Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

For ten years now, I've been teaching one version or another of a class on personal simplicity and economic and environmental sustainability here at Friends University, a formerly Quaker, non-denominational Christian, small liberal arts college in Wichita, KS. Though I teach at a religious university, I don't teach religion myself--and for that reason, I at first doubted that Jennifer Ayres's Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education would much that would be pedagogically relevant to me, despite my strong sympathy with her subject matter. In this, I was partly wrong. While Ayres's book includes many intriguing (and a few borderline outrageous) educational suggestions, its greatest value to me as a teacher is the way it inspires me to take stock of what I've tried to do with with my sustainability class, and to perhaps rethink what my primary goals in that course should be.

My original aim in the design of this class--about which I've probably shared my thoughts about too many times already--was always primarily getting students out of the classroom and into the growing, producing, fecund Kansas ecosystems all around us, showing them that there are patterns of life that can keep people fed and housed and happy without committing oneself to the rat race. It shouldn't have been a shock to me, after I'd lived in Kansas for a few years, to realize how many of my students really had no connection with farming or food systems--but it was, nonetheless. Sometimes broad popular stereotypes about "living in the heartland" would be confirmed as I talked with the students taking the class, and some of them would end up taking the lead in teaching me about cattle ranching or winter wheat or regenerative agriculture. But more often than not, my own agricultural background, limited as it is, nonetheless greatly eclipsed theirs. And so I figured that, whatever else I might be able to communicate to my students about Wendell Berry or John Woolman, I should at the very least get them out of the city and take them to some farms--as well as urban farmers markets and community gardens and other kinds of local sustainable business operations, perhaps going so far as to work on one of our own.

In doing all of that, I'd like to think I've been fairly successful, at least insofar as the "getting them out of Wichita" part is concerned. Even in the midst of the worst of the pandemic last summer and fall, different butchers and ranchers and food producers were willing to sacrifice some of their busy days to let students--majors in Conservation Science, Health Science, History & Politics, and more--come and tour their land, their independent meatpacking processing operations, their homemade tomato and lettuce greenhouses, their cheese-making and milk processing facilities, and so much more. These kinds of experiences don't, I'll be the first to admit, necessarily provide the students with the sort of detailed know-how necessary for them to develop more sustainable practices in their own lives. But as Ayres herself insists, knowledge about one's ecological surroundings are only the tip of the iceberg; as she writes, "Cultivating [the] capacity for inhabitance"--which she defines as "seeking to know and love and particular place in some detail and honoring its [ecological] rhythms, limits, and possibilities"--"requires personal and social transformation at a level far deeper than that of figuring out ‘greener solutions'" (pp. 3, 17). Thus the aim of those who aspire to "educate for inhabitance"--which I realized, in reading this book, clearly describes me--has to involve figuring out ways to engage the affections of others, their bodies and appetites and emotions and creative imaginations. If that seems intuitively true, it may be simply because philosophers from Aristotle to Polanyi have consistently argued that nothing can so engage people as real tactile experience, and real practical work. So far as that goes...as I said, I think I've done fairly well on the first, though not so much on the second.

To be clear: any success I've had with the first has to be attributed, first and foremost, to having an exemplar to draw upon, and becoming friends with Leroy Hershberger--a mechanic, handy-man, cook, juggler, bicyclist, and born story-teller, all with a degree from Yale--a decade ago has made all the difference in my life and the life of so many of my students. Some of them from years before have told me that dinners at the Hershbergers were one of the highlights of their entire college education. They remember well Leroy's glorious beard (that he shaved it off during the pandemic came as profound shock of several of them!), the kind words of his mother Mary, the inquisitive questions of his father William (who passed away at the age of 80 during the pandemic; Leroy's tribute to his father was touching, kind, and wise), and most of all the joy the whole Hershberg family take in being able to introduce young people a life more focused on the land, on real material productivity, and in that way a whole ecosystem--both ecological and economic, to say nothing of also spiritual--that exists and enlivens the worldview of many outside the hustle and bustle of our urban college campus.

I've sometimes been challenged--or, indeed, given the vicissitudes of trying to do my part to not just educate students but also keep my tuition-driven college campus alive and functioning, sometimes I have challenged myself--as to the real "outcomes" of this class and these excursions. Am I trying to turn my students into farmers, into rural proprietors and local producers? If so, why, and am I at all successful at it anyway? Every educator in today's late capitalist world confronts those questions of metrics and assessments at one point or another, and it's hard for me to conceive of anyone serious about the teaching profession who doesn't recognize the harmful framing they introduce into the very idea of paideia--that is, of the formation of the human person which a proper education should involve.

That may not mean that such questions can--much less should--be simply dismissed as irrelevant; our students live in this late capitalist world too, and are looking to find ways to discover livelihoods, relationships, and most of all places of productive inhabitance within it. If we as teachers provide no bridge from the formation we hope to introduce to their affections to the challenges facing them upon the conclusion of their education, then we haven't served them well at all. Ayres reminds me of all this, with wise comments on matters of both paideia (which she presents as an acknowledgement of the communities within which we are formed, and the responsibility of constructive critique which community membership must entail--p. 62) and place (which she defines as any location which, through human inhabitation, "is imbued with meaning, with histories, and [most crucially] with contestations"--p. 88). Creating, through my classes, opportunities for my students to come face-to-face, and hand-to-hand, with people like the Hershbergers and dozens of others who have exemplified simpler and more sustainable forms of life hopefully also gives them 1) a model of the love of place, and 2) the incentive to recognize, come to know, and thereby carefully--but unsparingly--critique their own places. 

Do I imagine that such incentives and models will automatically transform my students into ecologically, environmentally, agriculturally informed inhabitants of wherever they live? Obviously not, especially since my own inhabitation still falls short in so many ways. But life is long, and beginning students along a path scattered with seeds for reflection, fits in, again, with the kind of trust in the slow pace of creation which Ayers speaks of eloquently:

[S]low knowledge is the kind of knowledge necessary for an ecologically conscious person or community. It is cultivated together and shared, is deeply related to the context in which it is nurtured, and acknowledges--indeed, embraces--human limitations....[M]ost importantly, it demands human patience and attentiveness. It will not be rushed. In the not rushing, in the attentiveness, wisdom is cultivated and inoculates human consciousness against the seductions of technological progress and the quick fix....

In formal education settings, the push toward more content coverage and measurable success makes the proposal of slowing down, reading less, and reflecting more somewhat of a pedagogical and institutional risk. In religious communities, "slow learning" meets other institutional pressures: in a season of anxiety about declining religious affiliations and lackluster participation in education programs, religious and educational leaders might be seduced by slick curriculum packets that promise effortless preparation and meaning engagement with learners. The principle of slow knowledge, however would suggest that efficiency and meaning are sometimes at cross-purposes. Meaning takes time (pp. 72-73).

The relevance of ecological language to the slow formation of ideas, in the lives of students or parishioners or anyone else, contrary to what Ayres calls--learning heavily on Berry, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackon, David Orr, and many others--the "uncritical embrace of the efficiencies and networking capacities of technology" (p. 4) should be obvious. Equally obvious is how committing to the enacting of that slow formation--such as by growing a garden--can only strengthen that relevance. But that, of course, is where things get exponentially harder. It is one thing, in the midst of whirlwind of experiences that make up a college education, to get students to pause for an hour, or a day, or maybe even longer, and enable them to put their hands on the soil and the food and the people who can provide them with real models of belonging and critique. It is an entirely different thing to commit students to fill up that pause with the daily, weekly, monthly work of growing things in a garden, and to be able to see and, eventually, taste the results of their own re-orientation.

For close to a decade, many of us here at Friends have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to commit our students--and ourselves!--to projects requiring some genuine husbandry in a garden space on our campus. Sometimes there have been real successes, and sometimes the space has lain almost entirely forgotten for an academic year (or more). The space in general has much improved since the early conversations about it, and the first rush of enthusiasm to transform what was a vacant lot beside a student housing complex. But an entirely sustainable component of Wichita's local food system--much less even just Friend University's!--the garden is absolutely not. It remains, month in and month out, dependent upon the vision and determination of a few of us, and the occasional student or two or five who find ways to make the time spent working in the garden satisfy either their own personal commitments or their academic responsibilities or both. But even in those happy situations, we'll likely only have a season or two from the students in question: they are, after all, young people, seeking to gain the learning (and the certification of having received such) that will enable them to find their own place, and make their own commitments, on their own schedule, not necessarily Mother Nature's. So we make the most of the seasons we have, and continue to try our best to get the carrots and arugula and potatoes to grow, in the same way I try my best to make my classes spark agrarian and ecological ideas that might never have occurred to the students before. Sometimes, it all works. And when it doesn't, we trust in God's grace and the fecundity of both the Kansas soil and the college student's mind, and try again.

