Afraid of my mission to Monterey

I’m about to depart for a youth group mission trip, and I have some fears on my mind. I’m not so afraid, this time, of the stress or the travel. It’s only to Monterey, so we can’t get too lost and we don’t need to pass through any TSA checkpoints. In previous mission trips we’ve had worries (and actualities) ranging from major thunderstorms to 100+ degree weather to running out of insulin. This year those particular risks don’t threaten. Perhaps we may get sunburned, or tip over in our canoes on ElkHorn Slough, but we’ll have our life vests on. 

No, this year my fears aren’t logistics or weather or transportation; my fears are a little deeper and harder to address. 

I’m afraid, you see, that I’ll fall in love. 

I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with something fragile and vulnerable, something in mortal peril — that is, I’m afraid to fall in love with the the ocean and its creatures. We’re going on an ecological mission trip, and ecological work is a difficult undertaking in this age of climate change where species extinctions loom on every side. It’s more important than ever, but it runs the sharp risk of heartbreak as you stand there on the shore, throwing starfish after countless starfish back into a warming ocean. I’m afraid my heart might break open with compassion for the plight of some struggling sea creatures, and that it’ll be too painful to bear. 

I remember feeling this way as a college student in Europe. I was studying abroad in the Czech Republic, which is a lovely jumping-off spot from which a couple of college students might visit many other countries, but midway through the semester I started dreading our weekend adventures. The weight of nostalgia was pulling me down — I already missed the town I’d visited last weekend — and my photo album was thick with photographic adoration of cities and castles and gardens. How could I go on another trip? How could I add another place to love? 

And I remember feeling this way the night before my first date with Michael. Could I really open my heart to one more human being? I had already loved and lost - my ex-boyfriend had died in a work accident - and I didn’t trust the sentimentalists who rhymingly assured me ‘twas better to have loved and lost. Was it really? Grief hurts. Sometimes it incapacitates. It changes you. Did I really have the strength to open up again? 

My nephew - age 4 - said tearfully after a trip to see old friends in another state “sometimes I feel like there are so many people in the world that I love, and I wish we could all live together in one big house.” That’s the pain I’m talking about here. I don’t want to go to Monterey and meet some endangered herons or something. I already had my moment - with Great Blue Herons as a camp counselor in West Virginia fifteen years ago - and they still hold a heavy nostalgic weight in my heart. I can’t fit another creature in, especially not an endangered one. 

Opening up to ecological work is like deciding to fall in love with a person who might (or might not) be terminally ill. It’s like deciding to walk into a hurricane: you wouldn’t do it on purpose. Well, I’m going anyway (when you read this: I’m already there) and so I’ll have to pray my way around this block in my heart.

 Here’s what I’m working on: 

God is love 

Love is of God 

God created us fragile, perishable 

God created the world fragile and perishable too 

God loves the world

God loves fragile and perishable things 

God is vulnerable 

Vulnerability is part of love 

This pain, then, that I feel, is God’s spirit in me 

God aches for and loves the creatures in their peril 

It is our holy work to care for the fragile creatures and ecosystems that God so loves 

It is a holy thing to love what death can touch 

By the time you receive this, who knows what may have developed? The pastor hosting us may have spoken to my fears. The ocean herself may have soothed my worries. I'll share more...

Good News to the Creatures

 You might wanna listen to this one so you can hear me howl: https://mpcfamily.org/sermons/good-news-to-the-creatures/
Easter meets Earth Day 

Holy Week for the earth

Spring is springing up all around us and the Lenten days are lengthening as we approach a late Easter. This year Easter falls on Earth Day, a lovely coincidence for ecotheologians, and so as we approach Palm Sunday and the pathos of Holy Week, I’d like to invite you to mourn with the earth.
As we walk with Jesus along his road of betrayal, suffering, and death, let us also be present this year to the suffering of Earth and her creatures.

Just as Jesus was betrayed by his community and his friend, and ultimately cried out in anguish that even God had forsaken him, so the creatures of our planet have known betrayal at the hands of the human community. Like a lamb led to the slaughter, like an elephant taken for ivory, like a whale choked by the plastic littering the ocean, if we take time to remember, we know that our suffering is shared in a deep way that encompasses “all flesh” – from our human frailties to the vulnerability of the creatures entrusted to our care. We who walk with Christ on this fragile ledge of life, balancing between life and death, know what it is to fear, to hope, and to suffer pain in our hour of need. The creatures can remind us in wordless ways what that really feels like, at the same time as the plants – especially the flowers, bursting out this time of year – remind us how life still springs from death.

The good news of Holy Week is that we do not walk this narrow way alone. In Christ Jesus we know that God is with us. We do not suffer alone, fear alone, pour out tearful prayers alone, or die alone. Like him we may pray for this cup of suffering to be taken from us. But like him, we also rise. We rise from the ground, from the hospital bed, and even from the grave, where life is breathed again into the dust of death. These powerful metaphors hold us and sustain us through our darkness, and they will carry us into the spring of new life. Join in the lament and the joy of all creation, the songs of mourning and of new rising, sung by all — from lambs and cattle to the creatures of the deep. Walk this road with us, from the noise of Palm Sunday, through the silence of Holy Week, and on into the joyful celebration of Easter.

Happy New Year, extinction

Happy New Year! I hope that your celebrations were joyful. On New Year’s Eve my family and I changed all the clocks in the house so we could count down to “midnight” on some vaguely Nova Scotian time, and bade good riddance to 2018 early. We are hopeful for 2019, we have found out that our mother’s cancer is responding to chemo the way it should, and we were all happy to have that time together.

A piece of news which may not have made major headlines, but was a sad and poignant way to start the year, was the death of the last surviving Hawaiian land snail of its species. Hawaii is “the extinction capital of the world” in ecological terms, and while scientists do their best to identify and preserve rare species, the fact is that our world still sees many species going extinct.
It’s a heavy load to bear spiritually: the knowledge that life as we know it is being irreversibly changed, and that not all species will survive. One source of strength that is particularly helpful to me in shouldering this spiritual weight is the work of some eco-feminist theologians, notably Elizabeth Johnson, who write on the plight of the back-up pelican chick. For thirty million years, the White Pelican species has survived by employing the cruelest of evolutionary tricks. Each breeding season a pair will lay two eggs, a few days apart. Ordinarily the chick who hatches first gets most of the parent’s attention and nearly all of the food, and as soon as it is strong enough, pushes its younger sibling out of the nest to die of neglect. This is a winning evolutionary strategy because the parents will always have “an heir and a spare:” if the older chick fails to thrive, they will shift attention to the younger. In extraordinary circumstances both chicks may survive, but the important thing is that the pelican couple is rarely left childless. That puts a grim light on “mother nature,” doesn’t it?

