The priest had a suggestion, prayer to be offered with local aim.

Traveling over the weekend, I went to a church in a small community whose boundaries on every side touched farm fields. Most of the worshippers depended on those fields, in some part, for their livelihoods.

Within a mile of any direction of the service, corn stood knee-high and deeply green. Other fields had gone a flaxen shade, a wheat crop awaiting harvest. Soybean planting would follow close behind.

A wet spring in the lower ground had stalled some of the sowing, and a drive along the rural two-lanes showed the weekend provided no rest for farmers running behind.

So the priest, having dispensed with other business, had as parting words a request that God’s grace extend to the farmers, that they might get a few days of clear skies so their work could proceed.

I found it a comforting notion, that a small town so dependent on a single industry would summon the faith of its citizens in a call for assistance.

Maybe such a call goes out in Detroit for the recovery of the auto industry or along the Gulf Coast as the shrimp boats sail out.

I don’t know about that, but I live in farm country, and the solidarity of good thoughts has every chance at success.

Sunday night brought me home to St. Joseph through stormy skies, and I should have recognized the foreboding.

Newspapers that awaited my return had word of another City Hall rumpus, a finger-wagging, dirt-stirring, stink-eye-casting argle-bargle that makes the term “deliberative body” seem erroneously modified.

The germ of this dispute grew from an earlier rejection of federal stimulus dollars. The viral extension of this arrived with a familiar cycle of fever (target-specific profanity) and healing (a heavily equivocated apology).

A couple of years ago, the City Council took training in how to get along. It didn’t take.

Mayor Ken Shearin took issue with City Manager Vince Capell’s account of the earlier stimulus money vote. This journal’s Clinton Thomas reported that the mayor said, “I think you’re so full of (expletive) your eyes are brown.”

Finding a silver lining in this acid exchange, the community rests easy knowing the mayor holds license as neither optometrist nor gastro-intestinal specialist.

This City Council is like a pimple, a facial flair-up followed by embarrassing moments. Not even Sam’s Club carries Clearasil in civic size.

The United States has its red state-blue state debates. They never seem of the agree-to-disagree sort. Instead, they reflect an irresolvable divide, and they cultivate invective.

An informed back-and-forth gets no traction. Only the nuclear option works.

In our own city, divisions come in the extra-large pack, almost festive in their vitriol. St. Joseph saw it in the school votes in April. There were honest and intellectual differences of opinion, to be sure. But an indisputable sub-stratum existed, one with no interest in common ground.

While the extremes of municipal government took shape last week and disgusted some citizens, others cheered the chaos.

A prayer of our own, then: Please, never burden this city with people who agree on everything. At least supply the hope, though, that good can come from civil souls.

Ken Newton’s columns run on Tuesday and Sunday.