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Learning for Life: Cultivating a Student Spirituality
Week 26
Randy Gabrielse, Iowa State University
Creation and our Environment
26.1 Wounds
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:5
Aldo Leopold wrote “A Sand County Almanac” in 1949. Even then, he was seeking to educate about the environment. He felt like a lone voice. He felt alone as he entered the brokenness of the natural world. Was he “living alone in a world of wounds?”
The Bible describes the mourning of Jesus. He mourned for his friend Lazarus, even as he prepared to raise him from the dead. He mourned over Jerusalem, wishing to protect the city whose leaders rejected him.
We know that Jesus not only died for our sins, he took upon himself the brokenness of the world as he hung on the cross. We are tempted to believe that when Jesus died on the cross, that our new life is entirely a life of joy. But even as new life has come, the world is still struggling under the effects of sin. We feel the pain all the more because we have a taste of new life in Christ.
Mourning is dangerous. To mourn is to let a little bit of the wounds and suffering into us. But Jesus calls Christians to take up our cross and follow him. I confess that I too often find myself “too busy” to mourn. In busy, affluent, technological societies we avoid mourning either by ignoring what Jesus calls us to mourn or by trying to fix it ourselves with money, technology or political and military power.
Today the voices crying out against environmental degradation and for preservation are many. Let’s not avoid, but like Christ, enter into the “world of wounds” with the new life that he brings.
This week, we will be meditating on creation, the environment and our relationship with our neighbors and the natural world. As Christians, what is our perspective? What is our responsibility?
Prayer:
Lord, help us to live new lives in you.
Bless us as we mourn.
Bless those whose suffering we mourn.
Comfort us as we mourn and comfort those whom we mourn.
Show us what we may do in word and in deed to bring your peace
to them,
and let us give to you what we cannot change.
We praise you for taking all sin and suffering on yourself,
and offering us new life in you.
Amen.
Quote: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” —Aldo Leopold, Round River.
26.2 Connected or Disconnected?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” Matt. 6:28
Jesus’ words sound strange to us—we of “the wired generation.” Few North Americans worry about having clothes to wear; few of us give thanks for them. But if we were to express gratitude, would we have any idea who we would thank for our T-shirts, blouses, jeans, dresses or socks?
As a child I thanked my grandmother and had great respect for her when she gave my brother and me home-sewn shirts, slippers or even bathrobes. We thanked our mother after watching her make us our first suits (three-piece back in those days). But by the time our three new brothers started school, our grandmother was unable to sew or knit, and our mother was working nearly full time. We noticed that the clothes were very different, but were less aware that we had stopped giving thanks for our clothes – except for the hand-me-downs I received from my younger but larger brothers.
Who should we thank? We certainly should thank God for his faithful provision. But most of us no longer live in relationships of people and provision. We can’t tell who to thank for laboring and sewing so that we do not have to worry about what we will wear. Most of us don’t know the farmers or farm workers who labored for our food either.
We can take time to visualize some of the millions of textile workers who labor and spin for us. We can think of the farmers and laborers who worked for our food. Then we can pray thanks to God for them. But beware: Praying for those who labor and spin so we do not have to worry about what we will wear may lead us to pray for God to care for them, and that could lead us to care for them, and that could lead to…..
Prayer:
Lord, restore our connections, our relationships.
Restore our reliance on you for our clothes.
Help us extend our thanks to those who plant and harvest and toil and spin our behalf.
Help us to seek the welfare of the people whose labor frees us from toil and bless the places where they live.
Amen.
Quote: “We travail. We are heavy laden. Refresh us, O homeless, jobless, possession-less Savior. You came naked, and naked you go. And it is for us. So it is for all of us.”
--Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, Living Lent
26.3 Of Gardens and Gleaning
"'When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the LORD your God.'" Leviticus 23:22
I faced the over-abundance that hot Augusts bring to vegetable gardeners. We shared our abundance with friends at a local food pantry, neighbors along the street, and friends at church and the university. Under-sized tomatoes, peppers and beans continue to ripen on the rare warm days that come in the fall. I face this dilemma as the weather cools each year: continue to harvest fruit we cannot use, or admit that we cannot use the late fruits and clear the garden for its fall blanket of dull green?