Johnson reminds us in several ways that Christ’s death and resurrection is not only good news for humans, for Christ incarnated as “flesh” – this mortal bodily material shared by all creatures, from snails to birds and humans too. When Christ died on the cross, the pelican chick did not die alone. All the species suffering extinction will not be forgotten, for their death is shared by Christ himself, and all are united in the mystery of his resurrection. The Gospel has therefore been preached “to every creature under heaven” (Col. 1:23) in terms a creature can understand: the groan of suffering, the silence of death, and a loving and accompanying Presence within and beyond these experiences.
It is a challenge for me to make my faith stretch this far, to grow deep and wide enough to encompass without despair even the tide of death threatening the species of our world. Presbyterians don’t often stare at the body of Christ on the cross (we prefer him alive), which is why Johnson’s theology of Christ’s suffering with us, rooted in her Catholic faith, can be so powerful for us to borrow and share. Through my mother’s cancer experience she has found great solace in the solidarity of others praying with and for her. In all that we experience – from personal suffering to climate collapse – we must “hold on to what is good.” May we do so with and for one another, humans and creatures alike, keeping faith in this New Year.

PS For a version of Elizabeth Johnson’s theology that is readable and not very long, check out https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/sites/default/files/JohnsonGoodNewsTranscript.pdf and for George the snail, read  https://www.npr.org/2019/01/07/682908544/george-reclusive-hawaiian-snail-and-last-of-his-kind-dies-at-14

God in the Middle Places

I started writing this yesterday, but had to put it down, because I was waiting eagerly to see if the forecasted good news would truly come to pass: would it really rain? Would the promised moisture come and clear the fire out of our skies and lungs? My usual writing time was spent checking various sources of weather-related news, wondering, guesstimating, hoping and praying for rain. But this morning I awoke to a soothing sound – that softer sound the traffic going by makes when the road is wet. After checking air quality I even cracked a window open and smelled it. It’s here!

Last weekend, when we were on our way to Tahoe  — did you hear about that? The youth were slated for a retreat in Cazadero, where the air quality was beyond hazardous, and had an exciting emergency re-route to retreat in Tahoe instead! Anyway, on the ride out I was driving a car full of youth who are growing up in an apocalypse, who do not remember the days before climate change turned from an academic subject into a crisis, and who are getting used to fitting themselves for respirators and spending a few days every year hunkering down by the cozy glow of the air purifier. What a way to grow up. When I was young I read the “Ranger Rick” magazine, which wrote about the dangers of garbage and water pollution. The magazine framed the problem of global garbage pileup in in semi-apocalyptic terms but usually focused on how much better things would be if you (junior rangers) would just step up and lead your family to re-use, reduce, recycle. That’s how I grew up. But the apocalypse of today has a heavier emotional toll on young people, and fewer cheerful action items a kid can take to forestall it. The youth in our car, burning fossil fuels as we drove to Tahoe, asked “Why?” and as they asked they were thinking big-picture: why would God let us mess up the world this badly? Why would God give us the freedom to ruin everything? Unfortunately it’s hard to find answers to that deep a question. I think most people quickly default either to “because humans are awful” or “because God must not exist.” But at the core it’s the same question that Job asked, and the question we all ask, when a town is burned down, when our loved one gets cancer, when the ice cap melts. And even now, as we rejoice for the gift of rain, we also fear for those who may get affected by mudslides now, and we ask: why doesn’t God come and make it better?

I’d like to remind everyone that there are several middle places between “God must not exist” and “We deserve it because we’re awful.” There’s a certain depressiveness on each of those extreme sides, and a healthy flexibility in the middle. So, from the work of talking with the youth, brainstorming on my own, and later going through some theology textbooks to find more options, I’d like to present five in-betweeners for you to try on and see if they work for you, when you find yourself asking “Why doesn’t God intervene?”

1. God is powerful, but God is not very good. One of the teens took this idea and ran, characterizing God as a drunk frat boy just throwing things around the heavens. This idea works well in cartoons.*
2. God is someone/something good, but whoever they are, they are not the ultimate power. Rather, they** are a “Higher Power” who can do some things, but swooping down and vacuuming the carbon out of the air is not one of them.
3. God could swoop in and fix it, but she won’t, because that wouldn’t be the most loving action for her to do. Like a mother who doesn’t step in to keep her children from falling as they learn to walk, God wants us humans to make collective mistakes and learn together.
4. God ended up with limited power, because he handed some power over to humans. God wanted to love us as free beings who were not under his control, and so now he can’t fix our mistakes any more. He’s waiting (and hoping) to see if we can do it.
5. It’s all a divine mystery and humans can’t understand it, but we need to trust it’s working out for the best. (See Ben’s recent sermon on Job for more on this idea).

*note: Christians usually shy away from using this theology, but Jews are a little more comfortable with it. See, for example, the psalms of lament which angrily argue with God for better treatment.
**note: you know how to use “they” pronouns in situations like this, where someone’s identity is uncertain. Imagine God as trans-gender or inter-gender, choosing to use “they” pronouns: it works the same.
So, is this rain a merciful divine intervention? Or is that not the kind of intervention God would give us? Well, it depends on your theology. MPC welcomes all, and though not all of us can be in the car with the youth group driving to Tahoe, all our theologies can be in that conversation. If you don’t recognize your theology of divine intervention (or non-intervention) listed above, then drop me a note or meet me for coffee — I’d love to add to my collection of theologies. When things get tough, we need to be theologically flexible, and the more options you have, the better!
Every Blessing,
Talitha
PS:  You may enjoy this slideshow of pictures from the youth’s retreat to Cazadero Tahoe at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVmqpDbm5OY&t=2s

Convivencia!

Which Pope was it?

Wisdom and Milk

Exciting new developments in the world of biotechnology: Cows can now produce human milk. That's right. Read all about it on the UK's Telegraph.
Leaving aside issues of veganism, animal rights, and whether it's really desireable to nurse from other animals, when we were weaned off our human mother's milk decades ago... there are other questions.

Really, the bazillion dollar question is. "Just because we can, should we?"
We know how to do it. Well, sort of. More than half the first batch of genetically modified cows died, for unknown reasons, but that's probably a minor glitch in the system that can be worked out, eh?
We know that there are certain nutrients found in human milk that are lacking in cow's milk and in most baby formulas. For babies in need these are crucial. We can now turn cattle into living factories for essential nutrients. Awesome?

Genetically modifying plants and animals is a whole can of worms. My Material Theology class did a lot of work on debating their merits and dangers. My side (arguing against genetic modification) acted it out: we placed ourselves in a divine council, and God heard arguments against the dangers of GMO agriculture. In our heavenly council, there was an American farmer who had lost his land due to the monopolization process, an Indian farmer whose land was ruined by bad farming practices, and an activist talking about the agricultural-military-industrial complex. Jesus finally took center stage (in a kilt, to keep a bit of a gender balance - this is the GTU after all) and reminded people of the lessons of Job... to which I now turn.

The book of Job is in the genre of wisdom literature. It is a long debate about the merits of various theologies. How can you explain when bad things happen to good people? Job and his friends debate this for 37 long chapters. Then finally God speaks up:

YHWH answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements--surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

God further interrogates Job - he may know about domestic animals, being a man of many herds and flocks, but is he such an expert on the wild animals?

“Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you observe the calving of the deer?
Can you number the months that they fulfill,
and do you know the time when they give birth,
when they crouch to give birth to their offspring,
and are delivered of their young?
Their young ones become strong, they grow up in the open;
they go forth, and do not return to them.

