All the Seeds That Refuse to Die: Pactum Salutis (Introduction)
Behold, a Sower went out to sow. With his Son in toe, it would be the last time they spoke this side of the grave. The father’s salvo began a story, a fine frenzy rolling; a glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, to body forth the things unknown.¹ Imagination and Incarnation. It was one of the few times the Son had a conversation with the Sower in which neither of them laughed. And the question addressed would be the one we all ask when startled from the slumber of worldvision: Why does the world and all of heaven speak this way, and, just as important, to what end are we to speak back? Their conversation, a liturgy guided by the trembling hand of imagination, began with the crooked feet of man just east of a garden, and concluded in that great unspoken (yet always spoken for) talused liturgical entanglement of Adam.
“What does a seed do to grow,” the Sower asked.
“It dies,” the Son answered.
Catechistic precision.
Reaching into the bag of seeds hung over his shoulder, the Sower tossed some spring wheat seeds to his Son. The day was early. A stagnant convalescence of the infant day’s fog; a cantor-morning of the Son’s unexamined intuitions gathered forth by a father pulling the curtain to a world of self-entangled ankles mangled by being—day-start smolder, and we call it the Fall.
“Soon it will rain here. But I have other lands in which it never dews, but is ever in the ache of the onset of rain. Fog-fleeced, my tenants (the palsied pauses in a cricket-chirping, sent-for-help, sun-nudged reprieve) are the hushed world’s best attempt at ignoring the coming rain. They have come out of worldvision, disposed of their compass for a crumpled map, and have embraced the holy seriousness of disenchantment. They are hell-bent, and bent on ensuring nobody questions the Steward, Diotrephes, or laughs unless at the expense of others. They say it will never rain, and they use the land like machines. Diotrephes leads them all to never read the Baptist Farmer; to never lie easy in the shade or make more tracks than necessary—they never practice resurrection.² This, their misplaced glory, they know without knowing, is what it means to desire. I have sent them my servants, to warn them of the day when all things will be more than bedewed. But no servant has returned. And this is my discipline; their judgement. They will see no rain, until the whole vineyard floods.”
“A pity that they don’t realize this is your judgement.”
“Because they believe it to be a blessing. We join with the Puritan in crying out, ‘Oh the blindness of mind, the hardness of heart, the searedness of conscience, that those souls are given up to, who, in the eye of the world, are reputed the most happy men, because they are not outwardly afflicted and plagued as other men.’³ See, Diotrephes, while having my servants killed, and those who wished to account against him thrown out, believes that getting away with it is proof of the heavens’ siding with him. But it is my justification, for I have handed them over to the weeds they wish to sow.”
Behold, a Sower went out to sow, and the Son watched as his father tossed seeds along the stone path down which they walked. Looking back, he watched two Cardinals, one Bluejay, and a group of Carolina Wrens swoop down and back up, gathering the seeds before the wind could usher them off to the yard.
“Son, we know it is written, ‘For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.’ Everyone, when they are given the grace to work and keep my land, first do not understand my kindness, and like these seeds and those birds, a Steward after his own glory can just as quickly, once I have left for home, snatch away the memory of my presence—but never the longing for it.”
Having lived with his father all of his life (begotten 21 years ago), the Son proclaimed in praise, “Who could forget your presence! Who could lose the sound of your laughter, and the singing you do as you go out to sow!”
