I was driving to work today on route 65, and I couldn’t help but realize how green everything is. The vivid realness of the trees imposed itself on me. The wetness of the black, concrete road. The single drop of rain that “plopped” onto the windshield, refracting the gray sky above.
As I watched the obscure, looming outline of the city rise up to my left, I couldn’t help but think. Pittsburgh is an odd place. I’m originally from Chicago, and that town is a flat grid. In Chicago, Nature gives way to urbania; there is a clear delineation between what is tamed and what is wild. Sure, the whole town was built on a swamp and that swamp has attempted to take the city back into itself once before. But after a city-wide raising and some man-made land extensions into the lake, it was business as usual. Flat, controlled, one might even say tamed.
The geography of Pittsburgh is a different story. The rivers themselves preclude any easy travel from point a to point b. Hills and valleys create winding roads and unintuitive paths, bridges zig zag the waterways. The green of the lush environment is omnipresent, always threatening to retake what little civilization it has permitted to exist beside it. Pittsburgh is a town that has had to accommodate itself to nature. It is built around and in nature.
I was listening to Andrew Peterson’s album The Burning Edge of Dawn as I drove. Andrew Peterson is an amazing singer-songwriter that Elizabeth introduced me to (we actually got to see him sing in person at the George MacDonald Bicentenary Conference in Wheaton last June). Peterson tends to create community wherever he goes. He is the founder of the Square Peg Alliance and The Rabbit Room, the latter of which has its own independent press, publishing so much good and beautiful material from Christian creators. And of course, he’s also an author, having written The Wingfeather Saga for young adults and children.
I had listened to this particular album before, but I had never actually heard the words of the last song on the album, “The Sower’s Song.” It is, in some ways, an eschatological ballad. Told from the perspective of “the field,” it combines so much of the biblical imagery around planting and harvesting, putting together all of the pieces to tell a story of the field’s longing to be transformed into the image of God, to be brought to harvest. The field again and again begs that God might abide in him, take root in him, prune him, move him, that his branches might bear fruit and that he might grow into a mighty tree. Peterson begins the song by praying:
Oh God, I am furrowed like the field Torn open like the dirt And I know that to be healed That I must be broken first I am aching for the yield That You will harvest from this hurt Abide in me Let these branches bear You fruit Abide in me, Lord As I abide in You
Peterson begins by comparing himself to the field, broken and torn open by plowing. This is a twofold image, of course. On the one hand, it expresses his vulnerability, his sorrow and pain. But it also says something about that pain. That in some way, that pain has made him ready to receive. That by being cut open, tilled one might say, he has become a field for the Lord to plant something in. He is praying that his hurt will in some way become sacramental, that it will become the situation which God will speak into, that it will be the fertile ground for healing. And so he prays that God himself would come and abide in him, like a seed in dirt; that God himself would be what comes to germination in him: “Abide in me, Lord / As I abide in you.” The words of the Farewell Discourse here take on a new meaning, as they are combined with the metaphor of the seed. God’s presence within the believer is the thing that brings growth: and so, because of this presence, Peterson gives voice to a growing desire within him, “I am aching for the yield.”
But like in Gregory’s Homilies on the Song of Songs, that prayer only provokes deeper longing. Christ is present in the field in a hidden way, in a way that is not readily apparent. Peterson here puts into words the experience of all of us who struggle along the Christian path, who know that God has begun a good work in us, but still do battle against our flesh and still seek to mortify the thorns of our passions. We must wait; we must wait for the rain to come, for the harvest to be in season. We can only anticipate what we will become. Peterson describes the situation in this way:
So I kneel At the bright edge of the garden At the golden edge of dawn At the glowing edge of spring When the winter's edge is gone And I can see the color green I can hear the sower's song Abide in me Let these branches bear You fruit Abide in me, Lord Let Your word take root Remove in me The branch that bears no fruit And move in me, Lord As I abide in You
Hear the anticipation in the first lines. He is at the bright edge of the garden, not in the garden itself. He is at the glowing edge of spring, but the seasons have not yet turned. Winter has receded, and he can see that summer, the time of Jove, is about to begin. But it hasn’t yet. And so, hearing the sower’s song, he finds himself in the position that he must once again patiently wait, patiently pray, and ask God to continue to do his will.
Finally, the anticipation and waiting gives way to something more: hope. Peterson here lives up to his namesakes. The field receives an answer, as if from a prophetic voice, that speaks to its deepest longing.
As the rain and the snow fall Down from the sky And they don't return but they water the earth and bring they forth life Giving seed to the sower, bread for the hunger So shall the word of the Lord be with a sound like thunder And it will not return, it will not return void
The desire of the field will indeed be satisfied, because all will be provided for. The sower will have his seed, the hungry will have his bread, the ground will have its rain and snow; and nothing shall be lost. I mentioned the Petersons before because this is exactly their point in their Early Modern Boehmist circles–one might say that the entire refrain of the early proponents of apokatastasis was Andrew Peterson’s repetition of “it will not return void” in this bridge and in the lines that follow. Because it is the Lord who has planted, the field will have the deepest of its desires:
We shall be led in peace And go out with joy And the hills before us Will raise their voices And the trees of the field will clap their hands as the land rejoices And instead of the thorn now The cypress towers And instead of the briar the myrtle blooms with a thousand flowers And it will make a name Make a name for our God A sign everlasting that will never be cut off As the earth brings forth sprouts from the seed What is sown in the garden grows into a mighty tree So the Lord plants justice, justice and praise To rise before the nations till the end of days
All things, Andrew Peterson evokes here, will be made right by God, who is the true sower of all things. This is the message of the long harvest, which will only come at the end of the age. In a way, it is like what Origen taught in his Peri Archon, where the planted seeds, the logoi spermatikoi enfleshed in sarks, planted in the cosmic garden of the world, will by a cosmic threshing be harvested by the Master Farmer, to be sorted and eventually brought into the house for the eschatological Marriage Feast. Bulgakov evokes this theme in his consideration of St. John the Baptist, whose nativity we celebrate on June 24th, signaling high summer and the coming of autumn, and whose conception we celebrate on the 23rd of September, at the autumnal equinox, the liturgical end of all things.