We have plenty of the "words without knowledge." We can talk an endless talk about how we think the world works. Yes, we may understand enough to perform open-heart surgery, and fertilize ourselves in vitro, and drill for oil, but when the next earthquake is coming we really don't know. We can splice the genome apart and together again, but even the best-cared-for pregnancies often miscarry, and no doctor can explain it. We can attack HIV, but we certainly cannot conquer it.

In the face of the wonders created around us, we ought not to stifle our own creativity. But let us never forget the limits of our knowledge. Knowing that there is a God, a power higher than our best intelligence, reminds us to be humble with our creations.

The cows who survive long enough to produce the wonder-milk may have any number of health defects - we simply do not know what we have done to them when we spliced their genes. But for that matter, we choose not to know a lot about animals, as long as they do what we want them. We purposefully ignore the details of their gastrointestinal systems, feeding cattle on corn because it's cheap, and because given the right amount of antibiotics they'll survive anyhow. We know how to manipulate animals to our desires, but we truly do not know, with God's masterful knowledge, what it is that makes them healthy.
God is painted, in Job, as a caring and skillful creator. God is the one who DOES know when a wild deer crouches to give birth, and what a raven needs to eat, how to bring forth grass on the earth, and where the stars travel.

God is the one who truly knows. Let us not be satisfied with the kind of knowledge that gets results, well enough - but let us seek for the true wisdom that God can impart to us through intimate and compassionate ways of living with creation.

Responding to Catastrophe

The prophetic book of Joel is all about disasters.
It is kicked off dramatically by a huge locust invasion:
(1:4) What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.

The first response is mourning for the loss of agricultural produce.
(1:5) Wake up, you drunkards, and weep;
and wail, all you wine-drinkers,
over the sweet wine,
for it is cut off from your mouth.
And even mourning on the part of the land:
(1:10) The fields are devastated,
the ground mourns;
for the grain is destroyed,
the wine dries up,
the oil fails.
Just as the plants themselves wither, so does the joy of the people, shrunk to a bare ghost of itself. They cry, they wail, they mourn loudly as if to get God’s attention. Then they appeal to God’s kindness. The people do this first, calling for a solemn assembly (1:14), and then so do the animals:
(1:20) Even the wild animals cry to you
because the watercourses are dried up,
and fire has devoured
the pastures of the wilderness.
The locusts appear to attack again (or maybe Joel’s just being poetically repetitive) and then finally Joel reports God’s response to the frantic pleas for help, with words of consolation.
(2:21-23) Do not fear, O soil;
be glad and rejoice,
for YWHW has done great things!
Do not fear, you animals of the field,
for the pastures of the wilderness are green;
the tree bears its fruit,
the fig tree and vine give their full yield.
O children of Zion, be glad
and rejoice in YHWH your God;
for God has given the early rain for your vindication,
and poured down for you abundant rain,
the early and the later rain, as before.

God’s blessing and consolation is seen in the return of things to their “natural order,” the seasonal rains as expected. God’s word is in the disruption, and God’s word is in the reconciliation.
The reconciliation part is easy to “get.” God loves us and wants to heal our world.
But it’s hard to get your mind around the idea that God may have deliberately SENT the army of locusts…(Joel doesn’t say why)… especially in a world recently rocked by natural disasters, where people say earthquakes are God’s punishment on our sins. I believe it is offensive and wrong to claim God punishes us like this, but nonetheless the idea is represented in scripture: Joel calls the locusts “God’s army.”

I think it is important to listen for God’s word in the world around us. We all know how to learn from experience, and that may be the best way to listen for God’s word. I mourn the tragic events in Japan without calling them divine punishment, but I still hope that perhaps we can hear God’s wake-up call that asks us to question the safety of nuclear power.
One lesson I think we can always learn from the major disasters of the earth is humility – knowing that the world doesn’t revolve around humanity. I kayak in Tomales Bay, which lies right on top of the San Andreas fault. If that fault were to open, the bay water (creatures & kayaks and all) would go cascading down right into it. This is a risk I take on my kayaking days. Although it is scary to think about, I know that my life is, cosmically speaking, smaller than the importance of the continental plates maintaining balance against one another. The continental plates are important, too. The ocean is important, and Good, even when it hurls vast quantities of water up our shorelines. Even Joel’s villain, the locust, is God’s own creature, and treasured in God’s sight. We live in fragile co-existence with many natural powers greater than ourselves – from locusts to tectonic plates. May we learn to live within our limits, to keep ourselves (and others) from perching on those risky edges, and to honor the goodness in all created things.

Our ancestor, the land

This is a small point but an important one.
Leviticus, again – sorry to you who are Leviticus-haters – here we have a concluding chapter, where the blessings and are laid out – the blessings as reward for good behavior, curses as recompense for unfaithfulness. Blessings are abundance, fruit, grain, and peace. Curses are enemy armies, pestilence and wild animals, and the wasting and withering of your crops and fruit trees. But even after many curses, the land is given a “sabbatical” to rest, and if the people repent, God’s favor will return:
Lev 26:40-42 But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their ancestors, in that they committed treachery against me and, moreover, that they continued hostile to me—so that I, in turn, continued hostile to them and brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity, then will I remember my covenant with Jacob; I will remember also my covenant with Isaac and also my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.

These fine fellows usually appear in age order: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Num 32:11, Dt 1:8 and throughout Deuteronomy, Kings, Chronicles, Psalm 105:9, I could go on and on). Some people look at this verse in Leviticus and say, ha, isn’t that funny, they reversed the order! Here it’s Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham.
Don’t laugh it off. There must actually be a reason for this. In the context of such a land-loving book, it is not enough to command gentle and holy treatment of the land. One must be reminded that God has a long-lasting and important relationship with the land. Here, in reverse order, they begin with the most recent covenant (jacob), move back to his father’s covenant (isaac), and HIS father’s covenant (abraham) – but the relationship older and more important than any of the above is God’s relationship to the land. There is no covenant between the land and God, but the land itself is a kind of covenant, a living, adapting, changing token of the relationship between God and humanity. For a people defined by their ancestors, to put God in the place in a lineage where Abraham’s father should be is a high honor indeed. It’s as if the land itself were their original ancestor, and God’s original partner in the relationship to humanity.

Virtuous Consumption?

I went looking briefly through the “global village” upstairs in the Exhibit hall. It's totally guilt-free shopping. The principle behind the gifts for sale is that instead of just throwing money at charitable endeavours, we can purchase items produced by organizations in partnership, to help them empower themselves and their community. Instead of dropping kids off at orphanages, women form cooperatives, create textiles, sell them to us, make money, put their own kids through school. Super. I love it. It’s important. The ancient charity model (literally giving money to the poor) is great when you’re in a face-to-face relationship with someone, and can negotiate the power problems you create by charity, but it begins to massively break down when there are miles, oceans, cultures, languages, and glossy magazine advertisements separating the donor from the recipient. Money is never given with truly “no strings attached,” and the longer those strings get, the more they get tangled in outside issues (moral judgments, cultural domination, international relations...) The alternate model of commercial empowerment isn’t string-free, but they are transactional strings only as long as the distance between the product and the price. It at least looks simpler and more helpful. I give money not with expectations of some poor person's gratitude, but with expectations of a tangible item in return.