I am learning a new alternative: gleaning. I rejoiced when I was invited to glean peas in July. That was not the lesson. We gleaned tomatoes after harvesting sweet potatoes on Labor Day. That was not the lesson. When I faced our own garden with still-ripening small fruit on the plants, and didn’t harvest it because we have all we can use and know how to share, only then did I understand gleaning.
When I share with my neighbors but still have all of the ripe full-sized tomatoes and peppers I can use the remaining under-sized fruit appears diminutive. But to one in need it may appear full and beautiful. Our vision of the same fruit is different because at this time our needs are different.
The Lord gave gleaning as both gift and command to both the grower with plenty and the neighbor with little. Gleaning offers those with abundance a way to let go so that their neighbors in need could have enough or plenty. It offers those in need a way to gather enough without demeaning themselves by begging charity from their betters.
This year I learned from scripture and from the garden to invite friends and strangers to glean next year. What are you doing in your life that gives of your excess and accommodates the needs of others?
Prayer: Lord, you have blessed us with plenty. Help us to let go so that others may have enough. Raise up before us opportunities for us to give of your gifts our goods and ourselves, so that our neighbors and strangers may have enough hope, joy and love. Amen.
Quote:
“i got supper on the table
what do i do?
go out and help somebody
get supper on the table, too
'cause i got it to give
i got it to give
and when you got enough to give away
well it's the only way to live”
– Susan Werner, “Help Somebody”
26.4 Growing Harmony Farm
“I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil this is the gift of God.” – Eccl. 3: 12-13.
We finished five hours of pulling garlic plants out of the moist ground, trimming root hairs, and bundling and hanging the plants from the roof of the one-time corn crib. We rejoice in a job well done--eight hundred pounds of garlic bulbs over two days is a job well done. We rejoice at the sight of the harvested plants covering every centimeter of the building’s ceiling and much of its walls, accompanied by the aroma of freshly harvested garlic.
We rejoice as we envision making delicious dishes with our share of the garlic. We enjoy these visions because Growing Harmony Farm is a Community Supported Agriculture farm in Ames, Iowa, the middle of thousands acres farms of corn and soybeans. Members purchase a “share” of the crop and share the risk with the farmer so that forty four households can enjoy fresh, locally produced vegetables from late April through September. Oh, at Growing Harmony Farm we also enjoy a garden blessing in April, strawberries and homemade ice cream in June, and a harvest festival pot-luck, with sweet potato pie in October.
But this day, I’m not thinking ahead. I share the joy of the cooperative’s farmer, Gary, his jokes, his treat of homemade basil lemonade, his light step, and his pleasure in paying a living wage for the workers’ sustenance.
The deepest joy is working alongside old friends and making new friends as we pull, cart, trim, and hang the crop. Six work in the barn, sharing tales. Two of us pull and cart while sharing personal stories of struggles with our families and churches, our painful struggles that have helped us, or are helping us, grow in our relationships. Two days of work among these good friends and friends-to-be have been the richest fellowship I have enjoyed in the past year. “Working like this makes me feel almost Amish,” says one friend, simply.
Connection to earth and people around the gathering of food -- have we deprived ourselves of happiness and joy when we distance ourselves from the land? Do we need to re-evaluate how we live, reassess our priorities and find opportunities to get close to land and people again?
Prayer: Lord, bless us with opportunities to labor honestly.
Show us how to open such opportunities
for others to labor honestly.
Bless those who labor with fair wages.
Let us be a blessing when we work.
Amen.
Quote: “As embodied creatures who eat, drink, and breathe, we are necessarily and beneficially connected to natural habitats, myriads of (large and microscopically small) organisms, and the evolutionary processes that sustain us all:” -- More Deliberate Every Day
26.5 The Blessing of Food
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what will you wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” Matt 6: 19-25
John, my colleague in campus ministry, asked to say grace before our meal at his favorite restaurant. I nodded. John prayed: Lord bless this food to our bodies; bless the people who labored to produce this food and those who prepared and brought it to us. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
John’s brief request for God’s blessing on those who produced, prepared and brought our food to us stopped me short. I instantly realized that I had never sought blessing for the producers of our food as part of a meal-time prayer. I had worked to produce food for our table, both from our own garden and from the Community Supported Agriculture Farm that offers us a ever-changing variety of fresh organic produce through the summer, and I had given thanks for our of pork, beef and chicken.
