A Gluttony of Things

Just as we anticipate and bemoan our gluttony around the holiday banquet table, but appear incapable of preventing it, we appear also resigned to a low-level nausea stemming from a quite different source between Black Friday and the day after Christmas. It is hard not to feel a slight disgust at the desperate and belittling sales flyers, the endless lines of disheveled shoppers stooped like homeless peasants outside mall doors, and the milling, pushing, tired, flustered throngs filling sack after sack with merchandise – their faces growing more empty as the sacks fill. Over it all, a strain of festive music plays, interrupted periodically by the announcement of yet another sale in yet another store. Of course, some seem to enjoy it, and seem more energized each time their credit balance increases, but in even these glowing faces, one can see the effects of overindulgence – as if one were watching a sorority girl’s elation increase with each shot up until the moment of collapse.

Shopping online is, by and large, the same experience, although instead of feeling overwhelmed by the sensory overload of a hundred choices, we are overwhelmed by the mental overload of ten thousand choices, each with its own pictures, description, and list of reviews. We cannot buy a pair of fuzzy socks in such a context until we have compared it to a dozen other pairs and read about the fuzzy experiences of two or three of their current owners.

We have, of course, grown used to this feeling of mild disgust. We are quick to affirm that “the season” means something else. Different things for different people, but something about family, giving, and perhaps God. But what is one to do? The shopping will not be accomplished without us, and so we hold our noses and plunge in, sometimes even making a joke of it. Of course we are going to wreck our diet, but the cream cheese icing and one-day sales are just too tempting. There is always the new year, strategically placed in the final ruins of our previous resolutions, promising a reparation of our defenses and perhaps a few late-season deals.

Toward a Sharper Image

But gluttony is nothing new. We may be quite sure that the roots of our excess grow deep, and it is not difficult to imagine some medieval adolescent princess (attended by bodyguards and leading an entourage of slaves as porters) meandering through the marketplace picking out spices, trinkets, tapestries, and clothing – her face aglow with the elation verging on collapse.

One could even trace the glow backwards to when the first prince and the first princess went shopping for the first clothing among the trees of the garden. Their newfound understanding had led to a revelation of sorts. They had looked in the mirror, felt naked and knew they needed a change. Their first attempts left something to be desired and little to the imagination, but through gradual improvement in tailoring and materials, they were able through time to cover (or at least obscure) that first embarrassing problem. The image they created for themselves was never quite right, but they would have lots of time to improve it.

In a sense, one could look at the modern shopping mall, catalogue, or online store as merely an extrapolation from this point – ever more elaborate and inventive means of covering the anxiety of the human condition with new clothing and new things which are designed to match the image of ourselves in our minds and hearts with the one we encounter in the mirror each morning and see reflected in the reactions of the people around us.

However, the progression, to say the least, has been nonlinear. It is hard to imagine the medieval princess without also picturing the hundreds of peasant girls stretching out thin, dirty arms to her, dressed in tatters and trying to sell hand-spun linens. But visit today’s marketplace and it is full of princesses with not a peasant in sight. What sort of strange fairy tale are we in?

Consumerism Circa 1800

Consumerism, at one time, lived in rarified air. In the town of Natchez, Mississippi, on the great river, one can find preserved a remnant of the lavish antebellum lifestyle of the south’s planters. In one such residence, built by a wealthy cotton broker in the 1850s, stand two fifteen-foot-tall mirrors, gilded with gold and placed at each end of the home’s expansive parlor, giving the impression of a never-ending grand hall. The mirrors were imported from Europe along with many of the home’s other moldings, ironwork and building materials. The home’s owner had chartered a ship for this effort, seeing as free next day air was unavailable.

But you needn’t have been wealthy to enjoy early-1800’s consumerism. If you lived in a major city, you could find non-perishables for purchase from all over the world, some of them at prices that even the middle class could afford. Of course, at the time the middle class was just emerging, and the U.S. average per capita annual income (even adjusting for inflation) was just $2,000. Furthermore, only 9% of the U.S. population was urban, compared to 80% today.

Taken together, the portion of the US population in 1800 who were either wealthy enough or urban enough to be the princess was probably under 5%.

For the remaining 95% of early American citizens, if something was to be enjoyed, it would have to first be produced. The extent of one’s shopping might be for a few staples (tea, sugar, tobacco), or on occasion one might visit the confectioner and buy a bit of candy. Anything more was too expensive, too distant, and too infrequent to be worth thinking about.

But all of that was about to change.

