Know any young adults looking for meaningful work or a year of vocational discernment…pass this on tho them!http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2012/01/09/new-generation-explores-intersection-of-faith-service-and-community/“

Last week us Abundant Table-ers gathered over bowls of soup, cider and eggnog next to a crackling fire at Ched and Elaine’s lovely home to study the book Scripture, Culture and Agriculture by Ellen Davis. The chapter we spent the evening on looked at Genesis 1 examining it specifically as the poem it is.

“And God saw all that she had made, and here. It was very good!” (Gen. 1:31)

God saw. That word is not the one that is typically given focus. We tend to declare, “God said, God declared it was good.” Davis points to something huge here: “The goodness of the world is presented not as a simple fact, nor even as an authoritative pronouncement, but as divine perception.” (46) A perception that is especially significant because there are few times in the Bible that this view from God’s eyes is given. God sees nature as inherently good. (side note: Ched’s translation of the Hebrew word ‘good’ was, loosely, “juicy, exotic, awesome, that rocks, that cooks my noodle”)

As our group unpacked the profundity of this verse we spoke to the reality that, as a society, we don’t present a narrative of nature being inherently good. The bedrock of the modern relationship with nature says that nature is not enough, that we have to alter it. Our definition of civilization is autonomy from nature.

As I take bike rides along Hueneme Road, where our farm is, this attitude is evident. Humans have  covered the fields with plastic, and then, in protective suits, looking like aliens they spray the fields to control nature by adding or subtracting with pesticides and antibiotics to “fix” what we had declared as “not good.”  Such control that shouldn’t be needed, but the damage we’ve imparted on the earth now requires it.  These controlling practices we now deem as necessary.

I see ways that in my own life I have created control frameworks of necessary. Frameworks established from a belief that I represent damaged goods, flawed unless I work actively to control or fix myself. I have tried to control my body with an eating disorder that has been my reality for the last 5 years (3 years now in a journey of recovery). The eating disorder has given me guidelines to live under, guidelines it says are necessary for my happiness in the world.

The Abundant Table tries in our own ways to unwork these patterns, to let go of control, we have our organic 5 acre oasis here on the Oxnard plain. Ched and Elaine’s yard is a homesteading dream in the middle of an Oak View neighborhood. As for myself, working on the farm and celebrating the joys of food is actively healing the ways anorexia has been a distorting burden in my life. I believe in these efforts, and our book study conversations exhorted me anew to believe in them, act them out and our talk added a layer.

God saw. How can we as a society let go of the old paradigm relationship to nature and see with new eyes? Get out of our heads when we relate to nature? How can we get out of what we claim is the way things must be done next to the narrative we have written? It is time to rewrite our collective script. We need new eyes that don’t look at nature solely through a mental lens, but that can look at nature and see the value in the earth’s inherent, beautiful goodness through and beneath the ways humans have altered it.

Davis quotes philosopher Erazim Kohak, “The painful flaws in our conception of value…call less for a new conception of the good than for a new way of seeing the good.” (46)

Woven into this I think back to my own ways of seeing myself, the internal narrative that I work to rewrite. How can I alter the script I have been acting on? The self-constructed system of control I tell myself I must live out of in order to be seen as good?  This reading of Genesis has added fuel as I do the work to re-write my script; now with the reminder that God saw Julia and said I am very good, “juicy, exotic, awesome, that rocks, that cooks my noodle” the way I naturally, beautifully am.

First, thank you for your support and loyalty over the years-it has  been a joy to partner with you in our shared commitment to healthy food and strong communities. We are writing to let you know about an important organizational change that will be taking place in the coming months. Please take the time to read the following message carefully.

Join the Farm! was initially conceived as a for-profit, organic CSA attached to DeBusschere Family Farms. Since the beginning, Join the Farm! has also been the farm site of the Abundant Table, an organization that hosts farm interns and programs that address issues of healthy eating and food justice. The Abundant Table also serves as a campus (CSUCI) and community ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, and provides wonderful, interfaith opportunities for youth and other groups to learn about healthy food and to experience farm life.