Why then, had I never recognized such prayer as a significant part of enjoying each and every meal? This omission seemed even greater because John and I were meeting to discuss a project that would emphasize and develop Christians’ perspectives on and contributions to sustainable agriculture, a matter that we both understand to involve issues of stewardship, justice and personal relationships.
I am sure part of the reason is that I have never wondered where my next meal would come from. John spent a year working with the rural poor in El Salvador in the wake of the civil war that destroyed what little security the rural people there had enjoyed. Maybe that gave him a different perspective.
If you pray before meals, what do you pray? If you don’t, what might God want you to pray?
Prayer:
Lord, bless today’s food to our bodies. Bless the people who labored to produce this food and those who prepared and brought it to us. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Quote: “God is a god of abundance, not a god of scarcity…. God gives us more than enough: more bread and fish than we can eat, more love than we dared to ask for.” Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
26.6 Jubilee
Luke tells us of the opening of Jesus’ ministry in Nazareth:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me,
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4: 14-19
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’”
Many believe that these opening words of Jesus’ ministry were a call to a year of Jubilee. Perhaps Joseph and Mary’s return to Nazareth for a census proclaimed by Caesar Augustus was a precursor to the Jubilee command that the LORD gave for celebrating Jubilee: “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you. Each of you is to return to your own family property and to your own clan.” (Lev. 25:10).
This call to freedom from oppression after four centuries of occupation and to Jubilee must have sounded very different than when Moses announced it at Sinai. When Israel entered Canaan, the Jubilee likely appeared as an onerous task for those who had gained servants to free them and to return land to those who had lost theirs. But in the first century it would have appeared as a call for the people of God to gain freedom from onerous oppression.
What perspective do you have? Many of us in North America would consider Jesus’ call far too onerous to accept. But we must consider how it appears to those removed from family farms and those who labor in slavery or near-slavery sweatshop conditions. How does the gospel of Jesus Christ sound to them? And maybe, in spite of what we have, we are more in need of Jubilee than we think!
Prayer: Father, as we see the abundance around us,
help us to remember your words and consider
who are the least among us. Help us consider
how we might join them in community,
not as givers, nor as fixers, but as helpers,
willing to walk with them in their steps.
Quote “We read the gospel as if we had no money," laments Jesuit theologian John Haughey, "and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the gospel." –Ched Meyers interview with Wendell Berry, Sojourners, 1998.
26.7 Nazareth and Woman Farmers
Last night I and some friends watched The Nativity Story, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and released by New Line Cinema. I knew by the end that the director must be a woman. It captured so well the community of women in Nazareth who shared in harvesting grapes, olives and other crops; shared and cared for one another in childbirth. They also shared in the oppression of husbands and cousins by Herod’s soldiers, most dramatically when the soldiers seized the daughter of a man who could not pay the tax, so she could work it off (as servant or part of Herod’s harem?).
By contrast, we have removed women from integrated work and family provision: some become merely mothers and others “just another wage-earner.” But women own nearly half the agricultural land in the U.S. and the number of women who are principle operators has increased from 209,784 in 1997 to 237,819 in 2002; and from 5,101 to 6,204 here in Iowa. But they face barriers to the capital intensive commodity farming that we imagine as the male world of agriculture.
The USDA found that “In response, women farmers have moved toward sustainable agricultural enterprises that encourage lower capital investment, greater investment of labor, and more land-intensive practices.” They also “disproportionately engage in the production of fruits, vegetables, trees, nuts and animal specialties”. Women are leading the way back to diverse farming that cares for people, not the industrial food system.
Personally, I rejoice to see Jill working hand in hand with her husband at Picket Fence Creamery; to greet Julia and Kay, working alongside Larry at Happy Hollow Farm, to see Wendy, Carol and Kathy raise the goats at Northern Prairie Chevre; or Jan at One Step at a Time farm, or see Donna and Maggie produce food items, body-care items and hand-dyed scarves and other items at Prairieland Herbs. What do women like these show us?
Prayer: Lord, forgive us for seeking profit over relationships
and thriving of soil and your your creatures.
Give us today what we need;
help us enjoy more and desire less.
Help us rely on you for all we are
and all we enjoy. Amen.
Quote: “Once you confess to yourself that you need other people, then you’re in a position to look around your neighborhood and see how neighborly it is, starting with how neighborly you are yourself. The question of stewardship naturally follows. How careful is your neighborhood of the natural gifts such as the topsoil on which it depends?” – Wendell Berry interview in New Southerner.
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