The Conversation Between Heaven and Earth

by Mark Kutolowski

The dawn chorus begins before I open my eyes. There are enough songs outside that it’s difficult, with my limited knowledge of bird calls, to distinguish one tune from another. Instead, it’s one layer of melody upon another, seemingly uncoordinated yet somehow harmonious and beautiful to hear. Our home, a 20-foot diameter yurt, offers ample protection from the elements, yet is permeable to the sounds of the land. It’s not so much that I’m dutifully rising today, as that I can’t sleep past the exuberant singing of the winged ones just outside our walls. I open my eyes while still lying in bed – the light of dawn has just begun. I glance at my watch – it’s 5:14 AM. I take a few long breaths, warming up my body, and then pull myself up to sit on the edge of my mat.

‘Oh Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.’ I whisper the opening invocation of our family’s Vigil prayer as I make a small sign of the cross over my lips with my thumb. ‘Oh Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.’ Another sign of the cross. ‘Oh Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.’ I cross my lips a third and final time. Having finished the invocation, it’s time to join my words to the dawn chorus of praise. I crack open a psalter – and begin the soft chant, ‘Oh that today you would listen to his voice, harden not your hearts.’ After the psalm is complete, I sit in silent listening for another 20 minutes. I’m not listening for anything in particular. Rather, it’s a time to be attentive to the silent presence of the Creator of all, who abides within and among all things.

The invocation I opened the day with comes from St. Benedict, 1500 years ago. The psalm might be another 1500 years older than that. The silent presence of God is much older—older than the dawn of time. Later this day, I’ll be immersed in the world of email, reading correspondence from colleagues across the globe on a technology that was scarcely imaginable a generation ago. After the email is done, I’ll be cutting white ash trees along the perimeter of our field. We need the wood, but the reason I’m harvesting ash is to cut these trees before the emerald ash borer can get to them. The borer is an invasive insect that is predicted to wipe out 99% of the ash trees in our region. It arrived in our county a couple of years ago, after riding across the ocean a few decades earlier stowed in the ubiquitous shipping pallets of global trade.

One way I think about life on our homestead is as a series of ongoing conversations. There’s a conversation between the ancient biblical and monastic traditions and our present day life of prayer. There’s a conversation between the wild plants, animals, and fungi that inhabit our land, and the little patch of cultivated land and domestic species that we have introduced and steward. We think about the needs of the humans, the sheep, and the tomatoes, but also the ash, the maples, the porcupines and the morels. There’s also the conversation between the modern world with its high technology, near-instantaneous communication, and rapid change, and the much slower but equally dynamic churning of the natural systems, where the trees are adding growth rings and the topsoil is slowly building when the pasture is managed well.

Surrounding and containing all of these other conversations is the most essential conversation of all – the conversation between heaven and earth. We’ve made a commitment to listen to the silent presence of God, and to keep our hearts open to the level of reality where God is all-in-all. At the same time, we know we can’t remain only in the stillness. To live in this world, we’re also tasked with stewarding the things of earth, whether emails or ash trees, in a way that allows both the human community and the natural world to flourish. For every hour spent in silent prayer, there are several hours spent moving pasture fence, writing essays, cooking, cleaning and changing diapers. Tending to the things of earth is the necessary labor of incarnate life. Tending to the things of heaven is what can fill these labors with spaciousness, love, and a radiant aliveness. I’ve come to understand that we humans are neither animals nor angels, but a dynamic unity of both the material and the spiritual. We are made for both earth and heaven. If this is true, and I deeply believe it is true, how then are we called to live?

Embracing Heaven and Earth

Made of both matter and spirit, one of our major tasks in living a fully human life is to learn to embrace both heaven and earth. We live in an era and in a culture with an excessive focus on the material aspect of life, so much so that many of us even believe that the material world is all there is. Both the excessive consumption and rampant soul-sickness of our society reveal that we’re out of balance. There have been other eras and cultures that have focused excessively on the spiritual realm, denigrating the gift of this life as either a burden or a mere proving ground for the life to come. Ours is an imbalance on the material side of the spectrum, but that does not mean that the answer is to reject matter and fly to the spirit as an escape.