That kind of attitude is always going to be dispiriting to some. They might look at Ayres's book and note that she hardly ever addresses the complex structural forces which likely make it difficult for an education in inhabitance to translate into the creation care she considers imperative. The same criticism could made of the three-credit hour college class I teach once a year at a not-especially-notable Christian college in the middle of Kansas, of course: how is that really addressing the obstacles to inhabitance. But as utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" it may seem, that doesn't mean we still can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind. Or at least I do--and I thank Ayres for reminding me of that ideal. She is a teacher speaking to other teachers, like me. She is urging, through her book, those of us who have grasped the imperative of seeking to cultivate a greater concern for ecological and economic and spiritual sustainability to “envision...a way of inhabitance that may not yet be entirely possible,” holding on to the faith that the communities we might be building through our teaching “can imagine and do and become that which one person cannot on their own” (p. 129). Perhaps "envisioning for inhabitation" isn't a bad goal for my class, as I take it into its next decade.

Sukkot and Settling Into Fall

 [Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This year I planted a spring garden for the first time. Probably because of the pandemic, but because of other plans that I've been thinking about for a while, I decided early this year to up my gardening game--putting in raised beds at last, planting in mid-March, expanding the range of vegetables I aimed to grow: lettuce, broccoli, eggplant, green beans, and more. Most didn't work out, but it was a good struggle along the way. But with August and September, and the need to convert my classes online, the pressures on my time increased, and the garden (along with some of those other aforementioned plans) got pushed to the side. Perhaps not coincidentally, my once rewarding garden took a serious dive, in terms of both productivity and the enjoyment I took from my increasingly limited engagements with it. So it was with some satisfaction that yesterday I ripped out all the wilting tomatoes and long-since-exhausted peppers, as I usually do around this time of year. But this year, I also started prepping for a fall and winter garden. It's Sukkot, after all; time to build my settlement anew.

I've always been a fan of holidays, about which I've written a great deal over the years. I suppose I've always attached myself to them because something in me is always looking for ways to ritually connect myself to the seasons, to the rhythms of life, and to the people--family, friends, and other communities that I find myself, by choice or chance, enlisted into--who go through those rhythms and seasons with me. Holidays allow me to take a moment of time, a day on a calendar, and find in it something that puts me into a collective articulation of meaningful connections, through traditions and practices and celebrations and acts of remembrance. So I seek out holidays, and grab onto whichever one's I can. And the beginning of autumn gives me plenty to graft into my yearly routines, none more so than Sukkot, an ancient Jewish festival of the harvest--or the "ingathering," as it is usually translated.

Sometimes spoken of as the Festivals of Booths or the Festival of Tabernacles, the idea being to remind the ancient Israelites of the tents they dwelt in during their years in the desert, with the harvest association being a component of both the time of year when Sukkot falls (after the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, both of which connect to the autumnal equinox), and the tents or booths which would be erected out in the fields, as people worked day and night to get the crop in on time. The result is a joyous holiday of thanksgiving, with commemorative, temporary sukkahs being erected in homes and yards by observant Jews. The sukkah, taken in its fullness, is a sign of both permanence and transience, of coming out of the desert and settling into the promised land, the land of Israel, as well as a consciousness of how the blessings of that arrival, and the harvests having a home makes possible, are contingent things, as easily taken away as the sukkah is taken down once the harvest season is complete and the seven-day holiday is at its end. That ambiguity, that the felt need to make and identify with and make fruitful use of a home, which at the same time will never, ever--at least not during this moral existence, anyway--truly be one's own, speaks to me deeply, and never more than in the fall.

I've written about Sukkot a few times before. I reflected upon it back before my family found its place here in Wichita, KS, and I first planted my vegetable garden; I wrote about it again a few years after that, once we'd put down roots here and the kids were finding their place at school and we were finding our rhythm in our congregation; and then I wrote about it one more time, about six years ago, when I was deeply engaged in a slow, long process of Bible study, perhaps as a ways of dealing with the fact that our family had just started going through what would eventually become the most consequential, disruptive, and stressful time we've ever experienced, the effects of which are, perhaps, in our present pandemic moment, finally playing themselves out...or perhaps will just continue, in different forms, so long as we have our place here on Earth. Throughout it all, the seasons have turned, and my gardens have (usually, anyway) grown. What calls me back to it today?

It's the idea of the fall garden, I think. It's that, instead of beginning to move into my usual fall and winter mode, I have instead decided that, with a little planning and work and luck, I could have growing things into the winter months--and then maybe , after a spell of dormancy, into the earliest spring as well. Not a huge amount; I'm no master gardener. But I think I can keep the soil and water working well enough, and I think I can turn the compost frequently enough, that some Swiss chard, sorrel, and spinach might carry on through. Hardly a radical idea, but a challenge to the seasonal routine for me--a disruption, even, though a positive one. It means that instead of tearing down and leaving fallow, I am tearing down and settling on some other temporary arrangement in its place. Not all the hoses will go in the shed for the next seven months; I'll still be doing the work of ingathering for months and seasons yet to come. That pleases me. It makes me, at a time when it sometimes seems that the only constant is the legal and electoral and climactic and epidemiological chaos, more rooted than ever before.

In a couple of my previous Sukkot essays, I ended up making use of the writings of the scholar and Times and Seasons blogger Rosalynde Welch, which surprised me as I looked up these old posts of mine (perhaps our seasonal sensibilities are similar). In one of them, she compared the bi-annual Mormon tradition of watching General Conference broadcast from Salt Lake City to the High Holy Days of the Jewish calendar--but then added an important caveat:

Of course, worship always involves more than an act of communication; it is also a sensory and social experience that video can never fully replicate. So streaming video will never replace the experience of worshiping together during the rest of the year. No matter how capacious the broadband connection, it cannot transmit the warmth of a handshake, the space of a chapel, the taste of the sacramental bread and water. Those human-to-human connections will always be at the heart of Mormon religious practice–and of virtually all other cooperative religious endeavors, as well.

As our family begins our seventh month of home church--a practice that, despite the fact that our ward (or, rather, the ward we've been assigned to, since boundaries got changed during the covid summer) has begun limited meetings again, is likely to continue for at least a while longer yet--these words of hers are particularly poignant. Our family is more than a half-year into making new rhythms and traditions, all without the handshakes and hugs that our local instantiation of the Mormon community might have provided. The bread and water emblem's of Christ's sacrifice we have in our home, but the chapel space we do not. Insofar as matters Mormon are concerned, our home has been our sukkah, the temporary--but feeling more permanent by the week--place we have settled on. It was one thing to imagine our worship community reduced to various distanced and streamed routines during the summer months--but now, as we move into fall, into winter, into the times to holidays and collective articulations to come? this may be the hardest time of all. Like Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf told the assembled Mormon faithful listening to General Conference yesterday, there may be even harder times yet to come as well.

Uchtdorf also told us about planting our seeds well, though. Buried in soil, the seed, like the soul, nonetheless continues its work. So this Sukkot, perhaps in the spirit of all my other ruined (perhaps later to be reborn?) routines, I am not putting away my seasonal arrangement, but stretching it out, and maybe stretching out our family's harvest too, keeping my hand in the soil, to see what can be gathered in yet. I am settled on this commitment, this additional engagement, and feel good about. How permanent will it be? How permanent can anything ever be? For now, I'll just wait on, and work towards, the coming winter, and after that, the spring.

The Coronavirus in Kansas: Wichita's Weaknesses and Strengths

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, it's sometimes easy, here in Wichita--a large city nonetheless somewhat isolated and disconnected from the larger metropolitan areas of the country, a city which centers a largely rural and therefore much more low risk part of the state--to be unclear if we're overreacting or not reacting enough.But feeling as though we’re stuck in the middle, feeling divided, is nothing new for a mid-sized city like ours.

In general the news for Kansas overall seems to be pretty good. It is looking like the spread of the virus, as it peaks in April, won't be as deadly as we feared, almost certainly in part because of Governor Laura Kelly's (and locally, Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse's) insistence on pushing for stay-at-home orders as early as possible. But is it true that, in taking these actions, Wichita will suffer even more than it would have had the city, and its surrounding county and state, not shut things down? Obviously you can find folks who self-righteously insist upon just that. The evidence suggests otherwise--but all the same, there's reason to worry. My best guess, on the basis of both observations and ongoing research, is that Wichita, and most of our state generally, will be able to weather this month, and the next, relatively well--but that rebuilding afterwards may be confronted with some real difficulties.

On the positive side, comparative data provided by Wichita State University shows that, as Kansas’s economy is generally much less dependent upon service, entertainment, and tourist sectors than is the case elsewhere, we haven’t seen quite the same level of job losses and business closures statewide. The mainstays of Kansas’s economy–food production, manufacturing, education, and health care–are broadly considered essential, and thus have mostly been able to continue to operate.

