Gleanings From the Field., Vol. 13
Old churches and Christmas markets, the perverse habit of ecological degradation, landscapes of lies, and more...
Welcome to another Gleanings From the Field, an occasional newsletter of updates, recommended reading, and snippets of thought.
Update From the Field
This last Friday I held the first Wendell Berry Reading Group via Zoom. It was a wonderful time of deep and enriching conversation with all the participants on Berry’s essay Quantity Versus Form. I came away with plenty of new insights, some of which may eventually coalesce into an essay or two and we had the pleasure of hearing some wonderful stories that helped us all apply the essay. I must say that the calibre of participants was exceptionally high, with some having g been readers of Wendell Berry for over 20 years, and this was reflected in their depth of insight and the connections they made between the themes of this essay (ripeness, limits to growth, cultural humus etc) and other works and thoughts from Berry (e.g. health, membership, and community). So my sincere thanks to Eric, Jitka, Philip, Kiara (my wife) and Chris, it was an absolute joy.
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The Christmas break was a time of illness for both me and my wife, thankfully we have fully recovered now. But we did manage to get to Germany to see our new niece. We took a day trip to Köln (or Cologne for English), a city famous for its dark, imposing, and frankly huge cathedral. It is one of these places you are meant to tick off as a tourist — so dutifully, tick it off we did. But it is well worth the visit. Standing outside the monumental building one does get a sense of how small you are compared to the passing of history and the things of utmost importance — which I suppose is the emotion the designers of this ancient building wished to induce.
The city itself, however, I found rather dull. Heavily bombed in the war, Köln has lost most of its beautiful old buildings which have characterised other German cities I have visited (most notably the extraordinary beauty-dense Nürnberg). What remains or has been rebuilt is uniform, dull, and the kind of buildings you see in cities the world over. Plus, the philosophies of modernism and co. have taken root here evidenced by many buildings being hideous concrete blocks or over-sized greenhouses (though beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose).
However, the Christmas Markets redeemed the visit. There were at least two traditional Christmas markets lining the main streets, and the stalls here were simply wonderful. Each stall was a traditional wooden hut with beautiful gilded golden lettering and signage with antique floral prints — with many of the huts selling wares from local craftsmen/women and traditional foods. The distinctive smell of Glühwein saturated the air, complemented by the sound of traditional folk music. If it wasn’t so packed with people (like a tin of sardines) I would have loved to spend more time perusing the stalls and understanding a bit more about what traditional products come from this region (I have found in Germany that regions have preserved their traditional products and crafts much more than in the UK where standardised and mass produced junk has proliferated with each region selling and producing similar wares). For example, I saw a stall selling traditional Monschau mustard in distinctive grey clay pots. I wish I had taken some home.
Back home in not-so-sunny Essex, we greeted the Subsequent Year’s** day with an old church tour of the mid Essex heartlands. Armed with my copy of Simon Jenkins’ 1000 Best Churches, we set off to view some ancient history on this dull and overcast day.
In order of visitation we visited St Mary’s Stock-Harvard — an interesting church with a white wooden box spire; St Giles’ church Mountnessing (where I found to my delight some golden waxcap fungi in the extensive graveyard); St Mary’s Frynering — a red brick box tower church with Norman elements in the walls; St Laurence’s Blackmore — with a magnificent towering wooden spire, and lastly St Andrews’ Church, Greenstead, the oldest wooden building in Europe. Greenstead was the undoubted highlight. It is like no other church building I have ever been in. Small and low-roofed with giant old beams and tiny windows the building ooze with history. Carved into the woodwork is the story of King Edmund and the Wolf. The loyal wolf is said to have guarded the decapitated king’s head. The legend goes when his men found his wolf-guarded body, they put his head back on which miraculously became reattached to his body (though Edmund remained dead).
**This is what I call new year a it reminds me this year follows on from what has gone before and is not a clean break with the past so to speak (plus I do enjoy being a bit idiosyncratic).
Finally, I have just started a 2 year (3-4 day’s a month) course — Cultivate with Crosslands. This course is about raising up and maturing ‘Christian thinkers’. My topic that I am exploring over these next two years is ‘a biblical understanding of environmental stewardship’ (from an evangelical perspective). If this is a topic that interest you and you want to have a chat about it or know of books/articles that I should read please let me know! This is not a full-time course by any stretch of the imagination so it will leave me plenty of time to continue my writing here at Over the Field and for some publications (more news on this hopefully soon — but if you are an editor and reading this and would like me to write something for you please get in touch).
Gleanings From the Field
is someone whose writings I greatly admire. This anonymous Yorkshire man has a gift for perceptive (and at times scathing) analysis which strips away facades and shows things for what they are. And that is what he masterfully does in this phenomenal short essay — brutally expose the lies of our landscapes and cities. is a beautiful writer (and he has submitted a wonderful poem for the Old Towns anthology — there is still time to submit a poem to be considered for this if you were planning to) and I really appreciated his piece a while back on beauty in prose.“Beautiful prose speaks to this sense of homewardness. It sketches the great chiaroscuro of alienation and dwelling as it runs through the heart of human life.”
For the Christians in my readership,
is certainly worth following, as is the work he and others do at the Davenant Institute. His recent essay on pastors’ salaries was excellent. Rhys convincingly (in my opinion) argues that we should be paying our pastors a salary that meets all the family needs — so neither the pastor nor his wife needs to find additional employment. In short, let us not be stingy — but biblically generous.Finally, most of my readers will be well aware of husband and wife team
and — and for very good reason. If you are wanting good, solid (and extensive!) practical advice on how to navigate the technology age we are living in then I know of few better people to point you to than the Gaskovski’s. Their latest essay on “hollowness” is at their usual brilliant standard."That nagging awareness can rob us of our intrinsic motivation, though we don’t always notice it. The theft is like mental pickpocketing. We’re already thinking about going online, or we’re already online, by the time we realize what’s been taken from us, though often we don’t realize it at all."
“When we leave our mark on the real world, we, in turn, are touched, shaped. We are strengthened in who we are and why we are here. This is less likely to happen in virtual reality, where the pixels that make up the “experience” are too unidimensional, too temporary, too distant, to produce either a true mark on the virtual, or a true mark on us.”
From the Barn
An essay from my archives
A while back I wrote this piece lamenting the rural ‘hollowing out’ that has been going on since the World Wars and the need for there to be more workers on our farms to give our farmed landscapes the proper care they deserve. I have recently looked over at it again with fresh eyes, tidied up some of the prose and argument, and share it with you all again here:
From the Threshing Floor (paid subscriber content)
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