A child said “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
A few years back there was a trend in this country of grocers selling ‘corn-fed beef’ as a premium item. A couple high-end retail outlets sprang up to distribute this supposedly superior meat to those willing to pay for it. While corn-fed beef is still available and quite prevalent in many supermarkets it is no longer as prized as it once was and now ‘grass-fed beef’ is considered the preferred choice. Why did this trend shift? The answer is surprisingly simple:
Have you ever seen a cow shuck corn?
The answer is obviously ‘No,’ because cows aren’t naturally designed to eat corn. Cows are designed to eat grass. Corn actually makes cows sick and feedlots compensate by giving their cows antibiotics and other drugs. The organic food movement has brought attention to the negative effects that our attempts at “improving” much of our food have had on our health and the health of our environment. In our struggle to find a better cow feed we overlooked the solution that was right under our feet: grass.
In the 1300s a Franciscan friar by the name of William of Ockham proposed that the simplest solution is usually the best one. Scientists refer to this as Ockham’s Razor. We humans have a tendency to complicate things more than necessary: not just with our food, but in our daily life and work. We make our lives harder than they need to be. Maybe we are restless or ambitious; maybe we are so distracted by our own complex lives that we fail to see the beauty in simplicity. Humans are extremely smart, and yet we constantly find ourselves outwitted by nature.
Manhattan is a complex world of new experiences and pleasures and one can find just about every conceivable sort of entertainment on that island, but pick any sunny June day and what do you find hundreds of thousands of New York City residents looking for?: a patch of grass. Whether it’s the Sheep Meadow in Central Park or the Christopher Street Pier, people flock to find a temporary spot on the grass. We may not always think about it, but it is amazing how restorative living grass can be when we spend so much of our lives on dead concrete.
Walt Whitman was fascinated with grass. He looked at grass and saw not just a simple plant, but a sign that the earth was alive. In his poem “Song of Myself” Walt writes:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there really is no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
This summer as we are moving the lawn, sunbathing, playing sports or picnicking, may we see beneath our feet a sign of our world’s life and our creator’s power…and may we be fed by it.
Blessings,
Fr. Kevin
