Praying for Earthworms

Why the Lord's Prayer is an Agrarian Prayer

Photo by sippakorn yamkasikorn on Unsplash

The Lord’s Prayer is the most important piece of writing that has ever been written (and uttered). So simple that even a child can recite it; so profound that it encompasses everything we could ever need, ask, or hope for, and whose depths and riches we can never fully plumb. And no wonder, for this is the prayer God Himself taught us to pray.

However, what may have slipped your attention (it certainly did mine for a long, long time) is just how agrarian this prayer really is, and how praying it in faith is perhaps the most vital work an agrarian could do. It was an old reformer, Martin Luther, who showed me the full and wonderful extent of this prayer and helped me to see it with fresh, agrarian eyes when he wrote:

“When you say and ask for daily bread, you ask for everything that is necessary in order to have and enjoy daily bread…. You must therefore expand and extend your thoughts to include not just the oven or the flour bin, but also the broad fields and the whole land that produce and provide our daily bread. For if God did not cause grain to grow and did not bless it and preserve it in the field, we could never have a loaf of bread to take from the oven or set up on the table.”¹

Do you see what Luther is getting at here? It is really quite marvellous. “Expand your thoughts” to consider the soil! Consider the earthworms and the soil microbes. Consider the farmer.

The Lord’s Prayer is thus a deeply agrarian prayer and I am delighted to say the good folk at Front Porch Republic have today published an essay on this very subject. It is one of my favourite pieces I have ever written and I couldn’t have wished for a better place for it to be published in than the best agrarian journal out there.

You can read the essay here: An Agrarian Prayer

I hope you enjoy it.

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On the subject of published work, I have had a number of pieces published in journals and publications over the last year or two. I keep an updated archive of such work here (which can also be found on a tab on the main page of Over the Field under Published Work).

Finally, whilst we are on the subject of the importance of soil, here is an old piece I have wrote on Over the Field concerning this most vital topic. It is a topic we neglect as a society at our peril.

1. From Luther’s Larger Catechism.