Care and Repair:
A Lenten Faith and Practice for 2025
By Evan Clendenin
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” book cover.
Over the years I’ve gotten more into the habit of tool care. Every year as gardening season approaches, I take a courageous look at my garden and workshop tools, and the ways I’ve failed to care for them.
I’ve even made tool care a ritual, reviving in my life a ritual of PA Dutch country for fat Tuesday. Along with enjoying a grease-fried doughnut and hot cup of coffee that day before the beginning of Lent, I go through the soul-effort of collecting up my tools, assessing condition, cleaning, repairing, sharpening blades, greasing wood handles.
It’s a soul effort, because the tools may testify against me of my little hurries, half-done tasks, inattentions, and plain lack of care. They may occasion a delightful memory of pruning fruit trees, or a conversation with a family member or co-worker as we pressed on at a repetitive task on the farm. It’s a soul effort, a turning around, teshuvah, to attend to the care of tools. It becomes a moment of gratitude and trust. And the tools last longer.
At Garfield Community Farm, the staff have begun an effort to better organize and care for their tools. In the various places we work, attention to care, repair and maintenance are part of the good we undertake. Sometimes we let these tasks slide.
They don’t always beckon with urgency. There is much unhurried, according to schedule and agreed custom, a little bit boring. In such tasks we may face the prospect of silence with heart, mind and body, while our hands work at something knotty, that can’t always be sorted or solved quickly. But sharp tools, properly greased fittings, smooth handles, and other well-cared for things mean that work can be done with less effort, more safety and less harm for the workers, and the satisfactory sense of skill exercised and gained.
The time devoted to such tasks can be the little stillpoints in a day, and a year, a little lull, or a light and easy task. The stillpoints puncture the grand designs and unreasonable expectations of our schedules with the offer to ‘be here now.’
By doing so we can live in ways that counter and transform our wasteful culture. We resolve personally to take good care of material things. We re-orient and persist in concerted social efforts to care, repair, maintenance our homes, industries, tools, institutions, agreements, convenants, truths, agricultural and wild lands, and the other forms of life we depend upon.
Gardeners, smallholders, workers of all kinds undertake daily effort to prepare their tools and themselves for good work. Farmers who tend big acreages invest weeks and months in the repair and maintenance of equipment and various infrastructure to prepare for planting and harvest. And they depend upon workers, traditions, schedules, and also contractually-promised funding from banks and the Federal government in order to do so. And we depend upon them receiving these things.
Care and repair. Let nothing-personal demand, urgency, threat, fear-obstruct you from such important deeds. Small steps of care and repair confer a deeper capacity of soul and strength to meet the reality with truthfulness and compassion. In tool care, we practice a caring regard for reality.
A caring regard for reality translates into an unswerving willingness to turn again and behold the moral and spiritual worth of God and your neighbor. We fail, but we keep in the way of this moral purpose and vision. It means caring regard for human beings, and for the forms of life that make our lives and enterprises and associations possible. It means caring regard before the reality of the infinite creatures of land and earth, of sun, moon, stars, of birds, insects, death, and life. And it even means regard for tools and other things formed of earthly matter, forms generated by human hands, hearts, wisdom, forms generated within the Word and Wisdom of God.
It means receiving into our being the caring regard of God for us, and living ever more into and from that truthful and compassionate seeing us good and very good.
The church season of Lent offers us grace through a time on earth during which we may renew our caring and truthful regard for reality. From this can flow a desire for repentance, and healing impulses toward repair. We might find an new flowing of gratitude poured out in our hearts, and live more and more out of it. A season of renewed caring regard for reality renews our acquaintance with the ground of our being, gets us ground-ed.
Being so ground-ed, we gain humility, a knowledge and willingness to live with the limits, gifts and true shape of who we are and what we are part of. The grace of such a season instills caring regard for reality-for God, the gift of everyday life, for those near us along with ourselves.
And we practice such a season of grace and repentance by everyday deeds of care, maintenance and repair. Getting out for a daily walk. Cleaning that closet where you shove problems. Scheduling a medical appointment, (if you can afford it!) Calling someone with whom you have experienced hurt, and listening well, speaking truthfully with love.
