Two Farmers…Two Ways
Federico Respini via Unsplash
My friend, Shane Ash, and I were leafing through some of our favorite pages in Jayber Crow, a Novel: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Fort William Membership, as Written by Himself, Wendell Berry’s most successful book. I opened the book to pages 181-185 where Berry contrasts the life and work of Athey Keith and that of his son-in-law, Troy Chatham. The transaction between the older man and his son-in-law concerned the transmission of the farm from one generation to the next, a transaction sure to be fraught with tension and ambiguity. Berry takes the trouble to sketch out his characters with some great nuance. Athey, along with his wife, Della,
had about them a sort of intimation of abundance, as though, like magicians, they might suddenly fill the room with potatoes, onions, turnips, summer squashes, and ears of corn drawn from their pockets. Their place had about it that quality of bottomless fecundity, its richness both in evidence and in reserve (181).
Athey was an old-fashioned farmer whose life was marked by wisdom, frugality, and generosity. He is, of course, Berry’s model farmer who cares well for the land:
Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a “landowner.” He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter (182).
Athey easily resisted the temptation to produce “ever more.” The yearning for “ever more” by Troy
brought Athey to a stop. The law of the farm was in the balance between crops (including hay and pasture) and livestock. The farm would have no more livestock than it could carry without strain. No more land would be plowed for grain crops than could be fertilized with manure from the animals. No more grain would be grown than the animals could eat. Except in case of unexpected surpluses or deficiencies, the farm did not sell or buy livestock feed. “I mean my grain and hay to leave my place on foot,” Athey liked to say. This was a conserving principle; it strictly limited both the amount of land that would be plowed and the amount of supplies that would have to be bought. Athey did not save money at the expense of his farm or his family, but he looked upon spending it as a last resort; he spent no more than was necessary, and he hated debt (185).
He marveled at the fruitfulness of the land.
Athey said, “Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need” (181).
His son-in-law, Troy, embodied a contradiction of everything Athey understood and valued. Troy always wanted more! He wanted to plow more of the farm in order to have greater productivity. Troy did not mind a little debt, something Athey would never countenance. Troy wanted to plow more of the farm acreage for the sake of greater profit. He did not hesitate to buy a tractor in order to farm more and produce more. He did not mind that the tractor put him in debt. He readily embraced more plowed acreage, more debt, greater expansion, and greater productivity.
Berry sketches out the contrast between two notions and two practices of farming, the father-in-law and the son-in-law engaged on the same farm acreage:
And so the farm came under the influence of a new pattern, and this was the pattern of a fundamental disagreement such as it had never seen before. It was a disagreement about time and money and the use of the world. The tractor seemed to have emanated directly from Troy’s own mind, his need to go headlong, day or night, and perform heroic feats. But Athey and his tenant and his tenant’s boys were still doing their work with teams of mules…The work of the farm went on at two different rates of speed and power and endurance. It became hard to cooperate, not because cooperation was impossible but because the tractor and the teams embodied two different kinds of will, almost two different intentions…Little by little, he [Athey] began giving way to Troy’s wants and ideas, and the old pattern of the farm began to give way (186).
“The tractor and the teams”! What a clear and inerrant expression of contrast, contradiction, and conflict!
Shane and I saw clearly that this sketch by Berry articulates the tension of “two ways” that characterize our life in the world. We are always standing before the “two ways” and needing to decide. It is not a once for all decision, but a decision made every day that concerns small things, the sum of which matters cosmically.
This compelling distinction between “two ways” that Berry sees so clearly is as old as Moses in ancient Israel. In the Sinai covenant and in the derivative tradition of Deuteronomy, Moses articulates a decisive either/or that ancient Israel cannot evade. At Sinai, the Ten Commandments constitute a summons to love this God and no other, and to love neighbor as self (Exodus 20:1-17). The covenantal tradition of Deuteronomy details the choices to be made concerning the practice of holiness congruent with the holy God and the practices of justice toward the neighbor that dictates specific economic practices. In this latter tradition Moses seeks to fend off the “Canaanite” alternative that seduced Israel away from covenant. The term “Canaanite” in this usage is not at all an ethnic term, but refers to socioeconomic practices in which all of life is reduced to commodity that can be used to exhaustion, accumulated without end, and that readily turns neighbors into greedy, fearful competitors. In his summary statement Moses can characterize the way of covenant or the Canaanite alternative as a decision of “life or death,” of “prosperity or adversity”:
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendents may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob (Deuteronomy 30:15-20).
The reason that this declaration is so urgent is that the “Canaanite” alternative appears to offer a life of ease, comfort, and security, when in fact it is a way of the destruction of self, neighbor, community, and eventually of creation.
We can see this either/or reiterated in a great number of Old Testament texts, of which I will mention three:
1. When Israel had been well settled in the land of promise, Joshua leads Israel in a momentous, dramatic process of covenant-making. He summons Israel to choose the God of life, and to reject the available alternatives:
Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord (Joshua 24:14-15).
Israel is fully prepared to choose the God of the Exodus:
Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed; and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites, who lived in the land. Therefore we will serve the Lord, for he is our God (Joshua 24:16-18).
After Joshua’s further warning, Israel is firm and insistent in its decision:
No, we will serve the Lord!...The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey (Joshua 24:21, 24).
The outcome of this process is to bind Israel to YHWH in obedience, with a determined rejection of alternative loyalties.
2. In the acute contestation in Israel in the ninth century BCE, the prophet Elijah reiterates the role of Moses. In the dramatic contest of Mt. Carmel, Elijah summons Israel, yet again, to a sharp either/or:
How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him (I Kings 18:21).
