we need a village

A few weeks ago Michael and I had our youngest niece and nephew stay over for nearly a week while my sister (the kids’ mother) flew to New York to visit our mother as she continues to recover from all her treatments. The kids are number 8 and 9 in the roster of my nieces and nephews, and I’ve been changing family members’ diapers since my teen years, but this is the first time I’ve done anything nearly so ambitious as to offer full-time childcare for a whole week. I’m still sneezing from the germs they gave me, and there are still stray cheerios turning up under the couch cushions, but it was a wonderful experience.

It takes a village. How well-worn these words are, and how true. In our (especially white) society where families are typically isolated into nuclear units, we need more villages. White Americans have not yet escaped the myth of settler-colonialism, where a “family” is just a man and a woman and their kids setting off to create their own little kingdom on stolen land. This is a terribly dysfunctional model that robs us of the richness of multigenerational relationships and the beauty of a wide web of support. It also bankrupts parents who have to strive to meet all their children’s needs themselves – not just financially (a huge burden in this competitive economy) but also emotionally, as they suffer isolation, worry, and stress.

There are so many things we can do to make society friendlier for parents and especially mothers – from paid parental leave to affordable daycare and sensible healthcare reforms. Many of them need to go to City Hall – or to Sacramento or to Washington – but some of them can happen at your local church, and I see them happening. I saw three family units fold together for fellowship after church on Mother’s Day, a day that can be particularly difficult emotionally if your unit doesn’t match the settler-colonial-Hallmark model. I saw the youth of our youth group embrace and include the littlest kids. The youth of our church practically fought over the children who came on our last retreat, putting them right in the center of the community where they belong. At Sunday Celebration, by welcoming children into the service and not insisting they stay in the nursery, we all do our best to follow the call of Jesus. We remember that Jesus put a little child in the center of the crowd and said, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” Caring for children is at the heart of the gospel, and this call is laid upon us all, no matter whether your “family unit” includes children or not. If your unit doesn’t include children, I’d like to challenge you to expand your unit. Think bigger. Include your neighbors; include nieces and nephews and niblings of any gender; include your church family. Extend some support to them, whether that be a game of tag, a tea party, or a favor done for their parents, or advocating for better parental support on a local or national level if you prefer the political approach. Whatever you choose to do, choose it as plain good sense; or as an act of resistance against the white-settler-colonial myth; or as an act of devotion in following Christ’s call.

Presbytery, my happy place

Yesterday I spent a lot of time at a Presbytery meeting along with other people from our congregation and the congregations of the SF bay area. While there, I got to share the good news that we have 29 people registered to go to the Presbyterian Youth Triennium this year. My congregation is sending  seven people, to join with people from eight other congregations to make up our presbytery‘s delegation, to join with sooooo many other delegations getting together in Indiana. I am so excited to get to be a part of this.

I know that presbytery meetings aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some introverts can get quickly overwhelmed by the number of people bustling about making small talk with one another, and some people find the slow committee-based process to be incredibly taxing on their patience. There are some people who aren’t interested in going to Triennium for much the same reasons. But presbytery is my happy place, and although it will be my first time going to Triennium, I feel pretty confident that that will be a very happy place for me too. I’m glad to serve the presbytery through my role in being Triennium registrar, and I feel really hopeful and positive about how the trip will go. There is something wonderful about having a chance to meet together with other Presbyterians who have something in common with you, even though their congregational contexts may be very different from yours – whether locally (in our presbytery), or nationally (at Triennium). There is something wonderful about singing hymns with a large group of people who really know to how to sing, whether that be 100 people (at presbytery) or 5,000 (at Triennium!!). There is something wonderful about hearing a sermon preached in Spanish, with English translation for those of us who need it, and knowing at a deep level that we English-speakers are not the center of this church, because this church doesn’t have a center, other than our shared faith and commitment to follow Jesus together. There are no popes, bosses, or bishops, other than the gathered community together seeking the mind of Christ. We are all small pieces of one great body that can do far more than we can do individually – or even more than we can do in our individual congregations.

 I’m glad that my church's Triennium participants, who are all white, will join in a delegation from our presbytery that includes people of African-, Mexican-, Japanese-, Korean-, and Chinese-American descent; people whose families have immigrated more recently and those who have lived here their whole lives; people from conservative churches and liberal churches; and communities all the way from up in Richmond down to Portola Valley. I hope that the youth and adults who travel with our delegation will get the same glimpse of the beauty of the church that I got last night at our Presbytery meeting: a vibrant and living community of equals where we all take turns serving. And I hope that all of us will have our faith in God and our commitment to God’s work in the world strengthened, by taking our places as small parts of a greater whole. Thank you for being a part of this greater whole!

