Field Meds: Meditations on the Field

Chapter One – The Soul of the Caretaker

Imagine sitting on a meditation stool at the corner of a vast field looking over the expanse in front of you. You have a metal bucket full of dry seeds at your feet, and you think, It would be a miracle if I could fill this field with living, vibrant, amazing plants.

This is an illustration of our lives, our souls, and all the natural resources God has given to us—the seeds in our bucket and the environment and soil to allow them to grow. Our lives are like the field, full of opportunity— opportunity for growth but also opportunity for the field to go to seed. We can see from surveying our land what crops could grow best in what areas. Developing the eye of the gardener or caretaker is of great value.

In spiritual terms, it strikes deeper. The Holy Spirit living within us becomes our eye, our insight into our field. How can we become the most productive, growing amid natural processes that are impediments to desired growth? As in farming, the caretaker must deal with pests, creatures, and drought. But all this can be managed. Effective caretaking requires intentional actions, cooperating with nature as well as fighting against it. As any organic farmer will tell you, by doing both, you are creating the balance that the earth desires. As practicing Christians, we also need to balance our spiritual and worldly natures. The intentional caretaking that is lacking in most of our lives is meditation.

How to Effectively Approach Christian Meditation: A disciplinary practice in most Eastern approaches to meditation requires every practitioner to have a teacher or mentor. Although mainstream Christianity often uses the synonym discipleship, it is not necessarily the same deep relationship that Eastern practices exhibit in the master and student roles. I would suggest that we increase this practice in our Christian disciplines, leading to growth and accountability that will strengthen the body of Christ and our own godly values and effectiveness. The collaboration that develops in a key relationship between the teacher and the student is one that strengthens the body of Christ through a trust bond, and it allows for the motivation, accountability, and practice of faith disciplines that enhance our inner lives. If you are not yet in a growing community of fellow Christians who desire to follow God’s will for their lives, please consider joining such a group, often in the form of churches or small groups whose focus is to allow for optimum spiritual practice and growth through this discipleship or mentorship concept. If you take this journey with me, I ask that you enter the student role as a reader and thinker. In so doing, the thoughtful reading and practice of this book will be our disciplined approach to meditation.

As a young Christian boy, I was struck by one parable taught by Jesus. I thought about it more and more as I matured. I am happy to have been motivated by this very small lesson and to turn it into a book-size motivation for Christian meditation. I’ve been practicing these lessons, spawned by this short story, for the past couple of decades, and I’ve only just begun to understand how much work and reward there is within it.

The parable is this: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field” (Matthew 13:44 New International Version, or NIV). The treasure found in the field is of great importance. It is both the motivation and the resource, and it naturally creates action— motivation, as seen in the parable itself, to sell everything to buy the field. Resource, as the key ingredient of worth, perpetually adds value, limitless value, making it so worthy of the description “treasure.” As I develop my skill to actively practice meditation, it will enable the opportunity for a successful growth pattern in my spiritual life, in tribute to this value.

The content of the parable is simple and brief. I will intentionally magnify the content to put into place a structure to envision and carry out a spiritually significant parallel by use of physical illustration. Effectively, the worker, who was assigned his day’s labor (to caretake the field), has a paradigm shift of what he is being asked to do; he also sees the potential of what he could do if he owned the field. In my theory, the treasure is the content and nature of the field: something that can create, and re-create, given the natural resources within it. It just needs caretaking, which can be done either on a day-by-day paid basis working for an external master or by becoming the master by selling everything one has of value to establish the new value of this treasure as one’s own. There is an assumption, which Jesus embedded in the parable, that this value would not disappoint.