Obedience and Harvest Customs: Obedience Part I

Here begins the first installment of my second attempt at a conceptual rehabilitation. I'm officially adopting concepts I find useful but that are currently orphaned by our culture including, largely, the church and trying to get them a fair hearing. I previously took a stab at the word 'authority,' and I continue now with the perhaps even less popular concept: 'obedience.'

In coming installments I will explore some definitions of obedience, but - to get things off on a lighter note - I begin with a poetic meditation on the concept followed by my initial reactions to its place in our current lexicon.

What follows is a work by former Calvin professor Stanley Wiersma, aka folk poet Sietze Buning, taken from his book, Purpaleanie and Other Permutations.

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Obedience

Were my parents right or wrong
Not to mow the ripe oats that Sunday morning
with the rainstorm threatening?
I reminded them that the Sabbath was made for man
and of the ox fallen into the pit.
Without an oats crop, I argued,
the cattle would need to survive on town-bought oats
and then it wouldn’t pay to keep them.
Isn’t selling cattle at a loss like an ox in a pit?
My parents did not argue.
We went to Church.
We sang the usual psalms louder than usual-
we, and the others whose harvests were at stake:
“Jerusalem, where blessing waits,
Our feet are standing in thy gates.”
“God, be merciful to me;
On thy grace I rest my plea.”
Dominie’s spur-of-the-moment concession:
“He rides on the clouds, the wings of the storm;
The lightning and wind his missions perform.”
Dominie made no concessions on sermon length:
“Five Good Reasons for Infant Baptism,”
though we heard little of it,
for more floods came and more winds blew and beat
upon that House than we had figured on, even,
more lightning and thunder
and hail the size of pullet eggs.
Falling branches snapped the electric wires.
We sang the closing psalm without the organ and in the dark:
“Ye seed from Abraham descended,
God’s covenant love is never ended.”
Afterward we rode by our oats field,
Flattened.
“We still will mow it,” Dad said.
“Ten bushels to the acre, mabe, what would have been fifty
if I had mowed right after milking
and if the whole family had shocked.
We could have had it weatherproof before the storm.”
Later at dinner Dad said,
“God was testing us. I’m glad we went.”
Mother said, “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
And even I thought but did not say,
How guilty we would feel now if we had saved the harvest.
The one time Dad asked me why I live in a Black neighborhood,
I reminded him of that Sunday morning.
Immediately he understood.
Sometime around the turn of the century
My sons may well bring me an article in The Banner
Written by a sociologist who argues,
“The integrated neighborhoods of thirty years ago,
in spite of good intentions,
impaired Black self-image and delayed Black independence.”
Then I shall tell my sons about that Sunday morning.
And I shall ask my sons to forgive me
(who knows exactly what for?)
as they must ask their sons to forgive them
(who knows exactly what for?)
as I have long ago forgiven my father
(who knows exactly what for?)
Fathers often fail to pass on to sons
their harvest customs
for harvesting grain or real estate or anything.
No matter, so long as fathers pass on to sons
Another more important pattern
defined as absolutely as muddlers like us can manage:
obedience.

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I was reading this poem a while back, not for the first time, but on this reading the poem hit me in a way it hadn't before, even bringing tears to my eyes. Maybe it means way more to me personally than it could to others for a variety of reasons: conflicts and resolutions in my own relationship with my parents on religious matters, or my current possible tendency to sentimentally idealize rural life.

What I like about this poem, along with most of the others in the book, is its seeming ability to strike a sincere and nuanced balance between critique and reverence for tradition. There's not much humor evidenced in the above selection, but many of the others in the book are quite funny - if you know the subculture. The critique side of the more humorous poems is often carried out with a gently satirical edge, much like that of Garrison Keillor who has a similar gift for being able to satirize his tradition without losing a greater sense of gratitude for what it has taught him, thus avoiding the twin traps of easy sentimentality and unearned cynicism.

Obedience is such a tricky word at anytime, and to modern Americans the very idea has become almost anathema. Much of the reasoning for how this came to be is very understandable, given what it was sometimes in reaction to, even while the current situation of hyper-individualism is obviously lamentable. I'm nowhere near sure where the line falls between healthy and destructive obedience but I'm pretty sure which way the pendulum is swinging. I'm also certain that a Christian life which doesn't have any room for ego-humbling obedience, serving God and others, is just plain incoherent. Within the Church in America it seems like Protesants in general and evangelicals in particular have all but destroyed any structures worthy of obedience or at least any capable of asking for, let alone demanding it.

I believe American Evangelicals are in need of remedying this situation whether they know it or not. I'm not sure how to get there, or even where there is, but I know that we are in thrall to the god of freedom and the only way we can be freed from that most unforgiving of tyrannies - the tyranny of the self to its own desires - is to try to regulate it with a little obedience. Any degree of obedience might be a bitter pill to swallow for those of us on a saccharine diet of instant gratification, but I think the message of the gospel is that it ultimately leads to the only true liberation: the freedom to be who we were created to be, not who we merely want to be. Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden light. He never claimed that following his way was without burden or yoke. Adjusting to the harness might chaff at first, but it will lead to where we are meant to be.