Is There Any Non-Partisan Truth Left?

A retired colleague of mine posted on social media a scorecard that showed which national politicians lied the most. The scorecard was based on a non-partisan study of at least 50 public statements each of the politicians had made. The scorecard had a scale that indicated how many of the claims made by each politician were true, how many were partial truths, and how many were completely fabricated (flat out lies). According to the scorecard, the ones who lied the most were actually the ones who most frequently accused the others of lying. 

The Democrats fared a lot better on his scorecard than Republicans, so my Republican friends who responded to his post cried "foul!" They were absolutely certain the study was biased,  either a total fantasy of my friend's demented thinking or nothing more than propaganda from the left.  We have reached a time in the history of communications when nothing has to be verified as true before it is published as the truth, so critics were justified in their skepticism. Even if the scorecard was amassed by researchers with blinders on, the party that scores worse on it will deny its validity. That's the way of politics these days.

In 2016, a civil conversation about political differences is as rare as a high temperature of 75 degrees or less on an August afternoon in Alabama. Civil political conversations occur only when both parties admit that their opinions are biased toward the party and candidate they prefer.  The human condition of original sin continues to plague even those of us redeemed by grace so that we delude ourselves to believe our truth is objective and reliable and our opponent's truth is subjective and unreliable. The problem is so pronounced during this presidential election season that showing a lack of disdain for the candidate the local and vocal majority opposes will get you pigeonholed as ignorant or a radical, if not a lunatic.

Prophets were seldom if ever honored in their time for speaking inconvenient truth. Many of them were accused of treason and imprisoned or killed for their words whose truth time would confirm. Their words rang true sometimes centuries after they announced judgment or blessing.  Eighty-four years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr published a book titled Moral Man and Immoral Society in which he offered a theological perspective on social and political issues as current as today's news. The year was 1932, before the Nazi movement and its excesses became a serious concern to the US and its allies and long before the civil rights movement pressed for equal rights under the law for all races. Read the following statements written by Niebuhr. Think of American and world history since he wrote these words. Think of our current reality and draw your own conclusions. 

“There is a paradox in patriotism…[because] patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism…The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation’s power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint.”

“The moral attitudes of dominant and privileged groups are characterized by universal self-deception and hypocrisy.” They conflate (and confuse) “the unconscious and conscious identification of their special interests with general interests and universal values.”

“Will a disinherited group, such as [African-Americans], ever win full justice in society [through negotiation]? Will not even its most minimum demands seem exorbitant to the dominant whites, among whom only a very small minority will regard the inter-racial problem from the perspective of objective justice?”

“Contending factions in a social struggle require morale; and morale is created by the right dogmas, symbols and emotionally potent oversimplifications.”

A partisan view sees any truth in these statements as a critique of our opponent or enemy but does not see it as applicable to us.  A non-partisan view of these statements says, HE NAILED US. The partisan approach is denial. The non-partisan approach is contrition, a synonym for repentance. The only non-partisan truth that remains is confession of our own sins, mea culpa. Accusing our opponents of their many sins does not count as confession. Acknowledging our own failures and learning from them so that we do not repeat them is confession and repentance.  We would have smarter politicians if we allowed them to acknowledge their mistakes, learn from them, and continue to serve except with a little more humility and gratitude afterwards. As long as partisan politics determines who gets elected as our governmental leaders, confession and repentance will amount to political suicide, a self-incriminating admission to weakness. It is nonetheless the only way to start recognizing and telling non-partisan truth, and that is the purest kind. 

Hughey Reynolds

The Moral Dilemma of Voting for a Presidential Candidate

Several of us will have to eat our words when we vote for the Democratic or Republican Party nominee for President in this year's general election.  More than a few who were in the "Never Trump" movement are now lining up to work for Donald Trump's election this November. And among Hillary Clinton's supporters are former critics who once wanted to spit every time they heard her name.

This year I have said more than once that I am bracing myself to vote in November for "the lesser of two evils."  I do not want to vote for evil. I want to vote for good. Is that possible this year, or any year?  Based on recent primary campaign tactics and antics, I expect that the Democratic and Republican party candidates will attempt to demonize each other all the way up to November. Each candidate will ignore or minimize the positive and exaggerate the negative aspects of his or her opponent's personality, capabilities, and platform.