Limping on two opinions is an effort to have it both ways, to have the “religion” of YHWH and the socioeconomics of Baal who is the totem of commoditization. Elijah insists that Israel cannot have it both ways. After Elijah performs his great wonder, Israel responds unambiguously:
The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God (I Kings 18:39).
The double affirmation emphatically commits Israel to covenant with YHWH.
But the confirmation of this dramatic affirmation is found in the subsequent narrative that concerns socioeconomic practice. The Elijah tradition knows that a liturgical affirmation is vacuous if it is not matched by communitarian practice. Thus I Kings 21, the narrative of Naboth’s vineyard, presents two different views of the land. The royal presumption (not unlike Troy) is that the land is a tradable commodity to be used for productivity and profit. The resistance Naboth offers to the king is rooted in the conviction (also held by Athey) that the land is a precious inheritance to be kept and protected from one generation to the next, and not available for any market transaction:
The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance (I Kings 21:3).
The narrative unfolds with a triumphant outcome for the royal perspective:
As soon as Jezebel heard that Naboth had been stoned and was dead, Jezebel said to Ahab, “Go, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give you for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead.” As soon as Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, Ahab set out to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, to take possession of it (I Kings 21:15-16).
Except that Elijah, the great advocate for YHWH in I Kings 18, now appears in the narrative in vindication of Naboth and of his view of the land. It takes no imagination at all to see that Naboth is an anticipation of Berry’s Athey of whom Berry writes:
He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter (Jayber Crow, 182).
Naboth’s life, like that of Athey after him, was meant to be shorter than the life of the land which he inhabited and to which he belonged.
3. One can find the same either/or repeatedly in the prophetic tradition of Israel. Here I will take the poetic lines of Amos as a case in point. Through chapter 5 the Book of Amos issues a series of imperatives that echo the imperative summons of Moses, Joshua, and Elijah:
Seek me and live (v. 4).
Seek the Lord and live (v. 6).
Seek good and not evil, that you may live (v. 14).
Hate evil and love good,
and establish justice in the gate (v. 15).
The progression of the rhetoric is from “me” to “YHWH” to “good” to “good” to “justice.” The terms are all of a piece. YHWH is the source and embodiment of good; the substance of “good” is justice. The practice of YHWH-based justice is life. All that contradicts this neighbor-inclined justice is anti-life and will end in death.
The corpus of the prophet Amos details how it is that justice impinges upon the practice of money in the community, and how a passion for profit and the accumulation of commodities is, in the end, a sentence of death. Thus Amos, like his covenantal predecessors, offers an exposé of an economy devoted to profit at the expense of the neighbor.
Finally in this sequence of summons to choice, we may notice the summons of Jesus amid his Sermon on the Mount:
Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it (Matthew 7:13-14).
The summons is only one word: “Enter.” The remainder of these lines constitute an exposition of the “entry.” Jesus invites his listeners to a narrow gate and a hard road. That narrow gate and hard road together bespeak neighborly fidelity that can be costly and risky, and at the outset is at least inconvenient. The alternative that Jesus rejects is a wide gate and an easy road. The choice voiced by Jesus is one of life or destruction. Taken by itself, this brief statement offers no substance concerning the choice to be made. But the entire covenantal tradition of Israel and the sum of Jesus’ teaching elsewhere make clear that Jesus stands in the same covenantal tradition as his forbearers. In that tradition the way of life is loyalty to the God of covenant expressed as neighborly love that shows up in socioeconomic practice. The practice of socioeconomic justice toward the neighbor is a summons away from self-securing accumulation and the anxious greed that propels it.
We are able to see that Berry’s narrative presentation of Athey and Troy constitutes a stunning reiteration of the same covenantal claim made repeatedly in the biblical tradition. Athey is an embodiment of a life that has deep attachment to and respect for the land, and a positive regard for his neighbors and the neighborhood. Troy, by contrast, has no serious regard for the land, the neighbor, or the neighborhood. Everything for Troy is reduced to commodity; he is free (and compelled!) to pursue the accumulation of more and more, without regard to the abuse of the land or disregard of the neighbor. In his delicate narrative art, Berry has relentlessly reiterated the ancient and durable either/or of covenant.
The either/or uttered by Moses and reiterated by Joshua, Elijah, Amos, Jesus, and Berry among others, pertains to every sphere of our common life. Most particularly it pertains to matters of public practice and public policy. Its pertinence to the public sphere is a matter we might notice and heed, given that we live in an economy where the gap between workers and owners-managers grows and grows and grows without restraint. A socio-economy that gives tax preference to the wealthy, that has a parsimonious, unlivable minimum wage, that gives generous tax-funded grants to big land owners and big oil produces, that is grudging in its support of the needy, and that programmatically destroys its own environment is a society that has chosen death and is engaged in relentless self-destruction. The utterance of the either/or suggests that ours is a very late time to re-choose, but not a time that is too late yet.
As we finished our conversation on these pages from Berry, Shane had the thought that the “two ways” are not simply operative socially. The same either/or is operative within each of us. The “better angels” root for us, but in the end we may choose our better selves that are on offer as a gift from the goodness of God.
Wendell Berry has been sounding this either/or for a very long time concerning land-care, land production, and love of the land. In Jayber Crow, Berry’s embodiment of good land management is Athey who, in Berry’s rendering, is disciplined and restrained. He knows exactly what is happening with the new breed of farmers, but he does not address Troy directly about it. We could imagine that at some point amid the land crisis Athey might break his disciplined restraint and raise the issue directly with Troy. If he did, he might ask questions designed to haunt Troy. He might ask:
For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? (Mark 8:36-37; see Matthew 16:26, Luke 9:25).
Athey would let the questions ring in Troy’s ears!
Walter Brueggemann
December 26, 2022
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