Railroads and Richard Sears

In 1825, the first locomotive was tested in Hoboken, New Jersey, lighting a slow fuze which would trigger a series of explosions in the length and reach of the nation’s rail network. By 1890, 164,000 miles of track had been laid, enough to cross from New York to L.A. fifty times.

With the railroad, everything changed. Areas which were once inaccessible except by horse and cart could now receive their goods by the carload. In 1888, at the perfect point in history for such an enterprise, a man named Richard Sears sent out his first catalogue peddling jewelry and watches. Within ten years, this modest enterprise was selling paint, photographic goods, and “talking machines” – whatever those were. Suddenly, the humble Midwestern farmer could mail an order for paint from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, and pay for it by shipping his crops off on the train to distant markets. He too could now be the princess.

The intersection of the railroads and Richard Sears was but one development during the industrial revolution. There were a thousand others, and 998 out of the thousand served to either increase the selection of goods for purchase and speed their time to market or increase the purchasing power of the average American consumer. I do not know, but I wonder if it was in this period that the word “consumer” came into wide usage, having long before jettisoned it’s historical meaning of “squanderer”.

The Invisible Hand

Contemporaneous with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a Scottish philosopher named Adam Smith published a monumental book (both in length and impact) titled The Wealth of Nations. If Smith had not written it, it would surely have been written soon by another, for it was an idea whose time had come. In it, Smith examines the first budding seeds of the industrial revolution to find an “invisible hand” of economic growth prodding the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to benefit their fellow man. The hand was not, as Smith pointed out, one of altruism, but one of self-interest, each person serving the greater good as a byproduct of his own desire for gain. Multiplied by a million, Smith said, this was how great economies were formed.

Even Darwin’s theory of natural selection based on the survival of the fittest in a self-interested struggle can be traced back to Adam Smith and the invisible hand of economic struggle. Like the making of sausage, the result of economic growth may be delicious, but the process is rather distasteful – merely selfishness in motion.

Whether Smith’s theory was merely the reflection of ideological trends or their catalyst, the industrial revolution operationalized the self-interested tendencies of consumerism, creating a buzzing global industry designed to do nothing more and nothing less than create new images for consumers. The modern marketplace is what happens when self-interest and the assembly line collide.

What is strange at first glance is that our self-image has grown less secure even as its manufacturing methods have improved. It is not immediately clear why both the medieval princess as well as the medieval peasant appear to be more comfortable in their own skins than we are, who have had far more skins to choose from. One would think over time that we should have found the one which was, like baby bear’s porridge, “just right”. The modern shopper sits at the top of a tremendous supply chain consisting of hundreds of industries manned by millions of people concerned with nothing more than creating an image of the shopper which she will like and therefore purchase – thus giving individual producers the resources to become shoppers themselves and improve their own images. But the shopper still feels naked. In fact, more naked than before the whole modern industrial consumerism project began. Why might this be?

The Ghost of Shopping Future

Part of the problem, quite certainly, is the very proliferation of options designed to solve the problem of self image. The modern shopper is daily presented with thousands of alternate possibilities for what kind of person he can be. These possibilities come in the form of clothing (hip, traditional, rugged, retro, athletic), music (punk, country, classical, hip hop, indie) decor (modern, ornate, minimalist, period, rustic) toiletries (basic, indulgent, fastidious, pure, trendy) food (eclectic, organic, fast, comfort, or one of innumerable special diets). This is not even to mention the socio-economic stratification overlaid onto many of these categories to ensure that the wealthy and the poor each have their own brand of eclectic cuisine, indulgent toiletries, etc. What is more, while many shoppers pick associated labels across several merchandize categories for the sake of consistency (rugged clothing, country music, rustic decor, etc.) there are no rules governing such behavior and the modern consumer is often caught in a kind of limbo between competing options trying to figure out which one matches his true self. It is not hard to see how insecurity develops. After a few shifts from one image of the self supported by sundry purchases to another, the shopper realizes that he doesn’t really know who the person really is behind all the purchases. Its at this point, when the shopper sees himself as a ghost picking out clothing to give himself the semblance of corporeality, that acute anxiety sets in. It appears this anxiety can only be relieved by more shopping, and (thanks to Adam Smith and his co-conspirators) he does not have to look far.

Thus, the cycle of identity-building accelerates, along with the pace of purchase. We are not, however, doing much building. Each image of the self is promptly discarded after we realize that it doesn’t fit us as precisely as we hoped. Some people reach a state of equilibrium at some point, conceding the hopelessness of the process. Many never do. The net result of the enterprise is that our shopping is often focused on a very near-term future. We want to cloth ourselves for a few moments, knowing that when the moment passes, we will have to continue our foraging or feel ghostly.