All this to say, I support purchasing items from partner organizations. I was actually pretty excited about this global village, because I need a new bag, and I could get one there.
I was disappointed, however. You see, I was looking for a useful bag, and all they offered were pretty bags. They were a little on the flimsy side (I wouldn’t carry a computer in one) but most importantly, none had more than one or two pockets. I'm willing pay a higher price for a fairly made product, but not for a bag whose main value is in appearance, not function. And the transaction seems less than perfectly straightforward now. A line from one of the vendors explaining why the partnership was valuable: “they know how to sew, but they need to know what gringas will buy,” caused my heart to sink. Women who are perfectly skilled at creating useful items for home use are taking lessons in the school of creating flimsy, pretty things that white people will buy. They are feeding our addiction to consuming trivialities, and building for themselves a dangerous dependency on foreign buyers. If our fashion tastes change, they are left with useless product until someone transmits the valuable information of “what gringas will buy.”
So I’ll continue to use my ripped and fraying bag until I find (or make) one that is sturdy and serviceable. I wish I could participate in the “empowerment via consumerism” deal, and send a few of my dollars in the right direction, but as long as it’s marketing impractical and luxurious goods (if not outright luxuries) I have to step out and look for better things to do with my money, my purchases, and my fashion statements.

I am a preacher

My preaching class (“New Treasures from the Old Testament”) at ABSW last semester was taught by an amazing older man, honorably retired and serving as Pastor Emeritus (Pastor E for short), J.Alfred Smith Sr. His classroom manner was gentle and encouraging most of the time, but nearly every week we had a little fire put into us. We’d all stand up, make a fist for emphasis, and repeat after him:
I am a preacher!
I am a preacher!
I didn’t come to seminary to become a preacher!
God made me a preacher!
I came to seminary to become a better preacher!

This refrain runs in my head often, but it took on greater meaning during the HEART trip. I was kind of hoping to acquire a new identity, maybe an “I am a community organizer!” or an “I am a food justice advocate!” or even an “I am a farmer!” They are not mutually exclusive, of course, but the trip gently showed me that at the heart of it, though I love me some compost, I am a preacher.
We started of course (three weeks ago, though it feels like months) with Ellen Davis’ amazing Old Testament exegesis, which woke me up inside and inspired a sermon I gave in three different incarnations through the course of the trip, all well-received. And my experience at the USSF ended happily with an encounter with Ched Myers! He had collaborated on the creation of Tevyn East’s Leaps and Bounds (http://www.affordinghopeproject.com ) and was present for its performance. I owe that show a blog entry of its own, but suffice it to say it took the impending crises of population explosion and resource depletion and wrote them in Biblical terms, from creation onward to hope and resurrection. After that I participated in a Bible study Ched led on Sabbath Economy, and thrilled at his exegesis of Mark 9:43-48 in terms of our societal addictions to the things that are killing us, and his reading of the implicit “body” in that passage as the corporate and not the individual body. This is what I want to study! And preach on! And live! There is no doubt that Friday’s performance and Bible study meant more to me than any other of the other legitimately amazing workshops I had attended at the forum. So I’ve come to realize where my joy lies: speaking sacred, ancient text to troubled postmodern ears. And I can preach about community organizing, food justice, and farming – without struggling for expertise, status, and identity in each of those areas. I can be amateur in those, in the root sense of amateur, which is one who does it for love (latin amare).

Of course the next thing that comes to mind is... if I’m not called to be a farmer, maybe I can just marry a farmer and get some recreational raised veggie beds, restoring-of-creation, and strawberry feasts thrown in the bargain. Keep your eyes peeled on my behalf... =)

Growing Power!

Having concluded our HEART activities in Detroit, I headed to Chicago for a few days and from there on to Milwaukee to visit friends and hear good music at Summerfest! Yesterday Emu and I decided to do some MORE agrarian roadtripping, so we drove across town to Growing Power, Milwaukee’s only two acres of land zoned for agricultural use. On those two acres the organization (headed by Will Allen) manages to raise over 30,000 fish (perch and tilapia), copious amounts of salad greens and other veggies, ducks, chickens, goats, turkeys, and a LOT of red wriggler worms. They also raise farmers from age 7 on up, and raise funds for scholarships, and raise awareness of nutrition beyond that provided at the fast food joints nearby, and try out new and innovative methods of sustainable farming. The major operation there is an aquaponic interrelation of veggies and fish. Water is cycled through 10,000 gallon tanks, and pumped up into flats of watercress, sprouts, and salad greens. The plants (1) are fertilized by the fish waste, (2) filter and clean the water that returns to the fish, and (3) get harvested not only for human consumption but for the tilapia to eat.


Erin looking in




Fish on bottom, plants on top














Young learners and helpers

One worm, creating Growing Power’s most valuable crop: nutrient-rich soil!










Massive pile of compost, the foundation of growth: “it all starts here”


Burying a few rotten bananas acts as an aphrodisiac for the compost worms. Come back in a few days, it’ll be a snarl of breeding worms and new babies.



Mushroom operations (the mushrooms are still at spore stage, but they will grow on the logs and out of the hanging bags).