“It has been a long time since I have spoken to them directly, and although I have sent them my servants, the tenants do not know my presence enough to fully say what the longing for it is, or from whence it came. It is always there, that desire, that theopothos—and Diotrephes tells them it is, at least for a time, short-lived and well-put: the mingling of what they experience and what they cannot name;⁴ that waiting, and in the waiting, the supreme purpose felt by all men. Or so he tells them. And so, you see, their theopothos is the cause of that great leap, that grootensprong or nietsprong of the Dutchman: imagination grounded by revelation, or by the search for closure, leaps from this longing either to disenchantment or re-enchantment. As the Dutchman says, ‘I imagine a world, but whether that world also exists cannot immediately, clearly, and certainly be proved from this. I must take the leap from thinking to being where it is at its very smallest, where thinking and being come together, and that is in my soul itself . . . if we take the leap there, we are fully protected against illusions.’⁵ My tenants imagine a world of rain, but with their imagination ungrounded by reason, they leap from their theopothos (the longing) to disenchantment. This is why he also wrote of the many false leaps (nietsprongs) in man: the leap Descartes took, ‘however small it might be, was completely unacceptable . . . he leaped forward too easily and did not see that in doing so, he gave the rest of his system a foundation that was too weak to support the building;’⁶ Spinoza ‘took the leap from thinking [the desire] to being [worldview] too easily;’⁷ and Rationalism, too, ‘can never take the leap’⁸ and so, it takes ‘a leap that is itself neither valid nor true.’⁹ This ‘unauthorized leap of reason,’ as he calls it, ‘must remain on the terrain of the experiential and may not take a leap into the eternal,’ because, ‘the forms of our intellect are always suitable for use on appearance, on impressions localized in time and space, but they lack any capacity to acquaint us with that which is supersensory, spaceless, and eternal.’¹⁰ Again, my tenants imagine a world that fills their longing, but without reason, they leap to a lie: reason’s panting after closure. And from this panting, a worldview will never be built, and the longing will ever remain as their greatest purpose. And so, you see, my Steward is a bird, and has almost all of my tenants tightly in the grip of disenchantment, convincing them that the longing is all there is, the seeds must never die to grow in the grass of the yard, and that the true work of the vineyard is only that which can be measured. Back and forth they leap, and he tells them it is a dance. But it is the palsied stumble of the blind leading the blind. It is an empty life that they tell one another is abundant with the light of unity every time they throw another dissenting tenant to the woodchipper. Their world is dim, but as I said, the rain never comes. So while they pretend to forget the sound of my singing, the longing never leaves them: today, they call the pursuit of it the greatest of all sin: disunity. But we call it faith.”
“But they can’t stay that way,” exclaimed the Son. “What happens when others visit, or when they meet tenants of another steward at the market? They should realize how miserable it all is!”
As the Son said this, they came across the rocky ground by the path. A few days prior, the Sower had tossed seed there as they walked together and read selections from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince. The day of this conversation, as they passed by, the Son now noticed that seeds had immediately sprung up, but since they had no depth of soil, they were scorched by the sun. And since they had no root, they were withering away.
“Behold, the seeds the sun has scorched. Many have told my tenants, warned them, tried to help them see. My servants went and proclaimed my coming presence, and the way of life when I once walked among them in the vineyard. They read the Dutchman to my tenants, about the ‘paradox that tears our personality apart;’ how ‘all human seeking is a seeking after God.’¹¹ They read to them of how man ‘can find no rest in the world of sensations and without noticing it takes a leap toward the eternal. [How] all thinking ends in God . . . In this [they proclaimed by reading] there lies something that fills us with joy and emotion.’¹² Many of the tenants, for a time, received the news with joy and great emotion. They suffered the joy and even began to question the nietsprong, the closure-leap, and some aspects of the disenchantment. But Diotrephes caused great harm and persecution to befall them. He had the happiest buried in the weeds, the strongest sent to the woodchipper, and the rest he lulled to sleep: telling them that all such talk was disunifying to the people of the Master. Persecution at the hands of my Steward, but in my name and the name of Purity. When one would say, ‘The Master is coming, and with him, he brings a party,’ my Steward would point to the table I had set many years ago (a sign of my coming), and would say, ‘Here is your Master.’ And when my servants came and said, ‘The Master does not speak by this man,’ he would decry the presence of their greatest sin: as I’ve said, division. Man’s favorite place to hang the glory I made them to long for is upon their own selves, and it stretches out within them, and they call it a shadow, and so it covers them. In this grand disorder, Diotrephes has become an artist, even, and most readily, in the misery of a morning that never turns to noon. How sorrow grows the scattering of glory like a garden of gratified self-mourning: as it springs up it chokes with pride, and this withering is the fruit they enjoy.
So yes, my Son, they have often been told of their miserable state, and of the joy of another way of living. My servants have sought to bring about the right leap; the grootensprong along my revelation. They went and proclaimed, “The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. Thus saith the Master: Behold, I am against the Steward; and I will require my tenants at his hand, and cause Diotrephes to cease from feeding them; neither shall the Steward feed himself any more; for I will deliver my tenants from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them.” But Diotrephes is a great theologian, a wonderful lecturer. They do not yet realize it is his charm that makes him a poor steward of my lands. Every moment that they spring up with hope for a better way, he divides them against one another. An easy task, as he has kept their soil shallow with theological propositions for the sake of words, and no roots have made it from their head down past their throat. They are scorched and they wither away; a disenchanted, ever-serious, holy-boredom which only cares about how others are obeying the words of the Steward and the traditions he has built on the disenchanted back of a misuse of my promises. I gave them the keys of my vineyard to let in the poor and the lost, but they used them to lock the gate rather than open it.”