Or, caring for your garden tools.
By such attention and efforts of care, repair, maintenance, building, tending,-we contend against the vice and sin manifest in an opposing attitude, contempt for reality.
Right now, you may feel anxiety, fear, isolation, betrayal, and anger at seeing contempt of the rich and powerful who has grasped the executive branch of the US government in ways far exceeding what is just and right or consitutionally agreed. They demonstrate contempt for reality-for laws, institutions, public good, global ethics, land and water, agreements, and everyday people. They are deeply wounded persons, serial abusers of various sorts, in bondage to sin of contempt for reality. They violate americans and the world, grasping at our common heritage and our public goods.
(And we ourselves, of various political stripes, in our recent cultural celebration of such unthinking tropes as ‘move fast and break things,’ and status as ‘disruptors’ have some self-examination to do too.)
They attack government programs, workers and capacity, a vision of trust and responsibility, and indeed the values of care and repair that guide these, however imperfectly. Public health, education, science, ecological conservation, veteran’s benefits, weather monitoring, travel safety, massive and careful re-investment in housing, energy, inudstrial capacity, social safety net programs you working people paid into, like medicare, medicaid and social security. There are many stories you could tell of the people all over harmed by these actions.
What have you heard? What have you seen?
Among these, we hear from midwest farmers trying to repair and maintain the tools they use to grow the food we and the world eat. Large investments in the public good, land conservation, addressing climate change, and improving the farmer’s own prospects had been carefully negotiated in the Inflation Reduction Act. Those funds were promised and contractually obligated to help farmers build new water and irrigation systems, invest in no-till and cover-crop farming systems and equipment, and more. They have been denied the money due them for work of care, repair, maintenance, investment.
How many everday people have been impacted just recently by this violation and attempt to confuse, divide and ‘put them [us!] in trauma’?
We could recount a long history of contempt by some of the rich and powerful for the vision and promise hidden within our nation- that of realizing human dignity, freedom and equality in an unfinished democratic project that desires to aid the life of all dwelling here.
In the past 50 years, we met contempt for the reality of people, earth, institutions, public good, and the prospect of a humane life in the concerted effort of business to pursue de-industrialization. What we experience now might be understood as the outcome of 50 years of such contempt. They pursued a profit strategy of convincing people that government is the problem, evading taxation, environmental regulations and clean-up costs, breaking unions, exporting jobs, disrupting a diversity of communities, and very notably, choosing to not invest in the repair, maintenance and re-newal of industrial capacities.
That is to say, by not taking care of tools!
This winter, this spring…this season of Lent… and the Easter season of Re-newed Life…
We call you to to turn from contempt and toward caring regard for reality.
We call you to turn with courage to the contempt you carry. Whether you see others or yourself that way, may the caring regard of God gaze upon you with grace, truth and compassion. May it pierce your heart, change you, heal you, care for and repair, renew you.
You can do so in smaller everyday ways by taking up acts of care and repair. You can sharpen, grease and repair tools. You can be better prepared for one task, while pruning away others. You might patch some clothing, rendering it more beautiful in the process. And in your prayer you might wonder what work of repair and beauty like it might God be doing within and around you? You might consider that one person you know with whom you might attempt to repair something broken, frayed, or estranged.
If appropriate, you can ask for forgiveness, offer words of gratitude, make an offering of reparation. Or start by extending truthful and caring regard.
And with others we can make the great soul effort of caring regard for reality. For lands and their creatures, for working people, and the good of work done well, and the tools needed to do it. Regard for the grounds of our being found in many and diverse forms of life upon which we depend, and which require care: habitats, languages, institutions, associations, tools, public resources, close to home care and mutual aid, common goods. Truthful words, and the courage to make life good for others and ourselves.
May you receive courage and persistence,
in the face of contempt, and human destructiveness,
to care, repair, maintain and renew what is
good on this good earth,
and, made in the image of God,
destined to grow into the divine life and likeness,
to live with your whole being
in caring and truthful regard.