Members of DeBusschere Family Farms and the Abundant Table governing board have recently decided that the Abundant Table will absorb Join the Farm! and its operations. Over the past several months, it has become clear to us that Join the Farm! is not best defined as a family farm project but as a community farm project, and we believe that the Abundant Table is the most appropriate steward for such a project. Running Join the Farm! as a non-profit CSA is in the best interest of the community, and we are working hard to ensure that the merger will be done as smoothly as possible, especially as Join the Farm! moves to a new model of farming on a different piece of land.

We would like to underscore two points about this transition:

• Join the Farm! subscribers will continue to receive fabulous shares; during the transition, the CSA will continue to source from its own produce as well as our partner growers. As part of the Abundant Table, Join the Farm! will honor the value of all subscriptions paid prior to the merger.

• As the Abundant Table takes on the management of Join the Farm!, additional funds are necessary to ensure the continuity of all its programs during the transition. A charitable donation at this time would go a long way. Our goal is to raise $15,000 in the next two months. If each of you pledges $50, we will be well on our way to making this goal a reality.

Please consider donating $10, $50, $100, or as much as you want to give. Donations are tax deductible and can be made via Paypal  or by check. Checks should

be made out to The Abundant Table and mailed to: 4720 E. Hueneme Rd, Oxnard, CA 93033.

These two points may seem contradictory, but any merger of this sort requires additional capital for infrastructural and operational investments, as well as extra cash flow to cover unforeseen costs. As a non-profit organization, the Abundant Table relies on grant funding and the generosity of donors to be able to do its work.

Even as we take this new step, the Abundant Table will continue to develop its Farm to School and Farm to Faith programs, to expand its internship offerings, and to work toward sustainable and healthy relationships between people and with the land. All this is deeply consonant with its mission to help transform individual lives and strengthen communities.

Thank you for being loyal customers of Join the Farm! and/or supporters of the Abundant Table. We hope you will continue to support us as we make this transition during a crucial time. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@abundanttable.org or (805) 246-1070.

Abundant wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a 2012 filled with joy, peace, and fresh veggies!

Paul DeBusschere and Julie Morris                             Sam Thomas

DeBusschere Family Farms                                        President, Board of Directors                                                                                                        The Abundant Table

In the words of a good friend and colleague of mine, my last Bible and Interpretation editorial constituted a good old-fashioned “Isaianic smack-down” of self-aggrandizing, dishonest hypocrites (“Knowledge and Wisdom in a Politics of Passionate Intensity,” October 2011). That short essay was something of a political rant in a text-critical mode, channeling some of the fury of the biblical prophets to characterize our current state of cultural and political discourse. At the time I had in mind publishing a series of such “prophetic critiques” in this venue, but recently have thought better of it. Instead, I will offer here some “Isaianic” reflections on what I currently view as one of the few antidotes to political alienation and the estrangement at the root of our economic systems: local, sustainable, and ethical food production, or what used to be called “farming.”

My last essay was rooted in a text-critical observation from Isaiah 28, which as a whole juxtaposes vituperations against the rich and self- important with images of harmony and blessedness. It sees, in other words, that social and environmental ills are often directly related to greed and corruption, and that this is not in keeping with God’s vision of prosperity. In this way, Isaiah 28 is very much in line with an anti-imperial ideology that runs throughout the Tanakh, one that is based on a conception of covenant that demands care, hospitality, and justice as expressions of faithfulness to the God of Israel. To remedy social and environmental imbalances, God will be a “spirit of justice” (ruah mishpat) and “strength to those who turn back the battle at the gate” (Isa 28:6). Isaiah 28 continues:

Therefore hear the word of the LORD, you scoffers
who rule this people in Jerusalem.
Because you have said, “We have made a covenant with death,
and with Sheol we have an agreement;
when the overwhelming scourge passes through
it will not come to us;
for we have made lies our refuge,
and in falsehood we have taken shelter”…

Listen, and hear my voice;
Pay attention, and hear my speech.
Do those who plow for sowing plow continually?
Do they continually open and harrow their ground?
When they have leveled its surface,
do they not scatter dill, sow cummin,
and plant wheat in rows
and barley in its proper place,
and spelt as the border?
For they are well instructed;
their God teaches them. (Isa 28:14-15; 23-26)

