My father’s hands were always dirty. As an auto mechanic, the grease and grime of a thousand days never quite seemed to be erased. It was under his nails and accented the wrinkles and creases that marked his life of hard work. My mother always kept a number of abrasive and surfactant cleansers crowded on the bathroom sink, only ever marginally effective. As a child, I loved his hands. In those occasional seasons in which I was given the privilege of assisting in a mechanical task, I erupted with pride if the result yielded dirty hands. In my childhood world, a man’s hands should be so marked.
It is a pity that computer keyboards yield no dirt.
I think my parents’ relationship with even the mechanical world was shaped by their childhood on farms. I know that my father began working in the cotton fields by age 4. Poverty was the taskmaster of his family. Everyone had to pull some weight. My mother was one of 12 children, all of whom took their turns in the fields and kitchen. Even in our tiny suburban home, the kitchen was crowded with canning and pickling, particularly in later summer and early fall. I have an almost mystical relationship with fruit cake, the final crown of the kitchen season. Its appearance in our southern grocery stores signals for me the approach of Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The month of August has deep associations with harvest themes within certain segments of the Orthodox Church. It is affectionately known as the month of the “Three Saviors” in Russian tradition. They are “Honey Savior” on August 1, a day on which honey is blessed; “Apple Savior” on August 6, when apples are blessed; and the “Nut Feast of the Savior” on August 16 when nuts are blessed. In Greek tradition, August 6 (Transfiguration) is a day on which grapes are blessed. Fragrant herbs are blessed on the Feast of the Dormition (August 15) in many places. There are more agricultural associations on the calendar, often overlooked or forgotten in our urbanized world.
Our present-day culture is often torn between the attraction of an imaginary future in which science and such overcome all illness and disease, and our remembered instinct to love what is “natural,” as we have growing evidence that the artificiality of our modern lives makes us sick. We will doubtless continue the dance that moves between the two.
My life has largely been lived in urban or suburban environments and my labor has largely been cerebral, emotional, and liturgical. Of course, humans are created to think and feel as much as we are created to work with our hands. The Liturgical life brings all of that together – indeed, it reveals the whole of life as a liturgy (when we learn how to live it).
At one point in my priesthood, I spent Saturday mornings baking bread for the Sunday Liturgy. It’s a kitchen-work but asks for liturgical prayers at the same time. In Orthodoxy, the bread is leavened (it contains yeast). As such, it is alive. In the same manner, we use fermented wine which obtains its alcohol in a similar process. Both the bread and wine are alive. Of course, when you’re baking with a living recipe, things vary from week to week. Measure as carefully as you can and knead in the same manner, but living things have a “mind” of their own. The kitchen liturgy, like the whole of life, is variable.
The Christ who became dirt calls us back to the dirt, to the full truth of our humanity. He was no stranger to machines, even if they were but the first century tools of a Galilean carpenter. Jesus knew callouses. The truth of our humanity is all around us, within us, and within the persons we are with. It is revealed by love and the hard contours of its reality. When Christ feeds us, He gives us bread and wine – His Body and Blood. The Body and Blood on which we feed walked and breathed and bled. We may imagine such things as inconveniences, binding us to the earth with gravity and the sheer weight of our being. However, we were not created for “outer space” – much less for the “inner space” of post-modern abstractions.
On a recent visit at my new home, my two youngest grandsons joined in the dirty work of clearing the back part of our yard. They sweated and groaned. One was bitten by ants and screamed. They now have a bond with my new home that no amount of screen time within its walls could create. They left more human than when they came – and left me more human as well.
We are all farmers and mechanics, carpenters and crucified. Lovers and beloved, eaters of bread and diggers of earth.
Glory to God.
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