I idealized this life.

It wasn’t a false beauty that I loved - this, I think, is of paramount importance to keep in mind. In fact, the ideal, is, in many ways, reality in potency. It’s not unobtainable per se (although we are not capable of reaching it without sanctifying grace).

It was a real beauty that I loved, an original beauty - one can say with great accuracy - reflecting the original vocation: “And the Lord God took man, and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it, and to keep it” (Gen. 2.15).

Etched into my being now is the oft-quoted, impassioned declaration of the great Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Beauty will save the world”.

It is a profound truth! - and therefore beautiful. But beware: it is true also that salvation occurs precisely because of the sacrifice of beauty. The perfect Man who is God stretched Himself out upon the tree and watered it with His blood, a farmer from His first human breath to His last on the Cross.

In meditating upon the Mystery of the Nativity, is it possible for someone such as me not to weep as I stand amidst the mess of animals and He stares at me from the indescribable nearness of a manger? I tell you that it is possible - because I am hardhearted, and yet I want to weep.

For a farmer, “He is the New Adam” is not merely an abstract theological truth. It is a truth of tremendous and unshakeable and unfathomable nearness, and one that is so necessary as the Beauty of the idealized beloved becomes the Beauty that is the life of sacrifice.

It seems to me that I cannot explain why I must go on farming despite its devastating impracticality. In the perspective of the capitalist, one might even consider it a logical impossibility, an affront against rationality, to attempt to recall the old life of the family farm into the post-industrial, over-technologized wasteland of consumerism in which we find ourselves. (I suppose that this itself stands as the explanation.)

Je dois le faire. It is super-rational.

I have never witnessed so much loss in return for so much labor.

I have never felt such ingratitude from those whom I serve.

I have never had so little (and so much).

Yet -

It is my gift and it is my penance to do this thing that is the very thing humanity needs in order to acknowledge our insufficiencies: Sowing and not reaping and then reaping in great abundance, killing, culling, weeding, burning, losing, gaining, tending, caring … dressing, keeping, losing, failing, persevering in hope only by grace.

I am not here primarily to produce good foie gras (though I fully intend to). I am here to save my soul …

That first glimpse of Beauty - it is still here … here beneath my fingernails, in cuts and scrapes and a gash on the forehead, in a separated shoulder, in the ache of my knees and the wind in my face, in the flowers blooming in spite of (because of? along with?) my sweat-and-blood-drenched t-shirt.

It is here, but I did not always understand its pain. Beauty was the eternal principle. When I said “I shall farm” I saw Beauty only partially, as if through a mist. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13.12).

But I must be the sacrifice - an ever-dwindling of “I” in fact, if I will know Beauty fully, “even as I am fully known”.