Barnstorming

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work.
Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall,
driving horses, sweeping, scouring,
everything gives God some glory if being in his grace
you do it as your duty.

To go to communion worthily gives God great glory,
but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives him glory too.
To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory,
but a man with a dung fork in his hand,
a woman with a slop pail,
give him glory too.

He is so great that all things give him glory
if you mean they should.
So then, my brethren, live.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from Seeking Peace

Every happening, great and small,
is a parable whereby God speaks to us,
and the art of life is to get the message.
~Malcolm Muggeridge

I’ve banked nothing, or everything.
Every day,
the chores need doing again.
Early in the morning,
I clean the horse barn with a manure fork.
Every morning,
it feels as though it could be
the day before or a year ago
or a year before that.
With every pass, I give the fork one final upward flick
to keep the manure from falling out,
and every day I remember
where I learned to do that and from whom.

Time all but stops.

But then I dump the cart on the compost pile.
I bring out the tractor and turn the pile,
once every three or four days.
The bucket bites and lifts,
and steam comes billowing out of the heap.
It’s my assurance that time is really moving forward,
decomposing us all in the process.
~Verlyn Klinkenborg from More Scenes from the Rural Life

He <the professor> asked
what I made of the other Oxford students
so I told him:
They were okay, but they were all very similar…
they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies,
and they thought they would always win.
But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.

He asked me what could be done about it.
I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year
to do some dead-end job
like working in a chicken processing plant
or spreading muck with a tractor.
It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. 

He laughed and thought this was tremendously witty.
It wasn’t meant to be funny.
~James Rebanks from The Shepherd’s Life
(how a sheep farmer succeeds at Oxford and then goes back to the farm)

It is done by us all, as God disposes, from
the least cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor
of considerable heft, something awesome.

We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,
or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.

And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure
pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap
coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.

I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter
it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today’s last barrow-full,
I honor shit for saying: We go on.
~Maxine Kumin “The Excrement Poem”

It isn’t unusual for a mid-March cold snap to sweep down from northern Canada, freezing daffodils in mid-bloom, withering berry plant and orchard branch buds, causing general mayhem in our region. After a few weeks in February of rain and temperate weather up to the high 50’s, the low temperatures felt cruel indeed.

Our barn is fairly draft proof, but in northeasters like this, the water buckets ice up and the manure sits in cold hard piles, like so many round rocks. It is a great temptation to put off the stall cleaning when the weather gets bitter cold; I push the poop to the walls for later pick up when it is warmer. After all, it doesn’t smell when it is frozen rock hard, and certainly loses its “squish” factor, so the horses seem to not mind too much.

So then I start the digging out process, with several days of accumulation to contend with.

As I wheel the loads out to the manure pile, and dig into the pile to tidy it up, the steam pours out into the frigid air–there is nothing left frozen there. It is hot and getting hotter–its destruction assured through the composting of so much organic matter. No wonder the barn cats find a nice sunny spot to stretch out next to this smoldering mountain of poop. It is as comfy as a tropical vacation spot.

How often have I similarly piled my own metaphorical “poop” in piles to deal with another time? Frozen it seems innocuous, inoffensive, not worthy of my attention, not enough to bother with. It is so tempting to pass on cleaning up my messes, by shoving mistakes and errors to one side or “under the carpet” – ignoring the growing mounds in my own nest, especially less-visible “respectable” sins like impatience, anger, pride, greed, gossiping, worrying, grumbling, etc.

Like frozen poop shoved aside and not dealt with, sin eventually warms up. It starts to stink, and generally becomes obnoxious and overwhelming. Once it gets big enough, it becomes its own steaming inferno, burning and destroying everything else within. The only safe place for it is to move it far away from where we dwell everyday.

We must dig ourselves out daily from our mistakes, ask forgiveness for the harm we cause, and prayerfully accept the tools handed to us that make possible the impossible job of getting clean. We cannot do it by ourselves. Our wheelbarrow is too small, our dung forks too inadequate, our muscles too weak. Good thing we have a Savior who is not put off by dung piles and our stench.

Blessed are the barn cleaners: by working together, we find hope and glory beyond the steaming pile.

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:

…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…