Urban Agriculture

On the first day of the HEART trip, Jud Hendrix, our designated asker-of-spiritual-questions, asked us a deep one: If the roadtrip is the answer, what is the question?
The question that immediately came to mind for me was “urban or rural?” meaning all kinds of things, from “where shall I live next” to “where shall I raise my children” to “where will I retire” and on and on. I was born and raised in the heart of New York City, where all but one member of my immediate family remain, but last year I took an internship in a small town of 220 residents... and totally lost my love for the city. I assumed I’d never live in a city again. However this trip has re-seeded the possibility of enjoying urban life.
It started in Youngstown, OH. The prophetic Maurice Smalls (a.k.a. the Jamaican Farmer) gathered us on a block that had 2 occupied buildings, half a dozen empty shells of long-abandoned houses, and the rest vacant lots. All the lawns were more or less mowed by the remaining neighbors, and the lone boy who lived on the block rode his bike up and down all afternoon, monitoring us warily. Maurice and a bunch of neighborhood co-conspirators had started a fruit orchard on the corner, and he expounded on the importance of children having healthy snacks to pick each day on their route to school. Healthy food directly affects brain performance. More than that, a garden in the shadow of abandoned houses will give this little boy something to care for and believe in.
Maurice took us to a building perched on a few corners, with no foundation underneath, still owned by a disinterested absentee landlord who made his money in steel decades ago. He patted the trunk of an ailanthus tree, calling it “the mother of thousands,” and said, “this is God.” God is digging invasive roots into that house’s foundations, sinking the symbol of oppressive pride, and taking the block over, plant by plant. Maurice works with God – helping the vegetative takeover of the abandoned shells, through the use of straw, huge bales of discarded paper, table-scrap compost, woodchips, a few seedlings, and the salvageable scraps of hope remaining in the neighborhood. Contemplating the hole left underneath the house he asked us all sharply, “what is God going to send YOU to destroy?”
Maurice also took us around Cleveland (he works everywhere) and we saw food growing in alleys, in tin cans tied to fences, and in straw-bale beds raised above polluted ground or pavement. His confidence is indomitable, his style rapid. “It doesn’t take ten years and a strategic plan. This garden went up in three weeks.” He looks the murder rates and crime statistics in the eye, and unflinchingly leaves his gardens unfenced, knowing that the best protection is the goodwill and investment of the neighbors. One of my roadtripmates heard that he works with interns, and handed him a resume on the spot.
In Detroit we found the same phenomenon on a massive scale. There are uncountable vacant houses and lots, and nearly 1,000 community gardens. Most of these gardens are technically forbidden by city code, and every one of the chickens, goats, beehives, and horses within city limits is an illegal squatter – yet they are wildly proliferating. Neighborhoods are forming organizations where the children and youth can work on a “market garden,” bringing their produce to market and sharing the proceeds. Schools are contributing to their own cafeteria fare. The organization Greening Detroit provided us with a tour of just a few of the agricultural sites. Our traditional car-ride game of pointing out ridiculously large lawns (“that’d be a nice one to garden on”) turned into rapid successions of “look at that garden! And that one!”
Detroit, no less than Cleveland and Youngstown, has been abandoned by many. The city of nearly one million people has not had a major supermarket since the last one pulled out in 2007. A great percentage of Detroit food stamp money is spent at gas station convenience stores. Only five in 100 teenagers of employable age can expect to find work in the area. The entire area is in a quiet but persistent crisis.
Crisis is another way to spell opportunity, and while we hope and pray the “wrong” folks won’t make it into an opportunity for exploitation, we see the seeds of a new future sprouting in the empty soil. There are pockets and places where the “powers that be” are looking away while new communities and creative ways of life begin to flourish – and I want to be part of those!
A word of caution from our prophet, however. He looked at our mainly white group and told us not to relocate just for fun. He asked “do you have work to do where you come from?” and said “I don’t want you here unless you belong here – or if you’re planning to stay for a long time.”
I have to remember that my mobility and freedom to pick a place to live actually reeks of privilege. If I relocate to a place actually abandoned by everyone, fine – but if I’m moving to someone else’s “wasteland,” I need to be invited and welcomed.
But that in mind, I am excited for the future, as now I have a widened and inspired view of places I could be invited to work – urban or rural!

cross-posted to presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith

US Social Forum

Today we gave a workshop at the US Social Forum. About 60 people attended (including the 15 of us) out of the, oh, 15,000 or so attendees at the forum! But for this we were very grateful, especially as the room could hold just about exactly 60. They were a diverse crowd from all over the (US) map and of different faith backgrounds. Our presentation was entitled:
Faith Communities in the Local Food Movement: Sustainable and Just!
We began it with a rocking rendition of "Looking East" by Jackson Browne, organized in small groups, introduced the trip as a whole, ourselves as individuals, some of the places we'd been, etc.

This is the portion I did:


Thank you for being here today and participating. The experiences you share are enriching us, and we hope and pray it is mutual. I want to speak for a few minutes on rooting our food justice efforts in our faith, and specifically in our sacred traditions, by which I mean texts, rituals, and wisdom passed down the ages.
In approaching the issues of hunger, food insecurity, and injustice in the food system, it is easy to look to the moral teachings of our respective religions. For many people our entry into food justice work is one of the variants of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is a perfectly strong and compelling reason to work for justice and sustainability in our food system. None more is needed. Good ethical reasoning and a healthy sense of moral compunction can take us far, whether we are of any religion or none.
However, our work can only be strengthened, our spirits encouraged, and our faith deepened, by connecting the work we do in the world with the faith we profess. I will be speaking from the Christian tradition, specifically Presbyterian, and I do not pretend to speak FOR my entire church. However, as I relate to you my own reading of a text I hold as sacred, I hope you will be encouraged to look to your own faith, your sacred texts and traditions, and explore whether you can find similar connections. The human relationship with food and with soil is as ancient and essential as the breath of life itself, and so rightly takes a prominent place in many religions.
The story I would like to bring before you today is from the book we know as Exodus. It takes place after the first Passover liberated the Hebrew people from Egypt, and their flight through the Red Sea. I will begin in ch 16 vs 2:
The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, “if only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meatpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Then the LORD said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”
Thus begins the establishment of the nation of Israel. The very first question facing the group, released from the laws and social structures of their former life, is “how do we eat?” The answer to this question defines who they will be.
The story goes on. God does indeed send a mysterious breadlike substance down from the sky, called manna, and the people gather enough to eat. They are tested in this. Each person is to gather only what they need. If you try to gather extra, it will rot overnight. EXCEPT on the sixth day of the week when they are each to gather a double portion, so that they have something to eat without going out to gather it on the Sabbath day. God is testing the people. Some don’t trust, and they hoard their food, and others don’t listen to the commandment about the Sabbath, and they are surprised to find there’s no bread from heaven that day.
God needs to test the people in this story, because they are too attached to their old ways. They have been led by miraculous means out of slavery, yet they don’t trust these miracles, and they wish they were back in Egypt eating their regular allotments of meat. In the words of Dr Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School, the problem is that the Israelites have “learned to trust the deceptive abundance of empire.” In Egypt they were not free, they were not secure, their lives lay at Pharaoh’s very whim, YET Pharaoh always had a lot of grain in his silos, and he fed the slaves just well enough to convince them that they were happy under his thumb – as any cunning government, or corporation, will do to those under its sway. It was a hard task to be weaned out of this pattern of exploitative dependence. Much of the next few books of the Bible are devoted to several sets of divine instructions: how to live, how to eat, how to use the land. How to pattern a society that is the polar opposite of Egypt’s centralized, oppressive, command economy benefitting the few at the expense of the many. Instead, the new nation will guarantee that everyone has a plot of arable land; everyone must have the means of subsistence.
The lessons learned by eating manna from heaven were: 1) trust God to provide, (2) gather only what you need, and (3) take a break. Take a Sabbath. The concept of Sabbath was foundational to ancient Israel, and one of the things that distinguished them from other nations. The law codes prescribe not only on a weekly Sabbath, but also letting your LAND lie fallow, to rest once every seven years to regenerate the soil’s fertility. It’s good technique. Take a break.
Clearly there are a lot of people in this world who need to hear the word: “gather only what you need.” There are a lot of people who need to hear “take a break.” A lot of people need to get out from under the thumb of Pharaoh’s deceptive abundance, and start trusting God instead. And many of these people belong, at least in name, to one of the religions that holds this story as sacred. They need to hear such stories -- and there are many – taught and preached in a way that actually affects their economic practices.
It doesn’t only need to be preached to outsiders, though. Those of us who work actively for food justice and reform need to hear these stories too. We need to know that although today’s situation may be unique, it is NOT entirely new. We need to draw on the wisdom of the ancient storytellers who brought us the story of the Israelites in the wilderness. The details are amazing. Later on when they’ve been eating manna for a while the people complain again, (Num 11:5) remembering Egypt’s fish, and cucumbers, and onions, and leeks, and garlic… and we might do that today, maybe one week when the CSA delivers a few too many root vegetables, we could start moaning about the way we used to buy asparagus year-round, who cares if it’s local or organic… I bet we will fall into some of the same traps. We need to hear the stories of those who have gone before us. We also need to hear their poetry, their longings, their desperate prayers and pleas to God, and know that we are not alone. Just as important as it is for us to connect to one another as we are doing here and now, it is important to connect to those who have gone before us.
I want to end by asking you what traditions inform your work with food justice and sustainability. Is there another text, sacred to you, which speaks of food or the land? Is there a ritual which enacts your care for the land? Is there a saying or a song which inspires you? How do you keep your work rooted in your faith?