Throughout this chapter Isaiah presents the judgment of the Jerusalem elite (“scoffers”) alongside a vision of a redeemed Israel, of a “new society, a new polity, based on moral order. The important element is that justice and righteousness are the criteria according to which this or any society is to be judged.”¹ One of the insights of Isaiah and of other prophets is that moral order is not defined primarily in terms of sexual purity or patriotic fervor, but rather that it rests ultimately on conceptions of justice as fairness and equality, and righteousness as proper care. Another insight is that the dimensions of moral order are intimately tied to one another: pull a string and even unexpected parts begin to move. In our own time, food has become an important measure of justice, one that reveals the seamy underbelly of global systems of economic production and exchange.

It is becoming more and more difficult to ignore the devastation that is being wrought by what has come to be known (rather ironically, in my view) as “conventional agriculture.” Fertile land is rendered less and less viable with the over-application of pesticides and herbicides and the increasing salinization of soils and water tables that comes from intensive, non-stop irrigation; workers who have often migrated under great stress (and for reasons that are at least partially driven by U.S. international trade policies) are exposed to harsh working conditions and have few options and garner little sympathy; monocultures created to serve enormous corporate food and chemical companies (in the guise of “feeding the world”) threaten biodiversity and the very ecological systems upon which life as we know it depends; and the production and wide distribution of all this food consumes vast quantities of fossil fuels, reinforcing our system of energy addiction and dependency and contributing to climate change. What would Isaiah have to say about all this? We have become very adventurous in our use of science and technology for the purpose of growing and distributing food, but are we “well-instructed?”

In my Old Testament course this semester I decided to try something new with my own instructing: I experimented with teaching the Hebrew Bible through an agrarian lens while engaging students in the campus garden at my university, a 1/3-acre site devoted to growing food, building community, and learning. My primary animating question for the course was, “what does the Hebrew Bible have to say about the relationships between land, people, cities, God, and wisdom?” Of course, attempting to answer this question took us through a lot of talk about covenant, temple, ethics, justice, jubilee, Sabbath, and eschatology, not to mention beets and carrots and crop rotation (“do those who plow for sowing plow continually?”).

As we read primary texts from the Torah, Proverbs, Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Song of Songs, and lots of “comparative” material from the ANE, we considered this animating question carefully and in a sustained way. While we carefully considered this question, we spent a couple hours every other week in the garden, working side by side, getting our hands dirty, having some fun, and learning about how complicated and difficult it is to grow food—how very difficult it is indeed to “master” creation. All the while, we read John Barton and Julia Bowden’s The Original Story as a survey, Ellen Davis’ Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture as the frame for our agrarian reading, and T.J. Gorringe’s A Theology of the Built Environment as the theoretical driver of our animating question, as a way to unpack the creation-covenant-redemption arc of biblical theology.

One of my hopes for the students in this course was that they would be able to enter into an engagement with the Old Testament that was both historical-contextual and that addressed contemporary concerns—that they would come to see in a new way that, indeed, the Bible can speak to us about things that matter (like, say, food). None of this was done instead of developing “literacy” and “critical thinking skills” and other important learning outcomes. Ultimately, it was an attempt to appeal to the imaginations of my students and to provide a wedge with which to pry open the spaces where questions and problems meet with new ways of seeing the world.

Of course, I must confess my interest in also generating for my students new ways of being in the world. (Reader, set aside momentarily any questions regarding whether higher education should be about moral transformation, etc.—I know the debate and I’m clearly ending up on one side of it.) I believe that the Hebrew Bible has some very profound things to say about the relationships between humans and the natural world, between humans and other humans, and between humans and God. I would even go so far as to say that one of the principal features of the Old Testament is that it doesn’t let us off the hook, whether we are reading it in a religious mode or not. In other words, the Hebrew Bible—whatever else it may be—is about ethics, and being utterly serious about answering the question, “How shall we live?”²

