The blade of the plough…….

Swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks. Military hardware recycled as agricultural implements, personal weapons reshaped into horticultural tools. The African-American spiritual, ‘Aint gonna study war no more’, protests the use of human ingenuity and creativity in the art of war, as if there were such a thing as an aesthetic of killing. Instead to lay down the burden, down by the riverside, and cultivate, nurture, harvest and then feed, nourish, share – to rehumanise (new word?).

File0119_2 The poet Daniel Berrigan, one time friend of Thomas Merton, grew up in a farming family. I learned that by reading his meditations on Isaiah 2 in his book Isaiah. Spirit of Courage. Gift of Tears. Most of the chapter he works away at thinking through what it means to beat swords into ploughshares. And he makes it personal by recalling his own childhood experiences of ploughing with his father. Several sentences triggered deja vu in my own memory and experience – I was also brought up in a farm labourer’s family. My father was a dairyman and ploughman – the picture shows him ploughing in the early 1950’s – with my mother,(I’m sitting on her knee!) and my brother (standing at the edge of the field)watching the world, and the horse, go by. So when Berrigan describes the tranformation of soil through ploughing the images resonate deep in my memory of childhood, my love for my father, and make me long for a more innocent time – except by the 1950’s, the last decade of horse drawn ploughs, nuclear weapons were the holy grail of post-war governments desperate to possess the ultimate deterrent.  Here is Berrigan complete with American spelling:

Each spring I stumbled along after the plow as my father turned the earth, one furrow upon another. A sense of new life, damp, permeating, haunted with presences, arose in the mild air, so welcome after a killing north-country winter. I imagined that giants of the earth were turning over in sleep just before awakening. Or I thought of the furrows as great coils of rope, weaving, binding all things in one; earth and season, furrow and family, the horse plodding along, the planting, the harvest to follow, my father and me. It was all one. The blade of the plow wove the garment of the world.

I love that last sentence: The blade of the plow wove the garment of the world. Swords into ploughshares. Work that ‘rehumanises’.

Stuart has a characteristic word at the barricades, on the prophetic relevance of that short text for today (and I mean today, Saturday the 24 of February, the date for anti-war protests). See here. I’m blogging at hopeful imagination next Wednesday (Feb 28), on precisely this text, Isaiah 2.2-5. I’ll post the photo of my father there too; such human, humane labour, weaves the garment of the world…., and whatever else dad was, he was a man of the soil.

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