Newness of Life

As of this September, I'm carrying a column in Purpose Magazine - sort of a Mennonite Guidepost -the kind of thing you'd find on the coffee table or in the bathroom of a nice Mennonite home. You can check it out at MennoMedia.org if you're interested.

The good folks at Purpose said I could post articles here once they were out in print. This one was under the theme of "redemption":

Newness of Life

I've been to visit the Orthodox Mennonites a few times now. They fascinate and compel me, these "plain folk."

The barn-raising I came out for still stands as the deepest sense of "we" that this recovering member of a "me" generation has yet to encounter. It had all the team spirit, the physical strain, the risk of injury, the strategy, and the bravery of a major sports event--that last unitive sacrament of my culture--without any of the aggression; we were profoundly together, without being against anyone else.

 On each visit, their minister takes pains to explain to me that the point of using horse and buggy or hand tools or wearing plain clothes is not those disciplines in themselves, but to "walk in newness of life." Funny, that this fellow with the big salt-and-pepper beard, the quaint Germanic accent, the house, clothes and mannerisms of yesteryear should commend his way of life to me as a way of pursuing "newness."

In my culture, there are endless products and services aimed at selling me that elusive sense of newness, of being reborn: the home renovation, the makeover, the Go Away to Discover Myself trip--all ways of achieving "the new you." In my case, I got suckered trying to reinvent myself by spending thousands of dollars on a triple set of caps and gowns, if you know what I mean.

But what is it that truly frees us to walk in newness of life? The Orthodox Mennonites have decided that beyond sharing ideas and words, Christ-followers need to share life. They fear that the individualized Christian is like the seed sown among the thorns: "The cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing." I fear I have little evidence to counter them.

When I get back in the car and drive away from the horse and buggy folk, I'm left asking myself: How do the technologies I use (or don't), or the standards I aspire to (or disregard), facilitate my walking in newness of life? How do they build up or weaken the "beloved community?" What bodily work is spiritually healing? And perhaps most importantly, am I asking these questions and choosing my disciplines alone, or with soul friends?

Unequal Yokes

Well, the garlic is planted, the pigs are in the freezer and the tomato cages are finally pulled and stacked aside (Thank you, Jenn!). Darkness is falls fast these days; the land is falling asleep. Action gives way to reflection. At last.

I don't know if anyone out there has missed my writing. I have. The process, I mean. It's a more careful way to think.

So, as promised, about the oxen:

At my last oxen-related post, I had one sweetie-pie of a calf named Oscar. By now I have a team of two junior oxen, selected out of a group of four candidate bull calves we tried out this summer. They take a yoke, stop and go and turn when I ask, and pull around a small load on a little sled. They are calm and friendly and really do seem to try their best for me.

It's still mostly fun and games. But the working relationship is real, and every time we do a drill, I'm a little closer to really counting on my boys, Oscar and Ben. I can already see them being a big help hauling firewood out of the bush this winter .

I have to say I'm surprised how natural it has felt to start working with the team. This is a confession as much as it is a boast. This summer I learned that I really do like to be the boss. The word boss, as I have learned, shares its roots with the verb "to beat" originally referring to the one who has the right to give subordinates a beating.

As a stay-at-home Dad of two precocious girls who have learned well to question authority, I have moments when I am wistful for a Father Knows Best household. It would be a lot easier. As a Jesus-disciple, I try to be a servant rather than an overlord in my family and my politics. My efforts are consistently clumsy and at odds with my dominant instincts. But Oscar and Ben don't understand servant-leadership, so with them I am unequivocally the Boss. With animals that will grow to be 2400lbs each, I have to demand absolute respect for my authority. And this is the interesting thing. Although I have been culturally conditioned not to, I found that I knew exactly how to be that kind of guy. What's more, I like being that guy.

I reflected often this summer on the stories of corporal discipline I remember hearing from my mother. She knew her father as a man of great tenderness and love, but she also feared his big hands. There were lines that were not to be crossed, and a price she would pay with her heiny if she did.

That's how I was with my boys. I bottle-fed them, I led them by green pastures, I rubbed and scratched and spoke affectionately to them, but when they didn't listen to commands, I hit them with a stick. Sometimes hard. Sometimes in the face. Just enough to let them know that my commands were non-negotiable, and then when they obeyed, back to the soothing and the petting and the praising. James Dobson would have loved it.

And they got it. The commands were simple and consistent, and introduced with physical cues easily intuited by non-verbal creatures (follow but do not pass your dominant animal; move away from taps and prods; stop if there's a stick in front of your face). And they didn't hold the beatings against me. I remember how grateful I felt when they didn't pull away from my affections after the first time I really had to let them have it. But then I shouldn't have been surprised. I only have to look at Helen and Reba, our two beef cows. Helen used to ram her huge head mercilessly into Reba's side in disputes over prime hay, then later the two would be lavishly licking one another's fur. Today, Reba is dominant and uses her horns to keep everyone else in the herd in line.