That’s no comfort, of course, to the many Kansans who are suddenly facing unemployment and real economic distress. Nor does it lessen the fear which so many of us have here about the possible loss of so much that adds to the quality of life here in Wichita–the restaurants, the theaters, the bookstores, the "third places," and so much more. And that is what puts a question mark beside this otherwise good news for the folks in this city--Wichita is actually enough of a metropolitan economy that it does, in fact, include significant service and entertainment sectors. Not nearly what New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or even Kansas City has, of course, but still, enough that, as the Wichita State study shows, a few of the negative economic effects (like regarding air travel) which are below the national average for Kansas, are slightly above it for Wichita. Not much, but slightly. This is why it is vital for Wichita to take seriously questions about how to keep money in the pockets of as many Wichitans as possible (providing maternity leave for city workers whose vacation and sick leave are being used to help support their fellow furloughed workers is one good idea) that probably aren't even on the radar screen in many smaller cities. Small actions, such are withing the jurisdiction of the mayor and the city council, may make all the difference in enabling Wichitans to enjoy the same lower level of economic pain and disruption which will likely characterize the rest of the state for the duration of the pandemic.

Something similar might be said regarding psychological pain and family disruption. Nowhere in Kansas--and certainly not even here in Wichita, the largest single city in the state--do we see the kind of urban density which characterizes those cities that have seen the largest outbreaks, and thus have had to take the most extreme actions for the sake of public health. But even if such measures become necessary here--and again, given the success that we've had in flattening the curve they hopefully will not be--they still wouldn’t play out the same way that they have in larger urban agglomerations. Simply put, Kansans--and Wichitans too--generally have easy access to rural space. When it comes to mental health and minimizing domestic conflict, that matters. As one writer suggested in The New York Times, social distancing in an environment when families have gardens, fields, and locally grown food readily available to them, is a very different prospect from social distancing when three people in a cramped downtown apartment have to maintain 6 ft. distance from one another, and when even the parks and sidewalks are often so crowded with people trying to find some openness that they become sources of stress and have to be subject to further regulation.

In a way, it might be Wichita's very in-betweeness which will make this city a real model insofar as such matters are concerned. We have a genuinely large population with a low enough level of density that nearly all of its residents can take advantage of rural space for physical and mental rejuvenation relatively easily. That's not to say that there aren't problems which some Wichitans could face in this regard; one may think of transportation and access to some of that (mostly privately owned, and sometimes fiercely patrolled) open space, particularly for poorer Wichitans in the downtown and southern parts of the city. And of course, the safety and maintenance of the trails and bike paths and road shoulders by which we can make use of that space once we get there is a question as well. As city leaders take a look of where to cut costs in the face of the financial hit the city is taking, and will continue to take, one hopes they're recognize that is, also, is part of the value and resilience of the city, and will attend to the costs of those easily overlooked resources accordingly.

Still, in general, it would be fair to conclude that Wichita, and south-central Kansas overall, has available to it the opportunities and the resources keep the economic damage and the social consequences of the pandemic minimal. But that, unfortunately, is not the whole story. We have to think about long-term impacts, and not just short-term ones.

As the same Wichita State study warns, food production and manufacturing in Kansas is heavily dependent upon supply chains in equipment and trade that the overall economic health of the nation effectively determines. Service workers and others who work in more creative or information-dependent sectors of the economy can snap back as soon as paying customers return; the same cannot be said for larger industries that need to wait for raw materials to ship or are dependent upon extended networks of specialized workers. The fact that Wichita, as mentioned above, actually does have a decent-sized service sector, will mean that, as the larger mainstays of Kansas's economy slowly struggle back to life, it may be the collective action of activists, entrepreneurs, and urban creatives in our city that will be end up being essential to whatever support will be needed for workers in the aircraft industry and others in the meantime. Of course, given how much of Wichita's workforce is tied up in heavy manufacturing, which over the past year has already taken many 737 Max-related hits, maybe the best we can hope for is a wash.

Agriculture may be another problem. True, the likelihood of the virus spreading widely in isolated Kansas farming towns is quite small. But as the work force in Kansas’s rural counties is also quite small, and as many of those counties–thanks to Republican opposition to extending Medicaid—lack basic health care resources, even a small outbreak could be devastating. The resulting could be a domino effect, with unproductive or failed farms and feedlots forcing closures in ancillary food industries across the state, many of which are concentrated in south-central Kansas, with Wichita as their hub. Ultimately we may see a hastening of the already underway rural population collapse in western Kansas, with long-term social, economic, and political consequences for our city, as more and more people throughout the region come to Wichita seeking medical care and basic economic opportunities, contributing our aging population and probably not adding much to the overall tax base. It's a good thing that Sedgwick County's population is just over the half-million mark, thereby qualifying it for at least a slice of the $150 billion the federal government has earmarked to help out state, county, and municipal governments; in the months to follow this pandemic, with so many liabilities building up and so much potential revenue off the table, it's going to need it.

As we wait to see what this plague brings into our lives, our task as Wichitans must be to use the resources we have–a large population, one which is likely to find ways to remain relatively stable, socially and economically, in the short-term–to reach out and help make more resilient those places likely to struggle the most as Kansas recovers from this pandemic, whenever that recovery fully comes.

The Coronavirus in Kansas: The First Week

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

It’s dark and quiet Wednesday morning here in the Fox household, March 18, 2020. It’s been dark every morning–and mostly grey and cloudy and cool all through the days as well–for pretty much a whole week now, appropriately enough. Partly that’s because our schedules, both external and internal, haven’t caught up with the hour in the morning we lost less than two weeks ago when Daylight Savings Time began. But most, I think, it’s because of the gloom which has descended upon many of us here in south-central Kansas in the past seven days, with the weather–unhelpfully but perhaps unavoidably, reciprocating.

A week ago, on Wednesday, March 11, I was wrapping up my classes at Friends University in anticipation of spring break. Students were handing in their midterms, and telling me about their travel plans. Of course people were aware of the coronavirus threat; I’m originally from Washington state, and my mother still lives there (my father having passed on some years ago), so as the news tumbled forth from Seattle and elsewhere about cancellations and quarantines, I got regular updates from siblings and others. We all knew it–meaning both the virus and the panic--would be in Kansas soon; every informed person did. Yet from the top of the national government all the way down to the local level, the mood was...ordinary.

Maybe that’s not what you were feeling a week ago; maybe you’re a prepper that had already rushed out and stocked up on toilet paper back in February. Most of us aren’t that, and I certainly wasn’t, and neither were any of my colleagues at Friends. Our president spoke at a regularly scheduled university-wide community meeting that afternoon, and she said she didn’t anticipate anything that would require any major changes. We talked about the mission of our small liberal arts college, talked about the integration of Christian values and higher education, talked about and made plans for all the usual things. She wished us all a good spring break, reminded us to wash our hands and stay home if we were sick, and then we left to get our Thursdays and Fridays in order.

But, of course, they weren’t in order.

Late that Wednesday night, the cold weather rolled back in, and the University of Kansas announced–following the decisions of various major institutions of higher education around the country made that same day–that they also would extend spring break by a week, ask students to vacate student housing, and go to online education thereafter. Immediately, the dominoes started to fall. An NBA players tested positive for the virus, and by the following morning the word was out: the league was suspending all games until further notice. Throughout Thursday, March 12, the announcements kept coming. Other local universities--Kansas State, Wichita State, more--were following KU’s example, telling students not to return after spring break, but to work from home. March Madness was announced to be going forward without an audience, and then was cancelled altogether.

By Friday, March 13, there were reported coronavirus cases throughout Kansas, including one patient who had just been released from Wesley Medical Center here in Wichita. Our younger daughters were home, with their spring break having begun, but I was attending another, hastily-called, university-wide meeting, where our president, having been in conferences with other college presidents and Sedgwick County officials since 7:30am, informed us that Friends was following suit: two weeks of spring break, followed by online instruction. The rush was in full swing. Sedgwick County and Wichita started issuing the first of their cancellations and restriction orders, with the grand re-opening of Naftzger Park being the first casualty. And still the weather remained cloudy and cool.

It was a rough weekend, as anyone who went shopping can attest and looked in vain (as I did) for certain particular items (really, a mad rush on powdered milk?) can attest. The early farmers market that Saturday, March 14, at the Sedgwick County Extension Center was cancelled, so I couldn’t stock up as I do once-a-month while the regular market is out of session. (I ended up driving to Hutchinson to hit up our long-time local meat connection, Phil Nisly, at his farm-slaughterhouse directly.) There was a death in our extended family–not coronavirus-related; it was an elderly relative, and had long been anticipated. But there would be no funeral, in the same way that there was no church on Sunday, March 15, as our congregation had cancelled all gatherings at church buildings for the foreseeable future, as so many other denominations had. So, no chance to say a final farewell, no chance to mourn with family we almost never see. We needed to cheer ourselves up and hence, anticipating that movie theaters would soon close as well, we sneaked out over the weekend to see the new Pixar film, Onward, in a mostly empty theater. (No Wall-E, but pretty good!) Just in the nick of time, as it turned out.

Monday, March 16, dawned--sort of, anyway--and the long-process of sorting out the weekend and finding a new routine begins. The YMCA had announced they were closing their facilities on Sunday, cancelling all their classes; hence, my wife did her Zumba class in front of a screen. She went into work, wondering how Watermark Books, where she has been a bookseller and event coordinator for eight years, will ride out these quarantines and cut-backs (shop local everyone–keep Wichita’s small businesses alive!). Our second-oldest daughter consoled herself with the fact that, while her end-of-semester concerts were cancelled, at least the Chipotle she works at has a drive-through, and thus may be able to survive social distancing better than some others. Then yesterday, Tuesday, March 17, the governor and state education commissioner finally dropped the other shoe, as we all knew they would: all public schools are closed for the remainder of the year. Our sixteen-year-old is freaked about what shifting to online assignments will do to her grades, and our almost-fourteen-year-old, usually a dismissive teen-ager, kind of teared-up, realizing that her eighth-grade formal won’t happen, and sadly counting up all her friends that she never got contact information for. And still the grey skies continued, with an oozing, tail-end-of-winter wet accompanying us all through Monday and Tuesday.

Still, the seasons respect no virus; springtime is here (or will be, officially, tomorrow–and there’s even a chance of some proper sunshine by the end of the day on Thursday!). So all day yesterday, ignoring my wet socks and the mud, I did as I’ve been planning to do since January: redesigning and improving my garden space, with the aim of making for a more productive and more attractive crop this summer. So I plowed everything up--borrowing a rototiller from a neighbor, as I have ever year for close to a decade now--then raked it, purchased boards at Home Depot, built new raised beds, laid them down, hauled ten wheelbarrow-loads of compost over, then topped it off with 16 40lb. bags of topsoil from our local Ace Hardwart. It looks nice. Now I just need to put down the mulch on the walking paths, and step one of the garden rebirth will be ready, maybe just in time for spring.

One week into the full effect of the coronavirus panic here in Wichita, and we’re hunkering down for the long haul, like everyone is. Someday it will be summer, and there will be fresh peas and tomatoes to enjoy. Keep your eyes on the (still-distant) prize, everyone. Eyes on the prize.

Climate Change, Dirty Hands, and the Grace (and Hope) of Limits

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Paul Schrader, the famed screenwriter and director, does not make subtle films. His latest movie, First Reformed--the story of a depressed, emotionally exhausted, and ultimately suicidal minister (played by Ethan Hawke), a man haunted his failed marriage, his dead son, his collapsing health, and an overbearing sense of guilt--is very much in line with the rest of Schrader's work. Artists, in his view, should want to "cleave a crevice in the viewer’s skull that they have to somehow close"; in this regard (if not in all others), First Reformed succeeds.

The tool which Schrader uses to open up the viewer's skull in First Reformed is essentially the same one which finally drives Hawke's Reverend Toller, a former military chaplain whose son died in Iraq, over the edge: the question of whether God can (or will) forgive His creation for the immensity of the environmental harm it has done to itself, and the worry, or perhaps fear, over what struggling with that question honestly will mean for ourselves. For someone already as psychologically unbalanced as Reverend Toller--as the complacent but basically decent-hearted mega-church pastor who watches over Toller at one point comments, Toller, unlike Jesus, spends all his time in the Garden of Gethsemane--it meant a descent into jihadist madness. One would hope that would not be case for most of us. But struggle with it we must, however much that cranial opening in our perspectives pains us.

This is not, incidentally, merely a question for those who believe in a loving God who orchestrated our creation. Those who continue to insist that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's desperate warnings about the need to contain global warming to 1.5°C is just Soros-backed nonsense, or that the overwhelming scientific consensus on the terrible threat of anthropogenic climate change is merely an example of paranoid groupthink, or that we're on the cusp of a providential cornucopia of food production once the tundra in Siberia finally all melts, can, of course, continue to believe whatever foolish thing they want (and can save themselves the effort of reading the rest of this essay). But increasingly, the crushing reality of increasing ocean temperatures, extreme weather events, drought-driven refugee crises, and species collapse is forcing most of us to wonder how to navigate this human-made enormity, whether religious believers or not. Just this week, Noah Millman commented in The Week that "the most inconvenient truth of all" about climate change is the realization that we have "no mode of living that allows us simply to exist within an environment in a natural fashion, no spiritual road back to a prelapsarian state," and Jonathan Frazen commented in The New Yorker  that we must "accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope." Their counsel that we must find new ways to orient ourselves and our posterity towards what lays ahead of us, despite the immense difficulties which will almost certainly attend that future, is refreshingly honest. The near-simultaneous appearance of their essays, along with my watching of First Reformed, made a perfect complement to Noah J. Toly's The Gardeners' Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics, an unexpectedly deep work of political and theological reflection that I had just finished. Almost providential coincidence of influences, one might say.

I call Toly's book "unexpectedly deep" because, in working my way through it, I did not at first suspect that stakes that Toly was aiming for. His work in environmental politics is important, but not, I thought, the stuff out of which grand theological insights are made. I confess that "ethics" as a discipline does not, for the most part, impress me; it too often, in my observation, gets taught and deployed in the context of already established secular and capitalist practises, and thus usually targets individual practitioners, not the structures of the practice itself. So while I enjoyed his reflections on Malthusianism, his unpacking of the "IPAT" ("Environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology") formulation, and his invocations of Herman Daly and other environmental thinkers who have developed much needed steady-state or slow-growth economic models, I didn't find the book's argument remotely radical enough to be truly engaging. (For whatever it's worth, I teach Daly and similar thinkers as well, but at the present moment it is, frankly, "degrowth," rather than slow-growth, that we really need.)

But beginning with chapter 3, which starts with a brilliant consideration of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in conjunction of the disasters experienced by the village of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's famed On Hundred Years of Solitude, Toly moves in the direction of the describing what he calls the "magical realism of climate change." His point is that, unlike every other environmental concern we might face--urban brownfields, polluted rivers, deforestation, etc.--climate disruption is a phenomenon whose structural causes are fundamentally interpolated with the structures of human choices; as he pithily puts it, "climate change originates with the tragic or, more specifically, with attempts to overcome it" (p. 61). As modernity--and, most relevantly, the hydrocarbon-focused "paleotechnic energy regime" of the industrial and post-industrial world--constructed and repeatedly reconstructed itself around the transcending of various ecological and sociological limits, it exposed new limits to the world that would not have been known otherwise. Following a thoughtful review of the relevant science, Toly observes: "What this means is that climate change embodies the tragic dimension of environmental challenges not only because it requires us to navigate tradeoffs and instabilities now, but because the social systems that have fueled the problem were originally generated by impulses to address limitations" (p. 63). Or as he puts it at length at the end of the chapter:

Among other things, climate change is slowly undoing our ability to ignore or deny the tragic structure of the human condition. Perhaps more than any other issue, climate change has exposed the tragic foundations of environmental challenges, the ineluctable guilt that attends acting on those challenges, and the temptations to denial, paralysis, nihilism, and moral skepticism that attend those challenges. Reckoning honestly with climate change, and with the challenge of climate governance, shatters the illusion of a tragedy-free existence, highlighting what we might describe as the enduring tragic climate of environmental politics. (p. 79)

To speak as a Christian, I agree fully with Toly's insistence that recovery of the sense of tragic, or in other words of limits, is essential to any appreciation of those goods which come to us as grace, as abundance. Without a consciousness of what we cannot do, or of what our doing cannot avoid necessarily implicating us also in so doing, then there can be no consciousness of that good which is beyond our doing. This confronts us with problems of agency and sin, of course. Early in the book, Toly commented that "'the tragic' in this sense is neither sinful nor the result of sin"--and I took issue with that. If sin is understood as the absence of, or the state of acting against, God's good will, then how could something experienced as tragedy not be tied up with sin? But later Toly's arguments led me to reconsider the meaning of his words--that is, perhaps we should understand the environmental tragedy of the entwining of human innovation and destruction, and the tragedy of the tradeoffs it forces upon us, as reflections of a "benign alienation." That alienation--for those who accept the Fall, anyway--is both what introduced the possibility of and what contributes to the continuation of sinful acts, of course, most particularly against the natural creation which the Genesis story tells us we were given some stewardship over. But it also--and here Toly draws upon the work of Albino Barrera--"draws us into to Christian discipleship," making "our allocative choices, or our choices among competing goods when we cannot possibly secure all of them...an opportunity to be like God in choice and creativity....Apprehending the tragic reminds us of the enduring goodness of a finite creation and reveals the goodness of our limitations, as well as the goodness of the plurality of potentially legitimate but still not self-justifying ways to respond to the tragic" (pp. 88-89).