The Ghost of Shopping Past

As I have alluded to, the image-shifting malady of the modern shopper is not an individual and singular one. It is supported by an active industry of smart and creative people who are constantly inventing new ways to appeal to old desires. The reason the producer of goods is largely invisible to the shopper is that the consumer focus of modern industry has abstracted them. If (as is generally conceded) the only role of a producer is to create an object of desire (one which promises the shopper a new and better image of herself), then it is the desire, not the thing itself, which is most important. In fact, if the desire could be created in a vacuum, without the need for the article to have any real substance, then one would have struck upon the perfect business model – the output being profitable trinkets and the input being inconsequential.

In reality, this fabled business model is hard to come by, but many businesses come close to it by assembling from several layers of least-cost suppliers a shabby finished product supported by a generous marketing budget. The ironic thing is that this shoddy workmanship rarely hurts the consumer since he or she moves on to the next item after only one or two uses. It is telling that, with a consumer goods industry many hundred times as large as in days past, it is generally conceded and demonstrably true that the quality of most of the articles we employ in daily use has degraded rather than improved. Modern goods are quite often lacking in both craftsmanship and longevity for the simple reason that neither are demanded. Of course, we still appreciate the appearance of craftsmanship, but such can be more economically supplied in plastic, plaster, and polyester rather than wood, stone, and wool.

In this way, through a torturously attenuated supply chain, the shopper is hopelessly abstracted from any sense of a product’s past or producer. For all we know, the items of our daily use erupted fully-formed onto the shelves of our retailers having no past and no creator. If the shopper is by this incapable of seeing anything in the item except her own flickering image, then the ghostly producer will have accomplished his end.

Both the past and the future of consumer goods look (when seen in this light) pernicious, a series of selfish deceptions, perpetrated on others by industry and on himself by the shape-shifting shopper. However, the original ideological premise behind the rise of the consumer economy provides not only a methodology by which we have come to our current state, but a justification as to why it is really for the best. For when each of us (at every level of the supply chain) follows his own self interest, we are told, the result is greater prosperity and therefore greater happiness. Far from pernicious, our selfish image-making and image-seeking is rather instrumental in the greater good and to be encouraged. The only check we ought to give to our consumption, therefore, is based on our means of payment.

Loving Too Little

It is little wonder, then that many Christians and secularists alike have rejected the rat race (as we have aptly termed it) and sought to disassociate themselves from the consumption economy and its abuses. We must admit that this response, as extreme as it appears, is eminently sane. In a culture of gluttons and alcoholics, those who eat only bread and drink only water are probably healthier.

The Christian, furthermore, has an added rational for asceticism. Are we not told in the scriptures, “Do not love the world or the things in the world”. If John could write those words two thousand years ago, then what would he say today amid a world of cheap and petty nonsense attempting to pass itself off as our true self? Did not Jesus himself say that we ought not to be concerned with what we should eat or drink or wear. Is he who clothes the lilies of the field incapable of providing us with clothing?

However, one finds also in the scriptures the earthy scent of a beautiful and God-breathed creation peopled by God’s image-bearers, employing themselves in shaping wood, weaving cloth, tanning hides, and making music. The scriptures, conspicuously, do not condemn but celebrate these activities. Was not Jesus himself a carpenter? And where, pray tell, could he have sold his wares if not in the world?

What is unambiguous in the scriptures is that, while the creation and what humans fashion out of it is good, it is not God. There was nothing wrong with earrings, but (while they might be shaped into an instrument of greater worship to the true God) they were not to be molded into an idol.

In this we finally begin to see clearly. Our goods (the creations of human hands) have both a past and a future and we are to trace them both out. If one follows the path backwards, one arrives in time to the creator himself, forming man who forms the article in turn. If one follows the path forward to what ought to be the article’s destiny, this too culminates in the image of the creator as each new artifact of man’s culture fills up the cosmos’ remaining voids with the reflection of God’s character.

The central problem with the modern consumer economy (with the shopping mall) is that we have done everything possible to destroy all traces of this historical continuum, leaving the item purposeless and clean – a mirror reflecting our own image and nothing else.

