August 26thFive Minutes on Friday #38
CARING FOR CREATION
Wendell Berry is one of our most important and provocative thinkers when it comes to issues around food, farming, and creation care. Here are just a few of my favorite quotes from his many writings.
‘We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of this time: How much is enough?’
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.”
“Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”
“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
“To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.”
“There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.”
“Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.”
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”
SUNDAY – Acts 2.42-47; 1 Corinthians 11.17-34
On this the last in our Food and Faith series we celebrate the Lord’s Supper and what it means in the context of local and global food issues. Both texts speak to the importance of the ‘just community’, that is the practices of eating and sharing are expressions of the new kingdom Jesus has initiated.
STORY: Sara Miles was a chef, a left-wing journalist, war correspondent and an atheist; she is a lesbian. This is her story:
“I walked into the church out of curiosity. I had no earthly reason to be there. I had never heard a gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian. I, walked in, took a chair, and tried not to catch anyone’s eye. We sat down, stood up, sang, sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang. “Jesus invites everyone to his table” a woman announced.
“We gathered around the table. Someone was putting a piece of fresh crumbly bread into my hands, saying “This is the body of Christ” and handing me the goblet of sweet wine, saying “the blood of Christ” and then something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me. I still can’t explain. It made no sense. I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over painlessly, from behind. The disconnect between what I thought was happening - I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happening – the bread was ‘the body of Christ’; and what I knew was happening – God, named ‘Christ’ or ‘Jesus’ was real, and in my mouth!
“All the way home, shocked, I scrambled for explanations. Maybe I was hyper-suggestible, surrounded by believers pushing me into accepting their superstitions. My tears were just pent-up sadness after a long hard decade, spilling out because I was in a place where I could cry anonymously. Really the whole thing must have been about emotion: the music, the movement, the light …
“Yet that impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb. I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand. I had no idea what it meant; I did not know what to do with it. But it was more real than any thought of mine, or any subjective emotion: it was as real as the actual taste of bread and wine. And the word was indisputable in my body now, as if I had swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh.”
As a result of this experience Sara went on to found The Food Pantry, which currently provides free groceries to about 500 hungry families a week, from around the altar at St Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. It buys in between six and eight tons of food each week, and offers it free to everyone who comes. Families select the food they need from a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, bread, rice, pasta, beans, cereal, and dry goods. The Food Pantry is run entirely by volunteers, most of them people who came to get food and stayed to help out.
Sara insists The Food Pantry is not an act of outreach but expresses gratitude to God who meets the needs of our own hunger in abundance. The bags full of macaroni and peanut butter that are given to strangers are in remembrance of him. The fact that it takes place around the central table of the altar is crucial. This is neither a charity nor a food-kitchen for the poor; it is a eucharist community.