PS check out the video if you’re curious about Triennium: https://vimeo.com/273568850

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

Christians and the purity problem

This week has been a busy one for the news. It’s hard to know what to say about the Supreme Court case handed down this week which everyone hastens to say is “not as bad as it seems” – the case of the baker who wouldn’t bake for a gay wedding – so I’ll focus not on the actual case but focus on how it seems. Though the legal factors may be so much more complicated, “how it seems” is that the religious right has something to celebrate and the LGBTQ+ community has something to worry about.

What worries me a lot in this case is the equation of homophobia with Christian practice. Christianity should not be equated with homophobia, because Christianity is diverse. Though the conservative churches may get more news coverage, so many churches like ours have fought long and hard to express our own religious practice: we ordain, marry, and affirm the leadership of LGBTQ+ people as a core commitment of our faith. We believe God calls us all, not in spite of our sexuality, but through it. The call to love and to marry someone – of any gender or sex – is a divine call, and a sacred obligation.

A more subtle problem, but a problem still is the equation of Christian practice with a kind of purity practice. Seeing the world as divisible into “lifestyles we condone” and “lifestyles we must loudly condemn” creates a shame-based religion focused on sin and its management, dividing the world into clean and unclean… and this is a problem even if we disagree on a baseline definition of what is and is not sinful. Refusing to associate with sinners is the behavior of Pharisees. It is precisely not the behavior of Christ, who was famous for hanging out with tax collectors and sex workers. Jesus deliberately spent time with, and shared food with, people who were known to be sinners, even people who were publicly considered evil. So someone today who, while claiming to be Christian, refuses to be “tainted” by association with a “sinner,” is practicing a religion contrary to Christ and the good news of the gospel. I could go farther into the book of Acts where the purity laws of food and drink are overturned, or into the book of Romans where Paul basically says “it doesn’t matter how correct you are if you’re a jerk about it” or any number of stories that illustrate this, but hopefully you get the point: we’re all human sinners, and trying to avoid contact with people you believe to be sinners makes you less Christlike, not more.

Closer to home, and nothing to do with cake, the youth group at my church designed and painted some beautiful rainbow banners to show MPC’s commitment to the rainbow. They include Bible verses chosen to highlight our commitment to Love. We laid the banners out on Sunday at youth group and blessed them. The youth prayed prayers including:

“I hope these banners will help LGBTQ people see the church could be an ally and not an enemy”

“I hope these banners will make sure everybody feels included and welcomed”

“I hope these banners will help people feel our church is a joyful and happy place”                                                                 
“I hope our world will become a safer place for people to be themselves”

May the youth lead us into the future.

Giving Up Martyrdom For Lent

I think I'm well-qualified to discuss the topic of martyrdom. First off, I was a bloody St Perpetua for Halloween a couple of years ago. But then, my qualifications racked up during the 2012 Tour of Light, whereon I did two or three jobs at once plus parenting 3 girls at night, adding up to duties about 25/7. I accomplished this by depriving myself of sleep, of course, as well as eliminating any other thing you might call personal time, such as bathroom breaks or reading magazines or looking in the mirror. I carried around 3 copies of the New Yorker (my favorite) for weeks and read about a page. And I had a dream one night that I was trying to breast-feed 9 babies at once. SO, sometime near the end of the tour it was Ash Wednesday and I didn't have time to go to church of course, but I decided to give up martyrdom for Lent.

Instructions for this spiritual practice:
1) Eat chocolate every day. And you have to like it. This means no semi-chocolate like Reeses or KitKat, but pure yummy chocolate. You can't eat it on the run, or while doing other things. Sit down for a whole thirty seconds and let a piece of chocolate melt on your tongue. (This practice would also apply to good strawberries, or ice cream, or anything else that physiologically cues your body "all is well" and gets you out of fight-or-flight mode).

2) Moisturizer every day. YES it takes a darn long time to take care of one's body. No excuses. Love your scratchy old elbows. Appreciate them. Long baths and washing your hair and taking time to actually cut your toenails also fit in this category.

3) Makeup every day. It feels like penitential ashes as I smudge it on. I hate it, it takes SO long, and besides who cares? Even if I'm not going out that day, though, I have to make myself look good. By skipping the saggy sweatshirts and the self-deprecatingly ripped jeans, I'm doing something against that sinful habit of self-neglect.

