Local Food and Sustainable Religion

I'm not what you might call "self-motivated." I often need external prompts to keep me going on my more mundane projects. One of those projects is gardening.

So every year now (for the second year in a row!) I'm reading a book that relates in some way to the growing of food. Last year was Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a gift from one of my hippie author friends, who noticed that I had read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (a gift from another of my hippie author friends) and assumed that I must be a hippie foodie. I'm not, but the book was great.

This year's entry is Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, by Craig L. Goodwin. I met Craig at the Inhabit Conference last year, an event sponsored by the Parish Collective, a network of mostly urban and suburban hippies who want their religious life to be homegrown, organic and slow. It's a great event, if you're into that sort of thing.

Craig's family spent a year living locally, and facing up to all the implications of that. They went in fairly ignorant (less ignorant, I suspect, than he likes to suggest in the book, but by no means were they stealth hippies engaging in fraudulent life experiments), and dealt with the surprises as they came. I'm now at the point where the family is running out of staples, like flour, and running in search of homegrown replacements.

The family visits any number of processing plants with very little luck, until one food industry representative directs them to a "recovering conventional farmer." Fred proves to be a good match for Craig's "recovering conventional consumer"; I suspect I'll hear more from Fred as I continue to read. Anyway, Fred turns Craig on not only to local sources of flour but to the ecological logic of what has become, after a century or two of industrial progress, unconventional farming. Show concern for the sustainability of topsoil, Fred suggests, and your land will not dry up. I found this interesting: "The richness of the tropical rainforest is in the way it recycles the nutrients"--the interdependency of the soil and the plants growing in it. "Once the native vegetation disappears, so does the productive capacity of the soil." Deforestation in the Amazon, for example, won't result in more land for agricultural use; it'll result in more useless land and a starker, less stable environment.

The kicker of chapter five, for me, was the surprise twist at the end, in which Craig steps way back from his search for flour and sugar and cheese, and reflects on the parallels between environmental responsibility and congregational life. He's a pastor, so he thinks that way, but I found his insight to be quite compelling, and fertile ground for the church's ongoing reformation. Here's what he wrote:

I am learning that what farmers like Fred are doing agriculturally, I need to do theologically and pastorally in the church. Like farmers, our lives have become disintegrated and fragmented by rapid cultural and technological change. Maybe we've imagined the whole world as little more than a medium for growing souls, pushing and pushing until we erode the fertile topsoil that's essential to our faith--justice, goodness, mercy, compassion. Imagine what might change if we thought of the earth and everything in it as part of God's redemptive plan, as an integrated process of life breaking out "on earth as it is in heaven." Maybe even our stop at the dairy aisle and our choice of flour could be fertile ground for faithfulness.

An Anchor of Time: The Letter from Birmingham Jail, 50 Years Later

Everybody wants to be on Martin Luther King's side, but no one wants to cross the street.

Back in college one of my professors suggested that, while it was appropriate to date time from the birth of Christ, given the historical and cultural significance of that moment, the time had come to mark time differently. He proposed August 6, 1945, the day on which the U.S. government dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and ushered in the nuclear age. That day changed history, he argued, and he was right.

But the interesting thing to me about how we mark time now--according to the birth of Christ--is how unremarkable that day was to the people who were living it. It's only through the lens of history that we came to recognize its significance, only in retrospect that we know how profoundly that day changed history.

So, if my professor is right and the time has come to re-mark time, I think we ought to look for something more subtle than a nuclear explosion. I might propose April 16, 1963.

April 16, 1963, is the day Martin Luther King Jr. began writing his letter to white clergy, on the occasion of his arrest and imprisonment in Birmingham, Alabama, for "parading without a permit" in an effort to end legal segregation in that city. He wrote in response to an editorial, written by various white clergy, offering general support for the cause of the black person in the American South but urging patience and meekness. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the writing of that letter, and it is as current today as it was then.

Oh, the details of the story may be slightly different, but both in the specifics (the systemic injustices that keep people of different ethnicities separate and unequal) and in the generalities (the long arc of history that still leads to but has yet to arrive at justice), King's letter is profound and prophetic.

You don't know in a moment how significant a piece of writing will be. Even a bestseller can't be judged at the point of sale. Only time tells the real value of a good word. And time has been very good to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. It is eminently quotable but merits thorough reading and reflection. It has been the impetus for any number of short-term and lifelong works of reconciliation and justice. It has shored up the courage of people fighting good fights; it has comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.

To those who seethe under a general situation of injustice or who crave revenge over specific acts of hate and violence--as I suspect many are feeling today--King's letter points to "the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest." For those who think the law is the law is the law, King points out that "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and . . . it was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany." To those who think that the best life is the avoidance of extremism and the preservation of peace at all costs, King replies that "on Calvary's hill three men were crucified . . . for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."

