What is a glebe? In what Kingdom do you live?

My poetry (and this blog) is about the modernism of living off the land, its consequences and context. Today's sense of living off the land is ambiguous: do you mean beneficiary of the fruits of the earth or do you mean you live away from the farmland life. I live off the land in both senses.

I coined the compound glebewise to represent the wisdom inherent in learning to live on the land. I was a gardener at the time I coined the word.

The latin word glebe is now archaic language for a clod of earth or land. In medieval times, the word glebe was used to name a landstead dedicated for support of a parish priest including a house in which to live. The glebe of the parish could not be sold or alienated by attachment by any conduct of the parish priest (so creditors beware).

I know the responsibility of the human community is to persist in care for the land. We in the upper Mid-West like to underscore reminders of our earthbound dependency. We maintain the highest regard for the earth on which we are dependent.

In a similar vein, any theology which loses sight of our earthbound condition and therefore the essential materialism of our human condition is suspect for me. Midwesterners like myself typically consider a person of religious convictions is God-fearing. The reason that works is that even though we live in a republic of laws with democractic tendencies, we are personally governed by the rules of the Kingdom of God. As subjects in that Kingdom, we obey the laws of our King. Outside of that Kingdom is darkness and damnation for those without personal accountability.

Personally, my moral conduct is not dependent on whether there is a heaven or a hell, while it is enhanced by the prospect that if there be a God, God is love. We are called to the highest motivations in governing our conduct. The rub is in contemplation of the afterlife. I do not believe I can procure life everlasting by any conduct of mine. I do believe that failure to live my life governed by the rules of love is the same as hell on earth.

Belief in an afterlife of hell for the damned strikes me as a theology of consequence for those over whom a religion does not hold sway (at least and unless there is made an affirmation of the religion in a deathbed confession). There is enough fearful in our condition without terrorizing people with belief in a vengeful god. I persist in saying if there be a heaven or hell in the afterlife, it is the domain and provenance of God and not of humankind if it be so.