Trusting in God's grace in the midst of--indeed, actually though the medium of--our own alienation is a hard theological claim. Unfortunately, it was not the tendency of most American Christians in the 20th century to do political theology with the hardness of finitude, plurality, and tragedy in mind; Billy Graham, rather than Dietrich Bonhoeffer (on whom Toly relies extensively) was our collective preference. Too many of us were captivated by the idols of efficiency, utility, and inevitability, seeing God's will as, if not aligned with, than at least entirely orthogonal to industrial expansion. Of course technological progress and energy consumption must be unlimited; it's impossible to imagine things otherwise, right? The human creature demands it! This is what Wendell Berry trenchantly called "an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant." Toly invites us to realize how things can be otherwise. Not without painful tradeoffs, losses, and sacrifices, of course--but also not without hope for what he calls a "responsible Anthropocene."

What will it look like? Toly doesn't know. He gestures towards what geographer Doreen Massey calls "a politics of place beyond place," which he reads, in light of the finite and alienated fact of our existence, a fact that obliges us to dig into particular places and tend to those possibilities of fecundity graced to us (a possibility which he ties to Biblical cities of refuge), "a politics of place" that also "sees its identity as constituted partly by relations with, impacts upon, and obligations to others beyond its borders." As he concludes his book, "the gardener's hands are dirtied by their bearing the costs for others...because facing the tragic responsibility means giving up, undermining, or destroying one or more goods [one might think here of our ever-responsive energy grids, our industrial food systems, our fossil fuel-dependent addictions to global travel, our too-casual involvements with exploitative supply chains around the globe, and more]...that others may benefit" (pp. 116-117).

One need not rely upon Christian theology to recognize the wisdom of this kind of chastened, resolute, localized hope. Jonathan Frazen, in the aforementioned essay, doesn't advocate abandoning involvement with repairing or strengthening larger political and economic systems entirely--but he does center his own mostly (but perhaps not entirely) non-religious hopes on "smaller, more local battles....a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble," so that he  might "take heart in...small successes." For him, it's a community-supported agricultural operation that gives the urban homeless a chance to farm. Just more upper-class liberal do-gooding, some might sniff--but no one who takes both localism and the projections made by environmental science seriously, I think, can sniff at his final comments: "when the systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and homeless people outnumber people with homes....traditional local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal buzzwords. Kindness to neighbors and respect for the land--nurturing healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators--will be essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it." Toly, I suspect, would fully agree.

The fictional Reverend Toller, when brought into confrontation with the limits of his ability to respond to the horror and confusion that climate disruption is bringing into all of our lives, thought God was calling him to violently embrace the blackness around him. Toly's work helps us, believers and non-believers alike, to articulate a more hopeful response. It is not a recipe for something that our own contradictions ought to warn us away from deluding us into hoping for, but rather a recommendation for a hope which can co-exist with tragedy, a hope for endurance and grace as we do the hard, difficult work which this planet we have changed calls us to. Not a bad challenge, that.

Nature, Wisdom, Spirit, Mother

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This is an expanded and re-written version of a Mother's Day sermon I gave in church last week, on May 13, 2018. Please see the note attached at the conclusion of the post.

I'm pretty certain that ever since I became old enough to wonder about matters theological, I hadn't been all that enthused by the Mormon idea of Mother in Heaven. The Christian message which consistently spoke (and still speaks) most strongly to me was Pauline, Augustinian, and Lutheran; I took (and still take) seriously the omniscience and omnipresence of God presented through the Biblical tradition, and saw His relationship with us as profoundly grace-centered and not at all humanist. This left little room in my thinking for the discourse about Heavenly Mother that I was most familiar with, which seemed rooted in deeply literal and humanist presumptions about God's identity, sexuality, and relationships. "In the heav’ns are parents single?/ No, the thought makes reason stare! / Truth is reason; truth eternal / Tells me I’ve a mother there"--to a great many of my fellow Mormons, for many years, the claim made in this old hymn seems both persuasive and obvious. But it wasn't for me.

I write all that in the past tense, though, because not too long ago I read an essay which made me realize that maybe, just maybe, I've actually been thinking about, and perhaps even worshiping, Mother in Heaven all along. But let me work around to that.

Over the past two years, a large number of the trees which once lined the run-off beside the street in front of our home were affected by a blight, and were removed by the city. Last summer, they were replaced with saplings--many of which, I noticed over our long dry winter, got snapped off. Maybe the wind did it, but more likely it was stupid kids wandering along the street. And yet today all of them, even those that were left stubby and close to the ground, are growing. Rain finally came to this part of Kansas, and growth has too.

One of the most common themes in our sacrament meetings is "gratitude," and this is something I'm grateful for: the abundance of the natural world all around us, the rhythm of growth that returns, again and again, even in the face of all the harm we do to creation. It's an abundance we are invited, despite all our environmental crimes, to contribute to and benefit from, and by so doing learn from as well. That's something else to be grateful for: the satisfaction--and the often humbling learning which precedes that feeling of satisfaction--of being a part of nature's cycle of renewal and bounty. I grew up working in gardens, bailing hay, tromping through alfalfa fields, milking cows by hand, and the productive interplay of us human beings with the growing, gracious things that fill our stomachs with food and our minds with beauty is something that, even as an academic, attends much of my thinking. If you're looking for a romantic agrarian, someone who enjoys weeding the tomato plants and contemplating the meaning of the soil as I turn it over with a spade, you've got one right here. 

The week before I was assigned to speak, we sang in church one of my favorite hymns: "All Creatures of our God and King." The fourth verse, in particular, caught by eye:

Dear Mother Earth, who day by day
Unfoldest blessings on our way,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
The flowers and fruits that in thee grow,
Let them His glory also show.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

The lyrics of this hymn are a slightly changed version of those composed by William H. Draper, who in the early 1900s translated St. Francis of Assisi’s poem "Canticle of the Sun," which was written around 1224, and inspired by the 148th Psalm. Here's a translation of the relevant passage from the poem:

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Draper was inspired to see in that poem a hymn something he wanted to his congregation to be able to hear and sing for a Whitsunday service--Whitsunday being an old English liturgical term for the Day of Pentecost, the day, seven weeks after Easter, that the Christian world celebrates the blessing of Holy Ghost which comes to surround and sustain Jesus's disciples and all who come into His community. There is a reason, I think, why this particular work by St. Francis spoke to Draper as he made plans for this holy day--specifically, the association between the manifold gifts of the spirit, and the diverse fecundity of the natural world, which Francis placed all together in his poem as a family: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire. Note, though, that his "Nature" is not only a sibling; she is also a "Mother," by which and through which the governing, productive rule of life--the fruit and herbs we consume from the world, and the flowers by which it is decorated--is sustained.

Where did this idea come from, that the natural world, the world we work in and are sustained and enlightened by, is both feminine and maternal? If you turn to non-Christian history and mythology, there are plenty of ancient examples: Durga in Hinduism, Gaia from the Greeks. But these deities often are understood as embodying the wildness of the natural world, and are indifferent to, or often hostile towards, actual human beings. What of the image of nature as something which mothers us, feeds and teaches and overseas and loves us, and to which we owe the respect that we do to a mother?

The earliest example of a "Mother Nature" that I know of came from the pen of the French cleric Alain de Lille, who wrote, perhaps 60 years before St. Francis's "Canticle," a Latin work of theology titled (in translation) The Plaint of Nature. There is much in this work of prose and verse which audiences today might find strange or offensive--but it also gave the Christian world, for the first time we have record of, the idea of Nature as a ruling, feminine figure:

O child of God, the mother of Creation, bond of the universe and its stable link....you, who by your reins guide the universe, unite all things in a stable and harmonious bond and wed heaven to earth in a union of peace; who, working on the pure idea of Divine Wisdom, mold the species of all created things...

In the words of James Sheridan, translator of The Plaint, Nature comes to declare that "it was God's will that by a mutually related circle of birth and death, transitory things should be given stability by instability, endlessness by endings, eternity by temporariness, and that the series of things should ever be knit by successive renewals of birth." The idea of an immanent order, always linked, always disciplining, always rewarding.

I learned about Alain de Lille's Plaint from a long essay by Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, critic, farmer, and agrarian, who once famously declared “I’d rather rely on Mother Nature’s wisdom than man’s cleverness.” Contained in his latest collection, The Art of Loading Brush, "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World" is a deep dive into the depictions of nature in the history of English literature, and its influence on consequent writings about conservation and farming. His study is often a tendentious one (he doesn't like industrial agriculture, or tractors, for that matter), but it is revealing nonetheless. His aim to remind his readers that observers of the natural world have consistently recognized that there is an order to it, a miraculous rhythm that follows a mysterious logic which we can learn from, but never master.

Berry is a Christian, a man who knows the Bible very well, but who sometimes has a problem with the conventionality of Christianity in America. He is drawn to those who seem to him to respect the mystery, the glory, the stern wonder of creation, rather than those who want to explain it all in some tidy ideological or theological package. Thomas Merton, a French Catholic who settled in a monastery in Kentucky, where Berry also lives, wrote a prose poem about the “Hagia Sophia” or “divine wisdom,” an ancient Christian idea found in 1 Corinthians 2:7 ( “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory”) which Alain de Lille associated with the "mother of Creation," and Francis of Assisi with "Sister Mother Earth": "There is," Merton wrote, "in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans."

