To Buy a Field: Unearthing Spiritual Treasure

By Barbara Esch Shisler

To Buy a Fieldunearthing spiritual treasure is a collection of twelve essays that takes a sharp look at ordinary experience through the lens of a Christian spirituality. Chapters on the church, worship, and the Bible are joined by art, family, and the world as the author in journal entries, personal reflection, and insights from literary sources describes spiritual treasure found in every particular of life. She believes Jesus parable in Matthews Gospel that this kingdom of heaven is worth selling everything to find. Ending with suffering, aging, and dying, the book gives readers a lively mix of the serious and silly, ecstatic and grievous, human and divineall gifts of life and grace to the humans God so joyfully created.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781449700591

Barbara Esch Shisler

Religious faith has been a core value as long as the author can remember, leading to her pastor-vocation. Stories and poems, many published in books and periodicals, capture the flow of time. Children and grandchildren also gladden her life. Retired, she lives with her husband in eastern Pennsylvania.

Book preview

The Field

Field seems hardly the word for it,

imaging up green crops, a gold harvest;

here instead a tangle of weeds and rocks,

broken-down fence and scrub cedar,

the sponge of a hidden spring.

At least, crossing it, I’m not hardening

light soil or trampling corn. Whoever

owns it will not mind my passing through.

My passing through becomes a rite—

feet will go this way, wearing a path.

My eyes see more, ears hear, all senses

opening to the life throbbing in this place.

Little gifts come into my hands,

my conscience free as I pick milkweed

and wild carrot, carry home a smooth stone,

even cut a tiny cedar for Christmas.

The field is becoming mine, the rabbits

and birds, companions. As the seasons

come and go, my belonging deepens

until a spring when the truth dawns

like Easter. My life is here.

I must find the owner and pay.

I will cash in all of my scattered assets

to buy this field where my treasure lies.

Dedication

To those innumerable persons who have helped me to experience the treasure and pleasure of the spiritual life—family, friends, mentors, and faith community; those I’ve met only through books, music, or visual art; animals, gardens, lakes, and stars—I thank you.

Most of all, to the God I trust and expect someday to know, even as I am known.

Contents

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field (Matt. 13:44 NRSV).

The Field

Dedication

Introduction

I. Treasure in Solitude: Never Alone

II. Treasure in Worship: Expanded Consciousness

III. Treasure in Scripture: Bread for the Soul

IV. Treasure in the Church: Mud Splendor

V. Treasure in Service: Doing Good Well

VI. Treasure in Nature: The Sacramental Gift

VII. Treasure in the Arts: Creator Connection

VIII. Treasure in Family: Love in the Raw

IX. Treasure in the World: Holy Surprise

X. Treasure in Suffering: Spiral to the Still Point

XI. Treasure in Aging: Abandoning to Freedom

XII. Treasure in Dying: The Great Adventure

Sources

Introduction

When I was young, I had a brief, sharp exchange with my father about dancing.

What’s the purpose of it, anyway? he asked.

Fun, I said, just for fun.

Fun, he almost shouted (he was usually a quiet-spoken man), the Apostle Paul didn’t teach having fun!

It was a well-kept secret from me as I grew up that the spiritual life could be a pleasure. The church taught a rigid separation from the world and the world’s pleasures. Even though in our morning family worship we often sang, His yoke is easy, his burden is light, my parents lived and passed on to me the burdensome yoke as the church taught. It wasn’t until I hit my thirties and a major life crisis that I got desperate enough to set out on a different spiritual path where I discovered pleasure. Not only was Christianity about bearing the cross; working hard at being good; practicing prayer, Bible reading, church attendance, tithing, and church regulations; and struggling with sin, it was even more about grace, forgiveness, freedom, healing, adventure, and joy. Being happy wasn’t important, I was taught, being faithful was. I wouldn’t be able to count the many Sunday School discussions I heard that ended up solemnly restating the fact that we were faithful, not happy. And the difference between joy and happiness is that joy is down in our hearts—deep down—and happiness is merely what shows or doesn’t show in our faces and behavior.

In the many years since the beginning of my discovery of pleasure as a treasure of the spiritual life, I’ve found that the way of my childhood church and parents was also true indeed—true as one part of the reality. The whole of Christian faith was truer when the missing pieces were included.

And so I set down here some places in life as I have lived and observed them, and the flow, back and forth, of these places with the treasure of the spiritual life. My goal is to be whole in body, mind, and spirit, and to see all of life with the eyes of faith. My parents very likely enjoyed their faith experiences in ways I didn’t notice. My father, at ninety-six, had become astonishingly freer and more able to accept new understandings of the Bible and the changes in the church.

I don’t want to write a book burbling and bubbling that the life of a Christian is one glorious balloon ride. We all know it isn’t, and pretending doesn’t make it so. I choose to believe and affirm with the Psalmist (16:11): God, You show me the path of life. In your presence is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

What is the spiritual life as I define it? Simply giving oneself wholly to God and God’s presence in one’s life. If it is as genuinely and fully given as is possible, the journey has begun, the adventure is unfolding, and pleasure seeded into treasure will be springing up like notes of a song just too irresistible not to dance to.

I. Treasure in Solitude:

Never Alone

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Journal: August 11, 2001—"I enjoy being alone in this beautiful, quiet place. I go out to the labyrinth, a large open space surrounded by trees. I begin to walk, knowing how it seems I am heading straight for the center, then completely opposite. I walk slowly. The path has been mowed, but not for a while. There are weeds in places that almost confuse me. I go one way, stop; go the other way. I’ve been meditating on John 15 where Jesus says, ‘I no longer call you a servant but a friend.’ I find myself arguing, But Jesus, I like being your servant. I like doing things for you. Being an ‘instrument’ is a comforting image for me. Are you calling me out of my comfort zone? What would happen to me if I claimed my position as a friend instead of the role of a servant? Would I know more deeply that you love me? If I’m only following orders, I am a passive instrument, which helps keep me from making mistakes. And how I wish to avoid mistakes! This labyrinth reminds me that you want to walk with me. But it is narrow; we cannot walk side by side. So I will follow you. You extend your hand back to me. I take it. This is the way we can walk together. I sing the following song: ‘Follow, follow, I would follow Jesus, everywhere he leads me I would follow on.’ I’m getting nearer and nearer the