I have come to the conclusion that the Hebrew Bible can call our attention to the deep ethical predicaments that result from modern, technogene life—and it can help us work toward recovering what the poet Charles Olson might have called “an actual earth of value.” That is, in a national politics of alienation and a global economics predicated on displacement and overconsumption (despite the actual limits of scarcity), an agrarian understanding of the Hebrew Bible can help reorient us to the sources of life and real prosperity: land, community, and meaningful work. To put it in slightly different terms, “Through Adam and Eve we lost a gift but earned a heart, and in many ways we are still earning our heart, just as we are still learning that most of what the earth offers—despite its claims on our labor—has the character of something freely given rather than aggressively acquired.”³

Care for the land and the ethical production of food is inherently communal and community-building; abuse of the land and the unethical production of food erode the integrity of both natural systems and human communities. I have seen the former first-hand in the work of the Abundant Table Farm Project, a faith-rooted, organic CSA (community supported agriculture) outfit down the road from where I live.⁴ The amazing people at the Abundant Table understand that food is as much about relationships as it is about eating, and their efforts to grow food sustainably, work for justice, and engage people in their lives are deeply counter-cultural and inspiring. And biblical.

The work of the Abundant Table is about feeding people while reclaiming a kind of wisdom that insists that we are grounded in responsibility to and not freedom from. It is the latter impulse that appears to animate the logic of the global food trade and the thin platitudes of its greatest champions. Understanding and enacting sustainable, ethical food production through the prism of covenantal theology can be one important antidote to our contemporary estrangements. It is but a seed.

Notes

As the coordinator of Community Roots Garden, I help manage our garden’s programs along with volunteers from the surrounding area. My coworker Eric and I work closely with youth, especially inner-city Oxnard youth who are often serving their parole service hours. About 15-20 youth help harvest, weed, and plant at the Garden two mornings each week. Many of their family members work as farm workers in the fields bordering the city, and they often encourage these youth to get as far away as possible from the dirt. Education, climbing the ladder, language, gang life, and work experience are ways of distancing themselves from intensive farm work. It’s challenging to engage youth in our alternate model of agriculture in Oxnard’s wider culture of stigmatizing and de-valuing the labor it takes to grow food. We are, in essence, working  to create a different culture that centers on positive relationships to food and farming.

This year, I’m focusing on a project we started at Community Roots called the Oxnard Community Food Security Planning Project, funded through the USDA/ NIFA and fiscally sponsored by the Abundant Table. Through our work, we saw that food insecurity issues are highest for farm workers, the very people who harvest and tend our nation’s vegetables and fruits. Eric and I are bringing together representatives from organizations connected to the food system in the Oxnard area, including farms, farm worker groups, youth, our regional food bank, and public health, to plan for future food projects that will address the food insecurity issues in Oxnard. I’m amazed at the power of friendships to create change, and love seeing new and old friendships across organizations growing through this project and through the conversations it is starting.

After living at the Farm for a year following my internship and commuting to work, I decided to move closer to Community Roots. This gave me the opportunity to seek rest and renewal after 2 years of intentional community. I moved into a granny flat next door to Abundant Table church members and friends, Scott and Elisa. It was a sweet time of living alone and doing lots of reading, cooking, and having friends and family over to my own little place. This month, Julia T., a friend I met through work, moved in as a roommate and I’m enjoying broadening my circle of friends beyond the Abundant Table.

My role in the community has changed from member to community chaplain, and I’ve loved having community members/friends over for dinner, conversation, and prayer.  As a place where my own spiritual and vocational discernment was crucial, I feel gratefully committed to walking alongside new AT interns as they ask the big question during this time in our lives, namely, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” in the lovely words of Mary Oliver.

These last months I have thought a lot about death. This last week during All Saints and All Souls day I lit a candle for my dear childhood friend who died in a tragic accident this August. Seth’s death was my first experience overwhelmed with the grief of someone my own age, someone whose death came abruptly in a late night phone call from my Mom, shaking me to the core. I brought my heavy aching heart to the farm.  An ache that in these last two months has found a place of comfort and balm for the pain in the connection to the earth through farming.

Death is a part of life. Everyone’s physical space on earth is someday going to come to a end. Just as lives are constantly entering this world others are leaving it.

