Something New On the Earth

Newness always makes us a bit fearful, because we feel more secure if we have everything under control, if we are the ones who build, program and plan our lives in accordance with our own ideas, our own comfort, our own preferences.

This is also the case when it comes to God. Often we follow him, we accept him, but only up to a certain point. It is hard to abandon ourselves to him with complete trust, allowing the Holy Spirit to be the soul and guide of our lives in our every decision. We fear that God may force us to strike out on new paths and leave behind our all too narrow, closed and selfish horizons in order to become open to his own.

Yet throughout the history of salvation, whenever God reveals himself, he brings newness - God always brings newness -, and demands our complete trust: Noah, mocked by all, builds an ark and is saved; Abram leaves his land with only a promise in hand; Moses stands up to the might of Pharaoh and leads his people to freedom; the apostles, huddled fearfully in the Upper Room, go forth with courage to proclaim the Gospel.

This is not a question of novelty for novelty’s sake, the search for something new to relieve our boredom, as is so often the case in our own day. The newness which God brings into our life is something that actually brings fulfilment, that gives true joy, true serenity, because God loves us and desires only our good. Let us ask ourselves today: Are we open to “God’s surprises”? 

Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions all through the day.

Pope Francis, Homily, Pentecost Sunday, May 19, 2013

Reflection – We’ve been reading some of the latest material from Pope Francis for our post-lunch spiritual reading here at Madonna House, and it has stimulated much discussion and interest. I want to spend the remainder of this week, which in the traditional calendar is the Octave of Pentecost, looking at this homily, and at a wonderful Q & A session the Pope had with representatives of the ecclesial movements who met in Rome last weekend.

It is this same group who are the audience for this homily, too. And so the newness the Pope is talking about can first be seen to refer to groups like MH or Focolare or Communion and Liberation: this new outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church that has brought forth new forms of consecrated and lay life in the world, straining existing canonical categories and not infrequently raising eyebrows and furrowing brows – what is your group, anyhow? A monastery? A religious order? A commune? A mistake?

But the Pope here seems to be cautioning groups like mine, and of course the whole Church listening in on this homily, to never settle down to just being what we are, doing what we’re doing. God is always doing something new on earth. God is always pushing the envelope, pushing the boundaries, pushing, pushing, pushing us to some new way of loving, some new response to the real circumstances our brothers and sisters find themselves in.

Now, sometimes when words like ‘newness’ get thrown around, we can get thrown off the scent. Too often in the last 50 years the word ‘new’ has been put to the service of a certain ecclesial agenda of throwing all our doctrines and especially our moral teachings out the window and embracing the mores and mentality of the prevailing culture. This is not remotely what Pope Francis is talking about, as anyone who has paid attention to the whole of his teaching well knows.

Of course this attitude of refashioning a Church around the latest ideas and currents of thought becomes precisely what he is preaching against, precisely a matter of having “everything under control…  [where] we are the ones who build, program and plan our lives in accordance with our own ideas, our own comfort, our own preferences.” The newness of God is something quite different.

It does not resemble a political program, or an ideological agenda, or anything of that kind. It is a matter of deep prayer, deep compassion, deep love, and a deep willingness to let God set the agenda for our own personal life and the life of whatever community or family we find ourselves in. To trust that it is when we lose control of life—when situations and circumstances arise that take us into uncharted territory or painful confrontations with the unknown, it then that the newness of the Spirit is dawning upon us, and then that we should be vigilant,  looking for the new path of love and hope in the world opening up before us, Red Sea-like, in the darkness of the night of the world.

Back to the Land

The apostolic farmer is a man of integrity and he deals with things of integrity. There is nothing deceitful about a field. It is honest, straight and clean, for it comes from the hands of God. The farmer touches God in his creation as it came from his hands.

Somewhere along the road of history man began to pollute fields and to rape this planet with his greed and with a technology that is sometimes used to pervert what God had intended for us. Earth and water are defiled with all kinds of things that do not belong in them, and people have become unhealthy, eating junk food and greed-motivated, polluted food products.

A farmer deals with the mystery of life. We were watching a film showing the whole process of growth, and someone remarked that they couldn’t understand what happened in that little seed to make it grow. Frankly and simply, what happened was a mystery of God.

Because he touches God all the time in the mystery of nature and so is familiar with Him, a farmer can easily tell others about God. Respectful of himself, of the soil and all growing things, he communes with God and hence can communicate to others this God with whom he relates so easily through everyday work and life

The apostolic farmer is a man of prayer; he talks to God about the needs of the animals, about the seeds he has to plant. He knows his limitations, and it is on his knees that he begs God for light, for ingenuity, for vision, so that he can produce something out of nothing. For he understands very well that alone he can never do it, but with God all things are possible. It is said that with God, the impossible takes only three minutes longer! The main point is that God has said, “Without Me you can do nothing.”

