Feasts and Fasts (Hugh #7: on hunting and agriculture)
This year the US thanksgiving holiday is a “time to refrain from embracing.” For those who have heard these words, but maybe aren’t as familiar with their source in scripture, here is more from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes,
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing…
And this musical setting of these words might also be familiar.
So, stay home, kindly decline invitations, don’t host large gatherings. It will be an act of love for neighbor, stranger, and familiars.
It can still be time to craft a smaller, convivial table, where you remember past times, and those people truly near in spirit, wherever they are in earth and heaven. Yes, it will be a weird, lean kind of feast. But God can meet us there, as he provided for the Israelites in the wilderness.
My wife and I will make a little feast, and visit over computer with friends and family. I look forward to coming years when I can gather with them for thanksgiving and Christmas. We’ll once again sit down at a feast table together, hearts full. We will sit and watch in the wildness of the woods when hunting season opens, receiving all the kinds of daily bread from the wild, hospitable earth and heavens.
CB, JC and EC at the farm, 2013
Which brings me back to Hugh of St Victor. He is proving another true friend and guide. For those of you new to this blog, I’ve been writing about a medieval theologian as I read one of his books. Here is the first post, and you can find the others in the blog roll, Hugh #1-7.
In this seventh post, I’ll explore Hugh’s observations about agriculture and hunting, timely for this season of late harvest, feasts and fasts.
Hugh offers a vision and path of learning that heals the soul and helps the body. He is keenly aware of how bodies change, grow in strength and weakness, and require nourishment. Hugh sees that living, soulful beings need different kinds of nourishment. Sensing creatures need healthy sensory nourishment, and thinking creatures need proper intellectual nourishment. And he sees that different kinds of nourishment come from different sources. The whole earthly sphere receives nourishment from the sun, stars and planets.
Because he cares about the nourishment and care of body and soul, Hugh concerns himself with the arts and technologies of human subsistence. He deals with these under two headings:
agriculture (agricultura)
and
hunting (venatio)
For Hugh ‘agriculture’ deals very specifically with the disposition and use of land that has been marked, cleared, ploughed, burned or otherwise disturbed in accordance with human intentions to plant seeds, slips, or trees, grow grain, nuts, fruit, vegetables, fiber, biomass, wood, or forages.
Hugh divides agriculture into four types: tilled (arvum agrum), woody (consitum), pasture (pascuum) and garden (floridum.) I’m being a bit free in the translation, but I think these words get at what he is describing.
I wonder what we might learn from the agriculture of his day? We might discuss:
How do modern and ancient/biblical concepts of wildland conservation and restoration come into dialogue with these four categories of land use?
How can humans till land more responsibly, and tend it more carefully and contemplatively?
Tilling is disturbance. It must be done with care. Tending offers opportunity for at-tending and in-tending anew. So, we might grow more tree and perenniel crops. We might return often to a still-place before the sweetness of the wild rose.
Rosa palustris, Robert H. Mohlenbrock. USDA SCS. 1989. Midwest wetland flora: Field office illustrated guide to plant species. Midwest National Technical Center, Lincoln. Courtesy of USDA NRCS Wetland Science Institute., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
But hunting occupies much more of Hugh’s writing.
One reason for this is that Hugh chooses the word and activities of “Hunting” to represent the whole of human subsistence activities. The part (hunting) stands for the whole of how humans pluck our daily bread from the land. And he observes that not all human communities practice making and eating ‘bread’ as his contemporaries from a settled agricultural society would have understood it.
“…in antiquity men used to eat merely by hunting, as they still do in certain regions where the use of bread is extremely rare, where flesh is the only food and water or mead the drink.” (77)
Hugh points out that the basic need in humans isn’t to cultivate fields, but to care for the need for subsistence, nourishment, enough food for the day. Agriculture and the ‘use of bread’ emerged as arts & technologies to meet that ever-gnawing need. They are part of the larger tool-kit for subsistence that Hugh terms ‘hunting.’ Hunting includes for Hugh all the food arts: baking, butchery, brewing, as well as hostelry (hosting people and travellers, and the setting of table.)
Hard work, but what fun! Sometimes we need permission to play with our food.
Again, Hugh’s heart is concerned about the repair and restoration of body, soul/spirit. This tool-kit for subsistence may offer a path toward both. Something in this hunting-way-of being-and-doing may help us in the pursuit of Wisdom, who guides the care and restoration of fields, forests and wildlands, not to mention our own souls.
I recall that Hugh’s intent is to teach reading, for this practice helps the soul and body to love wisdom and live from it. Hunting, as typical of the human pursuit of bread for the day, belongs to the loving pursuit of wisdom, and can contribute to instilling the ability to read the world in light of divine things.
