The Land

Just in case there should be any lingering doubt in anyone's mind as to the fact that we live in a farming community, we are now well into the time of year that should erase that doubt completely. It's almost as though there is only so much attention and energy available, a sort of fixed quantity of both, and in a cyclic, seasonal sort of way the focal point of that attention and energy shifts.

For us here, really, there are two such points. Farming, and everything else. And it's an interesting thing to see just how universally involving a thing that shift in focus is. Everyone is in one way or another drawn into it, takes part in it. Farmers themselves, certainly, but more, businessmen, merchants, school people, local government, everyone. In any gathering, no matter how disparate the group, how wide the range of backgrounds and concerns, the conversation at this time of year inevitably starts and finishes with farming.

All winter long people seemed to be interested in dozens of different things. Programs, problems, issues and concerns of all sorts. School, community, family, personal. But then, a month or so ago, all of that began to change. It began to get harder and harder to stir up interest in things that had been rolling along pretty steadily since Christmas. Calling a meeting, getting any group together, on anything, got to be more and more of a challenge. It's as though people had slowly, perhaps without ever really realizing it, begun to listen to something else. And I guess that's so. As the land begins to stir and come alive, everything else, really, began, in a sense at least, to fade, to grow quiet. That age-old dialogue, almost an exchange of energy between the people and the land had begun again. And once it had, there just wasn't room for much else.

And it will continue so, I suppose, for about another month. Then, for a while, the land will be a bit less demanding. People will be freer to renew other interests. Vacations, hobbies, business. A few groups will meet over the summer, a few projects get organized. But only for a time. Soon enough the land will again demand to be heard. It will be harvest time, and again everyone's attention will be focused on that one constant, the growing of food.

Only when the harvest is over, when the land has once again grown tired and quiet, will it release its hold on people's minds. Then the attention will shift once more, and everything else will re-awaken.

There is something esthetically satisfying about that kind of cycle. It's reassuring, really. So many times in the Scriptures, Christ drew on images of farming in His preaching. He must have been aware of the hold it has on people's lives, the impossibility of ignoring its demands, or of denying the reality such cycles teach. And teach indeed they do. They teach that nothing ever really dies. They teach that for everything in our lives that may, at times, seen to die, there is always a rising again, a renewal, a coming to life somewhere else. Our task is to be as sensitive as we possibly can to just where and how that rising again may happen in our lives, to be as sure as we can that we do not miss it when it happens.

It is a good thing to keep that in mind. Whenever grace and blessing seems to fade and die in one area of our lives, it's good for us to realize that that is really an invitation to us to look and listen, to pay attention somewhere else, where it will surely bloom. A particular hope that is not realized, a particular problem or conflict that arises, a disappointment, all of these can seem to be an end to something, a kind of dying. But they aren't. The most they can ever be is a change, and that only for a time. Grace never dies, it only changes its focal point, and as it does it calls us to follow, to center our attention on the blessings, the movement of grace that is constantly beginning in our lives.

From 1980 through 1982, Father Sandell served as Chaplain to the Bishop O'Reilly Council No. 3918,Grafton, North Dakota Chapter of the Knights of Columbus. "Scattered Thoughts" is a collection of essays based on columns originally written for the Chaplain's Corner, section of the Council's monthly newsletter.