In my own life, I’ve gotten out of balance in both directions. When I become overly focused on the material, I become progressively more anxious and stuck in my thoughts. I’m filled with ambition and agendas, and my life becomes about reshaping my world (things, activities, and relationships) to my liking. When I go to pray, my times of silence are filled with to-do lists. Often, I start to write blog posts or develop cabin designs in my head when I am supposedly praying. There’s never enough time to do all that seems urgent, and I feel I can’t rest until I’ve accomplished my tasks. My happiness becomes dependent on a particular set of conditions in the external world – which means my happiness is fragile and fleeting. In this mindset, the less satisfied I am, the more I am tempted to skip prayer and focus my energies on the ‘real’ work of getting stuff done. The more I give into this temptation, the more true happiness escapes me, and I become trapped in the limited world of form.

In the other direction, I’ve had seasons in life where I’ve been free to spend hours every day in silent prayer. Although prayer is certainly not always peace and stillness, there are times of spiritual contentment and joy that are far beyond anything the material or psychic worlds can provide. The peace, rest, and even bliss I experience in prayer can make the rest of life feel like a mere shadow, an emptiness and an obstacle to the much more important realm of the spirit. In this state, I am severely tempted to linger longer and longer in prayer, and to disengage as much as possible from all external activity and relationships. If I stay in this state for too long, my life begins to unravel in the outer world due to my neglect, which only further increases my sense that the spirit world is superior and more worth my time than the material world. I become trapped in the world of the spirit, unable to be present to the gift of my life in time and space. The spirit becomes a sort of ‘escape’ from the necessary pains and sorrows of life in this world.

Both of these extremes create a psychic split between the worlds of matter and spirit.  Regardless of whether we’re locked into the spiritual or the material side of the equation, we become cut off from the fullness of life. Christian faith declares that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine. If we follow the way of Christ, we’re likewise called to fully embrace both heaven and earth – both the material and the spiritual aspects of reality. It is only when we are fully present to both realms that our lives can begin to resemble the life of Christ, who united both heaven and earth in his own being.

Ora et Labora – Uniting Heaven and Earth in a Way of Life

At our homestead, we use the Benedictine model of ‘Ora et Labora’ (Latin for ‘work and prayer’) as the basic rhythm of our lives. It’s a structure that includes time committed to accessing the spiritual (through prayer) and the material (through manual labor) every day. It’s certainly not the only way to achieve integration between heaven and earth, but for us it has been an incredibly robust, stable foundation in which to live out a life of faith and service.

If the conversation between heaven and earth is at the essence of a fully human life, then the practice of Ora et Labora is a sort of ‘guided conversation’ that sets the parameters ensuring both sides receive due attention. St. Benedict articulates the practice of Ora et Labora in his sixth century guide for monasteries, which he called ‘a rule for beginners.’ We’ve discovered that this is one of the great strengths of the Benedictine way as we’ve adapted it for our homestead. It can be followed by everyone who lives in community here, whether they’re staying for a lifetime or for a two-day retreat. Of course, we’re all beginners on the journey into the infinite love of God, and the ‘one size fits all’ aspect of the rhythm of life also reminds me that I begin again each day, and that I am on an equal footing before God with a guest who just arrived the night before. We’re each invited to be faithful to God and the way of life this day, and we’re each capable of answering that call with a generous heart or turning towards self many times over the course of the day.

What does the rhythm of ‘Ora et Labora’ look like at Metanoia? It’s an evolving rhythm of life, but at present, we hold seven times of prayer each day, and two periods of work. Our communal prayer life consists of a version of the ‘Liturgy of the Hours,’ which is itself a prayer form going back to the early church. We pray:

Vigils: Prayed immediately upon arising. Our vigils are done individually and consist of a simple prayer (described above), followed by 20 minutes of silence.

Lauds: Morning prayer at 7 AM. Prayed in community at our yurt chapel. Lauds consists of a hymn, two scripture readings (from the Catholic daily mass schedule), a chanted psalm, spontaneous prayers of praise, intercession, and petition, 10 minutes of silence and the Lord’s Prayer

Terce: Mid-morning prayer at 10 AM. The first of the ‘little hours’, prayed wherever one is at work, or on the knoll at the top of the property. Terce includes the Beatitudes, 5 minutes of silence and the Lord’s Prayer.

Sext: Mid-day prayer (the second ‘little hour’) between 12 and 12:30. Prayed immediately before or after the big communal meal of the day. We recite the Angelus prayer, 3 minutes of silence and the Lord’s Prayer.

None: Mid-afternoon prayer at 3 PM (the final ‘little hour’). Prayed wherever one is at work, or at the knoll on the top of the property. None includes the Prayer of St. Francis, 5 minutes of silence and the Lord’s Prayer.

