Fallow

Nature and human nature agree, there are times and seasons where we just need to lie fallow. By that I mean there are times where we plan for inactivity, rest and breaking the busy rhythms of life that keep us living intently by our calendar. One of the things that nature provides for us is seasons. For most of us these seasons are things we live by. Heaven knows that until the Industrial Revolution most people in the world were not even reflective about living by the calendar—their lives depended on knowing the calendar!I reflect often on my grandfather and the way he lived. My grandfather was a farmer in Northeast Mississippi and the most fully orbed man I have ever known. He lived in a place, loved a place, saw Jesus made flesh in a place, and was never in a hurry. Oh he was a flawed and sinful as the next man, but he just seemed to live a life of grace in both the way he treated people and in the way he inhabited the natural rhythms of his place on his farm and in his community. I don’t want to romanticize him, he was no saint. Like most people in the rural south, he was hard on people who wronged him and his, and old family wound lingered for generations! And yet, he seemed to inhabit time and space with a practiced habit and ease, like a man who was almost part of the natural rhythms of the geography—a man who utterly and completely belonged to his place.The rhythms of farm life are vast and varied but predictable. Your life is built around the seasons. In that sense a farmer has a huge advantage over most of us who live in cities. The farmer knows he controls nothing; rather he fits into and adapted his life to soil and season. It is a life that is ever varied but in the end the same old thing that comes around every year new and fresh. I was talked to a man just the other day, a stranger and I knew he was a farmer. When I asked him if he was retired, he said this. “I made forty crops before I retired.” A true agrarian, man of the soil—his life measured in seasons of fallowness, plowing, planting, cultivating and harvest. Then after a season of this rhythm, it is time to do it all over again.What does that say to me and the people in my parish? I don’t want us to go back to that time. I am not naïve about that. But the question remains? Does that have anything to say to us who now inhabit neighborhoods, towns and cities? We who live by Internet, calendars and in cars? I think it does. I think it says a lot, if we are looking for embodied wisdom from those in the past who lived well. Here are a few of the things I have pondered as I take a long look at the way people have lived and handled time and space in the past.The first is we are creatures that need to live in a predictable rhythm. Mostly we live in a seven-day cycle. As I have pondered what it means to live a fully orbed gospel life in the suburbs, the main thing I keep coming back to is the need for daily and weekly habits that continually remind us of who we are. I hate formulas but I love rhythms and habits. In fact, we are mostly formed by our habits or lack thereof. I was just reminded of something Aristotle said and though he said it over two thousand years ago, it is still true because human nature hasn’t changed. Human nature is still fallen and whether you are a believer or a pagan, you are trying to improve! Aristotle said, We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. So to live large in the mundane, there are habits we live into until they become second nature to our very being. This is the only way to have limits and thus freedom, when technology has made living by the natural clock of the sun totally irrelevant. (or so it seems)A second thing is we need time to lay fallow. In April, I looked at my raised beds, asparagus beds, and all Teri’s beds of flowers. For a few months they had done nothing, grew nothing, nor produced nothing and further more, I am not upset about this. God so made the earth that for it to be productive, it needs to go fallow, that is it is left unplowed and left unseeded for a season; uncultivated, not in use; inactive. None of us can totally do that but, we do need to pull back from our intense schedules and paces for a season. I have learned that I can work lots of hours for a season of time, just like farmers do. There are times we just have to produce and get lots of things done in a short period of time. But it is unrealistic to think we must work like a slave the whole year. If you think that, then in fact that is what you are—slaves. God build in a weekly day of rest for us and the summer time with kids out of school naturally affords us all a time to sort of lay fallow. I fear if we don’t we will burn out or worse. At St. Patrick we do this in the summer. We have to give our volunteers a break. If we don’t, how will any of us come back refreshed in the fall?A third thing is that when we are fallow, it is not all inactivity. This is the time we start planning and praying about the next crop or season. In planning we acknowledge we are participants in the restoration work God is doing in and around us. In prayer we acknowledge that without God sending rain and sunshine there will be no crop. For us we are acknowledging, we are helpless unless God chooses to bless.In all this the huge lesson is dependence. Do we really trust God enough to engage with passion when the season demands and can we take our hands off the plow when it is time to rest, reflect and pray? Unless we really believe the gospel and God is in control, I suppose we just be slaves to time, culture and modern convention.