It is doubtless true in the idolatrous sense which John indicates, that we love the things in the world too much. But by the same reasoning, we have been guilty of loving the things in the world too little, separating them from their rightful heritage as sacramental images and diverting them from their rightful future as lamp stands illuminating the character of God. Instead of admiring our goods as constituting part of the broader mystery of creation, we have used them mercilessly – used them up and thrown them out. It is as if we had been offered marriage and settled for a pinup.

Recovering The Past

Tracing backwards through the layers of obfuscation in the industrial supply chain to perceive the image of God in our consumer goods is rather like archeology. One senses that beneath the mountains of worthless dust, there must be some fossil worth digging out, but where to start?

I believe that among the first steps is to explode the myth of affordability which undergirds our perceived right to selfish consumption. As long as we believe that a purchase is our due, we have no need to dig deep enough to find something worth admiring.

We have been trained by two hundred years of economic growth to translate the most exquisitely-crafted of articles into monetary units. The temptation is to believe that because the effort and craftsmanship required to fashion something of quality and beauty (much less something without either) can be measured, that it can, somehow, be purchased. We have grown so used to the idea that it no longer seems strange to us to speak of buying someone’s time and abilities. This commonplace is made yet more ordinary by the producer himself, if we can find him, speaking of his own talents in the same way – as merely monetary units in an economic exchange.

However, simply because something can be measured does not mean the measure defines it. We may reduce the heat of the sun to a measurement in degrees, but that measurement merely adds a decoration to a phenomenon which we fundamentally do not understand and can certainly not produce on our own. To the question “what is heat really?” we have no answer and so we substitute something less for an answer: a temperature reading or a chemical definition. Our measurements and descriptions can peel back a thousand layers of phenomena but still leave unexplained the central inexplicable presence of the phenomenon itself. When a person (or a company of people) offers to create a good for a certain amount of payment, it is easy to gloss over the presence of the person for the price tag. But this ignores the fact that, while a person may not perform her services without payment, her skill, diligence, and materials are fundamentally incalculable. Our measurements cannot place skill in her hands nor diligence in her heart; their acquisition is a mystery which educational science only flutters around. And while we can measure the cost in dollars to extract resources from the earth, how is one to measure the value of their existence in the first place? In the end, we are like the farmer who plants his seeds in the ground, measures the amount of water and fertilizer, and waits. We know what we must do to make it grow, but we do not know where the growth comes from.

Even the things which we buy are a gift, springing out of the earth and from the minds and hands of others without sufficient explanation. We can purchase them only because they exist in the first place, though they are perhaps latent. It is existence itself which is the greatest and most immeasurable of gifts. The best things in life are free, but we have forgotten that life itself is free, and were it not so, we could not hope to pay for it.

And if existence, with all of its accoutrements, is a gift, then we may seek a giver, and this changes fundamentally how we view our shopping. To begin with, if we are purchasing what we cannot (in an ultimate sense) afford, then gratitude and appreciation is the proper response.

In a strange irony, the modern economy, with its consistency of fresh produce and packaged goods, its boring and repetitive exchange of money for pleasure, has robbed us of the very pleasure we presumed our due. For pleasure paid for and taken drives away all thoughts of love – both our own love as well as the possibility of love from another – and the only true pleasure is bound up with love.

It is fortunate, then, that the things we buy are priceless, no matter how much we may have paid for them. We could not have created one molecule of one trivial article, not with a million years and a million dollars.

To come face to face with this fact is to encounter our own dependence, but it is more than that. For one cannot perceive our dependence without then being shocked by the profusion of resources provided for our well being. It is as if for our whole life we thought ourselves to be purchasing the favors of a needy mistress only to find that she owns the whole realm and by her love and constancy has legitimized what we thought to be an illicit relationship, having casually tossed each of our payments aside. We could not have bought her though we tried repeatedly (comically and thanklessly we now realize), but she has made a marriage with us nonetheless and with her love elevated us infinitely beyond our means.

Recovering the Craftsman

In addition to a recognition of our essential poverty and blessedness, an archeology of consumerism ought also to unearth true craftsmanship, practiced by true craftsmen (of both genders I should add, although “craftspeople” is a rather awkward construction). Such people still exist although they have been pressed down and marginalized by an industrial economy content with surface stylishness rather than substantive beauty seeing that the former can be produced much more inexpensively than the later.