4) In true Lenten fasting tradition, you get to skip all these rules on Sunday and do whatever the heck you want to do, even if that means wearing PJs to church. Or not going to church, if that's what your soul really needs.

Holy Impatience (otherwise known as the Ankle Monologues)

Last week, in a burst of courage, I emailed my doctor saying "don't you think my ankle is taking, oh, well, just a little bit too long in healing? It having been a year already?" and he emailed back "yes" and within an hour a podiatrist called me saying "could you come in for an appointment in an hour?"
(Kaiser Permanente definitely has the internal communications down pat. Thumbs up for that, KP!)

So I went in, trembling, and grateful that I hadn't had more than a minute or two to think about what might actually be wrong with my ankle. Because, well, my ankle was last year's problem - I was done learning from that mistake. Sometime last winter the physical therapist dismissed me to self-scheduled aftercare, and said it'll be slow but sure. So I filed "ankle" in the back of my brain, settled into the self-abnegating practice of Holy Patience, and simply postponed everything I wanted to do, like hiking Mt. Bald, and Mt. Tam, and Tennessee Valley, and the AIDS walk.

I'd learned a lot of spiritual lessons, of course, like grace and humility and new priorities. So many lessons, in fact, that my ankle seemed to be, by now, not much more than a collection of Ideas and Learnings, of Humblings and Challenges. The ankle had ceased to be anything much like an ankle. I no longer thought of it in terms of leaps, or turns, or waltzes, or climbs. I'd even stopped thinking of it in terms of ligaments or tendons, strength or stretch.

It took some good friends and family members to gently push me and say, basically, "you deserve to have a working ankle." I went ahead and emailed the doctor, all but assuming he would answer "You're not spiritual enough. Practice patience." So it was scary when he agreed - "yes you deserve a working ankle."

My ankle is Not Okay, and if the steroid treatment doesn't loosen scar tissue, I could need surgery. That's scary.

What's scarier is to think about how quickly I shut myself up, shut myself off, denied myself the hope of a healthy ankle, and sanctified it under the name of the virtue - Holy Patience.
Impatience is holy too. Check out some psalms. That's the virtue I need to practice today. Today I need to push, demand, stand up for myself, and stop apologizing for the air I breathe. I need to know that I am good enough to deserve healing, and that, being a paying KP member, I am entitled to a doctor's care. Maybe I'll even get brave enough to ask God for some healing, although I'll have to get over the hurdle of wanting not to take up God's precious time.

Today I invite you to take a look at whatever it is you consider a virtue... and wonder about its counterpart. Could the opposite be a virtue, too? Patience - Impatience. Humility - Pride. Diligence - Playfulness.
I wonder....

Created in God's image

There's something difficult in the word "dominion" which the humans are commanded to exercise in most translations of the Bible: "have dominion over the fish and the birds and the animals." It should be translated somewhere on the fine line between "stewardship" and "domination," because its meaning is about midway between, but the problem is that the word resembles one much more than the other. So I take Ellen Davis' recommendation to call it "skilled mastery" (from her full article which you can download right here) which indicates that our rule is not arbitrary or forceful. In order to take good care of it, we must have knowledge and respect for it.
Also, the "be fruitful and multiply" is mostly quoted with reference to humans, but the fish & birds & all are also commanded to be fruitful and multiply. Let us not forget our kinship.

A reading modified from Gen 1:26-28

God said, “let us create humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them exercise skill and mastery over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind, Adam, (earthling), in God’s image.
In the image of God,
God created him,
Male and female,
God created them.
In much the same way God had already blessed the animals, God now blessed humankind, and God said, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and exercise skilled mastery over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

AND A PRAYER.
Great God, you have created us in your image,
and imprinted upon us your attributes.
You have created us to be creators,
you have created us to be creative.
Deep in our souls is imprinted
your limitless vision of this world’s fertility and abundance;
sharp on our hearts is your call
to exercise good stewardship and loving care over what is entrusted to us.
We feel the true goodness of the world you have created
And the particular goodness of our little corner of the world.
We are standing on holy ground; ought we to have removed our shoes?
Great God,
Into your servants breathe the inspiration of your holy spirit,
Scrub away whatever is covering your image hidden inside.
Allow us to pray and to think and to speak from that place of creativity, of wisdom, of love and tender care.
Be in our work, and in our play. Be love in our hearts today.
In the strong name of Jesus Christ we pray, Amen.