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Apostolic Farming

Reflection – This little book of Catherine’s is so wonderful – I’ve been re-reading it these days as I excerpt bits and pieces of it for the blog. It’s hard to excerpt, actually, because every bit of it is a vital part of the whole, and it is hard to find short passages that stand on their own. But for anyone genuinely engaged in environmental issues and concerned about planet earth and our life on it, this book makes a unique contribution.

Catherine is really going radical and deep here, striving to give a picture of life that is fundamentally at odds with modern technological society. It is as if the whole project of our society has been to get us far away from God’s created order and design as possible, to insulate, abstract, separate ourselves as much as humanly possible from the earth. Oh, a few people still farm—as few as economically possible—but those farms increasingly operate on such a vast scale that they too lack this closeness to the earth but become instead one more technocratic plant.

I read recently an article positing that soon we will not need to raise animals for meat – individual cuts of meat can be grown in laboratories from stem cells. I don’t know how speculative that article was, but there we have it: one more step in the utter removal of humanity from God’s good earth.

Meanwhile, it seems that every time we turn around, this technocratic approach causes more problems yet, more environmental degradation or health issues. Remember mad cow disease? I don’t really trust a scientist to grow me a drumstick – the chicken seems to know how to do that just fine, actually. We’ll probably all end up with mad drumstick disease or something.

Underneath and surrounding this strange separation of man from creation, man from the earth lies a deep spiritual malaise which both causes and is caused by it. We don’t want to depend on God; we don’t want to encounter our own limitations and poverty; we don’t want to engage in a process where we are not masters of the outcome.

And then, separate from the earth and its ways, its rhythms, its tender mercies and its stern exigencies, it is easy to forget God who in a sense made his creation as a reflection of his own tender mercies and stern demands. And so we go—continuing to rape and despoil the earth for as long as we can, while staying as far from it as we can.

And so we go in Madonna House—not fuming and fretting about these things, not protesting and storming the barricades. We farm. We touch our own need for God and our littleness before Him. We experience the sore muscles, the sweat and toil of the summer, the anxious care for the weather, the health of the animals, the harvest and its preservation.

We farm, and in that farming we believe we are offering a radical alternative to modern urban technocratic society. And that is MH’s approach to environmentalism and its challenges.

Isn't It Romantic? (No, Actually, It's Not...)

I do not know much about modern scientific farming. Combines frighten me by their sheer immensity. I can feel the earth weep under their heavy treads. It seems to me that they take from the earth but give nothing in return. Horses, as they go a–plowing, fertilize the earth. Man’s hand is gentle when he tills the soil. There is a less hurried pace about the whole thing. Tractors have a frantic pace about them. I cannot understand this hurry to get returns and results.

Today in our new world the earth is treated as if it were a factory. It is wounded by machines. Chemicals are sprayed, from airplanes and by tractors, onto the earth, the fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The earth is fed man–made chemicals that produce a large but far less healthy or tasty crop.

Farming has become almost a synthetic factory with a production line. Are we eating the fruits of the earth, or are we eating chemicals that God never meant us to eat? And what about all the insects that get killed in the process? We used to have a reverence for bees. Every farmer was a beekeeper.

But I have seen apiaries destroyed in a single summer in this wondrous land of ours by some new spray invented by some learned man somewhere—probably someone far away from a farm who never had the privilege of working with things that grow, nor with insects which God created to help things grow.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Apostolic Farming

Reflection – I’m spending a few days looking at Catherine’s basic approach to environmental questions. As I hope to show, her approach has commonalities with the ‘green’ movement, but some radical differences. One key difference is that her ideas do not remain at the level of ideas or of a few cosmetic changes in our life style, or of some restructuring of industry that someone else needs to actually implement. Her approach to healing the earth, which is Madonna House’s, is to thrust our hands into the earth to make it fruitful by farming it.

The above passage from Apostolic Farming follows upon a long trip down memory lane by Catherine to her family’s farm estate of her childhood, the natural methods used there, the harmony of animal, plant, and human being, the unhurried pace and peaceful spirit of the place. Some, reading this, would dismiss her as hopelessly romantic, out of touch, unscientific, unrealistic, luddite, etc., etc. (add your disparaging term here!).

I think that misses the point. Catherine was a symbolic writer, and I don’t think she was actually suggesting an abandonment of modern technology to return to methods of farming from the middle ages. She was in fact aware of the growth of global population and the realities of food production needed to support the human race. And indeed MH has always used, according to our needs and means, the tools of modern farming. We are not Amish; we use tractors!