Vespers: Evening prayer at 5:30 PM. We pray Vespers either outdoors on the knoll or in the yurt chapel.  It includes a hymn, the day’s Gospel reading (repeated from Lauds), a Taize chant, a selection of spiritual reading (we rotate through a cycle of books – one old male author, one old female author, one modern male author and one modern female author), spontaneous prayers of confession and gratitude, 10 minutes of silence and the Lord’s Prayer.

Compline: Night prayer around 8 PM, prayed in one’s dwelling. We chant compline as a couple after the kids are in bed. It includes a hymn, three chanted psalms, 20 minutes of silence the Lord’s Prayer and a final land blessing.

Taken together, we spend about two hours in prayer each day, with about half of that in silent prayer and the other half in spoken prayer, readings, hymns and chant. As our communal prayer life has developed, we’ve tried to discern what is the quantity of formal prayer that is enough to infuse the rest of daily life with a spirit of prayer and awareness of God’s presence. The foundation of the seven ‘hours’ of prayer interspersed throughout the day, holds this role well. When there are guests here, we’re almost always faithful to the hours. When it’s just our family (or during a big work project with local volunteers) we can easily miss one or more hours during a day – and I usually feel the effects of the absence as the day wears on.

It’s the times when I least feel like praying that the prayer is the most transformative. I believe this is one of the primary benefits of this structured rhythm of prayer. There’s never more than three waking hours between two times of prayer, and it limits how far off I can wander in my own ego and agenda until I’m called back, at least in part, by the structure and discipline of the time of prayer. Left to my own devices, it’s precisely when I’m most off-center that I’m least likely to stop and pray. The rule catches me at my worst and gives me an opportunity to return and open anew to the life-giving Spirit of God.

Equally important to our way of life are the two daily periods of work. On a typical day, the two work periods are from about 8 AM to noon and from 3 PM to 5:30 PM. While there’s inevitably more email, bookkeeping and other computer work than we’d like, we aim for the majority of our work to be physical. The physical labor involves a dynamic relationship with matter, where we’re using our hands to shape the world around us. Much of it is simple, repetitive activity – cooking and cleaning, hauling wood and water, weeding plants, harvesting, mowing and shoveling. These types of work can be quite meditative and offer an opportunity to extend the state of prayerful awareness from the times of prayer into the work with our bodies. Other activities – like construction and landscape planning require active engagement with the mind, yet still offer an opportunity to shape the physical world as an expression of the care and love we encounter in prayer.

Ideally, our times of work are an expression of the divine love we receive and are blessed by in prayer. They are the living out of the prayer ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ We’re not trying to fix a broken world, much less build some kind of utopia. What we are trying to do is express in our daily labors the spirit of love we open to during the times of prayer. The work is an outpouring and outward expression of the inward reality of prayer. The work is always unfinished. Give me a pencil, paper and five minutes and I can easily write out a to-do list for the homestead that would take me ten years to complete. However, our goal is to labor in love here and now, not to ‘get there’ to some future state where we’ve created our ideal world.

Another gift of work in our homesteading context is the intimacy it provides us with the real conditions of our earthly existence. We don’t grow all of our own food, but we do grow a good portion of it. When I eat a squash from the garden, meat from a lamb we’ve raised or lobster mushrooms Lisa’s gathered from the wild, I’m naturally and easily filled with gratitude. The gratitude is matched with a real understanding of the life of the creatures I’m consuming and the sacrifice they made so that I might live. When I enjoy a cup of coffee or a banana that came from across the globe, I still give thanks – but the thanksgiving is a much more mental and abstract exercise. By significantly unplugging from the consumer economy and producing many of our basic needs through our work, we’re more naturally led to a state of gratitude. Along with this gratitude is a sense of belonging. We come to feel that we are a part of this landscape, and that it is a part of us. As we continue to eat more from this land, our muscles and bones are literally made up of the substance of this earth, passed through the bodies of the plants, animals, and fungi we grow and harvest from the wild.

