Pagan Blog Project: Jer

The wheel turns
as the sod crunches
frozen beneath the cart.

The wheel turns
as the snow melts
and the plow bites
into the earth’s darkness.

The wheel turns
as the rains come
and light green dusts
the breast of the field.

The wheel turns
and golden stalks wave
in warm, lush winds
under a brilliant sky

The wheel turns
as the scythe whooshes
through the golden stalks
at the time of harvest.

The wheel turns
and time repays you
for the patience you’ve shown
about the seeds you sowed.

– first published in Runes: Theory and Practice, by Galina Krasskova (New Page Books, 2009)

The lesson of Jer is a simple one, but difficult for many of us to appreciate. In this world of immediate downloads, take-out deliveries, unseasonable vegetables and fruits available all year, and other forms of near-instant gratification, waiting for anything seems foreign, even unbearable, to many Westerners. But that’s exactly what Jer teaches us: the importance of waiting for things to come naturally and in their own time, rather than too soon or too late.

I’m reminded of a prayer written by a friend, addressed to Frau Holle: help me remember to execute each task in its time, not my own. If you keep peeking under the lid, the rice won’t get steamed. If you dig up seedlings to look at them, they won’t grow. You have to cultivate patience and forbearance, and control the impulse to satisfy your immediate urges. Look at the way the farmer tends his crops, completing each round of work as it became necessary: plowing, sowing, watering, weeding, harvesting, threshing, preservation and storage. In the end, like him, you are rewarded with the fruits of your labor — literally or metaphorically, depending on the situation.

Sometimes, things do go wrong. Babies are born too early, hail damages the crops, kinfolk die, animals eat up the garden, illness prevents people from working. Shit happens. Circumstances dictate swift action, or conversely, immediate cessation of activity. Just because luck is against you from time to time is no reason to ignore the fact that the wheel does turn, and that the pattern remains the same regardless of where we are in it, versus where we wish we were. If we rush too soon to the harvest, the crops are small and sickly; cattle that are not properly cared for are going to produce weak offspring, and we end up suffering, along with everyone who depends on us, for our presumption and impatience.

For those interested in the pursuit of mystic wisdom, Jer has a good deal of relevance. Nobody gets to be an adept the first day in. You cannot skip the months and years of prayer, work, experience, practice, learning, struggle, and challenge. Jer reminds us that despite how much we long to wield the scythe and show off our harvest, first we must wield the plow and the garden hoe. You cannot bluff buyers at the market by passing off your seeds as full-grown tomatoes, and you cannot bullshit other people by pretending to that which you haven’t rightfully learned or earned. Seedlings do not feed the hungry; only full sheaves of grain can do that.

This was something I had to learn for myself when I initially came into contact with other spiritworkers, Northern Tradition or otherwise. It was hard for me to make the transition from being independent and competent in my theretofore ordinary life to being a rank beginner in the new, spiritually-focused life I found myself living, especially because I was well into my thirties by then. As the call of monastic life was made clearer to me (despite my attempts to resist), I often put pressure on myself to Figure It All Out right away. You can see a bit of that inner struggle in the earliest entries to this blog. But nobody is born an expert in anything, least of all in dealing with the unseen or trying to understand the indescribable. There is no shame in being at the beginning, where one sows the seeds of wisdom at the start, because if you give it your best effort, you’ll eventually come to the harvest, where you can benefit from that which you have worked all year (so to speak) to accomplish. Once I recognized this, my life became significantly less frustrating.

The mystery of Jer is, of course, that the wheel keeps turning over and over — it never ends. After the harvest comes wintertime, and then spring begins and it is time to sow once more. This extends to our spiritual lives as well — even when we achieve wisdom, there is always more to learn. Even when we have mastered the skills we’ve set out to attain, there are always new skills to acquire. Sometimes there isn’t much to do, or nothing seems to progress no matter how hard we try, and things get discouraging. Then one day, the fields are green and lush and trees begin to bear flowers, then fruit. We start to see results, after a great deal of patient toil. Jer can remind us to tend to the important tasks of the moment without worrying that the fallow periods in our spiritual life will last forever. Hundreds of monastics and mystics throughout the centuries have likewise watched this same wheel turn, and learned to appreciate it.

In the end, Jer is the rune that, to me, most encapsulates the struggle of the vocational monk or nun, both on a day-to-day level and as a metaphor of the interior contemplative life in general. Even though that was not its original meaning or intent, I find this interpretation is useful to consider. After all, what’s the use of ancient ways of wisdom if they are not, in some manner, also applicable to our own lives?

(I recommend, once again, Kathleen Norris’s book Acedia, as well as Thomas Merton’s No Man Is An Island. Although both are written from the viewpoint of monastic Christianity, they both have wise things to say to monastics of all faiths about the struggle to truly inhabit the place where we find ourselves now, rather than focus on where we wish we were instead.)