Seamus Heaney's "Digging" and Vocation as Cultivation

Greystone Conversations

Scripture regularly deploys the imagery of agriculture and farming to describe the nature and dynamics of human faithfulness--or the lack thereof. While many might be inclined to explain away the agrarian assumptions of biblical teaching on vocation and human meaning as mere metaphors, others might be equally tempted to confuse the biblical direction of argument with a clear warrant for farming as the highest human calling. The truth, though, is somewhere in the middle, and its appreciation may go a long way toward our urgently needed recovery of the integrity and value of good work, the long view of personal, communal, and churchly formation, and the dispositional aspects of relating properly to tradition on the one hand and the present on the other.

In 1995, poet Seamus Heaney of Northern Ireland received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Probably best known to the wider public for his translation of Beowulf, Heaney, who died in 2013, is easily among the most well-received and respected of 20th century poets. “Digging,” which opens his debut 1966 collection of poems, may be his best-known poem. In “Digging,” Heaney characterizes his vocation as a writer with the imagery of a farmer working the potato field. Heaney betrays a special fondness and respect for farming and for the land, not least because the potato field encloses within itself the lives and stories of his farming father and grandfather before him. That same special fondness, however, introduces possible tension, as his own apparently non-farming vocation as a writer suggests that their hard-won legacy may be broken by his craft. Or is it?

The following lecture is selected from the Greystone full course module, The Order of Reality, and is drawn from the concluding series of lectures in that module which focused on the concept of vocation. The full course module will soon be available at Greystone Connect, but we are happy to provide it to the public today in the hope and prayer that it might encourage our listeners in the value, integrity, and meaningfulness of what may at times seem quite mundane and ordinary in the daily grind of modern life. At the least, we pray it will be of some interest to you in a way that leads you pick up some excellent poems, perhaps Heaney’s in particular, and sit back and reflect on things. Among the highest virtues of poetry is also a reason they are so rarely enjoyed in our day: they force us to slow down, think, follow, work, and only then enjoy the rewards.
Seamus Heaney reading "Digging"