As a boy I learned a lot from old Jimmy Welsh. (back row, centre) He was the stableman who looked after the last two Clydesdale horses on the farm, ploughman, fencer, dyke builder, ditch digger and all round one-man farm maintenance squad.
One day, I must have been about 7, I was standing watching him clearing the drains around the dung midden where the farm stored all that stuff later called more politely, farmyard manure. It was dirty work, which is about as descriptively inadequate as I can make understatement sound.
Up to his ankles in slurry, using draining rods and a shovel, he just got on with it. At one point as the gurgling from the drain signalled success, he stood up, pushed his bunnet back and said something I'd heard him say before, and would hear often enough again. "Aye Jim, hard work's no' easy."
Two things about Jimmy Welsh. First, this gruff friendly giant, six foot of lean, weathered can-do and know-how, was kind and patient enough to let me go with him when he was working down the fields, up the woods, in the byre, barn or wherever his particular set of skills were needed. Second, the first bike I ever rode on my own was his huge framed bone shaker, which I could only ride by putting my leg through the frame, under the bar! That's another story, which ended remarkably well, given I still cycle so many decades later, in decent weather.
"Hard work's no easy." Jimmy Welsh could have written some of the shorter ripostes in the Book of Proverbs. Whether clearing midden drains, grooming a Clydesdale horse, repairing a drystane dyke, ploughing long straight furrows by the score, scything the edges of the cornfield after the binder had passed, Jimmy worked with an economy and efficiency that impresses me to this day. He got the job done. What we now call 'challenges' he took as part of the job. Patience wasn't so much a virtue as the word used to describe the determination of someone whose job was to repair this particular part of the world, and to take great satisfaction in doing it.
So what's the connection between Jimmy Welsh and a post which has Karl Barth in the title. This at least. Reading Karl Barth is hard work, and "hard work's no' easy." But like Jimmy Welsh's never-ending maintenance work around the farm, reading Karl Barth has that same mixture of tasks and demands, of challenge and achievement.
And yes, there are times when it's really hard going. Like when I have to wade through dense pages of smaller print, with long interminable sentences and names I've never heard of and may never again. It helps to think of the tolerance and kindness of Jimmy Welsh, and hear him saying, as a truth that is better accepted than resented, "Hard work's no easy."
So I read on.
Here is Barth in full flow on the grace of God.
"The only answer to Χάρις is εὐχαριστία. But how can it be doubted for a moment that this is asked of [each person.] Χάρις always demands the answer of εὐχαριστία. Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like a voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning. Not by virtue of any necessity in the concepts as such. But we are speaking of the grace of the God who is God for man, and the gratitude of man as his response to this grace." (CD IV.1, 41)
(The photo is of Emil Brunner and Karl Barth. Barth's controversy with Brunner was a painful episode, and an unnecessary breach of friendship. That Barth wrote a conciliatory note on hearing of Brunner's impending death was an act too little celebrated. The story of that is for another time.)
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