Just then, they came upon some thorns, under which a small strand of honeysuckle chocked on the briar, with little flashes of yellow left to announce its tyranny. The sower tossed some seeds among the thistle.
Bending down to make sure the seeds got beneath the dirt, the Son began to weep, “If they have leapt from the longing, and done so seeking closure, they are, like this honeysuckle, unable to grow beyond the thorns of it.”
“Yes. The internal dialectic of disenchantment. Having refused the dialectic of reason and imagination, my tenants have put themselves, like lost sheep without a shepherd, into the liturgy of a purposeless existence trying to find a home in a meaningless world. There is a capacity of the soul by which man pictures what is not seen. We call this imagination, or fantasy. By this capacity, faith is expressed and cultivated; and faith itself expresses and cultivates this capacity. So is the first dialectic of the re-enchanted imagination, and from this liturgical dance of death, the mustard seed sprouts. But for the disenchanted, that same capacity is distorted. Where faith and fantasy might gather the world beyond what is seen in a liturgy that calls forth the works of my hands behind all things; the dialectic of the disenchanted imagination begins with cynicism and its liturgical partner is reductionism. The first stage of disenchantment is always fascinated (and boringly so) with isms; that leap along closure keeps them hiding their eyes from the piercing light of mystery. Everything needs an explanation, a label. Cynicism is that way of life defined by a distrust and discontentment in the way things are. As Lewis writes, it is the attitude of always seeing through things for the sake of it. However, as he notes, my tenants cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. ‘The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too?’¹³ And oh, my tenants have seen through the garden. In doing so, Lewis’ prophecy has come true: ‘If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see.’¹⁴ Yes, they are blind. And in the blindness of their cynicism, they see nothing. Not the beauty of my vineyard, but just a field of weeds; not the grace of being paid so bountifully, but the transaction of another thing they have to keep for themselves; not the freedom to harvest, and as they harvest, to pluck grapes from the vine—not that freedom, but the work of cutting off a bushel without dropping a single fruit. This is where worldview goes the die: peeling back the corner of a crumpled map, the paper tears. Reaching for a compass, man stays, like unturned dirt, asleep but never dead.
You see, both faith and cynicism use that same imaginative function of the soul: they both picture what is not seen. The former, the promise of my presence; the latter, the threatenings of a master who doesn’t exist. And so they say, ‘It is vain to serve the Master: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before him?’ This cynicism is expressed by and cultivated by reductionism. Where the re-enchanted imagination sees beyond things, the disenchanted imagination sees through them, and to accomplish this, it must reduce all things. Reductionism, mechanism as meaning, allows my tenants to ignore the greater story being told, and leads them to great abuses. Lewis reveals them well when he writes, ‘We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may conquer them.’¹⁵ But the Steward sees to it that it never ends with Nature. Yes, the abuses there are numerous, and this is why we read the Baptist Farmer.¹⁶ But ‘as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.’¹⁷ My cynical tenants, disenchanted as they are, find it so easy to mistreat my servants whom I sent because they reduced those servants to a label: enemy, dissenter, sower of discord. And so they seek to conquer them and one another. Faith would have them imagine more: the discipline of a loving father, friend who lays down his life, sower of unity in grace.
But disenchantment is a long and stumbling way of life. And so while the cynical dance is had, the music for the party is another of imagination’s distortions. Where the faithful imagination, by the word of my revelation, dances to the music of hope, expressed by and cultivated through humor, the unfaithful picturing process of the soul dances to the sound of despair, expressed by and cultivated through mockery of all things human and Divine. My tenants, having the brilliant words of the Steward ever before them, find a home in despair. This inward way of life, built upon the twisted ankles of a cynical reductionism, is a way of life that trips over itself. For the Steward, this life is what DeGroat called ‘a victim-martyr-hero identity’ that, when attacked, ‘postures them as the inevitable targets of frustrated subordinates.’¹⁸ Fearing the Romans or the loss of reputation with the other vineyards or the threatenings of action by the Mere Counsel, my tenants live a way of life captivated by the self-pity of the Steward. And so they too stumble through the dance of despair, never to realize that their fear, confusion, and Steward-imposed silence is not how my vineyards are supposed to be. But the party goes on, and to live with that despair, they turn the music up. Where laughter should be, mocking rises to the windows; where humor should set free with hope, ridicule is suffered under the guise of a joke or inner-circle admittance. And so to whom do they feel safe to cry out? To the seething hummingbird hard-fought breathing, sent by God to give a song, and perched by the empty feeder? To the rabbit in the short-drawn shade, a liver or a lung in the unmowed lawn—the bird and her alike: placed by us, like Adam, to shadow-forth? Or just to their Steward, leaning on sore parts numbered, numbed, and already mentioned? With my providence’s stumble (or so he calls it), and inspiration giving way to the dull drum of his ankles’ dictation, we know, like all men, they will not pray to me or hush away the lie. The sad-sight of nearsightedness. Pride’s towering reach, a greenery’s temple in the kingdoms of the world’s anticipation and his motion’s own potentiality: to ascend in their mind is to be the replacement, their hidden answer; the holy-of-holies, bustling fruitful with praise for rhetoric and propositions. The art of Ezekiel’s shepherds, and the rebuke of Christ to the Pharisees. Can they, the people in their longing, be his glory tomorrow, and is that their glory too? So he imagines, and they sing the serious song he hums in his mind.
