Thursday again, and so time for another thrilling installment in the franchise of MH short films. I'm posting a bit later in the day than usual, as I had some (routine) blood work at the hospital this morning. I have found that, while I can blog when half-asleep, I cannot blog half asleep without coffee. So here we are - enjoy the show:
This is just about my favourite of all twelve of the films. For one thing, it is beautiful - tons of beauty shots of our MH farm, which is an utterly gorgeous place. Lots of shots of cows and horses, sheep and chickens, and green gardens, pastures, hills. All just lovely - we are so very blessed to be living in such a place of God's created order and grace.
But I think the film does a very good job of giving at least a sense of our whole MH approach to the question of the earth and our care for it. We were environmentalists here long before it was a fashionable stance, long before anyone had any concern about global warming or whatever they're calling it these days.
And our approach to these matters are completely unconnected, then, to the fierce debates and raging conflicts around AGW, etc. If tomorrow there is conclusive proof that the AGW is false; or if tomorrow there is conclusive proof that it is true, it will not affect in any regard how we live our life in MH.
Because here, we have always cared for the earth. Here, we have always tried to use as little as we can, and to farm in a sustainable way, to compost and recycle, reuse and make do. We live on donations--every article of clothing I am currently wearing is second-hand! We do not use herbicides, pesticides, hormones. We do use chemical fertilizer, but even the most strong advocates of organic farming have conceded to us that we need to do that to get crops off the poor marginal soil of these parts.
But beyond the specifics, the MH approach to farming and the earth is one of knowing ourselves to be in relationship with creation, to dig our hands into the soil, to pull weeds and plant vegetables. To move through the year of plowing and tilling, planting and watering, weeding and thinning, reaping and storing, and to do it all again the next year, and the one after that, and then again...
There is something that happens to you when you live close to the earth, some way of being tuned in to God and his plan for creation in the natural order that blends easily with his plans in the supernatural order. So many things fall into place, and so much of our fractured, failing humanity falls into place as well.
Well, that is enough for now - watch the video, and enjoy it. We believe in MH that we have a key here, in the way we farm and the way we live, that addresses much of the anguished questions and turmoil of our times, and is a great healing for humanity and for our poor beleaguered planet.
Showing posts with label environmentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmentalism. Show all posts
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Thursday, May 23, 2013
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.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
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…
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
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…
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