Living from the Grace of the World
On mushrooms, manna, and the sabbath | The Word in the Wild, Proper 4, Year B
There was a smell to the woods, a sweet soil scent. The ground was still wet from Saturday’s rains and I picked my way around the orange clay, slick patches scattered through the path of broken shale. I recognized the smell like a truffle trained pig—there were mushrooms growing. Then, just to the side of of a stone, I saw one—the orange flesh of a chanterelle emerging from the mycelial body of the fungus beneath the surface. A bit farther along the trail, there was a cluster of peach-like mushrooms rising from the leaf liter. These were Hygrophorus Milkcaps, a mushroom considered “choice” for its rich, delicate flavor.
I let them be for now, but I’ll come back to harvest them for a gathered meal soon enough. Just seeing the mushrooms, knowing that they are there for the picking, gives me a sense of abundance. Its the same kind of feeling I get when I see a patch of ripe blackberries by the roadside, or a wild pecan or walnut tree in the fall, nuts exceeding even what the squirrels can eat. Most seasons here, I could walk for a mile and find more food than I need for a day, all growing from the wild wealth of these woods.
This is the oldest way of feeding ourselves—the way people in many places still live, at least part of the time. These “direct resource economies” work directly from the abundance of creation rather than from crops cultivated, stored, and sold. To live from the land is to live like the birds that neither sow nor reap, and there seems to be a way in which scripture affirms this as the ideal, a way in which agriculture should be kept in check and directed back toward this more primal pattern.
Such a reality is at the heart of the practice of sabbath. The sabbath was born from Israel’s liberation from the oppressive, non-stop work machine of Egypt. There, in the heart of agriculture’s beginnings, labor never ceased and the consolidation of power was inevitable. As the people of Israel fled Egypt and moved toward their own settled, agrarian economies in the Promised Land, God wanted them to be trained in a different way. This training was accomplished through a combination of means. First, there was the experience of manna—a food that appeared, like a mushroom (and there has been some speculation that it was some kind of fungus), without any cultivation. With manna and the quail driven into their camps, the people were taught to rely on God’s provisions through creation rather than on the economies of the Empire. Second, there was the practice of sabbath, in which the people were taught to be free from the constant need to work and control, even giving up a whole year of labor in every seven. With these two things agriculture was put in check from returning to the pattern of Empire.
As we know, however, checks can be undone; the lessons of the past can be forgotten. So it is with the practice of sabbath by the time of Jesus. Grain production had become an export enterprise, one now controlled by the Romans through the agency of wealthy urban landowners who exploited the labor of tenant farmers. And the sabbath had ceased to be a means of liberation, but had instead become another tool of control by a small group of religious elites.
Then one day Jesus and his disciples, in an act that seems like a provocation, went walking across a field of wheat, picking grain as though this is a patch of roadside blackberries or manna spread out in the Sinai wilderness. In this act, Jesus’s disciples are illustrating the sabbath spirit—a liberation from the tyranny of work and feasting from the abundance of the world. The pharisees will have none of it. For them the sabbath had become a mode of holiness without wholeness. Liberation was institutionalized in a series of codes, measures of who was in or out.
The social critic Ivan Illich has noted that the history of the West has been marked by an attempt to institutionalize love. Our schools, hospitals, and churches are aimed at making charity into an organizational rather than personal act. The end of such a move is to put human need at a remove, to make someone fill out all sorts of forms just to get $100 for help with a medical bill, or a voucher for a $30 bus pass. Anyone who has worked in such a system knows how absurd and frustrating it can be for those offering and those receiving charity. And in many ways, this is our equivalent to the situation in which Jesus found himself with the man with the withered hand. Jesus could do good, right there with a simple act, and yet there were those who wanted to prevent him from doing so because he was violating the protocols.
Whether it was questioning the disciples picking grain or the healing of the man with the withered hand, the Pharisees were in effect shutting down the sabbath. They were withdrawing the possibility of rest and restoration that the sabbath was meant to provide. Instead of an invitation to live in the abundant trust of the God who provides free food for the taking or the healing touch of community, these Pharisees were interested in consolidating control through the rigid codes of which they were the enforcers.
Though we do not face such strict sabbath codes, we are still in a world that would deny free food from those who could reach out and grab it, and healing to those without the correct protocols. Against this, we should learn to rest in the abundance of the world, trusting in the God who still provides enough and more than enough when we are willing to open ourselves to creation and share in its gifts. This Sunday I’m going walking again through those woods, and I know there will be something good on offer, something I did nothing to earn other than to accept the grace of the world.