Even this purely economical comparison is often misleading. We are all familiar with the notion that a well-made piece of furniture retains its value indefinitely. One may spend as much for an antique of high quality as for a new table or dresser. Thus, over the life of the piece, the price per year of true craftsmanship may be far less less than that of shabby mass production even though initially the cost of the former is a multiple of the latter. It’s not inconceivable, for instance (what with an arid climate and assuming a thoughtful series of owners) although highly improbable, that some few pieces of Jesus’ own handiwork remain in circulation. If it is not so, then it is not due to his cutting corners. The reason we don’t often value this sort of longevity is that is may outlast us and it is almost certain to outlast our current self-image.

Another, and perhaps the more important, reason to seek out the craftsman behind the article is that we are not good at appreciating abstractions. When we see with what skill an item is made and the care taken by its creator, it helps us connect the dots of human creativity with those of divine. In many cases, as with modern electronics, an abstraction may be all we have. We must do the best we can. But we ought not to make the mistake of ignoring the craftsman altogether, ignoring the human act of creation required to bring us our lamp stand. And having mentioned this, we must change the direction of our inquiry, for having bought the lamp stand, one must choose what to do with it.

Recovering the Future

I have mentioned already that the shelf life of our self images (we wear through so many. there is rarely just one even at a single point in time) has grown exceedingly short, supported as it is by an active industry of image manufacture. Asking about an item’s future, in that context, seems ridiculous, almost senseless. Often we have practically used up the thin utility which our psyche derives from a purchase by the time we remove its packaging.

However, since we have taken the time to dig backward to the image of a generous God equipping men and women to create beauty for our use and enjoyment, we must dig forward to find what use and enjoyment we are to make of it. At the outset, we must disallow the use that most quickly springs to mind – that it will make us someone different, someone better. Allow that thought in and the whole pile of self-interested shape-shifting futility washes back with it.

Rather, the use we make of things ought to be the same use that the craftsman should make of his labor – that of sacrament and incarnation. If we are indeed made in the image of the invisible God, then our purpose must be to make him seen, to display his character in our own. Our character, despite the teaching of hundreds of years of western philosophy to the contrary, is not dualistic. We are not merely an independent mind floating disconnected in the medium of a body. We are both, just as Jesus was both, and the actions of the one manifest in the other. By the same token, our existence (both spiritual and physical) is bound up in our environment and culture which itself has both physical and spiritual significance. Thus, the culture and environment we create around us (our occupations and surroundings) themselves constitute part of the image of God which we are to display.

What, we might ask, is the difference? Is it possible to see a distinction between the use of things for our own image vs employing them in reflecting our creator? It is, admittedly, a precarious enterprise to measure a human being’s motives by their actions, but let me venture an example.

It has been my experience that many of the people least capable of showing hospitality owing to the constraints of their home and resources are nevertheless the most hospitable. I am thinking in particular of an absentminded man named Wynn Kenyon whom I studied under in college. I’m not sure if I recall a time in the fifteen years since I met him that a friend, stranger, or foreigner (all three soon morphed into the first) was not occupying one or more of the bedrooms in the Kenyon’s modest home. Dr. Kenyon passed away a couple of years ago, but his wife Ginny still keeps his home open. By contrast, it has also been my experience that many of those most physically capable of hospitality are least likely to practice it, or if they do, practice it in comic disproportionality with their means. It might be mean-spirited to name names, but we can each think of a wealthy acquaintance whose well-furnished home we would be afraid to stay in for fear of disturbing some carefully-crafted element in his fragile self-image. Give the same home and the same furnishings to Dr. Kenyon and it would soon resemble the catastrophic collision between an orphanage, a library, a soup kitchen, and the school of Athens. No one was ever quite sure what Dr. Kenyon’s self image was (he often wore two collared shirts at the same time by mistake), but they saw clearly who he and the environment he built reflected.

Slow, Thoughtful, and Free of Anxiety

If you have read thus far, you may be concerned that this process of tracing backwards and tracing forwards to unearth the image of God in our purchases is rather time-consuming. It may be useful, at times, to stop and smell the roses, but hadn’t we better be getting about our business? We would never get to the end of our shopping list if we took such time to understand and fully utilize our purchases.

That is the point.

While it is certainly true that many of our purchases are for common use and one cannot always spend time in contemplation over every item on one’s grocery list, it is nevertheless this very contemplation, appreciation, and intentionality which distinguishes faithful, healthy shopping from that which is degrading of both our own health and of God’s image. We ought not pass so quickly by even the humble incarnation which a grain of wheat or a cup of wine affords.