Interesting in this song is the multivalent imagery of planting. It is honestly hard to figure out who is the sower and who is field sometimes. This blurring of identity and blurring of agency is important, I think, because it mirrors something real and true about the Christian life. God plants, and so do we. God sows, and so do we. We plant hopes, dreams, virtue; God, too, plants those things, what Peterson here calls “justice, justice and praise”--rectitude might be an even better word for what he’s getting at. Just as we wait patiently for the harvest to be effected in us, God, too, waits patiently, like a good farmer, for that harvest which is the rectitude or restoration of all things, for the resurrection of the dead–those literally planted in the ground like seeds. Peterson grows into a crescendo:
As the rain and the snow fall Down from the sky And they don't return but they water the earth and they bring forth life Giving seed to the sower, and bread for the hunger So shall the word of the Lord be with a sound like thunder And it will not return, it will not return void It will not return, it will not return void It will not return, it will not return void We shall be led in peace And go out with joy
Confidence in the Word of God as the rain which brings all things to their proper end, as the stuff of participation, as God’s abiding in us, which stretches us out and brings us to completion as human beings, which fashions the image of God in us, which brings the six days of creation to completion, the text which Gregory of Nyssa read as an allegory of the salvation of the cosmos. Is this not the mystery of regeneration prefigured in Baptism, the falling down of the cosmic bath which waters the seed of faith in us and brings it to fruition in love and good works? All things are one here in this Peterson song, identities constantly changing and shifting, the gemstone constantly turning, refracting, beatifying.
Peterson’s use of naturalistic imagery as the vehicle for contemplation of the regeneration opened up nature for me this morning. There is something disclosive about the green of Pittsburgh, something evocative about the way the city sits almost uncomfortably borrowed among the flowers and fauna. Nature here refuses to be tamed by human convention or destroyed by human industry. Rather, the wild creeps to our doorsteps and beckons us to imagine a world where all things are full, all things are green, all things are redeemed, the regeneration of nature herself. For as Bulgakov says,
Great Mother, damp earth! In you we are born, by you we are nourished, we touch you with our feet, and we are turned back into you.
Children of earth, love your mother, kiss her frenziedly, bathe her with your tears, sprinkle her with sweat, drench her with blood, and satiate her with your bones! For nothing perishes in her, she keeps everything in herself, a mute memory of the world; she gives life and fruit to everything. Whoever does not love the earth and does not feel her maternity is a slave and social outcast, a pitiable rebel against their mother, the progeny of nonbeing.
Mother earth! From you that flesh was born which became the womb of the incarnated God, from you he took his most pure Body! In you he reposed for three days in the grave!
Mother Earth! From you sprout forth grain and grape vines, whose fruit becomes the Body and Blood of Christ in the most holy sacrament, and to you this holy flesh returns!
You silently keep in yourself all the fullness and loveliness of creation.
(Unfading Light, 192)
Peterson’s song concludes with three repetitions of the line “And the sower leads us.” That is, as in Nyssa’s Life of Moses, God turns his back to us, he bids us to follow wherever he leads. This following is the life and joy of discipleship. Following God into his infinite being; following God out of ourselves and into him; following God out of ourselves and into our neighbor; following God out of ourselves and onward towards the cross of Jesus, self-crucifying love, and the resurrection and regeneration that await all things on the other side of the grave, on the other side of sorrow, on the other side of shame. This is what Gregory of Nyssa called epectasy, or the perpetual becoming of the creature into its Creator, what Luther meant when he said “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ``Repent'' (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance” (95 Theses, 1). It is to “continue in our Baptism”, to follow in the mystery of the regeneration of the cosmos, what Spiritual Alchemists like Boehme thought of as a life tinctured by Christ, the true philosopher’s stone. This is the wedding ring of faith, the snake that eats its own tail, the exodus and reditus, Eriugena’s Being God and Becoming God. It is the central mystery of reality, the center of everything, the perichoresis, theosis, deification. It is the Godman, Jesus Christ, seated on his throne, the Virgin Mary, with the Spirit as his anointing and the cosmos circling about him. It is the eternal sacrifice in the heavenly Jerusalem, the cross of love planned from before the foundations of the world. It is the dance of trinitarian persons, giving themselves to one another in the boundless divine essence, constantly and eternally moving according to the rhythms and pulses of divine love.
It is, in short, everything. And so I conclude: on my drive into Pittsburgh this morning, I caught a glimpse of everything.
Like the references to Gregory the first to really understand the implications of the infinity of God: progress is perfection in this everlasting growth into the boundlessness God. The insatiability that draws us forward. I wonder if this is why Maximus sees us after death in an ever-moving repose.