(we had a great discussion, went on to meditatively eat a blueberry, contemplate our role in the food revolution, and commit to action. Awesomeness.)
cross-posted at presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith

A letter to West Virginia

We spent Friday, and Saturday morning, at the Rural Appalachian Improvement League (RAIL) in Mullens, West Virginia. This is a town of about 2,000 in the heart of coal country. We saw a few flat-topped mountains on our way in, as well as machinery ticking away, and coal cars heaped full of the dusty black stuff. Mullens was a “railroad town” which used to be a hot place in the thirties and forties, or so the rumors go – if you’d go there on a Saturday night, you wouldn’t be able to walk through the streets, for so many people were packed in, shoulder-to-shoulder, partying. Needless to say there are more abandoned buildings than crowds these days; ever since coal became a mainly mechanized business, the jobs have dwindled. These days there are only 800 mining jobs in a county of 20,000, where the coal and timber companies combine to control the use of over 85% of the land. The result of this corporate control of land is a systematic approach to controlling the livelihood of the residents of Mullens. In the early mining days, the coal towns would literally forbid gardening – so that the residents would be completely reliant on the company store and hence unable to strike. Today’s methods are less overt but no less effective. As a result of the lack of public control of their land, Mullens’ freedom has been hidden behind an invisible veil of corporate non-accountability.
RAIL is working to bring freedom and hope back to Mullens through various community projects. The projects are headed up by Jack and Rebekah. Jack arrived two years ago, funded by a grant “to start a farmers’ market.” He found there were no farmers... (dramatic pause).... so instead his work shifted toward local agriculture. We saw the fruits of his labors... they do indeed now have farmers’ markets, supplied from folks’ backyards and several small community gardens. These gardens are on slots of land as small as 1/8 acre, squeezed between roads, rails, and the river, shaded by the hills to end up with only a few hours of sunlight per day, and subject to frequent flooding due to the devastation of logging and mining. Due to these constraints the local agricultural practices more resemble urban gardening, trying to grow as much food as possible on the tiny scraps of land they have.
The rivers and creeks were greatly polluted. This is not just because of the effects of logging and mining, but also because of a “build ‘em cheap” philosophy on the part of those who developed the land, ever since the earliest mining days. Even today 65% of the houses in the area lack septic systems, and dump straight into the streams. The bacterial count is astronomical, yet some folks still fish in the streams.
In such a heart breaking setting of poverty, long lines at the food banks, environmental degradation, and lack of economic options, it was encouraging to see so many good folks working to create a local economy. It was also great to have a little guitar and banjo jam session before we left, and to lift our spirits through music, from traditional bluegrass to a very nontraditional fun new composition we started – to express our own feelings. Rebeckah, another RAIL intern, sent us off with her beautiful little demo CD to listen to in the car, which kept our hearts aching as we drove away.

A Letter from our heart,

Thank you Rebekah, for the words on your CD allowed all our emotions to flow…
My Heart is crying as we leave your beautiful land. I cry because of my great sorrow and pain for what has happened to you and because of my great disgust of what will happen to you. The people of your land, more so the people of Mullens, Love you. ….I can’t hold back the tears anymore… they have begun to stream down the contours of my face. My emotions are raining. I have never seen so much beauty while simultaneously experiencing so much pain.

The World Must Know...People Must Know!

Our Land is bleeding and our people are covered in the green hue of Mother Earth’s blood. One must ask why but the answer is far too disheartening and far too destructive for one person to swallow. As we move closer to the realization that our perpetual state of denial is killing us, individuals are standing tall in a fallen forest of despair. As we continue on this path based upon a superficial existence and the ideal of short-term gratification, our land and her inhabitants are dwindling.

But there is Hope, there is Spirit and there is Jack and Rebekah! Thank you Rebekah, Jack and the community of Mullens – you all are truly amazing. You have shown me that in the face of overwhelming destruction, sorrow, and despair, the hope and optimistic persona of the human spirit will continue to prevail.

So West Virginia, as I put my heart on paper on your behalf, my tears are streaming down my face, so pure and true like your rivers used to be. As I write, my blood flows between the chambers of my heart allowing for the support of my body... as your clean and pure soil used to be the vital blood of the animals that existed on it. In the wise words of Mr. Doomsday, “the land has been ruined in historical time, but its recovery is now in geological time.” The Stewards, the shepherds of your land have failed you and your inhabitants. Our time to attempt to do what is just and equitable is up, we now must put back our faith in you – as it should have been since the beginning.

By Blain Snipstal and Talitha G Phillips
cross-posted from http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith

Wisdom from Dr. Ellen Davis

As a student in Biblical Studies, I was thrilled to find the entire roadtrip kicked off on the right foot -- with in-depth Biblical study. Way to go, Presbyterians! We do not neglect our foundations.

Dr Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School presented to us her agrarian reading of the Old Testament, recently published as "Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture." She took us carefully through her points, from the creation of humankind in the color and word of "fertile soil" (don't let them fool you that it's "dust" - we are humans from humus); through the first law and the first sin -- regarding how we shall and shall not eat; to the creation of the nation Israel, new-born out of the waters of the Red Sea with two commandments, to take only as much manna as they needed, and to rest on the Sabbath; through the law codes regarding land use; and to the harsh words of the prophets crying against injustice, telling the people to look to their infertile land as evidence of God's judgment.
What she did that I had never encountered before was to compare these thoroughly agrarian texts of the Old Testament to the surviving texts from Israel's neighbors, Egypt and Babylon. Both these nations lacked much literature on agrarian issues. They both dwelt in agricultural security, Egypt from the abundance of the Nile, Babylon through irrigating out of the Tigris and Euphrates. It may have been that they actually had all they needed, and did not need divine commands for their land use. Israel, on the other hand, lived in a fragile ecosystem where four out of ten years were drought or dry -- and they developed complicated codes of divinely sanctioned land use.
Wendell Berry said, "in order to be a true agrarian, you need to have just a little land." If you have an unlimited supply, or if your land appears to be infinitely fertile (like in Egypt), you will never learn to care in the way the ancient Israelites had to. Dr. Davis pointed out that ever since Europeans began pushing out Native Americans, we have been living under the delusion that our land is secure and limitless. Therefore we have exploited it, to the degradation of our topsoil, our water, our seed diversity, and even our own rapidly decreasing set of skills in the arts (not just the sciences) of land care and management.
She helped us understand that we are on the brink of something new (and very old). As our land and ecosystems begin to deteriorate all over the world, are suddenly and with a new urgency called back to the words of the Bible we have so long been reading without our agrarian glasses on. Suddenly we are called to account by the God who made us in God's image, soil-colored, with the wind of the Spirit in our lungs. These images and words take on a new urgency as we finally realize we are no Egypt, we are no Babel(-on) with our invincible heads in the clouds. Once again we are returning to see that our soil is fragile, not to be taken for granted, and only as fertile as God gives it blessing.

