The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 12 September 2021
Austwick, Keasden
In his book English Pastoral, the Lakeland shepherd James Rebanks recalls the night when his father ‘set the world on fire’. Marching out of the farmyard with a box of matches, a plastic bag full of straw and bale string, and a small jerry can of petrol, his father headed out towards one of the farm’s more neglected fields, intent on clearing the gorse which had taken hold over more than a third of the area. A few minutes later his mother sent the youthful James to see that his father didn’t ‘burn himself to death’. [1]
The result was a ‘roaring, crackling firestorm’, with the elder Rebanks climbing through the gorse, setting it alight as he went, in his hand ‘a kind of torch made out of a branch, and an oil-soaked rag’, the flames roaring around him. When the burning was over James walked back to the village where he met one of his neighbours, agitated, who asked him what had happened and before he could answer said she’d called the fire brigade. ‘She seemed puzzled and a little angry,’ Rebanks recalls.
‘But she was also confused because she was a friend of ours. She was trying to understand what was happening to a hillside near her house which she clearly loved as it was - before my dad turned it to ash. She had only lived here for five years, and had no idea that this was part of a traditional cycle. She thought the way this field was now was how it had always been and how it must always be. I could see she was trying to balance her anger and her usual respect for us. She wanted me to explain. Why is your father burning it? Why is he destroying the birds' habitat? What will happen to the wildlife that lives in the gorse? Her tone said, why is your father being like this now, when usually he is such a decent man? What is wrong with you people? [2]
‘I didn't have all the answers,’ writes James. ‘I'm not sure she was in a mood to listen anyway. I was embarrassed. I saw that two different ways of seeing our world were clashing.’
Rebanks says that after his father's death he remembered that night of burning gorse and ‘realised that many people who cared about nature were drawing the conclusion that all farming and all land management was now to be distrusted.’
The tongue is a fire. And - even if they start with good intentions - some people end up calling farmers brutal names. In her book Field Work, Bella Bathurst suggests that in the public mind, farming has become like the police, explaining:
Once the sort of profession which the middle classes respected without really understanding, now it had become the sort of profession which everyone disrespected without really understanding either. Now if you told someone you were a farmer they'd come back at you with something about chemicals or welfare. Farmers were murderers. Or poisoners. Or soil-plundering asset-strippers. Or they were benefit cheats, tax-dodgers, system-milking criminals. Farmers never stopped complaining. It was never right. Always it seemed to be too wet, too dry, too cold, too hot, too windy, too soft, too hard. There they were, on the radio or the TV, wanting something, having a go. No one seemed to pinpoint exactly what farmers had done that was so bad, but everyone knew they had. They were taking the taxpayer for a ride. They were ripping us off, pilfering the best of our good nature. And no one understood the time it took, the hope it used up, the unrelenting gamble in pulling a life out of earth. [3]
The tongue is a fire. And it burns to be on the receiving end of people’s enflamed opinions, particularly when they are lazily formed and poorly-informed.
‘No one can tame the tongue,’ writes James. It is ‘a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.’ [4]
Last week I spoke of the possibilities of what might emerge if we pooled our local resources and helped each other produce food together, reducing our dependence on the fragile, wasteful and unsustainable global food supply system, providing local employment and ‘increasing healthy soil, biodiversity, local composting, animal welfare, human health, satisfying work, planetary hope’. [5] It’s perfectly possible to achieve such a high level of cooperation, such a deep engagement in a community; we can all think of examples of places where people have come together with a common purpose and achieved good things for their own sake and others. It might be a journey to get there, and perhaps that journey begins when we start to watch our tongues, the way we talk about others around us who may appear to be treating the earth in a quite different way to us: but with whom in truth, we may have more in common than we think.
The tongue, well used, can help put out fires. James Rebanks says he ‘felt a bit like the PR man for the Apocalypse’ defending his father by explaining ‘why he would do something that seemed so wrong’ to his neighbour. How gorse burning was part of a very old cycle of managing land, how his Dad hadn’t burnt all the gorse, leaving some patches so that birds weren't entirely robbed of their habitat. How gorse is a farming nuisance, ruining the sheep's fleeces and, if unchecked, ‘would take over the field completely, making it fit for little more than rabbits.’ [6]
If there is ‘a gulf between people who think it natural and necessary to shape the landscape, and those who are troubled by it’, [7] then it begins to be breached by meaningful conversations, even imperfect ones. Each of us - the farmer, the bureaucrat, the tourist, the campaigner, the incomer, the tenant, the estate agent, the agronomist, the priest - sees the same land through our own frames of purpose or imagination. [8] The art of collaboration is in how we speak our version of the truth, and in how we go on to respond to the way that other people describe theirs.
Notes
[1] James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance. p.159.
[2] James Rebanks, op. cit. p.160.
[3] Bella Bathurst, Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land. p.10.
[4] James 3.8-10.
[5] John Davies, Have faith and sow some seeds, quoting from Liz Gibson, Lectionary Reflections, 15th Sunday after Pentecost (B) in Kathy Galloway & Katharine M. Preston (Eds), Living Faithfully in the Time of Creation, p.17-19.
[6] James Rebanks, op. cit. p.161.
[7] James Rebanks, op. cit. p.161.
[8] Bella Bathurst, op. cit. p.14.
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