To accept the demonizing of any political candidate is sloth. It is intellectually lazy and far less than we should expect of ourselves or our fellow citizens. And yet, conceding to vote for the lesser of two evils in November assumes that the demonizing politicians were right and that both candidates are devils.  On the other hand, believing the choice is between my candidate who is an angel, or at least an admirable human being, and the other candidate who is a devil is delusional.

A twentieth century American theologian named Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) taught, wrote, and preached prophetically about political life in America.  If you will engage his words thoughtfully, I believe you will see that what he wrote in 1946 offers a fresh and insightful perspective on this year's political campaign.  I believe acknowledging the truth of his words, i.e., that you and I see from a limited and skewed perspective, allows us to make a clearer judgment about this year's presidential candidates. When I no longer project my deception and my ignorance onto them I can see more objectively their real strengths and real weaknesses.

The following is more than a sound bite, but  if you soak in these thoughts and use them to reflect on our current political climate I believe the words will ring true.  This is an excerpt from Reinhold Niebuhr's book Discerning the Signs of the Times (Scribner's, 1946, pp. 12-13).

Since we usually do not deceive others without also deceiving ourselves, our motives are frequently "honest" after we have dishonestly constructed the imposing facade of ideal intentions...  

The combination of ignorance and dishonesty, which determines the composition of our social prejudices, is occasioned by the fact that all men are creatures of limited perspectives and yet are also free spirits who have some knowledge of the larger frame of reference in which their judgment and their interest are not the center of the scheme of things. Our anxieties as weak creatures in competition with other forms of life prompt us to advance our own interests. Our strength as rational and spiritual creatures enables us to advance these interests beyond their rightful range. Our further capacity to recognize the invalidity of these claims means that we must, with some degree of conscious dishonesty, hide our special interests and claims, and merge them with the more universal and general interests.

Thus it is that every party claim and every national judgment, every racial and religious prejudice, and every private estimate of the interests and virtues of other men, is something more and something less than a purely intellectual judgment. From the simplest judgment of our rival and competitor to the most ultimate judgment about the character of human history and the manner of its final fulfillment, we are tempted to error by our anxieties and our pride; and we seek to hide the error by pretension. We can not discern the signs of the times because we are hypocrites.

 Niebuhr's understanding does not elevate political candidates above the rest of us or give them immunity from the ignorance and dishonesty by which all humans pursue our own self-interest. He rather brings into focus the limited perspective we have to judge politicians, inviting us to take the first step toward gaining a clearer perspective by practicing a little humility.  Niebuhr astutely observes further, as if peering ahead 70 years from 1946 (p. 21,22, 25):

Anger is the root of both righteousness and sin... One source of sin in anger lies in the selfish narrowness of our emotions... The second corrupt fruit of anger is hatred..  The cure of the sin in anger is not an emotional detachment from the issues of life. It is rather an attitude of humility which recognizes the constant temptation to sinful and egoistic corruption in our anger.

Niebuhr's critique of human anger and limitation is on target. Does he see and offer any solution?  He warns us not to assume that having faith purifies our politics. "A faith which claims to know too much is not merely the bearer of the pretensions of wisdom, but also the instrument of human will-to-power" (p. 90).  He gives no final answer for us but has hope for our national life in the faith of Abraham who looked for a city whose builder and maker was God (Hebrews 11:10); in our expectant waiting for the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 25:1-13); in the humor of God (Psalm 2:4) and our own capacity to laugh at ourselves; in the power of God that is made perfect in weakness (Matthew 27, 2 Corinthians 2:9); in the unconquered mysteries of God (1 Corinthians 13:12); and in peace of God which surpasses all understanding and keeps our hearts through Jesus Christ (Philippians 4:7).

As Christians we do not have to choose between two evil political candidates, but rather confess the evil in our own lives that distorts our perspectives and claim for ourselves the mercy, grace, and love of God at work to forgive us and open our eyes so we realistically, and without condemnation, assess human beings for who they are: sinners saved by grace, and therefore God's children. As children of God we are called and expected to embrace interests that are far bigger than our own.

Given these realities, and discerning the spirit of the times, I fully expect to see the good beyond the bad in both presidential candidates and to make a choice for the one I believe is most committed and capable of delivering the good of our nation and world in the days ahead.

Book Release!