This challenging but hopeful reading of the "signs of the times" is one I can put my weight into. A return to Biblical wisdom on land use? We can do this. This, however, contrasts markedly with another, more doomsday-ical interpretation which we heard today in Berea Kentucky, about which I will challenge any of the other tripmates to blog...

Stay tuned at http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith/

on being preached to

Someone told me once, I think in a preaching class, that what folks hear (when we preach) is based 5% on our actual words, 10% on our tone of voice, 20% on our facial expressions... and 65% on who we are. That what people listen for is not a brilliant string of inspiring words... but for a person of character and integrity.

I get that. A few weeks ago we had a guest preacher at St Andrew Pres, and I disagreed with about half of what he said about the Bible, BUT still felt preached-to, and well. He's short, and at one point (a total sidetrack) he went across the room talking about how people think size matters, and degrees matter, and that you can measure people up somehow, and he just opened his arms at the front of the room saying "here i am! I'm just me! and that's okay." It had to be imbedded in the structure of a sermon, of course, but that one moment for me was his sermon. I was preached to -- because his short but steady, faithful, funny self just spoke to my short self with authority and confidence.

Today I heard a sermon of a wholly different sort, and with which I can find nothing to disagree. Dr. Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School (author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: an Agrarian Reading of the Bible) preached on the story of the Israelites and their Manna. She talked about the problem with the Hebrew people (while in Egypt) learning to trust the deceptive abundance of Empire. She marveled at how the very first thing that comes up, in how to create a new nation, is how to eat. She said Israel and we heard America. She said "the Biblical story condemns us" and our foolishly grasping at the false prosperity of agriculture and economy based on scarcity and fear instead of abundance and Sabbath rest. EVERYTHING SHE SAID WAS AMAZING.
But I felt the most powerfully preached-to when at the end of the service she blessed us, in Hebrew and English. She had authority and power as she fluently recited the Hebrew words, and as she stood there with hands lifted high. The sermon I heard today was actually just me saying to myself "I am in the presence of a woman of formidable academic credentials who BELIEVES and proclaims and preaches that we need to reform our agricultural system, for a host of reasons including spiritual ones."
AND she has hope.
yes. let's do this. here we go!

AGRARIAN DREAMS

As I (NOW!) embark on my next epic journey I want to share a little bit about it. I’ll be joining the Presbyterian Hunger Program roadtrip on Saturday in Louisville. I will be with a group of what promise to be very interesting people, touring farms and churches and schools and all kinds of organizations having to do with hunger relief via local agriculture, from Louisville up to Detroit over 2 weeks. In Detroit we hook into the US Social Forum where we will be giving a presentation on "Faith Communities in the Local Food Movement."
We also get to attend many other organizations’ presentations and brainstorm sessions, and hopefully have our minds blown a little more =)

So, yes, I’m diving into the “local-food movement” and its connections to faith... I’m trying to get my practical skills in line, and a little agricultural inspiration to boot, because I have decided I want food and community gardening to be an element of my ministry, forever and ever, Amen.
This is a new decision, and a little story is in order. A year and a half ago I scooted up to Lostine, Oregon to check out a church internship in a town of 200. Coming from NYC originally this was a stretch for me, so I was looking for God-signs pointing me there. I found one in the person of June Colony, Community Organizer Extraordinaire. Also a shepherdess, veggie farmer, and a fiddler. She had opened a little shop for folks to sell their homemade crafts and produce, and refused to charge commission because she saw it as her local mission work for the church.
Over the next year as I did indeed intern there, I planted in June’s greenhouse, weeded a lot of ground with her, bottle-fed her lambs, harvested berries, planted a few garden plots, staffed the Local Market, performed together at fiddle contests, rode her horses, and gave a hand in raising her new barn. She also planted and helped us to bring to fruition in our church the Best Mission Project Ever –a dinner of free local food and bluegrass tunes, called Cooks Night Off. What I mean to say, other than that she’s a truly amazing person, is that I learned from June about the fundamental shift that takes place when you begin seeing “your” land as “God’s,” and about the abundance that flows when you open your hands to others. I learned a little about how beautifully transformative this can be. When I got back to seminary my environmental ethics prof said “when we work to heal the earth, the earth works to heal us” and I thrilled at that statement because I had begun learning it. When we take care of our corner of creation, God takes care of us. When we discover the joys of root vegetables we slowly stop craving EZ-mac, and our insides begin healing. When we open our garden gate and let friends plant on “our” precious land, we end up with gifts of overabundant produce, AND a loving web of community around us.
I believe that community gardening and creating local food systems will not only address the problem of hunger and malnutrition, but will also take a stab at some of the underlying causes of our poverty: our isolation, the compartmentalization of our lives, the over-consumerized culture we live in, and our reliance on the wisdom of those experts at Kraft Foods... instead of the intuitions our bodies have as to what’s healthy.
I am so excited to meet more prophets of the same movement, who, like June, don’t waste their time fighting against the insanities of our nation and world, but who just go ahead and plant seeds for a better way. I’m glad to say that those seeds appear to be spreading like mustard.

Grounding - part 3

In my favorite class this semester (philippians philemon and colossians) I encountered an idea that belonged in my second-favorite class (material theology & consumer culture) and my brain just about EXPLODED with major ideas.
So the Paul/Pauline class had an essay on ritual in early (pauline) christianity which dealt with that religious (spiritual) experience in which, practicing a ritual such as baptism, Lord's Supper, fasts or feasts with your religious community, you all feel as if you have entered "mythic time," leaving the ordinary everyday behind and entering the realm of your God. This is, if not a universal experience, at least one common to most religions, and labeled as "experiential transcendence." It helps us all feel closer to our God and to immortal life, but also ties us together as a people who have experienced this together.
Experiential transcendence is linked to a reordering of the dominant symbols and images by which one lives, and this in turn can lead to greater integrity and more courageous moral actions." *
Thus helping the early and persecuted Christians to live radically, sharing all their possessions, serving one another without regard to status, gender, or race, NOT TO MENTION surviving as a persecuted minority under an unhospitable (to say the least) Roman empire. If you agree with this analysis of what it is experiential transcendence could do for people, it must have done a LOT for the early Christians.