What she is talking about is a very deep approach to the earth, to God’s creation, that is utterly lacking in modern factory farming. Modern factory farming, like so much of modern life, assumes that creation is woefully deficient and needs to be ‘fixed’ by human beings to meet our needs and agendae. We do this with our sexuality, and so castrate and sterilize ourselves chemically, and then abort the children who manage to get conceived in spite of our best (?) efforts.

And we do this agriculturally, pumping cows and chickens full of growth hormones, pouring poisonous chemicals onto the land to kill the weeds, taking the nutrients out of the soil at maximum yield and pumping back chemical nutrients into the soil. The earth is a factory, and we are the overseers, and we will bend and break the earth to meet our needs, as we define them, with no heed to what God has fashioned.

Catherine is a radical, and so are we in Madonna House. We know that the global agro-business model cannot just be done away with without causing famines. We know that the whole of our global civilization is interwoven with modern factory farming and that it is all deeply connected.

And we know that there is something badly amiss in this. The bees, in fact, are dying. So what do we do? Protest General Foods? No. We pick up a hoe, a plow, a pitchfork, and we start farming. Our few little acres here in Combermere, where we strive mightily to work with God and work with His creative genius. And we invite people to come join us, to work the land alongside us, to plunge their hands into the good soil, to smell the good smell of manure, to collect fresh-laid eggs from the chickens and hear the baaing of the ewes and their lambs.

We don’t opine or rail or agitate. We farm. And in that farming, many beautiful things happen. To be continued…

True and Radical Conservatism

The stocky peasant with the square beard that tumbled down to the middle of his chest stood easily before my father. I heard his usually calm voice acquire a vehement accent: “No, sir,” he said, “it doesn’t do to make the earth angry. It will punish us if we do.”

The words struck me forcibly. I was around thirteen. I wanted to know what our farm manager meant by this strange sentence, and asked my father that night. He smiled; then his face became serious. Father explained to me quietly and with a depth of feeling I did not suspect he had, that mankind was the child and servant of the earth.

The earth was our mother, in a manner of speaking, and farming was a holy way of life. It was a way of life that God meant for the majority of people. In the growing of things, first to feed one’s own family, and then to serve one’s neighbour, man fulfilled himself as a workman.

He went on to say that work was not a curse. Adam had worked; God himself had worked. Work was holy, especially work on and with the earth. One had to be reverent when one was a farmer. God spoke very clearly to those who farmed and taught many lessons in this place of formation.

Above all, He taught them prayer, faith humble submission to his most holy will and reverence for all created things—trees, flowers seeds, grains, animals. Even the tools used for this tending of the earth and of living things must be reverenced.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Apostolic Farming

Reflection – You know, for the most part I consider myself a ‘conservative’ politically and economically, as much as I dislike labels in general, the labels conservative and liberal in particular, and as much as I would only claim to be a conservative with huge reservations and significant areas of dissent from the reigning establishment of our day.

For example, I have never been able to fathom the ‘conservative’ contempt for the environmental movement. Now, we can disagree about anthropogenic global warming, and I do. We can have conversations about specific uses of this or that technology and their environmental impact. We can highlight, and indeed must highlight, the more radical fringes of the green movement which truly merge with the culture of death and the rise of soft fascism in our day, calling for example for a global application of China’s one child policy and other horror shows like that.

But surely, for all that, ‘conservatives’ should be concerned to, well, conserve the earth, right? Surely pollution and environmental degradation are not in themselves obvious conservative values? Surely we can see in the earth itself, its integrity, its fecundity, its solidity and beauty a clear affirmation of that most radically conservative of all statements, that God looked on everything he had made, and saw that it was very good?

In Madonna House we don’t talk so much about environmental issues. There are different opinions possible on, say Al Gore and the whole global warming issue. Instead of talking about it, we do stuff. Practical, on the earth, on the land stuff. MH was recycling and composting long before it was cool, and of course there is no more effective way to reduce your carbon footprint than to live a communal life, sharing meals and living quarters with a certain austerity and economy.

But most important of all, we farm. And I would like to share some of Catherine’s insights on this for a few days, taken from her wonderful book Apostolic Farming. We farm because we need to eat and this is the way most in line with holy poverty to produce food. But we also farm because our mission is to restore all things in Christ. Modern man, modern civilization has become very far removed from the earth. We treat the earth as a machine, or as raw material for the machine which is technological civilization.

But the earth is not a machine. A cow is not a machine. A cabbage plant is not a machine. They are living creatures, bound together in a subtle web of inter-relations and interdependence, with human beings bound up in this same network of life and death which is our food, our clothing, our shelter.

So for a few days I want to let Catherine have her say on this. Some consider her a romantic, old-fashioned, hopelessly unrealistic. Maybe she is. I don’t think so. There is something in our modern stance to creation that is deeply disordered, a basic rejection of God’s creative will and the original blessing of the earth’s goodness, and that is the key point in how Catherine, and how MH, approaches environmental questions. To be continued…