A Calling Toward Humility
A Review of
The Art of Being a Creature: Meditations on Humus and Humility
Ragan Sutterfield
Paperback: Cascade Books, 2024
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Reviewed by Christian Lingner
In his spiritual classic, Beginning to Pray, Anthony Bloom writes that “Humility is the situation of the earth.” According to Bloom, we are to be like the dirt beneath our feet–“always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone”–and always seeking to transform refuse into richness, regardless of whether our quiet faithfulness is remarked upon or admired by others.
Expecting little else than a book-length elaboration on Bloom’s theme, I was a bit surprised to find that The Art of Being a Creature, the latest offering by pastor and permaculturist Ragan Sutterfield, is, at bottom, hardly a devotional work at all. These forty-two “meditations on humus and humility” certainly have much to offer readers by way of spiritual and ecological wisdom, but the aim of this work seems to lie elsewhere–namely, in reawakening us to a biblical notion of justice, which is righteousness, or right relationship, with both Creator and creation. For Sutterfield, spirituality is never an end in itself, but a beginning. We must be sanctified by imitating the earth in order that the earth and all its creatures may benefit.
For Sutterfield, the problem with today’s world is that we, as humans, have forgotten that we are creatures–creatures called to be keepers of God’s garden. In the 21st century, our tendency is to act as if we are gods, denying our creaturehood through repeated attempts at self-definition and environmental control. However, this technological pursuit of mastery over the earth and our fellow creatures comes at a great cost: When we trade self-control for control over the god-given world, we soon come to resemble animals more than humans, and our fellow creatures–as well as the earth beneath our feet–are those who bear the brunt of our barbarity.
It’s hardly a surprise that Sutterfield traces human hubris back to the early chapters of Genesis, though his interpretation of those chapters is anything but conventional. Whereas most accounts of human fallenness center on Adam and Eve’s disobedience, for Sutterfield’s purposes, Cain is the real villain of the story–not so much due to his jealous murder of Abel, but, surprisingly, because of his farming. God accepted Abel’s sacrifice because he is a keeper, or servant, of his flock, whereas Cain seeks mastery over creation with his farming, and therefore, deserves God’s rejection of his offering. So Cain kills Abel–another flailing attempt at control–and then builds a city within which he can be safely sequestered from God’s given world: “Cain, tiller and worker of the ground, who refused to understand his vocation as service and denied his call to keep, now becomes the inventor, the creator, the builder” (29).
Clearly, the implications of this interpretation are radical and enormous–especially, the implication that civilization, with its arts, agriculture, and technology, is little more than a manifestation of the perverse human desire for control over the earth. Sutterfield goes so far as quoting Ernst Becker when he claims that “all culture, all man’s creative lifeways, are in some basic part of them a fabricated protest against natural reality” before ensuring readers that Jesus came to show us another way of fearless, humble living: “In him we find not a liberation from the shit of the earth, but a path of humility through which we discover that shit is holy and so are we” (80).
There is little doubt that Sutterfield is right to suggest that our attempted mastery over creation has been carried too far. Likewise, we have little reason to argue with his contention that Jesus calls us to a life of real vulnerability, and probably for most of us, a far greater level of felt vulnerability than we now experience. Yet Sutterfield’s seemingly unqualified critique of culture may leave other readers, as it left me, wondering what kind of ideal world our author is actually envisioning. Unfortunately, it is difficult to piece together a coherent practical vision from across these suggestive but often shifty meditations.
At times, Sutterfield’s theology is similarly murky. In one chapter, he recounts a story from his farming days, when, while walking through a pasture, he encountered the decaying corpse of a ewe. Rather than mourning the death of a fellow creature, Sutterfield was so struck by the beauty of the “orange and black barrion beetles, flies of iridescent green, and maggots busting from around the eyes” that he began to wonder whether death may have a place in paradise (54). Acknowledging that these speculations would have little place in the Christianity of his upbringing, which “saw death as something to overcome,” he indulges them nonetheless: “[S]eeing the ewe, I couldn’t help but wonder, what if death is a part of paradise? What if it is one of the essential realities and gifts of being a creature?” (54) These rhetorical questions couldn’t but lead me to wonder what Sutterfield makes of the biblical language surrounding Jesus’s defeat of death–yet he is ambiguous on matters of soteriology as well. Addressing St. Athanasius’s revered maxim that “God became man that man might become God,” Sutterfield wonders, “[W]hat if it is more than that? What if the truth is that God became human so that humans could become creatures once more, reminded by Jesus of what it means to be connected to the flow of life?” (88) It’s hard not to wonder whether St. Athanasius also belongs to a school of theology from which Sutterfield has distanced himself.
Still, these reservations, while significant, do not altogether invalidate Sutterfield’s most fundamental point, which lies in his insistence that there is an essential connection between Christ’s call to humble holiness and Adam and Eve’s vocation to “serve and preserve” the earth. We, as creatures and Christians, are not called to humble obedience just so we can escape to heaven when we die, but also so that we can act as Jesus’s hands and feet on this side of heaven. I look forward to a future work in which Sutterfield outlines his practical and theological vision at greater depth, and with greater clarity.
Christian Lingner
Christian Lingner is a poet, songwriter, and teacher living in Nashville, TN. He is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St. Thomas-Houston.
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