The direction she gave was exactly as my mother taught, so I knew it to be a perennial truth, even though I was five years old. Our kindergarten teacher, Ms. Olive Garrett, took Richard by the hand, whispering in his ear, showing him how to share the wooden blocks he was hoarding. I was the student who was waiting to play with them. It’s one of the most salient kindergarten memories I have, along with the taste of pineapple juice and sweet bread cookies.
Sprouting, growing, and then fading like leaves of grass, we are here for only a little while. How beautiful it is to move with the wind blowing through our fields. To see the world open up like a rose, and us within it. How precious, this breath of life we share. And yet there is great temptation to never be satisfied, to want more of what we already have. A scarcity mindset grows in the barns of abundance. Who’s to think that our lives are any different than the harvest? From a seed to a seedling, a budding tree ripe with fruit, and then turning back to the earth again. Another perennial truth. The fruit of you. The grain of me. We are not first to be stored, but shared and consumed. The very heart of communion.
We know little of the greedy farmer that is at the heart of the young rabbi’s parable, told to a group of folks who were antsy about things.* It’s safe to assume that the farmer owned his property, but not the growing, nor all of the harvest. We don’t need to ask why he built bigger barns to store the great surplus. I know the answer, and it makes me a little nervous about my surplus. It is far too easy to limit this as a cautionary tale about greed, or an admonition to share. The teacher wasn’t talking to kindergartners. At the more mature, textured level, it is a story about the loss of self… of spiritual death. An abandonment of not only one’s humanity, but of the humanity of others.
It is not God who kills this farmer. By removing himself from life’s circulation, he took his soul’s currency out of the market of the Great Sharer. It was not that his earthly life was over, but that his soul was gone. With grown up ears, I hear Ms. Garrett’s voice again. My voice now has changed. I call her by her first name, speaking in the language of my abundance, sharing how her teachings keep blooming in my heart. And that my very soul depends on it.
–Jim Marsh, Jr., Bread of Life Church
