World Food Day Blog Post
Originally posted on The Iliff School of Theology's Blog
“…the
decision to attend to the health of one’s habitat and food chain is a spiritual
choice.”
–Barbara Kingsolver, The Essential Agrarian
Reader
As
a person of faith, I trust in the presence of divine possibility within each collision
of institutional crisis and societal need. While the decline of organized
religion in the midst of an overwhelming need for global advocacy for peace and
justice can easily be seen as a double negative, I chose to experience their
sum as a serendipitous pre-dug hole awaiting the arrival of hands prepared to
plant new seeds. If the mission of the church is some version of creating
disciples for the transformation of the world then shouldn’t it be the visibility
and vocalization of societal injustices that functions as the template for the
shape of the church in each moment?
The
Land is a seed planted at the corner of “Empty Pew Place” and “Feed My Sheep
Street.” The Land is not a traditional church. It’s quite literally a field
covered with wildflowers and prairie grasses. You can breathe out there and if
you’re not careful the sky will reach down and swallow you up while the breeze
blows sharp against your skin making you feel as if you could fly. At The Land
you might find yourself warmly welcomed by cows grazing or warned off by the
cautioning rattle of a snake guarding her babies. No matter the temperature or
the company that day, at The Land if you look with the eyes of your heart you
will notice that just beneath the surface of the cracked soil are seedlings of
a vision for a faith community wrestling to pop up and surprise all of us as if
to say, “God is here!”
Given
the spiritual location of our faith community, it’s understandable we plan to
gather at the empty field we call The Land to commemorate World Food Day. World
Food Day is a day of action against hunger. The Land is an invitation to plant,
harvest, and share fresh, local produce at a table that welcomes all. At The
Land, World Food Day serves as a strategic gathering in the barren field to amend
the soil, plant the seeds, and collectively labor to understand “for what do we
labor?” As Christians in particular The Land creates space to prayerfully
consider how we labor not only as citizens
of the world but also as Disciples of Christ.
World
Food Day is a reminder of the urgency of our labor in the presence of a barren
global, field. A field where there is enough food for each person in the world
to have 2,700 kilocalories a day and yet 805 million people, one in nine
worldwide, live with chronic hunger. This is a field in which every ten seconds
a child dies because invisible borders prevent food from making it into their
grasping hands. At The Land we approach the unequal access to nutritious foods
not simply as a political, ecological problem but as a spiritual conversation
requiring individual and communal transformation. In community, in prayer and
practice, we religiously labor for a global food system that empowers local
farmers and engages the environment as a limited and valuable resource.
The
vision of The Land faith community is to explore what it looks like to live as
a disciple in the 21st century as we connect to our Creator and all
of Creation. Integrating spiritual ritual and agricultural practice, The Land is
a training ground to transform the everyday rituals of growing food, sharing
meals, and tending the earth into acts of worship. One day this empty field
filled with prairie grass and possibility will grow an edible labyrinth, spout
an outdoor amphitheater and harvest a cathedral greenhouse. The Land’s
seedlings are little, sometimes hidden, and often invisible to eyes that aren’t
sure what the Church looks like anymore but we gather because we believe. We
believe issues of hunger are spiritual conversations and that just as this
field will grow into a faith community so too can our world transform into a
place where all can reach the table and be filled with abundant blessing we
call enough.