Available today through Amazon:

The Land That Calls Me Home investigates the disappearance of small-scale farms from rural America and casts a vision for the church to lead in their recovery.   The book goes beyond naming the usual suspects of industrialization, agricultural policies, and corporations most often blamed or credited with orchestrating the mass exodus of farmers from rural America and brings to light two overlooked contributors to driving farmers away from the land: Theology and the Church.  

The author shows how a misinterpretation of scripture erroneously equates farming with God’s curse on Adam for eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.  That fallacy lies at the root of the uncontested takeover of agriculture by corporate powers. The takeover centralized farming so that today a few giant corporations monopolize global farm markets and only one-percent of all Americans farm full time.  Globalizing farming promised to free the masses from the curse of having to work the land to survive.  The author debunks the portrayal of tilling the soil as a curse and interprets the curse rather as the separation of human beings from the soil.  The more distance we create between ourselves and the soil, the less healthy the earth and our human bodies become.  Therefore, restoring the viability of small-scale farming is a means of counteracting the curse on Adam and the soil.

The church has been an accomplice to the theft of agriculture from the people and forcing their mass migration from rural farmsteads to suburbs and cities.  The church saw the increase in productivity of those who were left to farm on a large scale as a positive development to be celebrated.  The negative impact of farming with pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified organisms (altered seed), and chemical fertilizers, along with the effect of agricultural runoff on the soil, rivers, oceans, and on human health were seen as negligible compared to the promise of increased yield that could be used to eradicate global hunger.  Corporate greed, however, has stockpiled food while millions die of malnutrition annually.  Furthermore, the church has too often separated the care of souls from the care of the earth and ceded earth and health care to government and free enterprise.  In shrinking rural communities, decimated by the migration of farmers to the city, a few dwindling churches have remained open long enough to care for the lingering souls and to bury the dead.

By confessing our complicity in causing the current farm crisis in America, church leaders can with renewed vision help restore the viability of small-scale farming in rural communities on the fringes of larger population centers.  Churches can serve as network hubs for farmers, whose crops are too small to win contracts with large grocery chains, to sell their produce in local Farmers Markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) networks.  Churches that catch the vision to support local agriculture have the volunteer base, the parking lots, and the presence in their communities to organize and run an effective Farmers Markets.  They provide a service to the farmers and to their community while reconnecting people to the soil.

The author researches the loss and revival of small-scale farming from the standpoint of a pastor and a farmer.  He lived on and moved from a small-scale farm as a youth and has served in full-time pastoral ministry forty years, including the last twenty years when he has worked to revive and grow his family farm.  His greatest discovery in seeking to make farming viable has been that the small-scale farm’s best chance of financial solvency is having adequate local markets to sell farm products, markets which churches in population centers are ideally suited to provide.  He has worked with lay leaders to establish a successful Farmers Market in his present pastoral appointment and serves as consultant to other congregations seeking ways to support local agriculture.

The Church Farmers Market

The Farmers Market at Latham United Methodist Church opened in the church parking lot on May 7, 2013 and will open every Tuesday through October 1 from 3-7 p.m.  Don’t mistake the Farmers Market at Latham as the latest trend or the nostalgia of a pastor who grew up on a farm.  Church-based farmers markets are part of a growing trend and Latham’s senior pastor has a lifelong love of farming.  However, the Farmers Market at Latham UMC is an outgrowth of a theological understanding that values dirt.

In his book titled God’s People and God’s Land,[1] Christopher Wright says that the covenant relationship God established is properly conceived as a triangular relationship among Israel, the land and the Lord. The word land appears over 1,500 times in the Bible. That is more than the words heart, spirit, and love combined.  And yet, the Bible is not a geography or geology book. The Bible is the book of God creating and redeeming people and the land. The Apostle Paul says the creation waits with eager longing for human redemption by which it will be set free from its bondage to decay.[2]

The fifth commandment reads: “Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”[3] We often shorten that verse to “Honor your parents” or stress it as way to long life. The greatest benefit of honoring parents is that we continue in the land that the Lord our God is giving us. The sense of the command is more than “Be kind to your parents or they will take you out of their will.” The admonition is to honor your parents by working the land with them that has been given your family as a heritage. Stay connected to the land, your parents, and God. Our mobility makes it difficult for us to keep this commandment.