Such a way of life leads, finally, to the disenchanted distortion of love. Love, expressed by and cultivated through play, is turned to apathy. And its vine is control. A Day is coming when my tenants see clearly that they and their Steward love nothing and seek to control everything. Under the shade of these three—cynicism, despair, and apathy—the honeysuckle of my beloved is choked out. And the sun that scorches them is their refusal to die.”
As he said this last sentence, the Son saw that they had arrived at the seedbed. His father now had tears in his eyes (joining the Son in weeping over the vineyard) as he looked out over the rows of fresh turned earth. They were tears of sorrow and of hope. The sower stretched out his hand.
“Up to this point, I have shown you all the ways I intend to sow. But you have also seen, if your imagination will allow it, all the seeds that refuse to die. Here before us is the turned earth of re-enchantment, where seeds will surely die, stay that way, and be made new. Here before us is the grootensprong; the leap allowed, the one along revelation: not in the pursuit of closure or measurable facts or even results, but the one that chases nothing but nearness to the Master. Here, faith imagines a world brought to life through death; hope laughs in the face of it; and love plays as it sows to feed our family, our neighbors, and the world. We call this re-enchantment theodosia. All that can be told of theodosia is theodosia known; a thirst, a pleasure, expressed as one; but surely expressed as worship, like a prayer, for others. Speaking of play, do you remember what we read in Jayber Crow? How he fell in love with Mattie as she played with the children?”
“Of course, said the Son,
“‘I was all of a sudden overcome with love for her. It was the strongest moment I had known, violent in its suddenness and completeness, and yet also the quietest. I had been utterly changed, and had not stirred. It was as though she had, in the length of a breath, assumed in my mind a new dimension. I no longer merely saw her as one among the objects of the world but felt in every nerve the heft and touch of her. I felt her take form within my own form. I felt her come into being within me, as in the morning of the world. This love did not come to me like an arrow piercing my heart. Instead, it was as though Port William and all the world suddenly quietly fell away from me, leaving me standing in the air, alone, with the ache of acrophobia in the soles of my feet and my heart hollowed out with longing, in need of what I did not have. For a time—how long I don't know—I was lost to myself, standing there still as a tree, and I have always wondered if she saw and knew. And then somehow, as uncertain of my contact with the ground as Julep Smallwood drunk, I made my way out of town into the woods, and sat down and put my head in my hands.’”¹⁹
“That, my Son,” said the Sower, “is re-enchantment; and it is where the leap along revelation will lead all men. Theodosia, the gift of God. But my tenants know nothing of it.”
Without tossing seed to the rows ahead, the Sower turned away and began walking back down the path. As the Son took the seedbag off the shoulders of his father, he said, “I long for nothing more than to go to that vineyard and rescue your namesake.”
“In due time, you will go and you will bring glory to my name, and you will bring the rain with you. But first, I must tell you about my most disenchanted tenant. How she has helped my Steward in all of his ways; flipped the switch on the woodchipped, and even helped kill a few of my servants. I would like to tell you of her, and how she will one day be your bride.”
And when the chief priests and Pharisees had heard his parables, they perceived that he spake of them.
¹ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, act 5, sc. 1, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Longman, 1997).
² Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” in The Country of Marriage (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
³ Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, in The Works of Thomas Brooks, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1980), 71.
⁴ C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1966), pp. 4-5.
⁵ J. H. Bavinck, Personality and Worldview, trans. and ed. James Eglinton (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 107-108.
⁶ Ibid., 107.
⁷ Ibid., 117.
⁸ Ibid., 120.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid., 131.
¹¹ Ibid., 172.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 81.
¹⁴ Ibid., 81.
¹⁵ Ibid., 71.
¹⁶ Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977).
¹⁷ Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 71.
¹⁸ Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 22.
¹⁹ Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000), 191-192.