As much as I knew those realities in a head conceptual way I wasn’t prepared for the swarm of confusing questions that came as I suddenly faced the reality of life’s end in a new way. I attest some of this to how far removed I am from the daily experience of death. In my normal life death flashes by in the sound of ambulance, it is housed in sterile hospitals, or read about in newspaper statistics–a typed number, a far away name.

Walking through the farm field it is impossible to forget life’s cyclical track. Wading through the tomato line my boots squish over fallen tomatoes and the smell of the rotting sun warmed fruit rises.  Though that tomato is not done even in its human labeled  “gone” decomposing state, rather is in a continued state of giving of pouring nutrients into the soil, of shedding seed, of rejoining the earth in a way that gives nothing but possibility for new life. The tomato lines are now gone, tilled and ready for the next planting but I don’t see that space as empty, no it is full of life, full of what was that will enrich the what is to come.

I have been reading a lot of Wendell Berry lately and copying gems of his words on scraps of paper that are now tucked in my brimming journal. Words that put concreteness to faint musings I had as I squashed through juicy tomato lines.

“The second reason for the failure of industrial agriculture is its wastefulness. In natural or biological systems waste does not occur. All that is sloughed off in the living arc of a natural cycle remains with in the cycle; it becomes fertility, the power of life to continue. In nature death and decay are necessary–are one may also say, as lively–as life; and so nothing is wasted. There really is no such thing, then as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction.”

Just as the tomatoes are in a tangible way  gone from this earth, Seth is gone. While this daily fact is still hard for me to think about, to place in typed words. I find comfort in the fact that just like the tomato patch the space he left is in no way empty. He has left with him 20 years of living; times of thriving, times of pain, booming laughter, present eye-contact, natural leadership, gentle compassion, insight filled wisdom, inspiring curiosity, contagious joy, deep love, all these things and layers more this richness now added to the soil of life. A soil now drenched with the salty tears of us who weep. Soil in which I have already seen sprout beautiful seedlings of new life, reproduction.

This summer after the official phone call from Sarah Nolan offering me an internship position I happily called a friend exclaiming, “I’m going to be rooted! I am going to be in a place for a whole year.” I should explain why for me 12 months in one place is a BIG deal.  My childhood was marked by moving. I recently counted and in my 22 years I have lived in 25 bedrooms, jr. high being the last time I spent 365 calling the same room my home. My transience only increased during my college years where I honed the skills of fitting my life in my well-worn backpacking pack that soon became covered with airplane train and bus tags.  Being a nomad has shaped me but over this last year I could tell a deep need to put down my backpack and sink into a place (even if for just a year!).

Carrots. These last weeks I have spent some time getting to know roots. I smiled to myself Monday while yanking up carrots realizing I was making up a little rhythm-ditty in my head to the pop sound that carrot-leaving-soil makes. Though some of the carrots I attempt to harvest threw off the beat and held no pop, as I pulled off only the green leafy top and the carrot stayed firmly…well rooted. I grimaced and head-hung shared with Guadalupe my apologies that I had ruined the carrot. He assured me that no there is grace; the carrot does this wonderful thing of self-rejuvenating. He showed me a row whose tops had been lobbed off weeks before and now as he pulled one it out let out not only a delightful pop, but was one of the bigger more beautiful deep orange carrots I had seen that day.

The time in the field not only provides these learning’s, beat-poetry dappling and wonder, but space for the mind to wander. I must admit that at times that wandering leads to dreams of my own wandering.  I think about that dream I have to hike the Pacific Crest Trail or biking the country, I wonder if my college-roommate is still up for that traveling Europe adventure we spent late nights envisioning, I think about my hitchhiking boyfriend and plan to tag along for an adventure.  When I was reflecting on why these open road dreams were hitting I realized that when I thought about coming here and being rooted I naively thought roots would be instant.

Transitions are hard and for me it is easier to be on the move. I forgot that rooting requires time and patience. It’s not simply being in a place that makes you then rooted, you have to put some intentional working into rooting, seeking nourishment.