God created human beings to tend and care for God’s creation that provides all that is needed to sustain life. The fall of humankind separated us from God and from the land. Within the “curse” on the land resulting from Adam’s sin lies our path to redemption. God said that the ground without man tilling it would bring forth thorns and thistles, but by tilling the soil, man “shall eat the plants of the field.”[4] God’s command is for us to work with the earth for our food, to reconnect with the soil for our survival and growth.  Jesus lived close to nature and his parables invite us to observe and learn from creation to see and enter the Kingdom of God.

Today, many layers of suburban and urban domestication insulate us from the soil.  Hosting a farmers market in our church parking lot is a step toward reconnecting ourselves and our community with the soil and the people who draw their life and livelihood directly from it.

---

[1] Christopher J. H. Wright, God’s People in God’s Land: Family, Land and the Property in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI,: Eerdmans, 1990), 104-5

[2] Romans 8:19-22

[3] Exodus 20:12

[4] Genesis 3:18

An Ireland-Inspired Hope for Small Farms in the US

While traveling in Ireland last year (2011), I made the following journal entry:

I am traveling and experiencing parts of Ireland in a group of 6 United Methodist and 3 Episcopal male clergy.   We arrived in Dublin from the United States on Saturday morning, 11 June 2011.  A bus transported us through the city southwest into the countryside for about 2 1/2 hours.  We stopped along the way for breakfast at a restaurant next to a horse farm.  The study proposal says that we will begin to focus on the question of which faith resources will empower us for the rest of our pilgrimage by involving ourselves directly in the ancient spiritual disciplines of Benedict, Celtic theology, and the sacred places of Ireland. 

Although on a spiritual journey, I saw immediately that small farms are still viable and carry the weight of agriculture in Ireland.  We followed a milk truck that made stops at farms to pick up the milk daily.  This is a stark contrast to the US where the infrastructure supporting small farms has been minimized or eliminated.  An agriculture map of Ireland shows the rich variety of agriculture across the country.  As I write on the 4th day of my travels through the region southwest of Dublin, primarily County Limerick, I am in a hotel outside Adar.  A colleague, Roger Thompson, and I walked from the restaurant back to our hotel 1 1/2 miles from town.  On the right of the road was a golf course on which the Irish Open has been held.  On our left was a pasture that had cattle, horses, sheep, and goats all grazing together.  

Yesterday, while visiting a holy burial site near Lough Gor, an ancient mystical lake, we stopped at The Great Stone Circle at Grange that is located inside a pasture.  Five calves were grazing and resting inside the Circle itself.  The spiritual practice of walking the circle and sensing the lives and stories of those buried there was powerful.  The walk required stepping around cow manure which added to the richness of the experience for me.  A serendipity occurred when the farmer whose land contains the Stone Circle showed up to greet us.  Our guide, Norin, had encountered him before when she had come to meditate or brought groups.  She tried to avoid him and urged our group to return to the bus when he approached us.  I stayed behind and engaged him in conversation about his dairy.  He was in his sixties.  At first he showed me a book that contained a photo taken in America of one of his sons when he had visited our continent.  It was obviously a way of connecting with the tourists who visited Stone Circle.  He then tried to interest me in the picture postcards he had to sell.  When I changed the subject to ask him about his herd of Fresian milk cows, he was eager to tell me about his plight, and that of other small farmers in Ireland.  He said one of his sons had taken interest in the farm so he had hopes of the farm continuing into the next generation.  He said he needed another farm worker to help them tend and milk his 40 cows that were coming into the barn for milking as we spoke.  I was tempted to take the job and ask the group to pick me up on their way back.  

After returning to the US, I had the following reflections on the intersection of spirituality and agriculture and on the future of the church and farming as a way of life:

At Glenstal Abbey, the worship with the monks grew in depth and richness with every service.  Although we were in a large nave with often only a handful of people spread through the building, the sense of God’s presence was intense.  The singing, praying, meditation and discipline of the monks stirred the heavens and awoke something inside me that I had not felt in year.  A sense of God’s peace even when all around is decaying and declining.  God can be trusted and will create a new heaven and a new earth; even a new church. 

Noirin Ni Rianan brought an earthy yet effervescent spirituality to us with your ancient songs and instruments and piercing voice.  The ancient ruins she led us to were not ruins but eternally thin places where she sensed, and helped us sense, the faith of believers and martyrs who had worshiped and died there. The context of all our travels, however, was the countryside consisting of small and medium size farms.  

Glenstal Abbey itself was on a 500 acre farm.  Father James had as his daily work apart from worship the management of a 100+ cow dairy.  Our host, Brother Coleman, arranged for me to visit the dairy with James and discuss farming methods and developments with him.  Between every holy site, we saw back to back to back small farms, both on the flatland and on the hillside. 

When I returned from Ireland, I immediately began to share stories from the trip in my sermons and newsletter articles at Latham. I also suffered from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with my comfortable suburban life in the states.  It was a restlessness of feeling more than ever that my life and ministry were to be lived out in a farm-based ministry.  I felt that I had little energy to get back into the grind of the daily work of ministry at Latham, but had no choice but to do it.  I did have energy to write my story.  I began to revise a manuscript I had begun to write in 2009 and added 30 more pages of new material.  I titled it The Land That Calls Me Home and am continuing to add to it as my ministry to support small farms and churches in rural communities continues.  The book is not finished because it develops a still unfolding plan that creates markets in urban and suburban areas for small farm products, which is a first step toward  returning to rural ministry and farming.   My ultimate desire is to assist rural churches to find their role in helping restore a farm based economy in their community through networking locally grown food in nearby population centers and urban-suburban churches.  I am in an ideal population center to develop such networks and am excited about working with Latham, my District Superintendent, and local agencies and individuals on increasing food security in our region.  The next stage of this plan is organizing a Farmers' Market at Latham to open in the spring of 2013.

Sandy and I have had many heart to heart conversations about eventually making this transition from suburban to rural ministry.  She works outside our home, and employment opportunities for her are limited once we leave Huntsville.  That means some economic constraints and lifestyle changes for us.  We have become dependent on our suburban life and the process of weaning ourselves from it is not easy.  

I had fruitful conversations in 2010 with Ken and Sarah Corson about partnering with SIFAT (Servants in Faith and Technology), located 10 miles from my farm, in strengthening rural economies and churches by through facilitating food production and market networking.  More recently, Sandy and I have come to know Chris and Jennifer Sunde and their daughter Caitlyn. Chris and Jennifer are in their late thirties.  They first came to Lineville, Alabama to work with SIFAT, where Chris taught sustainable agriculture and Jennifer cooked.  After a few years living in the area, they bought a small homestead consisting of a house and 3 acres near Lineville and set out to grow enough food for themselves and to sell locally for a modest income.  I would pass their house frequently when I drove from my farm to visit Sandy's mother.  My mother-in-law went into in the nursing home in Lineville early this year. She had a condition that made her unable to digest processed foods well.  We contracted with Jennifer to cook and deliver one home-grown and home-cooked meal a day to Sandy's mother and my father who was in the same nursing home.  The Sundes are deeply spiritual people who practice a lifestyle and the faith of simple people.  Their attire is similar to  Amish and Mennonites.  Their commitments to live close to, depend on, and care for the earth and the animals that help and feed them are not only similar to the Amish but to the small farmers I met and observed in Ireland.  

These connections, in Ireland, Huntsville, Lineville, and in rural farming communities across Alabama, are all part of a growing network that is giving vitality to small farms and the people who choose the lifestyle that goes with them.  The church has a key role to play in forming and sustaining this network to connect God's people to God's land.   In my next blog I will share  how Latham United Methodist Church is progressing toward opening a farmers' market to expand opportunities for small farmers in our area to sell their produce.

The Grow Your Own Food Network

The Grow Your Own Food Network  began when I called a long time Latham United Methodist Church member Cal Blevins in May of 2012 with the idea of pairing experienced gardeners with anyone who wanted to learn to garden and share gardening ideas.  He agreed to participate and started naming others in the church who garden.  I invited them and made announcements in the church that we were meeting.  Twenty-one attended during the next ten weeks to ask questions, share information, and give advice to first year gardeners about site selection, soil preparation, plant varieties, composting, mulching, caring for plants, combating insects and plant disease, and knowing when to harvest.  Participants included Cal Blevins, Tom Yates, Jim and Mary Jane Williams, Al and June Kid, Carolyn Peters, Faye Cook, Liz Hall Zeman, Susan Terry, William McRea, Candy Trowbridge, Betty Kilpatrick, Ben and Ginny Bentley, Cheryl and Cathy Cray, Charlie Warren, Diana Underwood, Carolyn Sorrell, and   Michael Sorrell.  Some who attended had no space at home to garden.  I contacted the pastor of nearby Hope Presbyterian Church, Christie Ashton, and asked permission to use the eight raised beds Hope built on their property several years ago.  The members who had planted the raised beds were no longer able to maintain them.  Only one of the raised beds was in use so Christie agreed that beginning gardeners in our network could use them.  Diana claimed two of the raised beds, pictured below.  She and her daughter Carolyn and son Michael planted the beds and harvested tomatoes, squash, beans, and peppers.  Betty planted tomatoes and thought her garden would dry up while she was in the hospital during the summer.  To her surprise, the plants thrived due in large measure to a subterranean hydration system that the church had installed beneath the raised beds.  She was still harvesting tomatoes until temperatures dropped below freezing in late October.  A small group of gardeners continued to gather at Latham for “Ask the Gardener” sessions into September.  We shared information about insect and fungus control and the best fertilizer to use to stimulate blossoms rather than more plant growth. 

Raised bed Garden at Hope Presbyterian kept by members of Latham's Grow Your Own Food NetworkShe and her daughter Carolyn and son Michael planted the beds and harvested tomatoes, squash, beans, and peppers.  Betty planted tomatoes and thought her garden would dry up while she was in the hospital.  To her surprise, the plants thrived due in large measure to a subterranean hydration system that the church had installed beneath the raised beds.  She was still harvesting tomatoes until temperatures dropped below freezing in late October.  A small group of gardeners continued to gather at Latham for “Ask the Gardener” sessions into September.  We shared information about insect and fungus control and the best fertilizer to use to stimulate blossoms rather than more plant growth.

In September of 2012, Latham held a Locally Grown Covered Dish Supper.  I invited Lee McBride to lead a gardening class afterwards to talk about eating locally grown food, fall gardening, and preparing for a spring garden.  The event expressed the church’s vision of connecting generations to grow relationships with God, others and creation.  The supper was an overwhelming success measured by the locally grown foods that we grew or purchased, prepared, and brought.  There was great attendance at the supper, and we enjoyed the fellowship and conversation about and around the food.  An additional result was the increased awareness of the availability and benefits of locally grown food.  One member brought venison to the supper, which was a huge hit, but besides the venison, we had no locally grown meat dishes.  Local butchers get their beef, pork, and chicken from meat processors sourced in the Midwest.  I raise beef.  When I sell steers at the Clay County Livestock yard, buyers transport them to feedlots and slaughterhouses in the West and Midwest from Texas to Iowa before meatpackers distribute them across the nation or export them back to us or to other nations.  No wonder conservative estimates of the distance our food travels before reaching our tables is 1,300 miles.  I visited Wright’s Dairy in Alexandria, Alabama, which is ninety miles away, to buy cheese, milk that was not homogenized, and eggs, all from cows and hens raised on Wright’s Dairy farm.  The cheese was a delicacy at the church supper and many children tasted whole milk for the first time, to the delight of many.  I have since learned that there is a closer source for locally grown cheese thirty-five miles away, the Cheese Factory in Ardmore, Tennessee.  The picture below shows the intergenerational crowd that gathered for and enjoyed the locally grown supper.

Latham has committed to host quarterly Locally Grown Covered Dish Suppers featuring seasonal foods.  One benefit is to raise awareness of the availability of locally grown food and the absence of those foods in our local grocery stores who stock their shelves with food grown and processed out of the region.  My goal in the suppers is to increase demand for locally grown food, which will lead to support of local farmers’ markets and influence local grocers to buy from local farmers. 

This is one of the ways that Latham seeks to fulfill our vision to connect generations to grow relationships with God, others, and creation.  It aligns with my personal vision to connect God's people to God's land  through God's church.  I love cultivating and making fertile ground for growth of all kinds.

Meeting Wendell Berry

In February I heard Wendell Berry speak at Samford University in Birmingham.   Two preacher friends and I showed up with tickets to the VIP reception for Mr. Berry so we could meet and talk with him before the lecture.  We intended to book a meeting of our clergy study group at his farm in Kentucky but we found no way to do that without being awkward.  So we awkwardly inquired if he ever invited groups like ours to visit at his farm.  He told us his house was rather small and our group of 9 Methodist preachers and Episcopal priests rather large, so we let the subject drop. Besides that, I stumbled trying to quote a short poem he wrote on work and prayer: "work, done in gratitude, kindly in well is prayer."  He  told me that was Catholic: laborare est orare, to work is to pray.  


