Pastoral ministry has many similarities, entirely to be expected. The seed-planting, the plowing, the offering back, all with the hope of seeing the yield - the harvest of righteousness - increase and lives mended. With Berry, there is a proper sense of not really knowing or seeing what is being served - there is a hiddenness that, wisely, closes off the possibility of vainglory.
And the offering has to include the whole life of the gospel-farmer, who traces the same arc into the fund of things. Is there to be any consolation in the hope that, after death, something might yet come from the life that was thus lived? By the resurrection of Jesus, yes. When "the most mute is at last raised up into song".
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Enriching The Earth
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
(Wendell Berry, from The Peace of Wild Things)
