Behold the Lilies

Jesus and the Contemplation of Nature—A Primer

H. Paul Santmire

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781498240284
• eBook ISBN: 9781498240277
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Behold the Lilies draws from the riches of the author's long-standing work in the theology of nature and ecological spirituality, especially from his classic historical study, The Travail of Nature (1985), and from his Franciscan exploration in Christian spirituality, Before Nature (2014). In this new volume, Santmire maintains that those who would follow Jesus are mandated not just to care for the earth and all its creatures but also to contemplate the beauties of the whole creation, beginning with "the lilies of the field." His first-person reflections range from "Scything with God" to "Rediscovering Saint Francis in Stone, " from "Taking a Plunge in the Niagara River" to "Pondering the Darkness of Nature." Behold the Lilies offers brief spiritual reflections that can be read in any order, over a period of time. This accessible primer will be welcomed not only by those who have already identified themselves with the way of Jesus but also by others who are searching for a contemplative spirituality attuned to global ecological and justice issues.

Part 1

Encounters

1

Scything with God

ecstatic moments in rural maine

“He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest for a while.’”

(Mark 6:31)

My family owns an old farmhouse at Hunt’s Corner, in rural, southwestern Maine, in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. For me, this is a place of spiritual knowing—a deserted place, in a biblical sense—where I can contemplate nature in peace. When I get away to Hunt’s Corner, to a familiar place that almost always surprises me, I often behold a world of amazing beauty and striking diversity of plants and animals and contours of the land and of the clouds, particularly when I scythe.

Thankfully, I’ve never had to decide whether or not to scythe the field of daylilies south of our house. That land belongs to the postcard picturesque, little white New England church next door, which was moved up from the valley to that place, we’ve been told, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Call this a holy place, the daylily field included. That’s why I wouldn’t want to scythe that field, even if I could. For me, it’s sacrosanct.

The common orange daylilies there have gone wild and spread widely over the years. Members of that church don’t cultivate that field. Instead, those several hundreds of bright orange flowers seem to take care of themselves. They apparently don’t allow other plants to take root in their midst. And their beauty’s deceptively ordinary, so much so that it wasn’t until many years after we had begun to cultivate our own land that I happened one day to stop in my tracks to contemplate them. My God, I thought to myself, I’m beholding the daylilies of that field! How long had it taken me to discover the obvious: that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these!?

But it’s my scything with the God, in whose name that church had been built and then relocated, which I want to describe here, even though when I think about it, I realize that that the daylilies of that field define everything else I want to say.

I love to scythe the field to the north that separates our plain nineteenth-century house from the wooded slopes beyond and above. 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, hemlock, ash, maple, birch, and meadowsweet every fall, and I do so with a passion.

Why this passion? 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 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 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 almost always leave me contented. But there are other benefits of scything, too.

Scything keeps our back field 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 house have their own awesome standing, without a doubt, especially the colossal, hundred-year old white pines. 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. 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 variegated gardens and its modest lawns, and the forest beyond, on the other hand, where one can catch signs of the bears, the moose, the porcupines, the foxes, and the other creatures of the wild that sometimes edge their ways toward our house; or one can contemplate the red-tailed hawks and the crows, the swallows and the goldfinches, the hummingbirds and the doves, the grouse and the wild turkeys, and the occasional purple grosbeak or downy woodpecker or woodcock that soar above or fly nearby or otherwise announce their presence from time to time. The whole area where I scythe is a rich meeting place for many creatures. So I scythe that back field once a year in contentment, not just for the exercise, but also for the sake of reaffirming its right to be and its larger meanings.

Scything, I should also point out, brings with it more than the good exercise and preservation of the beautiful spaces between our house and the woods. The scyther, in our part of the world, must contend with the blackflies or the mosquitoes or the ticks, messengers of pain in their own ways, depending on the season or the rainfall. Once, more ominously, my scythe dislodged a nest of bald-faced hornets, tucked at the base of some high, thick grass. When I instantly realized what I had done, it was too late. They were upon me in droves.

That experience then impelled me to run faster than I think I had ever run, at least since the days when I played soccer in high school. I ran as urgently as I did, not only so that I could avoid the onslaught of the hornet stings, which already were painful enough, but also to save my life. Many years before, when I was in my thirties, I had been stung on my leg by three such creatures along a New Hampshire mountain trail and had had to limp back to my car and drive to an emergency room, twenty miles away, in shock. I could have died, due to what was revealed to me then for the first time to be a severe allergy to insect stings. In this respect, never mind the good exercise and the integrity of the field, scything also keeps me honest about the world of nature. All the wonderful creatures of God’s good earth are not always our friends. Only people who never leave their homes or their automobiles or their offices can believe such a fantasy.