I did not know beforehand the topic of Mr. Berry's lecture so I was pleasantly surprised when he read a not yet published short story titled "Sold."  I anticipated from the title itself that it would be a story about a farm foreclosure due to the get-big or get-out policy of the US Department of Agriculture.  I was partially correct.  There was no foreclosure because the farm he wrote about remained small and diversified.  It was about Beulah and Grover Gibbs, a farming couple who started out as tenant farmers until Beulah's parents died and left them the farm and house to tend and occupy.  Once Grover died, a neighbor named Coker Brand entered a sharecropping agreement with Beulah to cultivate the fields and tend the flocks and herds for her.  When her health failed, however, and she decided to sell the farm at auction and move closer to the doctors, that's when the tragedy occurred.  Coker Brand, was outbid by Mr. Big Rocks.  Coker knew what the place was worth as a farm.  Mr. Big Rocks bought the place for strip mining.  He immediately began to bulldoze everything, house and barn and fences, and erased all memory of the farm with its pastures, fields, and streams.  "Sold" meant violated, abused, valued not for its history of providing for families but for the natural resources that could be extracted from it unnaturally and permanently.

The Samford audience was spellbound.  Mr. Berry, my favorite living writer, does not own a computer or a cell phone.  He is a farmer who still plows with a horse.  He reads a lot but is not distracted by mounds of cyber information.  Instead, he pays close attention to the people around him and the details of their lives.  When he points out traits and expressions of ordinary people’s lives in his writing, it rings true and connects deeply in us.  He commands attention because people matter enough to command his.  

I asked the first question during the Q&A that followed his reading.  I said that many sources tell us that by the year 2050 there will be 9 billion people living on earth, 2 billion more than today.  At the current rate of production, we do not have arable land to grow enough food to feed the world over the next 38 years.  However, representatives of biotech and chemical agricultural corporations tell us not to worry; they have ways of radically increasing productivity on the land we already have through chemical and hybridization technologies.  My children and grandchildren do not like that answer. So I asked, "Mr. Berry, in light of this dilemma, what do you see as our preferred future?"  He first said he could not predict the future.  Then he replied, "If we can be scared enough about what may happen in 2050, a lot of people stand to make a lot of money and still not necessarily feed hungry people."  He also said that he was hesitant to answer the question because he never wants to say there are too many people.  "If we ever say there are too many poeple, and I've seen this in my lifetime, somone will name the excess."  And yet, he said death by starvation is a terrible thing, and what I described is paramount to a national emergency. We should take the problem seriously, but not panic.  If we are patient, we will not accept chemical and biotech solutions that have already created a 6,000 to 7,000 square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico from agricultural runoff.  Patience should lead us to find some answers to the problem of feeding the world in our not too distant past. 

That not too distant past was a reference to the lifestyle of Grover and Beulah Gibbs and Coker Brand in Wendell Berry's short story.  It is a lifestyle of living in harmony with the land and the natural environment, of working the land in ways that give to it and take from it in mutual sustainability.  In 2010, global human migration from the country to the city reached a milestone.  Over 50 percent of the world population now lives in cities, defined as municipalities with a population of 50,000 or more.  That shift is synonymous with the abandonment of the lifestyle that Grover and Beulah Gibbs enjoyed--investing in the land and its animals, livestock, and crops that sustained them.  

Yesterday I conducted a funeral for a man in his late eighties who was an engineer for NASA, on Dr. Verner von Braun's Apollo team.  And yet, his family recalled how he grew enough vegetables in his back yard and on a small piece of land he had in the country to feed his family, and share with his neighbors, friends at work and in the church.  His family survived the Great Depression by growing their own food and sharing it.  He continued the practice after he moved to the city and as long as his health allowed it.  This man lived the answer to the dilemma we face of feeding ourselves, eating better food and getting exercise while we do it,  feeding 2 billion more people over the next 30 years, and sustaining the environment too.  We who live and work in the city have arable land that Cargill and Monsanto have not considered as available for growing food.  We have lawns or spaces for raised beds; or if in apartments, we have balconies for container gardening or window planters for tomatoes, peppers, or radishes.  We have spaces owned by the city that could become neighborhood gardens.  We can make soil in the city or the country available to grow food on some scale. When we do, we reclaim our heritage of self-sufficiency and thrift, and solve the problem of feeding the world beginning in our own back yards.