In the centuries between Alain de Lille of the 12th century and Berry and Merton of the 20th, many other authors strove to capture the order, surprise, and wisdom of nature--and again and again, their intuition of such took feminine and maternal forms. Geoffrey Chaucer's poem The Parlement of Foules presents Mother Nature as the "vicar of the almighty Lord" who "hot, cold, heavy, light, moist, and dry / Hath knit by even numbers of accord," bringing a wise balance to the renewing, reproducing processes of of nature. Edmund Spenser's Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, which were appended to The Faerie Queene, also gives us the "great dame Nature / With goodly Port and gracious Majesty / Being far greater and more tall of Stature / Than any of the Gods or Powers on high," who, when confronted with the challenge of Mutability, imposes a larger, deeper, unseeable order upon the changeableness of creation. John Milton’s allegorical poem Comus presents us with Nature ("the Lady") wisely resisting those that would indulge in nature’s bounty, instead insisting on "Temperance" so that "Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed in...even proportion."

This only scratches the surface of this one linguistic, poetic tradition (Berry goes on to consider the realization of Nature, and its wise discipline, in the works of Pope, Wordsworth, and Ezra Pound as well), but the themes, I think, are clear. For many Christian artists and thinkers, to take seriously God's creation is to take seriously the idea that some part of God, or something suitably God-like, overseas it, blesses it, makes it meaningful and a source of bounty and wisdom to those who tend to it, and issues a reproach to those who do not. Is this Mormon doctrine, or even Christian, for that matter? Not directly. But the more that I think about it, the less I can read any of revelations of Joseph Smith dealing with the natural world, with their insistence upon bounty, respect, patience, and humble and equitable use--see Doctrine and Covenants 49:18-21, D&C 59:15-21, or D&C 104:14-18--without imaging a distinctly maternal, a loving but also wise and watchful, eye behind them. It is the same loving (but unsentimental) eye I think sometimes I can see through, when I look upon our often frustrating, but just as often rewarding, front yard flower and strawberry patch, when it is weeded and well-watered and flourishing. In it, I sometimes see something more than my work--I see labor in the soil made meaningful. Guided, one might say, to becoming a part of the abiding spiritual rhythms of the natural world.

I realize that if this is an argument for Mother in Heaven, it is a distinctly panentheistic one, with some feminine element of the divine being made manifest through (though not necessarily being identical to) God's creation. I'm happy with that accusation, though. I think it is necessary, if one insists upon doing theology, to be willing to consider such categories, or else one is going to be stuck with a terribly reductive literalism (case in point: the plain comment by Mormon apostle Erastus Snow in March 1878 that "I must believe that deity consists of man and woman" and that we Mormons worship a "Godhead composing two parts, male and female" causing a minor hermaphroditic freak-out in the footnotes to the BYU Studies article cited above).

In the same way that we Christian believers need to be willing to think expansively about we mean when we talk about the Holy Ghost in the connection with Pentecost--remember that in the Fifth of Smith's early Lectures on Faith the Holy Spirit, which in Biblical history begins with the idea of the ruach Elohim or the Breath of God, was identified with the mind of God the Father--we similarly need to think expansively about Heavenly Mother. Might She be that title which we could give (and maybe, through Mother Nature, always have given) to that part of God which is invested in creation, in the wise, tutelary, fecund impulse which governs nature and those of use who live off of and through its creative rewards? No scriptural account that I consider at all inspired says so, in so many words. But lately, I find I'm persuaded that it makes sense.

In the Mother's Day service where I gave the original version of this sermon, the Primary children sang two songs: "Mother Dear" and "My Heavenly Father Loves Me." Both wonderful, sweet songs. And yet, the association they make together--one song about the love one has for mothers, the other about an appreciation for creation--can be achieved much more directly, I thought, by just one song, one of the wisest Primary tunes of all:

I often go walking in meadows of clover,
And I gather armfuls of blossoms of blue.
I gather the blossoms the whole meadow over;
Dear mother, all flowers remind me of you.

O mother, I give you my love with each flower
To give forth sweet fragrance a whole lifetime through;

[And this, right here, I think, is the key verse, the one that really brings it all home:]

For if I love blossoms and meadows and walking,
I learned how to love them, dear mother, from you.

Blossoms and meadows and walking. Which mother did that teaching, do you suppose? The child's, presumably. But also...maybe, another One as well? Some patient mothering spirit or thought, some sehnsucht that calls to us, without us knowing why or how, helping us see something meaningful, something orderly, in every spring surprise, in every growing and good thing. In the Book of Mormon, Alma claimed that "the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it...denote there is a God." He didn't know the half of it, perhaps. Paying attention to, and learning to be properly grateful for the other Half, the Half that we've always known, and named Mother Nature, and yet not always fully seen, may be one of our tasks today. It is one that I long thought I'd dismissed--but yet, I think now that I've been looking for Her all along.

PLEASE NOTE: It has been pointed out to me that the initial premise behind this whole post--seeing Heavenly Mother in and through the concept of Mother Nature--was originally suggested to me by another Mormon blogger, Cynthia Lee, and in writing it, I had completely forgotten her contribution. For that I want to apologize, fully and sincerely. Moreover, the fact that I did that, and probably have done so many times before, particularly in regards to matters involving women in the church, is not only a terrible--and likely much too frequent--mark on my character, but it is reflective of so much casual, oblivious sexism in the way both theological speculation and ordinary practice is performed in the Mormon church. I first thought to take the whole post down, but other female bloggers I know have suggested leaving it up, as an opportunity for conversation and learning. I am one of the first in need of that, and I am grateful for their understanding.

10 Years and Change(s)

So, I've spent a surprising amount of time over the past couple of months planning on getting back to the blog--and then not doing it. Sorry, everybody. While I procrastinated, several anniversaries passed me by--particularly the 10th anniversary of our arrival in Wichita, Kansas, in late July 2006, and my beginning, as a lowly assistant professor (that's right: not even an associate!) here at Friends University a few weeks later. Well, I may have forgotten, but my place of employment didn't, for which I'm grateful. I'm grateful for a lot of things associated with my decade at Friends, and in Wichita, and in Kansas, and with many other people and events that have come along with them, in fact. So, today, late for the anniversaries as I may be, let me mention a few changes I'm grateful for, for the record if for nothing else.

1) Friends was the first small liberal arts college I'd ever taught at--and as I obviously hope to never to be forced to go back on the job market, I sincerely intend (speaking, as always, without any knowledge of what the future may hold) to make it the only one I'll ever teach at as well. Every where I'd been previous to coming here had been a temporary gig, demanding as they sometimes were; it's here that I've been able to put down the kind of roots (part of which has been my advancement to full professor, but it's more than just that) which have encouraged me to think about my teaching, my students, and my field in a way I never could before. That thinking has been driven by exigencies as well as my own curiosity; like nearly all SLACs, Friends is a tuition-driven school perennially facing hard financial choices, and my own position here, while never directly in the cross-hairs, has seen plenty of ups and downs. (Witness the fact that when I arrived the major I taught classes for was "Political Science/History," which I later split off to form its own separate "Political Science" degree, and which is now, coming full circle, back to "History and Political Science" again, with me as the sole full-time faculty responsible to work with adjuncts to get our History courses taught.) I don't want to paper over the frustrations and fears contained in those ups and downs, nor make them out to be a greater trial than they were, but through it all there's been learning and stretching and growth. I understand what it means to be part of a faculty in a way I couldn't have possibly done ten years ago, and I've taken on responsibilities (on a general education reform committee, as the chair of the undergraduate college, and most recently as the director of the Honors Program) that now just seem par for the course. I look back on some of my old Friend-inspired speculations about my profession, and while I'm not sure I would dismiss it all as naive, I do know that I'm grateful for all the changes which time has wrought--because it's forced me to go back to drawing board, again and again, and dig deeper into what I can offer, and not be content with any one interpretation of My Place at Friends. There's an organic quality to this institution, like all institutions, and I want to be able to continue to grow and develop along with it.

2) I can't separate my feelings of appreciation for my position from my affection for the city its a part of. No, Friends isn't a world-famous SLAC with an awesome reputation (I personally thought the tag-line the marketers once came up with for Friends--"a regional university with national programs and an international presence"--was both basically misleading as well as hokey). But it is a school that is entwined enough in the story of this place--see the university's Davis building there in the A of that old post card?--that getting my roots into its personable practices and spiritual traditions (which, 10 years on, I still love) has only deepened my appreciation of the particular urban space it's a part of as well. So my interest in sustainability and ecology, the revival and re-focusing of my old love for farms and gardens and nature and agriculture has ended up occupying my mind in connection with the sort local possibilities a small college might involve itself with; and my old fascination with community and democracy, with working out just what kind of government and political culture can promote both locality and equality, has ultimately revolved again and again around theoretical questions of city life and city politics: specifically, ones that take into account Wichita's own context. And it's been genuinely fun to get so engaged, because through so doing I've been able to meet and learn from so many other urban activists (whether they would describe themselves that way or not) who are doing the same, and moreover (to allow myself some vanity for a moment) meeting and involving myself which such people and groups have led to me being noticed, called upon to speak and pontificate, in all sorts of social gatherings and on local media venues to such a degree that sometimes I even get paid for it. So yes, the city of Wichita has been good to me, and appropriately so, because I think it really is a good city, located in a good place, despite how so many people here can't quite see that. Being in one part of the country for so long, and going through so much while here (anniversaries being celebrated and friendships surviving both meetings and partings, being some of the most important), has enabled me to talk about this place as a home in a way I've never been able to speak of any other location.

