"A Field in Winter"
First Presbyterian Church
Richard Redington
February 20, 2008
Wednesday Lenten Service
Return to the Sermons and Articles Page
Return to the 2008 Lenten Series Home Page
A Field in Winter
In early winter, a cold, still day,
On icy glaze and crusted snow
I walk around this field –
Clean out a bluebird box,
Scan for a red-tailed hawk,
Crows call from the pines;
Nothing moves.
Inside the field: a frozen pond, a dock,
Our beached canoe,
A small orchard of young apples.
At the edge: blurred tracks of deer come and go,
Wild turkey claws, a raccoon’s paws –
Marks from the world outside.
Walking Around
For about a month now I have been thinking about walking in
circles. There’s a fairly common
saying that “If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
In common experience, also, it seems as if, when you buy a car, suddenly,
everywhere you look you see more of those cars.
I guess it is on those principles – namely, that the more we think
about something the more conscious of that something we become – that I have
seen references to circles in almost every sermon, every op-ed piece and every
work of literature I have enjoyed in the past month or more.
This circular thinking started because I took a walk on a
Saturday afternoon around some country property.
Caran and I had skied on it the previous week, but most of the snow was
gone and I was just alone that day out for exercise.
Then too, motivated by working at RTPI I thought I might go out and look
for birds. My poem tries to put some
of the sensations of that walk into the compressed language of the fact.
I worked and worked at making it more simple, more unadorned – more
like a sketch of the outlines. That’s
all I’ll say about writing the poem, which has to stand on its own.
So walking around the perimeter of this property which I
know so well – 8 acres of stubble from harvested field corn, another dozen
acres of grass and weeds that I have been chopping down with my tractor for four
or five summers, a one-acre pond we had dug down near the road, 22 heritage
apple trees my partner wanted to plant, all this I know, can see in my mind’s
eye in all seasons and was plainly visible as I walked and looked into the
middle of the property. There were
no birds. I did hear a crow call and
another answer, but they were out of sight.
So I settled for the experience at hand – looked into two empty blue
bird boxes between the corn and the woods and began to pay attention to the
tracks of deer coming out of those woods, imprinted in the frozen ground and
crusty snow – and farther on, some other tracks – a lot of wild turkey, some
paw tracks of a small animal – maybe skunk, possum or raccoon.
And because Tom
Sweet had just asked me the week before to preach at this Lenten service, during
this walk I began to think in other terms than just the enjoyment of being
outdoors that January Saturday. Maybe
you could call these remarks by the title of a famous book about golf – A
Good Walk Spoiled – but that’s just a cheap shot, because what I really
think is: that was a Good Walk Revealed. In
any case, I began to think along the following lines.
As you think about a circle, you can look at it a lot of
different ways. Looking at a circle
as a kind of fence, we look inside and we see the familiar – at least in the
sense that we have been there before. Inside
our circles we find the familiar usually comfortable terrain of our own selves,
our family, our closest friends – the cultivated ponds, the mowed pastures and
the historic apple trees we focus on and love. The work and play of our own
lives are inside this fence, and, Lord knows, that’s complex enough.
It cannot be wrong to tend to that inward part of the circle of our walk.
But I really could not ignore those tracks of deer, turkey,
raccoon. Some came from outside the perimeter and some went back out to the
woods, all of them inviting me to look away from the middle and try to see into
the distance. And sometimes I walked
outside the property to see where these tracks came from or went.
Thinking about that outside world, I thought about both danger and
obligation.
We use some simple words when we warn of a threat; we say, loudly, “LOOK OUT!”
Yes, look … out, there may be a threat out there – something strange to us, uncomfortable.
Though I did not see the tracks that day, I know that there
are coyotes and black bear near this field for sure, and one nearby farmer
claims to have seen a mountain lion in the woods within a mile of this place.
But these invitations to look out may also enrich the
experience of our walk, may suggest that we are not alone, even if we are
enjoying the introspection of our walk around our own acreage.
They remind us that we do not grow the corn and the apples for ourselves
and our inner circle alone. On a
nature walk, these marks remind us that we share the planet with animals, plants
and all of nature. They call us to
the obligation to pay attention to our effect on the world we share with them,
though that world is often unseen.
On our walk around and through life, these outward tracks
remind us that there are many that do not share the comfortable inner circle of
plenty, family and friends. The language of our faith points to a larger family.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we say.
The family of humankind, we say. Children
of God, we say. The Abrahamic
community, we say. To live in that
larger world, we do need to look outside our small circles and define family in
larger terms. Our faith governance
system reminds us of this point, too. We
worship in our own congregation and we sing “We Gather Together.”
But we respond to our Presbytery, our Synod, our General Assembly –
what are these but the concentric circles of outreach into larger and larger
worlds – opportunities for our individual contributions to act in that larger
world?
Well, I’m sure I could work this circle metaphor until
lunch gets cold. It does raise some
interesting questions, though. Am I
just going around in circles and making no progress if I walk this same
perimeter at different stages of my life, of the seasons, of the day?
What about the ground underfoot – how’s my footing now?
And most important for those of us on the Vision Quest this Lenten season – do we wander in this circle on our own? Or are we led to this particular walk, these actions, these notions? A lot of questions for a simple walk around a few acres.