Dominance relationships established and maintained through force are the most natural thing in the world. And unlike Christian mutually submitting relationships, I know instinctively how they work. I know intuitively, genetically, how fathers kept families together with a firm hand. I know how kings held kingdoms. I know how masters kept slaves. And I know how a Father, a King or a Master could be at the same time potent and benevolent. It's a queasy thought for a liberal.

The irony is that I have become a "boss" on a quest for a humbler, more peacable way to live on the earth. I'm reading a book right now called The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude by Andrew Nikiforuk. Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor: the oil economy is as morally problematic for us today the slave economy was for our ancestors, and calls for a new global Abolition Movement. He's spot on.  There are plunderous wars, ruinous pollution and corrupting politics all down the supply line of my oil addiction. I want to work with oxen because I desperately want to kick my oil dealer out of my food system, at least.

So have I just traded in one level of violence for another? Me beating animals with sticks instead of US troops kicking in Iraqi doors for my energy requirements?

Well, I don't know. I really do love my boys. There may be army chaplains out there who are counselling Christian soldiers through some convoluted this-is-how-we-love-our-enemy psychology, but I'd be ready to argue that such love is perversely disengenuous, while what I feel for my oxen is not. It is love of an older order. Spare the rod and spoil the ox, as it were. Is there is a place for such relationships even on the road to new order peaceable kingdom relations, where we learn, as the Bible says, to "break every yoke"? Strangely, I think so.

in the furnace of this afternoon

These are hot days. The earth cracks open in a prayer for rain. Every day the wounds gape a little wider. Sometimes deprivation ensures that when the blessing comes, it will reach the deep, dark places inside us. Sometimes it engenders a desperate neediness, a greedy draining of the blessing that stops even a drop of goodness from spilling over us to run back to the river. These are the two parables the earth confesses under my feet while I scythe hay in the furnace of this afternoon. I need them both.

It is to me an unfortunate irony that after hundreds of years of the prophets tying drought to holy judgement that today, in a climate crisis for which we are demonstrably to blame, we have lost the imagination to hear God's word in this drought, telling us some things we'd rather not hear about ourselves. That so many of my co-religionists are at the forefront of denying the signs of the times is painfully sad.

At least it has gotten oppressively hot enough that the city newscasters no longer broadcast an outlook of uninterrupted sunshine as if it were a proclamation of good news.

My Boy Oscar

Here's a baby picture of Oscar, shortly after he got here in mid April. One half Milking Shorthorn, one quarter Brown Swiss, one eighth Jersey, one eighth Holstein, all pretty boy bull calf.

I couldn't say if that feeling welling up inside me was due to his gorgeous dark eyes, or the thought that finally, I was beholding a way of farming that would not give me that sick little feeling every time it ran out of fuel.

More to come.

In the thick of things

O, Dear Reader,

Spring came upon me and had to be lived rather than blogged. Here it is mid-June and I never found time to write about the crazy burbling of the Bobolinks, or the mossy blooming of the oaks, or the goldfinches and the Harris Sparrows and the Cowbirds and the Tree Swallows showing up all at once; I didn't write about the poplar leaves the size of nickels and the potatoes in the ground; about the surge of life and the blue of sky and the gold of finches, dandelions and marsh marigolds; about the mind-clearing balm of Gilead in my nose and the exuberant orange of Orioles in my eye.

God, the world is beautiful and busy in the spring. What an adolescent season. All of life clamoring and competing to happen and to be noticed and to reproduce and suddenly it's June and all those baby plants you started need to be weeded, row upon mundane row.

Anyway, just wanted to say hi.

By the way, Matthew and I did buy a pair of bull calves, Oscar and Ben. I love them. I promise I will tell you all about them when I get a chance.

Ballad of the Brokenhead

I've referred to this story obliquely in this blog's title. I thought it high time to include ithere. The story came to me thanks to local historian George Lalor, the insights about the impact of the shift from subsistence hunting to fur-profiteering came from the late Cree elder Percy Bird, the melody and the rhythm for the verses came from Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," and the rhymes came from staying up too late one winter night.


Ballad of the Brokenhead


I live on the banks of the old Brokenhead,
A river with a name and a story of dread.
Long before you, and long before me,
These banks were the home of the Little Poplar Cree.

One day a trav'ler brought news from the East
Of the pale white faces, hairy like beasts,
Who traded in goods indescribably rare;
Their long sticks of thunder could fell prey anywhere.

Their blades and their pottery never broke, never burned;
But to trade for this prize, a new way must be learned:
To kill every beaver, every otter and mink,
To pile up their hides, and let their meat stink.
 Chorus:
Brokenhead
Brokenhead
What can't be undone
is oft left unsaid
What can't be undone
is oft left unsaid

They'd have to kill more than their families could eat;
What would this do to the harmony sweet
Of taking from the river no more than you need?
The old ones feared curses and sorrows of greed.