3) Of course, "Kansas" doesn't rate very high on most Americans' lists of preferred locations. Ten years here, and the language I hear is pretty constant: we don't have mountains, but we do have Brownback, so Kansas is unimpressive both coming and going, right? Well, my opinions about Brownback are clear, so I'm not going to attempt a defense there (though, as always, just wait to November!). I've lived in conservative states--allowing for the one year in Illinois--ever since I left graduate school, and the simple truth is that I really don't mind being surrounded by and making friends with people whom I disagree with; conservatism is fascinating to me, and figuring out how the conservatives (as opposed to the simple-minded, Know-Nothing, dead-end Republican voters who show up at ever election; they bore and frustrate me--but so would they, and their equally unimaginative Democratic compatriots, in any locale) I know and like really think has been an important journey to me. Perhaps Kansas's political culture added a slight twist to that process, but when I think of what Kansas--especially this part of Kansas, my south-central section of it--has added to my life over the past decade, I mostly don't think politics. Instead, I think this.

Lame and folky, you think? Sorry; don't care. Yes, I already had an affection for a productive, pastoral relationship with the land in my background, so perhaps I was an easy mark for Kansas's lessons. But the simple fact is that I really kind of love it here. I think I love the summers best: I love the blue skies, the broad horizons, the golds and browns and surprising splashes of color throughout the fields. I love getting out on my bike under that hot sun and with the never-ending breezes blowing and letting the wide world turn in all directions around me. And I love being in one place--a city, a campus, a classroom--in the middle of it all. So what has happened to me for the past ten years? I've been centered--or I've centered myself, I guess. And communitarian and family man and believer that I am, being centered is something which I, predictably enough, think everyone needs to be. I suppose I could well have found a center for myself most anywhere...but I did it here, and for that, I'm happy.

Okay, that's it, for now. Here's to another ten years of changes, everyone!

Barns I Have Known

"Dad," he had once asked when he was a little boy, "what is a stable?"

"It's just a barn," his father had replied, "like ours."

Then Jesus had been born in a barn, and to a barn the shepherds and the Wise Men had come, bringing their Christmas gifts! (Pearl S. Buck, "Christmas Day in the Morning")

Barns were a place of gifts in my childhood. Or, at least, they were gifts in themselves, though I'm sure I never thought of it in those terms at the time. Barns were places of work and play and discovery and injury and confrontation and mystery and meditation, for all of us older Fox children (but especially, or at least so it seems in my memory, thanks to the quite patriarchal home we grew up in, for us boys). That's gifts aplenty, don't you think? Well, I do now, whatever I might have thought about those reliable structures, those constant edifices, those musty and strange and delightful and dirty and smelly and disgusting and wonderful and scary and familiar storehouses of grain and hay and machinery and animals that I went into and out of multiple times a day from 30 to 40 years ago. Storehouses of memories, that's what they were (and, in at least one blessed case, still are).

Here are the ones that I remember, from the nearest to me temporally to the oldest.

The A-Frame Barn at Fox's Den

In some ways, I almost feel like this one doesn't count. After all, how can a barn that you saw built from the ground up, that you went into when it was brand-spanking new and you could still smell the paint on the outside, that you walked around and climbed on top of when the cement foundation was clean and the shingles running down both sides of the roof were still fresh and black and little sticky from tar--how can a barn like that be much of a surprise, a gift? There's no age to it, no discovery, no mystery--it's just part of the architecture of my memory of that time, a time of building a new place for a family still growing, but nearly, by then, entirely grown. The folks who can speak about the A-Frame best and most meaningfully are those younger than me, who found it waiting for them as they grew up: Stuart a little bit, but mostly Abe and Jess and Phil and Marj and Baden. Especially Abe, because, of course, this is the barn which tried to kill him.

Dad had the barn built behind the house, just large enough to store hay for the cows, with two stalls for milking, and a small enclosed pen in back for any calves. Daniel and I often speculated on the possibility of building a small door at the rear of the A-Frame's tiny loft, so as to enable someone to climb up the ladder and then cross through, out of the rear of the barn and onto the roof of the calf pen. We never did that, and so instead we would just clamber up the fence behind the building and pull ourselves up onto the roof of the pen--that, or we'd attach a rope to one of the branches of the tall pine trees near the barn--maybe the one that Daniel attempted to build one of his about five aborted tree houses over the years in?--sling it over the top of the A-Frame, and then, grabbing hold, walk while pulling ourselves up to the roof. (My memory is that Dad hated us doing this, because it damaged the shingles, but oh well.) Anyway, the point is that we would, one way or another, regularly find ways to get ourselves on top of the barn or at least the pen behind it. Then what would we do? Well, jump off, obviously; I mean, it's not like there wasn't precedent (see below).

So, long story short, at some point after I'd grown up and left home, the younger brothers (was Marjorie there? I don't know; the legends don't say) had come up with a variation of this time-worn activity that involved leaping from the roof of the pen behind the A-Frame, grabbing onto a rope hanging from a tree branch, and then swinging out over the gully which Dad, in his wisdom, had the barn built directly beside. I've no doubt it was great fun--up until the moment when the barn, obviously sick of these kids climbing all over it, conspired with the tree to cause the branch to break at the furthest extent of one of Abe's swings, resulting in his crashing down into the gully, tumbling all the way to the tiny creek at the bottom, and impaling himself on the branch of the fallen log. The story I was told--which I do not want any of my family to correct because this is how I REMEMBER being told the story thank you very much so shut up--involved a collapsed lung, a desperate prayer, a vision of heaven, and a life-saving rush to the hospital. Abe survived and, amazingly, considering that it had clearly demonstrated itself to be a death trap, so did the barn.

Of course, if it didn't kill us by luring us to outright injury, it could attempt to kill us through pestilence, heat stroke, or hypothermia. Seriously, the place had essentially no ventilation and no insulation, which meant it was hideously hot in the summer months and dreadfully cold in the winter. A small lake of manure from the cows stunk up the place from pretty much all of May through September, and then in the winter months we'd have frozen bovine urine making the milking stalls and feeding pen actually difficult to traverse. The long strips of flytrap tape were always clogged black with dead fly bodies by midsummer; it didn't matter how many we hung, because the supply of insects was endless. Stephen King would have had plenty of material to turn our slow trudges out to the barn for daily milking and feeding duties into a descent into horror, for certain.

To be fair, though, I never felt any of that, mostly because of the cows. I liked them; I would talk to them, commiserate about the heat or the cold or the stink or the ice or the flies with them. They would nod, moo, occasionally add silent comments of their own, and the conversation would continue. It was in this barn that Daniel and I witnessed our father's by-now mythological struggle with the Hell Cow; it was one frozen morning in the A-Frame where a cow slipped on the ice covering the milking floor and fell on top of me. It was from the small old transistor radio that Dad put up in the rear of the barn that I listen to Casey Kasem's Top 40 and sing along (badly) to the cows as a child (once I discovered radio, that is); it was with the cows that I tried out various debating strategies and arguments; it was while milking the cows with Daniel that we sketched out Dungeons & Dragons adventures that took on a life of their own. So, yes, I have many fond memories of the old A-Frame--after all, that was the barn I spent more time in than any other--but mostly because of what happened in it, not so much because of it, itself. For that, we have to reach further back.

The Red Barns at Ye Olde Fox Farm

If Americans have a stereotype of barns in their minds, then it almost certainly looks just about exactly like the barns which we older Fox children knew for two short, intense years in the late 1970s. One big, classic red barn ("Big Red"), with multiple stalls for animals, a huge hay loft, a broad front floor for grain, additional hay, and machinery, and a big sliding door in front. And then another, smaller barn ("Little Red"), with separate rooms, a mysterious attic, and an even more mysterious basement that could be accessed with a trap door in the floor. We loved it.

Honestly, we probably loved the doors the most. Not only did Little Red have the trap door in the floor, which gave access to some creaky stairs which took you down into a low-ceilinged, unfinished, dirt-floor basement, but Big Red also had a secret door, built into a wall and not visible unless you knew what you were looking for, that led to another set of creaky stairs which would take you down into another low-ceilinged, unfinished, dirt floor basement. This one was much smaller than the first, and was obviously a root cellar (which is what we used it for, storing bunches of potatoes from the garden down there, which we would, of course, promptly forget about, and then only remember months later, at which point we would open up the dirt-filled trunk in that cellar and be confronted with a small army of mutant potatoes, their ghostly white roots all growing pathetically upward). As for the first one, the one below Little Red? Who knows? It was probably intended to be another floor, but we imagined that it had been a designed as a way-station for the Underground Railroad (which, of course, passed regularly through eastern Washington back in the 1840s) or a meeting place for communists or rebels or some other group (it depended on whether we were imagining good guys or bad guys at the time). Once, when Mom and Dad were involved in youth leadership in our congregation, a huge spook alley was planned using our barns, and that whole lower level in the smaller barn was turned into a maze, with canvas walls stretching from floor to ceiling, and Uncle Chuck, revving the motor of his chainsaw (but the chain was off--or, at least, so I was told; I wasn't allowed to go through that part of the haunted house), wandered the maze, healthily scaring teen-agers to death.

Those barns were scary, honestly. They were old, and going in and out of them, tending chickens (which decided they hated Stuart, and would organize to attack him whenever he approached) and pigs (which all died one winter--what, don't they have fur to keep them warm during the cold weather?) and cows (we started our milking operations while living at Ye Olde Fox Farm, but my primarily memory was Daniel and Samatha squirting milk at me as I passed by the stalls carrying grain), could often be a little terrifying, but in a pleasant way, to an 8 and 9-year-old. Creaks and moans from the wind, loose floorboard whose location we kept forgetting (actually, Dad made good use of those loose floorboards during the aforementioned spook alley; he brought in an actual slaughtered cow from some ranch that the mill he ran sold feed to, laid it out over a loose, jostling floor board in Big Red, and then, while taking groups of teen-agers through, would get them to step on it, causing the bloody carcass to suddenly move), and of course cats creeping up on you all the time. Oh, the cats! I think I counted about 14 strays that had adopted the barns as their home. Some were nice enough, but a couple were positively feral, and seeing their eyes suddenly pop out at you from a dark corner of the barns freaked me out.

Mostly, though, we loved these barns. So many things to discover! Piles of old boxes, books, clothes, and knick-knacks, left in corners of the attic of Little Red or the loft of Big Red, weird moldy stuff dating back to 20, 30, 40 years before we were born. The dust motes that danced through the streams of sunlight that penetrated cracks in the barns' siding early in the morning or as the sun set. The huge indoor playground which Big Red essentially became for us: endless games of hide-and-seek, of building forts out of hay bales, of challenging each other to athletic contests. Most of those contests, admittedly, involved running and leaping off the hay loft, so you can see the roots of Abe's unfortunately incident right there. But leaping indoors, as dangerous as it obviously was (that was a concrete floor down there!), never resulted in any injury. Mostly we'd soar 15 or 20 ft. through the air to hand, tumbling, on piles of hay or grain--the latter being even better than hay, because the loose grain piles of corn grain would sink underneath you as you landed, and for a moment it was like you were in quicksand, though suffocation was never a possibility, and you always ended up smelling like molasses afterward.

Of course, I said "leaping indoors" above--leaping from the barns themselves was a different proposition. I jammed a rusty nail into my heel thanks to one such adventure, and Daniel actually landed headfirst in a bush that jammed a thick stem into the back of this throat. (Dad just yanked it out and all was fine, but remember this, kids: if you're falling headfirst in the direction of foliage that you're hoping will break you fall, keep you mouth closed.) So, sure, being around old barns that were always falling down as fast as we fixed them up could pose some dangers. Overall, my memory of those barns is filled with warmth. The Big Red became, in my mind, the Fitzgerald's barn from the Great Brain books, and I imagined I would build a high platform over the main floor, accessible only by roped ladder, just as J.D. and T.D. did. Maybe we would have if we'd stayed there longer. But by the end of the 70s our family was moving on, with a year in a barn-less suburban house before our construction of Fox's Den with the A-Frame. In the meantime, our barn experiences fell back on the oldest, and the first.

Grandpa Bill's Old Brown Horse and Grey Hay/Grain Barns

Unlike the A-Frame and Big Red, at least, which Google Map's satellite view tells me have been preserved as re-purposed over the decades, Grandpa's barns are either gone or stand mostly lonely and empty today. Perhaps that's not a terribly inappropriate fate. Grandma and Grandpa Fox are both gone; the horses, the alfalfa fields, the cattle, the corrals, the old colt-breaking pens, and network of wooden fences, the groves of pine trees: all gone also. The big open Grey Barn--where owls, crows, and pigeons roosted, where piles of hay bales and bags of grain reached up three stories (or so it seemed in my youthful mind), where cows and horses would gather to be fed on snowy winter days, where, like it was some sort of magnet, the odd detritus of decades of farm and milling work had been drawn (an old, empty Fox Milling truck, which we'd climb down inside; a dangerously appealing, unsupported, broken-down loading chute; more railroad ties than you could count)--is completely removed. The Brown Barn, though, is still there, surrounded by the remains of the once productive farm and ranch which it provided the center of, and beyond that the housing developments and pleasant lanes which now occupy the land. Talking with Phil and Jesse, I learn that you can still go inside. I hope it still smells the same.

That's the memory which most grounds me when it comes to the Grandpa's barns--the smell. Which is surprising for me, because I've long known that smell is probably the weakest of my five senses. Time must have something to do with that. The barns were there when I was a toddler, and a child, and a teen-ager, and a young man; they were always there with their odors, building up in my memory. At first they were a little unnerving: that's where horses which could bite and kick me were, that's where tractors that could run me over were, that's where Grandpa--he of the imposing height, the busy eyebrows, the beak-like nose, and the legendary reputation--worked! But then, as I grew, they were the places where I could work with Grandpa and Dad and my brothers, loading up hay from the fields, feeding the horses, tending our calves (after we'd left Ye Olde Fox Farm and before the A-Frame had been built), saddling our pony Sparky and taking him for a ride. They became comfortable places, places where I knew I could always visit and feel at home--but also places where the years before me and around me were always a haunting presence too, and the smell communicated that best.

I don't have the vocabulary to detail that smell exactly--but I could recognize it instantly. It's a horse smell, which is distinct from cows, to be sure (that one I can recognize instantly as well). But with the horses there is leather, oil, grease, varnish, sweat. Slide back the tall front door and walk into the Brown Barn and soak it in. On the right is an old, never-finished room, whose walls only go halfway to the ceiling high above, and thus one we could look down into from atop a stack of hay bales or from the hay loft: old woodworking machinery, sawhorses and tables, barrels of forgotten stuff, all covered in dust. But the smell comes most strongly from the left side of the barn, where the walls are smoother and stronger and go all the way up to the roof. The doors along the right side of the Brown Barn were where the real mysteries were to be found.

I open one of those doors, and the whole wall is taken up with saddles, stirrups, harnesses, and straps. The smell of leather and ointment, even if almost nobody was regularly riding any of the horses any longer, was strong: I learned early that pleasing odor can last for years. It was a dark room, with one window partly covered in dirt, giving a soft glow to the supple browns all around me. At some point I watch the film The Black Stallion, and the scene where Alec stumbles into Henry's old racing shed, looking at old photographs of him as a jockey and the headlines of preserved newspapers detailing his wins, became part of my narrative imagination every time I went into that space. The soiled  and worn gloves, the coils of rope, the extension cords with their rarely used lanterns attached: all were touched by that sensibility. The old stories about Grandpa breaking expensive Arabians for rich buyers, the fact that he'd actually served as part of a mounted posse in the 1940s, the way in which so many of the Fox clan, despite not having anything to do with horses for decades, all seemed to be tuning in to watch the Triple Crown races this year (and man, the social media firestorm which we generated with the news with each other!)...maybe it all started with us breathing in the smells of Old Brown.

Thinking back on all that, and upon years of hauling bales of hay by truck, or railroad ties by tractor, or following Daniel around after Grandpa had hired him to shoot gophers so as the minimize the change of livestock breaking a leg in one of their holes, or hiking between the two barns with Uncle Chuck as dusk descended, with him pointing out the hawks and owls either returning to or departing from the trees that stood tall over the pastures--well, it makes me appreciative. Deuteronomy 28:8 includes a promise from God to the people of Israel on the moment of their entering into the land of Canaan to claim that which they believed He had promised them: "The LORD will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to." In other translations "barns" becomes "storehouses" or "granaries," but it's all the same: they are the places where people living lives of agriculture and husbandry, lives tied to the land, do not, in fact, live and sleep--but they are buildings where they store all the fruit and gear and tools and rewards of their living and working, and they are the buildings where the evidence and blessings of all that is to be found. The Foxes are not, and haven't been for many years, a farming family, a family of cows and horses. But I blessed by the memory of them. And those memories, even if the barns themselves have been changed entirely or perhaps don't even exist any longer--they can last all the years of my life.