Even though it is winter, there is still plenty to do on a farm: cleaning and organizing, feeding the furnace, and repairing equipment to name a few. There are things you hope and pray for—precipitation of rain or snow—to replenish the soil. As I traipse throughout the acreage, I look out on the snow-covered fields as they hibernate for the winter seasons, awaiting new life in the spring. To work the land requires a body that can take sore muscles and cuts on the hands. But I’ve pulled enough muscles and had cuts on enough fingers to take a more cautionary approach to how I use my body to do certain work.
In conversations about the nature and purpose of our physical bodies, how do we understand our relationship to the rest of creation, to land? For those who are into fitness or a nutritional lifestyle, do you think about the similarities of how you treat your body to how you treat nature? Likewise, for those who may be predisposed to discourses inspired by the localism and environmentalism of Wendell Berry, do you think about the implications of green philosophy or land stewardship on the physical body? What does caring for the land have to do with caring of the body?
There are many scriptural examples that relate nature to the body. Genesis 1:28 tells us that God blessed mankind, giving them “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” In Genesis 2:15, Adam is placed within the Garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. In the Book of Jeremiah, we see a call to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.” Further, the metaphor in Jeremiah 17:7-8 joins our bodies to the life-givingness of creation:
“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
Stewardship of Land and Body
I have often observed in conversations around how to think about our physical being and how to treat land, that the two are spoken about separately, as if mutually exclusive. It seems the one does not relate to the other—that a theology of the former has no bearing on a theology of the latter. Conversations among Christians that bring up our role as caretakers of the environment rarely discuss the role of our own bodies in that caretaking. What I want to put forth here is that one cannot be understood fully without the other. How we steward our bodies reflects how we steward the land, and vice versa.
Stewardship does not have to be a term solely referencing how we care for nature. It can also be a blueprint to how we care for our own bodies. To be a good steward is to first recognize that we do not own that which we are tasked with keeping. For the land, it is God’s, and we are responsible to care for it, whether we are farmers, gardeners, or regular homeowners. Are we honoring and cultivating creation when we pay it no mind? Are we fulfilling our responsibility to steward the land when it is misused by sucking as much production and profit out of it as possible; ie, slaughterhouses, cash-crop agriculture, or unrestricted urban sprawl? For our bodies, the same is true. Our bodies are our own in one sense, but more deeply—more truly—they are not our own. They are a gift from the Lord, and we are called to steward them too. Psalm 24:1 tells us that the “earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” The ways in which the land is misused or ignored can logically lead into conversations about how we treat our bodies in relation to our eating habits and diets, our exercise and work routine, and what we set our gaze upon and let our senses see, hear, taste, and feel.
As readers of Perishable Goods understand, we are ensouled bodies. Since we are bodies, we are rooted in time and space. We have been placed to live in the midst of creation, with its joys and sorrows—deeply and richly informed by the places where we walk and work, dig and plant. Indeed, if we are embodied persons, what then are we called to do? Looking to Scripture, we are called to govern ourselves and, with the guiding hand of the Holy Ghost, defeat sin wherever it may be in our lives. As we are called to have dominion over ourselves and accept the gift of embodiment, so we are called to have dominion over the earth, accepting it as a gift to care for as well. Dominion, from the Latin word dominus for “lord,” contains no semblance of tyrannical exploitation and abuse, but an awesome power and responsibility to keep that which we are asked to steward: land and body.
The Grace of Creation
The bodies we’ve been given are not merely temporal necessities that allow us to act in this world only, they are meant to be a gift to us throughout eternity. Much like the earth.
As creation itself is under the curse of sin, it will, likewise, be perfected by grace, and made new. It is because of this grace and regeneration—and God’s loving commands—that we ought to see the connection between land and body. By focusing too much on our modern conveniences of screen-technology and comfort-lifestyles, we are forsaking a stewardship of our bodies and land, for both are given as gifts to enjoy and mediums to love others.
Of course, our bodies and creation are not equal in all things. The trees and plains do not contain the imago Dei that the human person does. In that way, the dominion we have over our bodies and over creation is not identical, but similar. Even so, we should see the land—and our embodied lives—as a canvas for beauty given by God. And as we till the soil in the spring to make way for new life, or trim the branches of our orchards to allow them to bear better fruit, so sometimes do our bodies have to adapt to a change in relationships or eating habits, in order to grow stronger and develop healthier ways of living.
So, as you find yourself in conversation with others about either creation or our own creatureliness, consider bringing up the other within the discourse to consider the connectedness of the two. How we treat our bodies is how we will treat creation. And how we treat creation is how we ultimately want to treat our bodies. I invite the reader to share/comment on how your experiences in stewarding nature have helped you steward your body well.
“The Peace of the Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”