The hunters grew restless as questions were raised;
The young men had expected their ambitions be praised.
"But what of the women, the old and the young?
Who will protect us when you go for the gun?”
"When the willow's in bud, we'll leave you alone;
when the willow leaves fall, our canoes will come home
Then should ever our foes trespass on our lands,
We'll reach out and fell them with fire in our hands.

 chorus
And in the fall it was true, as the willow leaves fell,
The men sighted their homes, but caught no homely smell;
No fires were burning, no children were heard;
From the inside their lodges came no greeting word.

Dread warriors of the Sioux the camp had detected
And made easy prey of the Cree unprotected.
The white sand had swallowed the flow of blood red,
Where scattered and shattered lay the Cree's broken heads.

Now I'm haunted by spirits here long before me
I'm haunted by the cries of the Little Poplar Cree,
I'm haunted by the words of the old ones who said,
“Take no more than you need from the old Brokenhead.”

Brokenhead, Brokenhead
What can't be undone is oft left unsaid
 Take no more than you need from the old Brokenhead

The Little Poplar Cree who hunted these shores,
Where the otter still plays and the eagle still soars,
Are gone like the mist that lifts in the morning
From the river whose name is a chill mournful warning.

Brokenhead, Brokenhead
What can't be undone is oft left unsaid (x2)
Take no more than you need from the old Brokenhead (x2)

 
Brokenhead, December 2010


mr

A Titanic Metaphor

The Titanic disaster was the bursting of a bubble. There was such a sense of bounty  in the first decade of the 20th century. Elevators! Automobiles! Airplanes! Wireless radio! Everything seemed so wondrous, on an endless upward spiral. Then it all came crashing down."

- filmmaker James Cameron

This mother of all shipwrecks, is, among other things, a motherlode of metaphor: the sinking of the "unsinkable," the flagship of industrial engineering and fantastical luxury, the very vessel of technological hubris; the once largest moving man-made object on Earth, too massive and cruising too fast to pull out of a collision course with a large, cold, hard fact of nature, of which the humans could only see the tip.

A hundred years and hundreds of dives later, this ship still holds many haunting metaphors, depths to be plumbed. I want to spend this anniversary thinking about the lifeboats.

A lifeboat is an interesting presence. A reminder that the much bigger boat on which it rides could fail, and that survival could depend on this much simpler, radically scaled-down version of the big ship. What other institutions carry such overt warnings and preparations for their own demise? Imagine a school, or a government, a business or a church openly prepping its students, citizens, customers, parishioners: There is a chance that this will all come undone. In the event of our institution's collapse, the essentials needed to preserve life are the following....

Noah built a boat like that once, much to the ridicule and chagrin of his neighbours. The ark was an embarrassment to their civic faith, their belief that their society had grown too big to fail.

But the sea suffers no fools, and sailors have learned that times do come to abandon the big ship, and get into those little boats.

The Titanic, famously, had far too few lifeboats. The White Star Line gave meticulous attention to the design of the Turkish baths and to the ten course dinner menus on their luxury cruise ship, but not to the essentials of preserving life. In the more than two hours it took for her to sink, desperate, painful decisions had to be made. Some women would not to get in the life boats, refusing to leave their husbands, for whom there was no room. One man dressed as a woman so he could jump the cue. Few third class passengers, male or female, ever made it onto the boat decks.

Now that I think about it, the interesting thing about the Titanic lifeboats is not that there were too few, but that there were any at all. There persisted a seafaring culture of caution, a humility before the sea, that even the opulent and overconfident "unsinkable" Titanic could not completely cast aside.

What are the traditions still carried in the DNA of the wider culture that caution and prepare us for cataclysm? Well, the biblical tradition, handmaiden to Empire though it has admittedly been, is really one of the most honest and sober accounts we have of the corruption and the collapse, again and again, of Empire: the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans - sometimes their machinations benefit the Jews, most often they hurt them, but never do they last.

The Bible contains a history of the Fertile Crescent's "cradle of civilization" as seen from the underside of the great powers. From this view is revealed not only the ugly violence of these grand civilizations, but also their vulnerability. Even Israel's own national history is often told in a way most unflattering to its officials and their schemes. Again and again, the Bible warns against seeking security in the designs of "the nations." Security, counterintuitively, is to be sought in an unseen God, and in compliance to a covenant of justice, drawn up with a people much smaller and poorer than their come-and-go imperial neighbours.

Is this our culture's lifeboat?

Wes Hartley, the leader of band that played on while Titanic went down, at first played showtunes, at the captain's behest, to mollify the nervous passengers. But then, when the unthinkable turned inevitable, he turned to hymns. The final song, with which Hartley prepared himself and the others left on board to enter the deep was, "Nearer My God, To Thee."

I was thinking about the Titanic nine years ago, when Ploughshares Community Farm was not yet a place, and barely a notion. Drawn to do something rural and agrarian, and ready leave behind more urban, more activist pursuits, I journalled, “I am giving up on shouting over the orchestra or winning the ear of the captain. But maybe some of us could see about improving the seaworthiness of those lifeboats.”