This brings me to a still darker truth that I sometimes ponder while I am scything, with particular reference to our field. We sometimes refer to this field as “the pipeline.” For me, that bland expression isn’t bland at all. It has an impact on my consciousness like the thunder and the lightning that occasionally roll over our house and our gardens and the field and on into the woods beyond and above. Our field covers, in very small measure, a pipeline which day and night delivers oil hundreds of miles from Portland, Maine to Montreal, Canada. Sometimes helicopters from the pipeline company shatter the silence of the field, as they roar by at low altitudes and high speeds, inspecting that pipeline. It can be frightening. So, on any given day as I scythe, I think of that fateful black gold pulsing through the pipe buried beneath my feet. And I realize how deeply my own world in rural Maine is bound up with the dynamics of globalized industrial society everywhere, with the threats and the realities of warfare in the Middle East, in particular, and with global warming, more generally. Even more sobering is this ominous fact: before too long, toxic tar-sands oil from Canada might be flowing through that pipeline, moving, in this case, from Montreal to Portland.

This image then sometimes hovers over my mind, especially in the aftermath of one of those helicopter fly-overs: the grim reaper of Death of course carries a scythe! Forces are at work around the globe in these times that threaten the sustainability of human life on this planet and the future of many other creatures as well. Don’t those forces—first-century Christians thought of them as the “principalities and powers” of Death—dwarf in significance anything that transpires in one minuscule life like mine, hidden away at times out in the field and surrounded by what some think of as nature’s “pristine beauty”? What is my contemplation of nature when I am scything, however good and beautiful it might be in my own eyes, compared to that global scything by those principalities and powers?

Still, I typically scythe in peace. How this is humanly possible in these times of global crisis and cosmic alienation is a question with which I have been wrestling since my first book, Brother Earth, more than forty years ago. Notwithstanding all the ambiguities, however, I hope to continue to scythe with such inner serenity as long as I have the physical strength that this traditional practice requires, because when I scythe, in addition to everything else, beyond the good and the beautiful and the ominous and the portentous, I am not only engaged with God at that moment, but blessedly engaged.

As I look down the sloping field as it flows westward by the church toward a valley, beyond which the world of the White Mountains rises into view—some of the oldest mountains of this nation—and as I then lift up my eyes to those hills and mountains themselves, especially on a clear fall day, when the bright colors of the maples and the birches and the beeches and the more somber hues of the oaks stand over against the dark figures of the white pines and the hemlocks, I see the grandeur of God.

And more. I rake up all those cuttings from the scything year after year, and wheel them to stack them in large piles near our gardens. In a year or two, this green manure decays into good nutrients for our vegetable garden, where I spread it and dig it in. In this way, the field serves the garden by helping its plants to flourish, along with the other natural nutrients we add to the soil from time to time, like cow manure and green sand. When I lift and push wheelbarrows of cuttings from the pipeline toward our gardens to be composted or when I spread the cow manure or scatter the green sand, and thereafter, in due course, when I kneel down on the earth to weed the vegetable seedlings, I am lifting and pushing and spreading and scattering and weeding in prayer. Because “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps 24:1, KJV) and the Lord is there, I believe, in, with, and under not only the grand vistas of the field and the forest and the mountains, but also in, with, and under every furrow of the soil and every glorious green shoot, both the seedlings and the weeds. I am kneeling there on holy ground.

I am particularly grateful for our vegetable garden. Sometimes, scythe in hand, as I catch my breath out on the field, I look across the little stream that runs along the side of the field where I’m working and marvel at that vegetable garden, closer to our house. It has a life of its own, just like the field where I scythe. The growing season in southwestern Maine is short (neighbors still repeat the story of a killer frost in July a hundred and fifty years ago), but after decades of work our soil is good and the fruits of that good earth are usually plentiful.

It’s a joy, too, to eat from the garden, in due season. It’s akin, for us, to a liturgical calendar. There’s the salad season, the zucchini and yellow squash season, the tomato season, the potato season, and the kohl season, each with eating rituals of its own. Fecundity is the word that comes to mind. I have a photograph on my desk of my wife holding a huge armful of chard, half as big as she is. She freezes the harvest of those seasons, as much as she can, and so we eat from our garden virtually the whole year.

I have no illusions that we could get by “living from the land,” as some city-folks like to think when they garden in rural areas. But that vegetable garden is nevertheless a gift of unmerited grace. Not the least of such a grace, for us, are the “veggie feasts” that we host for family and friends, three or four times during the growing season. Those feasts, with all their homegrown and home-cooked delicacies covering our table and all the personal warmth around the table, are unmerited grace multiplied. My wife does the cooking and I do the cleaning up when all have gone home. For me, those quiet moments are like the time after the Sunday liturgy, as I’ve experienced it over many years, when I have washed the chalice and cared for the bread and...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part 1: Encounters
• Part 2: Explorations
• For Further Reading
• Author’s Note
• Endnotes