I was visiting my cousin M. in rural eastern Massachusetts once in early October when, at the last minute, we decided we’d like to visit the local Episcopal church.  We arrived to find the congregants milling about outside the church building with pets and farm animals: dogs and a goat on leashes, a lamb, a duck, a piglet, and several cats and chickens carried in arms.  There were a pet lizard and a pet rat, and several fish in bowls.  The congregation moved into the building and began the oddest liturgy of morning prayer I’ve ever been a part of – dogs panted and looked around for faces to lick, chickens clucked, the lamb let out a few hungry baaas.  Instead of the usual sleepy morning looks and yawns on the faces of the human worshipers, there were smiles and tears and laughter.

Then came the actual blessing of the animals.  The priest first called forward the dogs by size – small, medium, and large, and then the cats, then the birds, and so on.  When she got to “other,” the boy with the rat came up, as well as a boy with a little terrarium for his hermit crab.  M. wrote to me years later and said that “Bless, oh Lord, this hermit crab,” remain the most beautiful and holiest words she’d ever heard in church.

Some wise men and women have told us that our mission as the church is nothing less than partnership with the Holy Spirit in establishing the kingdom of God on earth.  What we sing and pray about, what we preach in our sermons, what we do in our work in the world – all these things indicate what we value, what is precious to us.  The ecologists tell us that “everything is connected.”  Genesis tells us that God calls all things good; indeed, creation in its wholeness is “very good.”  What, then, can be more appropriate and good than bringing our earth, our mountains and our rivers, and even our animals into church with us, into the circle of God’s New Creation? 

“As the mountains are round about us, so the Lord is round about his people . . . O taste and see that the Lord is good!”

by Claire Hope Cummings; review

One of the most important books anyone could read.  A readable explanation of the science and anti-science behind genetic engineering, the scientific and legal history, gene patenting, agri-chemicals, globalization, seed-saving, farm debt, colonialism and its impact on indigenous agricultural practices, storytelling and food, religion and farming.  200 pages of insight about the most basic thing about us: how we feed ourselves.

Each chapter is located in a particular place and a story about that place: The little-known destruction of a seed bank in the Abu Ghraib neighborhood of Baghdad (and US attempts to establish Iraqi dependence upon genetically engineered seed), genetic engineering field tests in Hawai'i and the contamination they cause in one of the most fertile places on earth, corporate control of research at land-grant Universities, focusing on the UCal Berkeley site, etc.

Each chapter then addresses the scientific, political, economic, nutritional, and pragmatic issues inherent in each story and each place.  Some of the stories are appalling and heart-breaking, some made me feel fiercely proud of my fellow human beings.  Some were so beautiful and hopeful they brought tears to my eyes.

The last three chapters (2 chapters and epilogue) stand on their own.  In them, Cummings illustrates the wisdom of indigenous approaches to farming and food, the contamination of the birthplace of corn and the likely consequences of that contamination.  She discusses the need to tell stories about our food and its growing, to link food to place, to have and teach a hands-on approach to growing food, and the spirituality of seeds.  (She points out that, in the event of an oil crisis, natural disaster, or food-security crisis, communities that know "how to get along with each other," are autonomous, diverse, and engaged in growing their food, will not need to rely on the dubious comforts of FEMA or Homeland Security [181].) 

In the Epilogue, Cummings reminds the reader of the story of the Garden of Eden, and discusses its similarities to other creation narratives, in which the Creator gives abundant food to human beings, with a test or string attached.  When the humans fail the test, their relationship to their food becomes fraught with hardship and heavy labor.  The act which causes them to fail the test s often a act of transgressing a boundary: trying to become gods, ignoring their place in the community of the living, repudiating their dependence on and interdependence with other parts of nature.  Since this is a big part of Chapter Two of m dissertation, I was delighed to see evidence that I'm on the right track.  But I think everyone can learn from this chapter, and the book as a whole, that food and the new life of seeds are sacred things, full of the potential to give life in new ways, and that "our survival depends on returning to a sense of the sacred" (186).

She includes Howard Nemerov's poem, "A Cabinet of Seeds Displayed":

"These are the original monies of the earth,
In which invested, as the spark in fire,
They will produce a green wealth toppling tall,
A trick they do by dying, by decay,
In burial becoming each his kind
To rise in gory and be magnified
A million times above the obscure grave.

"Reader, these samples are exhibited
For contemplation, locked in potency
And kept from act for reverence’s sake.
May they remind us while we live on earth
That all economies are primitive;
And by their reservations may they teach
Our governors, who speak of husbandry
And think the hurricane, where power lies."

Amen.

 

by Ellie Schoenfeld

My country is this dirt
that gathers under my fingernails
when I am in the garden.
The quiet bacteria and fungi,
all the little insects and bugs
are my compatriots. They are
idealistic, always working together
for the common good.
I kneel on the earth
and pledge my allegiance
to all the dirt of the world,
to all of that soil which grows
flowers and food
for the just and unjust alike.
The soil does not care
what we think about or who we love.
It knows our true substance,
of what we are really made.
I stand my ground on this ground,
this ground which will
ultimately
recruit us all
to its side.

Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.

Come under the strong wave
Here where the tug goes
As the tide turns and flows
Below that architrave.

Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.

Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor.