Back to the Land

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Apostolic Farming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Apostolic Farming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True and Radical Conservatism

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Apostolic Farming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put It All Together, And What Do You Get?

According to the Philosopher (Metaph. i: 2), it belongs to wisdom to consider the highest cause. By means of that cause we are able to form a most certain judgment about other causes, and according thereto all things should be set in order. Now the highest cause may be understood in two ways, either simply or in some particular genus. Accordingly he that knows the highest cause in any particular genus, and by its means is able to judge and set in order all the things that belong to that genus, is said to be wise in that genus, for instance in medicine or architecture, according to 1 Cor. 3:10: "As a wise architect, I have laid a foundation." On the other hand, he who knows the cause that is simply the highest, which is God, is said to be wise simply, because he is able to judge and set in order all things according to Divine rules.

Now man obtains this judgment through the Holy Ghost, according to 1 Cor. 2:15: "The spiritual man judgeth all things," because as stated in the same chapter (1 Cor. 2:10), "the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God." Wherefore it is evident that wisdom is a gift of the Holy Ghost…

The seventh beatitude is fittingly ascribed to the gift of wisdom, both as to the merit and as to the reward. The merit is denoted in the words, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Now a peacemaker is one who makes peace, either in himself, or in others: and in both cases this is the result of setting in due order those things in which peace is established, for "peace is the tranquillity of order," according to Augustine (De Civ. Dei xix, 13). Now it belongs to wisdom to set things in order, as the Philosopher declares (Metaph. i, 2), wherefore peaceableness is fittingly ascribed to wisdom. The reward is expressed in the words, "they shall be called the children of God." Now men are called the children of God in so far as they participate in the likeness of the only-begotten and natural Son of God, according to Rm. 8:29, "Whom He foreknew . . . to be made conformable to the image of His Son," Who is Wisdom Begotten. Hence by participating in the gift of wisdom, man attains to the sonship of God

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II.45.1,6

Reflection – Happy Feast of Pentecost, all! May the Holy Spirit descend afresh on each of you, and pour out all seven gifts upon you, and a million other gifts, too.

So we fittingly end our tour of the seven gifts of the Spirit with the gift of wisdom, which is the crown of all of them. Wisdom is the integrating gift, the gift that puts all the other gifts, and everything else, into the divine order, that sets all things into the order of love which is God’s ordering of all that is.

This is so crucial. Without wisdom, all we have are little potsherds of reality – fragments of this doctrine, a fragment of that moral law, a bit of spiritual maxim that we read in this book, a helpful practice we heard about in a sermon once. But potsherds don’t hold water, and sometimes they have sharp edges and can cut deep. Bits and pieces of truth ultimately lead us astray; in fact, since any bit of truth has such power in it, a partial truth can do much more damage than an outright lie.

And so we need to pray for wisdom. To see and know how to fit all the jigsaw pieces into a coherent whole, and not just a coherent whole but a beautiful picture. And that picture is the love of God poured out in Jesus Christ, made really present in us by the abiding gift of the Spirit which is mediated to us through the life of the Church, and which is expressed by us in lives of justice and mercy, leading us by the loving mercy of God to eternal bliss in heaven.

That’s the big picture, and holy wisdom stirs within us, then, to bring us to live orderly lives by loving right now, by serving right now, by praying right now, by being a child of God right now.

I included the bit of article six to highlight something I have omitted, that each gift of the Spirit bears fruit in a beatitude. In this case, ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, since it is wisdom that establishes God’s order in our lives, and that order is our only peace.

So, a happy feast to you all – and may the wisdom of God bring your life into the order of love and mercy so that you can be a peacemaker, and hence a true child of God in the world.