(I prayed that for the trustees of SFTS as they opened their meeting yesterday. I'm an avid recycler. )

Grounded Scriptures

So I’m a seminarian, a New Yorker transplanted in California, a musician, a Sunday School teacher, a feminist, and an aspiring farmer.
Whaa? You may ask. What kind of well-educated, urban, pulpit-bound woman aspires to spend her days digging in the dirt? What kind of feminist is eager to do more canning and preserving than her grandmother did? Odd, I know. I often keep this part of my self-identity under wraps, because people do just that – “Whaa?” … and then I have to explain about how I might not have to operate a tractor, it could be urban community gardens, or how I could have a seedling nursery… But the fact remains, surprising many – I want to farm. I'm itching for more than a few square feet of land to do it on.


I have to blame a lot of the “why” for this unfortunate vocation on the Bible. Ever since my Old Testament professor Marvin Chaney shouted at our Prophets class “you can’t read this in stained-glass language!” about the sin of land-grabbing, I have had a vivid sense that the Way described and commanded in the biblical texts had plenty to do with how we work, live, spend our money, relate to our neighbor, and how we eat… perhaps more than with how we pray. And through reading (lots of Ellen Davis) and learning (with the Presbyterian Hunger Program roadtrip) I’ve come to believe that the particular realm of how we grow and distribute food in America is drastically opposed to the ideals set out in the Bible.

The rubber hits the road in my new blog series, posted here & elsewhere on Wednesdays, “Grounded Scriptures.” I will search each week for a Bible verse we tend to read in that “stained glass language,” extricate it from my piously cerebral assumptions, and look for a way to understand it in terms of the relationship of God’s people to the land, the soil, and the plants and creatures that grow in and on it.
Read & join in!
http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith/
http://pcusablog.blogspot.com/

I wrote this

Meditation for Dec 27th, SFTS Devotional

Today’s passage: Proverbs 8:22-30
This passage speaks of a personified wisdom – Sophia. The Hebrew Hochmah and Greek Sophia are both feminine nouns and so have been understood as a glimpse into the feminine aspects of God. The Hebrew understanding of Sophia includes the kind of wisdom that Solomon was reputed to have, with insight and understanding of complex situations, but also includes skills and abilities. Sophia was with the carpenters, weavers, and other workers who constructed the tabernacle. She indwelled them to such degree that they were said to have “the spirit of God.” (Ex 31:6). Her grace-filled gifts are given not only to the mind, but to the hands as well. She is, above all, creative.

We can understand this Sophia as God’s first creation, made not begotten, but we can also see her as a female manifestation of God and of Christ. She is “the first of God’s acts of long ago,” just as Christ is “the Word, in the beginning with God” (John 1:2). She is a co-worker in creation, a “master worker,” similar to the Word through whom “all things came into being” (John 1:3). Paul calls Christ “the wisdom of God” – God’s Sophia (I Cor 1:24).

As we continue to celebrate his marvelous coming into the world, let us seek to be in touch with Christ, the wisdom of God.
The one who makes fools out of the worldly wise;
The one who is understood by fools, women, shepherds, pregnant teens, tax collectors... and dismissed by many others;
The one who came to her own, and her own people did not accept her;
The one who has been “daily God’s delight,” on whom God’s favor rests, descending like a dove;
The one who has seen the creation of all things, who creates, who recreates, who allows us to be recreated.
All these things, wrapped tightly together in story-cloth, laid in the straw he created – all these things made real in one tiny baby.

God – Sophia – Christ.
Be in our hearts and minds and hands today.

barnyard leadership

So this blog got reviewed in Presbyterians Today, and they included a little pic of farmer talitha:
They gave it a caption - "church leadership in her future?" And one might think, yes! in some kind of barn-church.

Right. So the word "pastor" means "shepherd" as in sheep. In fact that small animal in my arms is not a sheep but a goat, long-standing symbol in Christian literature of an outsider/bad person, as in fact are dogs (and Samaritans). Score. Pastor to the less than perfectly sheepish. I could live with that.
But I was reminded that my sister & brother-in-law have definitely got me beat in terms of ministering to the less stereotypical flocks. They did a brief stint in Uganda as pig missionaries.
So if you ever tire of the sappy Christian songs about shepherding, or just DON'T WANNA BE A SHEEP, rest assured that my family has got the rest of the barnyard metaphors covered.

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.