Our carrot harvest has been lacking lately because of the weather, simply not enough sunlight. The root vegetable was just too small to be harvested. I realize now in my first weeks I was to quickly harvesting my own roots examining them and becoming frustrated that they didn’t make the leaving the soil pop, they are still too small, not because of big bad things but just needing more time.  But I am glad that like carrots rejuvenation can happen, I can tuck those to-soon-pulled-roots back into the soil and give them more of the nourishment that I daily can tell is making them grow.

Nourishment in the form of deepening relationships with the wonderful women I share the farm house with, with Ched and Elaine while we garden and work together two days a week, with Guadalupe, Julie B and Sam as we join and work in the field, with the Abundant Table church community as we hug one another during the passing of the peace and through connection to this physical place through hikes where I start to recognize native plants, Tuesday morning bike rides with Kat up the Ventura bike trail, and full moon gazing on the beach.

And nourishment through plenty of grace.

Pulling on baggy work pants and rain boots this evening to take out the trash, I got hit by an extra-strong wave of farm nostalgia. My spaghetti sauce could use some fresh basil, my body could use a few hours of field work, and my spirit misses the company of my four sisterfriends.

Having boots on my feet also reminds me of a promise to update the Abundant Table community on my whereabouts post cross-continent move. After a roadtripping through some of the most beautiful parts of the US (you should have seen the look on the face of the woman selling tomatoes and cucumbers at the farmers market in Casper, Wyoming when I asked if I could pay for my selection in fresh California lemons and avocados!) and spending a few weeks resting and catching up with my parents at my aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in Lancaster, PA, I finally ended up in New York City a little less than a month ago. I just started my fourth week of working on the transition from the farm to the office, from the comfy world of flannel and rubber boots to the ambiguities of “business casual”, from “whenever we’re up til whenever it’s done” to a 9-5.

I’m doing a one-year AmeriCorps position with a community-based organization in North Brooklyn. For the first and final four months, my job is screening our clients (mostly low-income job seekers) for eligibility for public benefits (mostly food stamps and Medicaid). It’s a little like case work – talking to folks to find out what their situation is, helping them fill out applications, letting them know what offices to go to, and following up to see how things went. While the work itself is worlds different from the farm, I find myself continuing to wrestle with one of the fundamental questions posed at the Abundant Table: how to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food.

January-April things will look very different. My co-workers and I will be running a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assessment) center, helping our clients file their taxes for free and making sure they get all the credits and refunds they qualify for. I’m enjoying my supervisor and co-workers, my interaction with clients, and (ever the nerd) the challenge of learning the endlessly complicated (and dysfunctional) system of public benefits in the U.S.

But as I couldn’t quite handle a complete break with the world of farming and sustainable food systems (and in order to supplement the AmeriCorps stipend that leaves me eligible for many of the benefits I recommend for my clients), I found work once a week as a Market Hand at the New Amsterdam Market. The market is an exciting effort to re-introduce a public market (much like a farmers market, only with more of an emphasis on regionally-sourced prepared foods like cheeses and pies) to NYC’s 350 year-old market district in the south seaport area of Manhattan. It’s also an exciting chance for me to interact with vendors, customers, and the odd farm apprentice, and occasionally talk my way into a free loaf of fresh bread or half a bottle of good NY wine.

My free time includes a shameful amount of getting lost, a (thus far fruitless) search for a permanent place to live, a good library, a church community like the Abundant Table, and an affordable place to practice yoga, and vicariously getting my Masters in Food Studies through Mark. I’m enjoying an incredible array of apples, slowly finding new friends, and the ever-fascinating diversity of New Yorkers (my walk 1.5 mile walk to work, for example, takes me from hipster-art-school land through a Hasidic Jewish community and past the projects).

This time tomorrow I’ll also be enjoying the company of a certain Katerina, which reminds me that though my room may be 7×9 (and yes, that measurement is in feet), I always love friendly faces from out of town. It helps with the nostalgia, you know…

Hope all of you are well.

If you read the article on Food and Faith, it looks like we have a “sister” farm in NY! Go, sisters!
http://www.chssisters.org/melrose-bluestone-farm/