Before Nature: A Christian Spirituality

1. Blessedly Scything with God: You Are Invited

1 Blessedly Scything with God You Are Invited During the journey before us, I want to take you to many ordinary places. This story begins in a field at Hunts Corner, in rural, southwestern Maine, in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. For me, this is a place of knowing. I invite you to join me in that field. Blessedly Scything with God: A Place of Knowing My grandchildren who are old enough to be aware of such things know that I love to scythe. My children know that for sure. They all have seen me swinging my scythe out on the backfield that separates our plain nineteenthcentury farmhouse from the wooded slopes beyond. Every fall, I scythe that swath of variously sized and elegantly configured ferns and purple asters and goldenrod and yarrow and meadow rue and daisies and black-eyed Susans and evening primroses and the differentiated patches of stunning grasses and the innumerable seedlings of white pine, ash, maple, birch, and meadowsweet—and I do so with a passion. Why this passion for scything? The exercise itself, to begin with, is good. I work hard to take care of this tired old body. There is something, too, about scything that focuses the mind and quiets the heart, notwithstanding all of the physical effort required. In fields that have not been tilled for many years, such as ours, the scyther must carefully attend to the sometimes bulging contours of the land, so as not to jam the carefully sharpened blade into the coarse, rocky soil. As one attains a rhythm with the swinging scythe, one must see through the jungle of plants in front of one’s feet and adjust the course of the scythe in flight, so as to be able to cut the plants as closely as possible to the earth and 3 yet to avoid that jarring experience, that dull thud, that clanking, which results from faulty swings when the blade jams into the soil. When the swing is right, however, and the blade is sharp, the cutting feels effortless. In my experience, the scyther is then attuned to the rhythm of the field. Such moments always leave me contented. But there are other benefits of scything, too. Scything keeps our backfield from turning into part of the forest, as it would quickly do without that kind of yearly attention. I do not mean to demean the forest by any means. The trees on those slopes north of our field have their own awesome standing, without a doubt, especially the colossal, hundred-year-old white pines. Over the years, some of us have explored the edges of those woods, which sweep far beyond our property to the north. One time, my wife, Laurel, and I took our two kids—then not yet teenagers—in tow and ventured up into the heart of the forest. With compass in hand, we bushwhacked our way to the top of neighboring Round Mountain, a small hill compared to the Presidential Mountains twenty miles to the west but still a remarkable capsule of wilderness in its own right, with no trails at that time or logging roads. That adventure, modest as it was, tested the four of us and inspired us for the better part of a day, particularly when we contemplated the vistas of the westerly mountains from a break in the trees near the summit. Family members and friends know, too, that I have carved out some ascending and descending trails along the edge of the woods at the base of Round Mountain. I love to walk there, and to think about what lies beyond and above. For me, that forest has its own compelling majesty. But the field has its particular kind of meaning, too, which I want to help preserve. Hence, my scything. Without that work, the forest would overtake the field in no time—with ash trees, for example. During the first few weeks of the spring following my fall scything, hundreds of ash seedlings soon sprout up to a height of maybe ten inches. They are already tiny trees by the time the next fall rolls around. So, if you want to have a field, as I do, you must care for it, lest the forest take over. The field as I see it—a thought that reflects the perspective of some New England transcendentalists—mediates between our house, on the one hand, with its perennial and vegetable gardens and its modest...