Fast forward to today, and I think we are experts in experiential transcendence. At least, Californians are, judging from the per-capita consumption of tibetan prayer bowls, yoga pants, and spirituality books. In the Christian world we are no less experience-oriented. You can go shopping for church-experiences and monastic retreats (and I have). There are fields of scholarship and books written for pastors about how to maximize the "worship experience" for everyone involved, through musical changes, more focused architecture, methods of preaching, and methods of prayer. But the "reordering of the dominant symbols" of our lives? Not quite. Our dominant symbols, before spiritual awakening, were clothes and appearance. Our dominant symbols post-ashram are yoga pants and appearance. Post-youth-group-retreat, your symbols are probably going to be a WWJD bracelet, and maybe even a fish tattoo if you're REALLY hardcore. Some modification, yes, but seldom quite at the level you could call "reordering." Why is there such a disconnect?
In the context of Marin County's conglomerate religion of eco-simplicity and spiritual serenity, I ask WHY do we buy a $4.50 cup of purifying herbal organic African tea (sereni-tea), sip it meditatively, and then walk out the door into our SUV stickered "diva going green"? (I kid you not - you can't make this irony up). Where did we disconnect our spirituality of purity from our actions of consumption?
In the context of Christian sacred practices, and the untouchably holy Service Project Trip, I ask WHY do we buy a dozen plane tickets to Mexico, get "outside ourselves," serve and worship with the poverty-stricken... and coming home (with tourist crap and a vague intention to "be more grateful") proceed to pass by Mexican day laborers in our own neighborhood? How did we disconnect the spirit of service there from the spirit of justice here?

Every once in a while someone actually does something somewhat approaching the ideal of "following through." But for the most part we put our donation in the monk's bowl, walk out the door of the retreat center, and get on with our lives. Preachers and yogis alike.

In Consuming Religion, Vincent J Miller contends we are "spiritually... trained to seek, search, and choose but not to follow through and to commit" (142). We don't know how to Stay, to let our religion have its implications on our life, and to be transformed.
I'd call this one out as a dangerous failure of community. With church compartmentalized into a once-a-week experience (in the early days, "church" used to be your new family, political identity, and social position i.e. lack thereof) it is something you can leave and come back to, and we no longer hold one another accountable to what we profess. Yoga classes are a perfect example of a spiritual tradition turned into a commodity -- where you pay $10 for an hour of elevated consciousness, and never need to have anything more to do with those people or even with those principles -- but do we do much better in the church? Many people come, put $10 in the offering plate, and consider themselves spiritually full for a week or so. Do we offer a life of the imitation of Christ every day of the week? I know I want to live it more than once a week, which of course is why I'm going to be a pastor, but I bet that won't be enough either. I want to sink my feet in, grow, and be completely transformed.




*quote: "ritual and the first urban christians" by Louise J Lawrence in After the First Urban Christians, eds Todd D Still and David G Horrell, p 113. the essay refers here to Robert J Lifton and Eric Olson, "symbolic immortality" in Antonius Robben, ed., Death, mourning and burial 2004. I used footnotes in a blog - I must really be a geek. At least I resisted the urge to use proper and complete bibliographical form.

Insatiable is Not Sustainable

"Black Friday," here we are. Although I am gladdened by generosity to others, and cool window displays (like the one that Joie de Vivre is going to post pictures of, ahem ahem), and Christmas Carols, I am saddened by the glut of overconsumption we experience in our culture, and yes, I'm calling it for what it is. It isn't a culture of a little too much of a good thing -- it's a culture firmly stuck in overdrive.
I'm a big fan of natural products, eco-friendly anythings, replacing the polyester in our lives with some nice bamboo... but still. When we go on eco-kicks, we tend to just replace everything we have too much of, so too much polyester becomes too much bamboo. Down in California (on my recent vacation) I saw an enormous moving van -- I'm not talking a U-Haul size, I'm talking a Major Truck -- advertising "eco-friendly moving company" on the sides. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, because we have now acquired so much eco-friendly furniture that we can no longer fit it in a regular sized biodeisel-powered moving van. Okay, maybe it wasn't quite an 18-wheeler, but it was HUGE. That is a frikking lot of bamboo. Or am I being judgmental to suggest that a truly eco-friendly denizen of this earth should be able to restrict themselves long enough to fit their belongings in a smaller compartment?

In a New Yorker review of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals," as a response to the accusation that vegetarians are sentimentalist about their fuzzy creatures, the quote is printed:

Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?

I think this is spot-on, not just because I "passed" on a very delicious-smelling turkey last night, but because it seems that our moods and whims have come to rule us. We can do all we want to channel our desires into healthier products (bamboo vs polyester) but unless we learn to say "no" to some desires we will never be free of the endless cycle of production, consumption, disposal, and the desperate attempt to cover our own tracks.

For the third year in a row, my family is giving one another cards this Christmas instead of gifts. I know that not everyone's sisters are the brilliant poets that mine are, but I have cherished these cards as much as I would any tangible gift. I commend the practice, and close with the words from St. Suess:
Maybe Christmas, perhaps,
doesn't come from a store.
Maybe Christmas, perhaps,
means a little bit more.

And for more fantastic slogans of the like, check out https://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd

Vacation Bible? School

When I moved into the manse here I explored one of my extra rooms and found a stash of mysterious objects. Brightly colored things that seemed like soft styrofoam, in funny shapes - incomplete shapes - pieces of shapes. Bagged in sets of twenty each, packaged in more foam (as if they weren't soft enough?), accompanied by "foam glue" and special markers. I was befuddled.

You see, my church never *did* Vacation Bible School. We went camping, yes, and put on musicals, but never had summer-camp-at-church. We missed out on the whole phenomenon of VBS crafts, a subject that is still foreign to me, but now I've done some research and found out what I was missing. A crucial part of VBS is, apparently, gluing small pieces of pre-cut foam together to make a predetermined craft shape, which then you bring home and give as a token of affection to your adoring parents who can't think of a blessed thing to DO with these crafts, so they accumulate on the counter until the child has forgotten to be proud of them or concerned with them.

To help make VBS more cohesive, the geniuses at the Oriental Trading Company have developed more than a summer's full of themed VBS packages. For example, you can have a "safari" theme, where you bring home tiger and lion crafts which remind you of the Bible because Samson and David used to kill lions, and those stories were in the Bible somewhere. Or maybe the connection was that lions and tigers are brave just like Jesus was brave? Something of the sort - I forget.

In all seriousness OTC carries a "crocodile" VBS theme, although they can't decide whether it's an alligator or crocodile, and it comes with such catchy slogans as "looking out for God's Love" (eyes poking out of the swamp), "hungry for God's word" (toothy grin), and "basking in His Glory." So if your kids remember these slogans, perhaps THIS activity:

will pack some punch.
But I wouldn't be surprised if a few of your kids come home at the end of the day a little confused about what they were supposed to be learning. Odds are the "gator snacks" (reconfigured gummi candies) will be the most memorable.

Some of you have probably never heard of such activities, and are scandalized. Some of you probably just finished your own crocodile-themed VBS and have reasons why it was great. Be it all how it may, I really do question the need for such an industry of disposable entertainment under the banner of raising up children well-schooled in the Bible. The Word of God ought to be attractive enough without the murky filter of swamp water making it "fun."

Our church is trying to re-focus VBS. We renamed it, as if that would help, but we also chose our own non-commercial theme, a little more Biblical: "the Light of the World." We'll still be doing crafts, but they will be focused on the useful tradition of candle-making, and foam glue will not be implicated. Our Sunday School Superintendent is working on her own original tunes for them to sing. Stay tuned to see how it actually goes... attendance has been low in the past few years, perhaps because the local children know this church doesn't give out gator snacks. We'll see!