The great ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote about learning to read the land in a similar way. In a short piece of writing, ‘The Deer Swath,’ he explores the ways that hunting is less about killing and capture of meat, than it is about other kinds of nourishment. Leopold noticed how differently guests at his ‘shack’ sat and watched a clearing, ‘the deer swath’, where deer were visible at different times and in different ways. He reflected on the differing habits that shape why and how we watch, and what we are able to perceive.
“The upshot was the realization that that there are four categories of outdoorsmen: deer hunters, duck hunters, bird hunters, and non-hunters. These categories have nothing to do with sex or age, or accoutrements; they represent four diverse habits of the human eye.”
Leopold reflects on the habits of what and how these men and women watch. “The bird hunter watches only the dog, and always knows where the dog is, whether or no visible at the moment. The dog’s nose is his eye.” He reflects on how watching in one way or for one sort of things excludes the perception of other sorts. And there more subtle ways of hunting/reading.
“There is one elusive mode of hunting which I cannot associate exclusively with any of these groups: the search for scats, tracks, feathers, dens, roostings, rubbings, dustings, diggings, feedings, fightings or preyings collectively known to woodsmen as ‘reading sign.’ This skill is rare, and too often seems to be inverse to book learning.”
Leopold notes with no little self-reflection and humility that,
“the biological jack-of-all-trades called ecologist tries to be and do all these things. Needless to say he does not succeed; the best he can do is alternate his modes of hunting.”
Hunting is an ability to use a set of tools for paying attention to the terrain of signs and creatures before you. This paying attention is a kind of reading, or lectio. As you hunt a piece of land, you grow in what you see and are able to see, the heart grows in its watchful capacity.
Leopold offers a secret about the ecological arts of hunting and reading, and perhaps about spiritual practice,
“The final test of the hunter is whether he is keen to go hunting in a vacant lot.”
Hugh may very well have in mind something like Leopold’s thoughts on hunting. While it does involve chase, capture and plucking of food from the landscape, what is more essential and remarkable is the way it is a style of attention, an ability to read or pluck the land before us for signs that lead us to true nourishment.
And maybe meditating on bread can help us to see this way even more. Hugh leaves another comment to follow in the undergrowth of his observations on hunting,
“food is of two kinds: bread and side dishes.”
Well, now we know that. (Would Hugh have liked hoagies and pizza?)
First ‘hunting’ stands for whole of subsistence activities. But then, Hugh puts his attention especially upon bread and how it is spread as not the part that somehow standing for all the things we eat. He ponders the word ‘bread’/ latin ‘panis.’ He reflects how it sounds like the greek word ‘pan,’ meaning ‘all.’ He notes the importance of bread at tables and gatherings, no meal being complete without it.
Hunting and bread. Hunting for bread. Let me not hurry past this.
Bread. Recall the important word-prayer practiced by christian pray-ers:
…give us this day our daily bread…
Daily Bread.
‘Daily’ translates the greek word ‘epiousian,’ a rare, peculiar word found in ‘The Lord’s Prayer.’ (Matthew 6: 9-13, Luke 11: 2-4)
I’ll freely translate:
…Give us the kind of bread needed-for-true-being today…
This word evokes both a present moment trusting God, and a deep sense of gratitude for God’s good gifts in bearing, nourishing and restoring all life.
As vocation into the present moment, ‘daily bread’ pulls one out of a linear, future-oriented sense of time, and into the present moment and what it affords.
It tells to eat what you are offered on this day of pilgrimage. It evokes a heart that trusts the present tense of the cycles life, of elk trails on earth and the paths of stars and planets in the sky. Seasons of abundance and hunger are not unknown, but today we receive enough.
‘Daily bread’ also leads us into the prayers of the church, the larger body of faithful pray-ers. The Eucharistic feast is a symbol of a mystical whole. It is a convivial, storied gathering at table for a wondrous and simple gift, ‘bread and side dishes.’
It is a thanks-giving, and a good gift on which the faithful subsist.
Usually at the national Thanksgiving, and at Christmas, we feast. This year is much more a season of fast. So take the distancing and not-gathering as your spiritual fast. This time might be even hungrier and more difficult for others, so fast and pray with them. Consider how you might aid or advocate for them.
You can craft a feast with only a few visibly present at table. You can compose a little eucharistic plate for your home, to give thanks with others for your daily bread.
Send pictures, I will post them here for others to see in Advent and Christmas-tide.
Let your holy imagination be fertile, and your senses and heart keen for hunting.
bread, wine, maize, chestnuts and oysters (from calm cove shellfish co.)