We All Have a Structure of Life

The significant majority of Christians over the past two millennia have had little choice over the basic structure of their lives. In the late Roman Empire, most Christians were enslaved people, with their lives dictated by the demands of their masters. In the Middle Ages in Europe, most Christians were peasants whose lives were dictated by their feudal lords and the cycles of the agrarian year. Today, two-thirds of all Christians live in Africa, South America, and Asia. Most are poor, and many have little choice of what they do with their days living on a plantation or laboring in the only factory in their village, caught up in the gears of the global economy. Closer to home, many poor and working class Americans are trapped in survival mode, working multiple jobs with no space to consider major change. Among the college educated, Lisa and I have both met many young adults who would love to live radical and generous lives, but whose life options are strongly curtailed by crippling college debt.  For the majority of Christians throughout history, there has been little real choice of what to do with their lives. To live in Christ within these conditions, the critical question becomes how one lives in the midst of a structure that is outside of one’s control. There are countless enslaved people and peasants who have become saints through passionately loving God and neighbor in the midst of incredibly challenging circumstances. When I think about the question of ‘how are we called to live?’ I want to always keep in mind this forgotten majority of the Christian community. They are the true face of Christianity, both throughout history and in our time.

But what of the minority of us who are living in conditions of relative freedom and agency? How are we called to live? I think the first step is becoming conscious of the current state of our life. As humans bound in time and space, we all have a certain structure to our lives and rhythm to our days. In a capitalist society such as our own, the cultural default is a way of life defined by one’s job, income, and purchasing power. In this system, production and efficiency are central, and work for the love of creative engagement with matter is either secondary or not present. Prayer and the spiritual life, if they are pursued at all, are expected to be politely followed in the spare time left over after the ‘real’ productive activity has been accomplished. It’s no wonder that faith and spiritual awareness live on the margins of our culture. The structure of our days virtually ensures that they remain there. This in not to say that one can’t live a full, vibrant life of prayer while holding down a career or a 40+ hour per week job. Many do. But the structure of our society establishes work and income as king, and the spiritual life as optional. At best, prayer is granted space to fit in around the edges of our collective cultural awareness.

For those of us with the freedom to structure our lives differently, there is tremendous spiritual benefit to breaking from the cultural norms of our capitalist culture. There are countless different ways life can be structured, and the structure of our days has an enormous influence on what grows and what diminishes in our conscious awareness over time. If we want to have an intimate relationship with nature, we must structure our life in a way that we have regular, sustained contact with the natural world. The more movies, TV shows and sporting events we watch, the more knowledge of these fantasy worlds we will acquire, and the more we’ll think and reflect on them throughout our days and weeks. If our lives lack regular times of stillness, it’s almost a certainty that we will have difficulty accessing the still, small voice within. What we feed, grows. What we starve, diminishes. How we structure our days determines, to a large extent, what we feed and what we starve. If we want to know God, we must structure our life around this intention.

By living out a lay expression of the Rule of St. Benedict, Lisa and I have created a conscious structure of work and prayer (and study) to orient our days at the Metanoia homestead. Our intention has been to develop a structure where prayer is central, and where there is a dynamic exchange between heaven and earth in our lives and the lives of all who dwell here. It is certainly not the only way to follow Christ. There are countless other expressions that a life structured around intimacy with God might take. It is one way, and we’ve found that we grow in wholeness and intimacy with Christ, the land, and one another with each passing year that we are faithful to this way of life.

For those of us seeking to follow the Way of Christ, perhaps the pertinent questions are:

1.) Are we conscious of the structure of our days?

2.) Who or what is being served by this structure?

3.) If we have the freedom and ability to choose, how might we build our structure of life around the Way of Christ, and intimacy with God, nature and others?

I invite your thoughts in the comments!

A warm welcome to the many new subscribers we’ve received since the last post. Many of you have discovered our Metanoia writings through Paul Kingsnorth’s reference on his deeply insightful Substack, The Abbey of Misrule. I read (and recommend!) Paul’s masterful essays to learn from his understanding of how our world has gone astray. While we occasionally write cultural analysis on this Substack, our primary focus with Metanoia is an exploration of how to live out a path of wholeness and new life in the midst of our troubled world. It ends up being a smaller, more particular and more practice-focused inquiry. We hope our journey with Christ and the land can be of support and encouragement to others seeking the fullness of life. Welcome aboard!

To all our subscribers—it’s been about six weeks since I last wrote. Spring is always one of the busiest times on the homestead, and this year is no exception. As we turn towards summer, our plan is to continue with a series of essays on our way of life, including this one. My hunch is the more practical focus of this series will be easier to write in the midst of the busy growing season. However, speaking of growing things, our second child is due any day now. Please keep us in prayer, and I’m not going to promise a date for the next essay!