with and established by God’s labor” in creation. Eden, in fact, was a training ground. God would teach Adam and Eve how to “extend and elaborate good order within the creation” and from there they would go out to exercise this responsibility throughout the world. Eden would remain as the primal garden sanctuary, where God and humanity could commune. Humanity’s work would be a pattern of there and back again: going out to perform their work, and returning to the garden sanctuary to be with God.

The Fall, however, changed the character of work:

Man’s work was supposed to flow out of and back into fellowship with God: it was ordered out from and into the sanctuary. However, after humanity’s rebellion in the Fall, human labor went awry, adopting a different character. Alienated from God, human labor lost its primary orientation to communion, becoming acquisitive, driven by a desire for material possessions, power, and status. Capacities that were created for beneficent rule were twisted to the ends of domination over others, and labor became entangled with systems of bondage. Mutual recognition, companionship, and belonging through fellow labor curdled into rivalry and division. Work once blessed with fruitfulness was reduced to frustration and futility. Labor degraded into unrelenting toil. The earth no longer readily answered to the efforts of the man, and now, alienated from the Giver of Life, man’s labors were constantly slipping down into the pitiless maw of death. The labor of women in childbirth became hedged about with the risk of death, for mother and baby alike. The book of Ecclesiastes, which meditates upon the condition of man in a world under the power of death, describes how man’s greatest works are washed away and forgotten beneath the advancing tides of time.

Having lost its grounding in relationship, suffering became the new character of work. I appreciate this elucidation of the story–so I’ll adapt it for my own uses.

My personal theory (more in that link above) is that the Eden story is an ancestral memory of our break with the more-than-human world. Viewing this through the lens of work, Eden tells us that once we labored in harmony with the universe. Our work was reciprocal: taking and killing, yes, but also giving, caring, and protecting.

Perhaps the break with the more-than-human world happened because evolution damaged humanity in some way. However it happened, the separation set us at odds. Work is now rarely a partnership between people, much less between humans and non-humans. At this late date, money is all that matters.

I don’t know whether or how this breach will be healed on the grand scale. I will leave that question to the religions that operate at that scale.

In my own life, I intend for my labor to be grounded in the recognition of interrelatedness. Living in the world as it is, my work will often breach those relationships. Wendell Berry once had a pond excavated on a narrow shelf on a wooded hillside. He thought he had done it carefully, in consultation with experts. Nevertheless, after a wet fall and winter, a chunk of the woods above slid into the pond.

In general, I have used my farm carefully. It could be said, I think, that I have improved it more than have damaged it.

My aim has been to go against its history and to repair the damage of other people. But now a part of its damage is my own.

The pond was a modest piece of work, and so the damage is not extensive. In the course of time and nature it will heal.

And yet there is damage—to my place, and to me. I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.

Until that wound in the hillside, my place, is healed, there will be something impaired in my mind. My peace is damaged. I will not be able to forget it.

When our work has breached relationships, it is our responsibility to repair and heal what we can, in memory of Eden.

It is better, of course, to avoid these breaches altogether. This is where our work becomes truly difficult, because it cuts against the grain of everything around us. I don’t know what you will be called to do; I know what Rachel and I have been called to do. Like Adam and Eve, our work is joint, one long venture lasting thirty years so far. We have been called to work together in patience and love: parenting, gardening, making a home, supporting each other. We gave up a job with money and status (that was killing me) so that we could remain near each other, within our community, and fully shift our focus there. I say this only to insist that work grounded in interrelatedness will cost you—but only in ways that do not ultimately matter. Ultimately, you’ll only lose your suffering. For the last word, we turn again to Mr. Berry:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and that vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.