I prefer to read blogs that have a particular focus, rather than those that ramble on about the author’s personal life and problems. In the same way I intended to keep the focus of this blog squarely on themes and issues relating to sustainable living and agriculture both in the general cultural picture, as well as specific tactics for living a more sustainable life in community on our farm. The problem with this intention is that on occasion one’s personal life will demand every iota of energy -- as it did for Sarah and I last year with the illness and death of our first child, Hannah Ray -- and blogs along with all other non-essential activities are abandoned.
I am considering this entry in this new year as a fresh start, as I have begun taking up more of my day-to-day activities and responsibilities over the last few weeks as the process of grieving has gradually been taking up less of my energy. To that end, I would like to reopen this blog with some general thoughts about sustainability in culture and agriculture as a way of articulating the context in which I see our work and our collective thinking process on and about the farm taking place.
I think the best thing anyone with an interest in the relationship between culture and agriculture can do is read Wendell Berry’s classic book “The Unsettling of America,” as I did again recently. Berry articulates the tension between health and sickness in our culture as fundamentally a tension between a mentality of exploitation and nurture, not only between individuals or groups representing competing lobbying interests, but within the minds and hearts of each individual person. No one is exempt from accountability, in Berry’s view, for the damage we have done to the world through the exploitive attitude that permeates our culture. None of us can separate ourselves from this mentality entirely, because we are all products of our culture, and implicated in its abuses – even (or especially) if we attempt to remove ourselves from it. This is the failure of the back-to-the-land movement (or any movement) that seeks to set up an alternative to the culture we all participate in. Berry’s view is that anything less that a holistic vision for transforming all of life, from the literal grassroots up, participates in exploitation by abdicating responsibility for it. This is why the task of advocating for and encouraging cultural transformation has to start with the self. I don’t think it a coincidence, either, that this is the path of personal redemption. We must be doing everything we can do in our own life to transform it into the image of Christ in the world, before we presume to tell others what they must do. The work of personal transformation is never complete in a fallen world. This rule of evangelism also happens to be (again, I think, not coincidentally) the first rule of good storytelling: show, don’t tell. Let your audience draw their own conclusions from what they experience in the story.
The first issue of geez magazine quotes Aldous Huxley in this regard: “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is one’s self.” Geez also quotes the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr on this topic: “Sin, for Jesus, is not found in any kind of localization of evil outside or over there, where I can point to it, punish it, and try to change it. Sin, for Jesus, is itself the very act of accusing – whenever you try to expel and accuse… “Accusers” in various forms are the only people that Jesus himself accuses. (In fact, Satan means “the accuser.”)”
I have lately been developing an interest in the work of Norman Wirzba, chair of the philosophy department at Georgetown College in Kentucky. He is involved in articulating an agrarian approach to contemporary culture that is rooted in Wendell Berry’s work. Wirzba recently delivered a paper at a conference on globalization at Calvin College in Grand Rapids titled “Agrarianism After Modernity.” The paper opens with what I consider to be an excellent analysis of the destructive impulse in culture as a failure both to accept the free gift of grace, as well as a failure of the imagination. Wirzba writes:
Our rejection of grace, of its possibilities and demands, and our substituting for it the cheap satisfactions of consumer culture, is the practical demonstration (often more honest than our verbal piety) of a prior hesitancy or refusal to live out the ways of faith. In other words, our destruction of creation, and the undermining of human health and conviviality that are its inevitable correlate, raises the possibility that our religious faith may be little more than a deceptive play, however exalted or affirming, of words.
The manipulation of language for self-serving ends, whether it be the language of faith or of science is also an important theme in Berry. Wirzba goes on to describe our responsibility to enter into a relationship of grace with God and with creation in this way:
as Christians who are led by the Holy Spirit our task is nothing less than to share in the divine work of healing, reconciliation and celebration. Our most fundamental work is to bring a halt to those practices that disfigure creation and community or that prevent them from achieving their full potential.
Wirzba quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the implications of living out this task in the ordinary day-to-dayness of our lives:
"it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith … By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a person and a Christian.”
- Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1971) pp. 369-70.
Wirzba articulates the groundwork for an agrarian metanoia that offers a genuine sense of hope for our culture, and all of our relationships with land, food, fellow creatures and one another. It is my hope and goal that our farm and the people who visit it and live on it will develop and practice these “apprenticeships of being creatures.”
If we are to recover a sense for the costly grace that is God’s dedication to be with us, we must learn the daily, practical metanoia that is our turning toward the world and to each other, for it is here that God is at work… agrarian practices and responsibilities initiate us into the now lost art of being creatures. We cannot be authentic creatures so long as we despise the limits and possibilities of creation, or deny or degrade the biological, ecological, and social networks of relationship that permeate and bless our life together. What we need are to devise apprenticeships that lead us ever more deeply into the requirements of creaturely life, requirements of attention, patience, nurture, and protection. From these apprenticeships there will follow an honest humility and a grateful mind, a heart that celebrates the gifts of God that we are to each other.
I am involved in a couple of training programs this week on sustainable agriculture that are associated with the annual organic agriculture conference at the University of Guelph. I’m planning on exploring some of the big issues relating to sustainable agriculture that are in the air at the conference, as well as those of the more ordinary (metanoic) sort that we’re dealing with on the farm every day.