"So the question," King asks for all time, "is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be." This question, grounded in history as it is, will haunt us far into the future. It is transcendent, the way all good anchors of time should be. As we return to it, we make inevitable progress on the long arc of history toward justice. As King declares in his letter:

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

For the full text of the letter (which I read once a year, every year--a practice I recommend wholeheartedly), click here.

Jesus with Skinny Jeans On

I found this recent episode of The Mindy Project (embedded below) wildly entertaining. Mindy meets a guy on the train and they go out on a date. She finds out that he's a Lutheran minister (he prays for dinner). She goes to his church and he dumps her because she's not selfless enough for him. She goes to prison to prove she's a good person. Hilarity ensues.

The thing that strikes me as most interesting about this episode is how fascinatingly odd Mindy finds it that someone would (a) pray before eating and (b) go to church. Churchgoing is that quickly becoming exotic and unexpected.

The concept of religious faith isn't pilloried by the episode, even though the show makes a mockery of contemporary worship services (Moby as liturgist?!?). Fair game, I say. But the church and the vocation of Mindy's would-be boyfriend (he's a Lutheran, probably mainly for the vestments, but he could have been a pastor in pretty much any church without a celibate clergy) are really just foils for more interesting questions:

[] Why do some people believe some things, and others don't?

[] What motivates our altruism, and are our motivations legitimate?

Anyway, I liked it, and I thought you might like it too. A little harsh on people in prison, and a little blue here and there. But comedy genius. Enjoy it while it's streaming.

The Cloud We Find Ourselves In

Before there was a cloud, there was a great cloud.

We read about it in the letter to the Hebrews. It’s mentioned explicitly in chapter 12, but the heart of it is actually in chapter 11, as a kind of litany declaring what faith looks like. Guess what: It looks like a cloud.

A cloud jam-packed with people, it turns out. “By faith we understand,” the writer tells us, “that the universe was formed at God’s hand.” Faith characterizes the stories we tell each other about Abel, whose sacrifice was better than Cain’s, and who paid the ultimate price for his great faith. Faith describes the experience of Enoch, who was taken from this earth. It describes the experience of Noah, of Abram, of Isaac and Jacob, of Joseph and his sons, of Moses and the people of God in their exodus from Egypt, of Rahab and Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah and David and Samuel and the prophets. Faith is the great motif of the story of God; it floats through two testaments like a cloud; it lights up the sacred text like a pillar of fire.

And yet the faith of Hebrews 11 was an unfinished story: “none of them received what had been promised”—and this is important—“since God had planned something better for us.” The writer of the letter to the Hebrews goes so far as to make us—you and me—the final object of all that faith: “only together with us would they be made perfect.”

The paean to faith in chapter 11 is the antecedent for the “great cloud” introduced to us at the beginning of chapter 12. Our connection to this historic faith is the rationale for our faith-rooted efforts in the present and the future: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” Just as our antecedents await our witness to perfect their faith, we come to understand, we depend on their experience for the perfection of our own. And all of us, taken together, depend on Jesus for perfect and perfecting faith. We are incomplete without each other, and all together we are incomplete without Jesus.

Right. Jesus is important. But I’m mainly interested for the moment in the fact that we’re incomplete without each other. Communality is so hot right now—we crowdsource and kickstart and otherwise participate in a broader communal life in virtual and occasionally real physical space. Some code writer somewhere probably thinks she invented the cloud, where all our best selves commingle and cultivate something greater than the sum of our particular parts. But then we flip to Hebrews 12 and we see it’s always been there, supporting us and making demands on us.

What does it mean to participate in the great cloud? It means, among other things, that we owe it not only to our ancestors but to ourselves to get to know them. We search the Scriptures not just for fortune-cookie axioms to organize our days around but to know who we are, as parts of a whole but also as a whole with so many constituent parts.

It means, among other things, that we read beyond the Scriptures, to familiarize ourselves with those who came after Hebrews 11 but before Century 21. They too occupy the cloud with us, with them; they too help perfect us, and they too are perfected in us.

It means, among other things, that we engage one another fully, encouraging one another where encouragement is needed and challenging one another where challenge is needed. It means we play fair and fight nice, since we’re all in this cloud together, and we’re all interdependent for our mutual and collective perfection.

Someone will complain that I’m writing so much about perfection. (Not my uncle; he'll complain about the whole post. He hates when I write stuff like this.) Nobody’s perfect, someone will remind me, and the pursuit of perfection in the aftermath of humanity’s fall from grace is an idolatrous waste of time. To them I say, chillax. I don’t expect to become perfect; I don’t think I or anyone else is perfect. I do believe in a great mystery, however—that he who has begun a great work in us will see it to completion. Not in my lifetime, surely, any more than he completed it in the lifetime of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob, or Peter or Paul or Mary. In the meantime, we owe it to ourselves and to one another to make the most of this cloud we find ourselves in.