Dear Reader,

Thanksgiving construed as a harvest festival does not hold the immediate relevance for many that it once did.  Biblical parables about farms and fields are in a similar predicament. Currently, just over one percent of employed persons in the United States report their occupation as “farmer”; the first U.S. census in 1790 had that number at ninety percent.  My skills as a data analyst are moderate, but I perceive the trend line to be downward. This growing separation from the land makes it hard for us to grasp the nuance and subtler points of certain agricultural topics.  Still, we all are born of the earth and fed by it, and agrarian symbolism carries something real and personal for even the most distracted city dweller.  One agrarian analogy I’ve been thinking about lately is that of the wheat and the tares.  It seems they both grow up together.

Such co-location makes things tricky.  I am quite prone to note (and point out) that I dislike this or that thing — this movie, that song, this book, that restaurant chain, this corporation, that political movement, this approach to supply chain economics, that immersive virtual unreality program, et cetera.  And by “dislike” here, I more or less mean “disapprove of vehemently because of horrendous potential consequences.”  I am nothing if not thankful for the wheat, but the tares seem to get an inordinate share of my attention. 

The challenge is that the ills are in ample supply all around me, everywhere I turn.  We ought to spot bad things, elucidate them, heal them where we can, fight them where we can’t.  It does not make sense to ignore them, to bury our collective heads in the sand, or wheat field, and pretend the tares don’t exist.  On the other hand, as Thanksgiving approaches, I ponder my blessings and the fact that I want, for myself, my wife, my children, a life of goodness and beauty and truth.  This is not best accomplished by fixating on badness and ugliness and lies.  If all I do is tear up tares, if I never plant anything, the best I’ll achieve is an empty field.

So what to do?  They both grow up together!

I believe the solution is, as usual, found by delving deeper into those nuances and subtler points.  A friend (whose verdant results suggest that he knows) says the best way to keep weeds out of your lawn is to focus on having lots and lots of healthy grass.  It leaves no room, no nutrients for the weeds. I’ve not personally grown any wheat, but it is a card-carrying member of the grass family, so let’s assume the same principle applies.  The wheat and tares do grow up together, and it’s hard to separate them before the harvest, but if we focus on the wheat most of the time there will be fewer tares to worry about — or at least less tendency to be consumed with worry about what tares there are.  We’ll also improve our identification skills; the scriptural word “tares” most likely refers to the plant Lolium temulentum, which looks a lot like wheat.

I think then that I want entirely to fill my home and my life and my children’s lives with beautiful things, with so much good art and good literature and good food and good friends that our minds are formed by little else.  Whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are wheat and not weeds.  Wherever we fall in the census data, farmer or not, these are the seeds we ought to plant, thick and full, with very little space between them.  Our harvest then is rich; its threats are clear, constrained, and conquerable.  And that is something to be grateful for.

Sincerely,