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“Have your roots and your foundation in love.” (Ephesians 3:17)
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s poem, “As a man soweth”:
“We mustn’t hope to be mowers,
And to collect the ripe golden ears
Unless we were sowers first,
And soaked the furrows with tears.
It’s not just how we take it
This mystical world of us
The field of life will give way if we make it
A harvest of thorns or flowers. “
There is one field that I remember from my junior high and high school days. The man who looks at a lot of green bean harvesters is Austin Wolney, a young farmer. The mode of transport was a truck with rails around a large flat floor and has two seats. Austin and his wife Carol sat in it and their happiness seemed to say, “I love this farm!” She helped us teenagers, some with black bread buckets, onto the back of the truck. We were about three miles from the farm in the country and acres of green beans greeted us. “Time to be picked and put in your buckets,” they seemed to be saying.
Some of what happened in our younger years is blurry, but often the blur is broken like a tree falling on our picnic table – we can see things, feel events like drizzle at a soccer game. I remember walking down the rows of green beans. Pick it, fill a bucket, toss it in a sack, and take it to a scale where Austin noted the pound number we picked next to our names on a tablet.
A few of us neighborhood friends who were riding the flatbed back to our downtown Wisconsin got out and drove to the A&W Root Beer stand almost on the run. Money in hand, not one but two root beer fins, would make up for the day the hot sun poked through the wide-brimmed straw hats we wore. Back then, did all young people have a job in the summer months? Employment for people of all ages is a necessity.
Those who receive food stamps or other public support are part of our human family. We hope that they look for and find work that can support themselves. And those who hire them hope that they will find ways to ensure a living wage with benefits.
Today is a time to think about the children we brought into this world out of our passion and love for creating other people. We have made movements to enable our children to have a decent future.
We take care of these children all the days that life gives them. Dentist appointments are also a responsibility. I can tell my dentist about one of his colleagues who appeared in a courtroom. The judge, who found his profession, asked the usual question: “Do you swear to tell the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth?”
In raising our children, I understand that when held back, affection can often lead to behaviors that are shattering in a classroom. An example of humane teaching and the creation of an appropriate atmosphere was an article in the May 2021 issue of The Sun. M. Jones is a teacher living in the American Southwest. She writes about some of her experiences with her students: “Beyond the American and state flags in the courtyard, the mesa is shrouded in gray clouds and rain is smoking in the gutters.” She writes about the students: “I would tell you and you would understand because they trust me. For example, when I tell you that Beatrice was the great love of Dante’s life and also the poet’s symbol of heavenly wisdom, you know that it is true. When I tell them that I take care of them, they know that this is also true. It is an immense power that I have, which I prove to be unworthy of every day. “
I am confused, but not too confused, because I realize that in order to have power within a group, within a family, within an organization, each of us must have humility. This teacher, Ms. Jones, has among her gifts qualities that we cultivate.
One orientation of religious life is the desire to transform hatred into understanding, resentment into discarding injuries, wounding into healing and scars into a gentle reminder: “I was there”.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, contains a line: “Both remained floating in an empty universe in which the only everyday and eternal reality was love.”
My thoughts in this essay wandered from lunch in a black lunch box in a bean field to a classroom. Life is good! Life has many challenges.
“Fill your mind with the things that are good and deserve praise” (Philippians 4: 8)
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