It is a necessarily time-consuming enterprise, and the length of our deliberations may preclude many of our intended purchases. But if we appreciate more of the less we have bought, we will not be the poorer. We avoid binging on things not because they are not worth tasting, but because they are. Neither the teetotaler nor the drunk are conscious of the wine’s flavor; it is only the person who tastes carefully and in moderation who is able to taste at all. Far more importantly, we may by this slow and arduous pathway come closer to the image of our creator and become a little less mindful of our own shifting and rebellious self-image. In this, we will shine the brighter, though it will not be our own light we see.

The slowness need not cause anxiety. In reality much of our anxiousness about things is based on our doubts that we will have time and money to buy what we really need. If we recognize them as gifts, then we can assume that we will have time to admire the ones intended for us and assume that what we didn’t have time for we did not really need.

The Words of Grace

In a fascinating book titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the natural history of four meals. It is an archeology of dinner. He starts with a meal at McDonalds, follows the industrial food chain all the way to its grimy, mass-produced, and petroleum-fueled source and then works his way through more organic fare to a meal which he serves his guests out of the produce of his own hunting and gathering. The meal is exquisite, not merely because of its contents, but because of its origin – because of the way in which each aspect of the meal grew unmolested from the very earth. The morel mushrooms (impossible to cultivate) grew up nonetheless in shadows and crevasses, the grit and bitterness of soil transmogrified into a savory and rich delicacy. The wine came from local grapes, their sugars distilling through vine and branch into choice fruits. The fruit, in turn, fermenting in a process carefully managed but not entirely understood. Finally, the wild pig roasted for the table represented many elaborate stages of reconstitution. The earth produced the budding oak which would conserve and channel its resources so as to litter the ground with acorns. The pig would eat the acorns and, through an almost miraculous metabolic process, convert the acorn’s nutrients into blood and bone and hair and muscle. The muscle, in turn, Pollan cooked for his guests, turning raw and inedible biological tissues into caramelized and tender mouthfuls – dust to pork roast.

The meal is likewise remarkable for its healthfulness. Rather than loading their palates with synthetic additives which would be expelled from the body as an enemy, Pollan’s guests would be nourished by the wholeness of true food – not isolated nutrients made through scientific ingenuity to taste like food, but food itself with all its richness and complexity.

As Pollan raises his glass to toast the meal and thank the meal’s contributors (his guests had assisted with many parts of it), he is struck with a strange and guttural desire:

I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace.

For Pollan and his guests, the moment passed and the words were never spoken. It is, after all, not easy to elicit thanksgiving from a modern man. Perhaps the words of grace were, as Pollan says later, unnecessary, the meal constituting grace in itself. At the very least, however, this encounter between a modern intellectual and the immeasurable bounty of the earth is a curious one. His response is surprising because he neither bows down to worship nor dismisses the feeling of thanksgiving as primitive sentiment. It is as if, for a few days, he has stood in the presence of a beauty he cannot describe, a beauty which feeds and nourishes him, which he cannot purchase but only receive.

The feeling is almost one of embarrassment, of knowing the appropriate response in the face of such generosity but knowing too (in the way we moderns know everything) that if he allows the notion of a generous earth, he admits the impossible: that someone has given the earth the gifts it gives to us.

This is where we often leave it: at a vague feeling of undirected thankfulness, in the brief and furtive moments in which we see the gift at all. The words of grace are hard to speak but leaving them unspoken is even harder. It is harder because it hardens us and inures us to further thanksgiving – and by this stroke distances us from the enjoyment of the gift, which is now demoted to a mere purchase (only our due).

We may (like Pollan and many another modern man or woman) be embarrassed by the exchange – the presence of pure and priceless love makes a mockery of all our diligence and effort. But if we are humble, we may by grace be able to say what we are searching for: the words of grace. The words are both thanksgiving and benediction – both an acknowledgement of need and gratitude as well as a blessing on the gift and on the giver. The words of grace bless us as well, for they add to the pleasure of the love the far greater pleasure of the lover.

It is thanksgiving, in the last analysis, which our digging has discovered, or rather evoked. I would like to believe that adding an additional day of thanksgiving to our calendar on December 27th might help to remind us, but I’m afraid the sickness is much too acute for such a remedy. The words of grace, after all, have been spoken to us before. They grew up before us like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground, but we did not esteem them. Perhaps it is because we did not look or having looked, hid our faces. But the word of grace comes not only to those who seek it out through the thanklessness of our culture, but also to those whom the word of grace seeks. We might remember as we strip off our pretenses in order to dive down deep and see the image of God in created things that it was to renew the image of God in us that the Son of Man stripped himself of position and dove down into our history. It was only in this way that he might create for us a future.