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Union University Church | |
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| By Reverend Laurie DeMott |
November
23, 2008 |
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| When
I was 12, my family moved from our small suburban house in Rochester to
six and a half acres of land near Geneseo, and in no time at all, my father
was at work finding ways of using that land to produce food for his family
of seven. He built a chicken coop, dug a pond for ducks and geese, erected
a barn to house rabbits and a cow, and grew most of our family’s vegetables
in his half acre garden. Every fall my mother would spend her afternoons
canning tomatoes and freezing beans, and would corral any available children
into stripping corn from the cobs or shelling peas. My memory, of course,
is that I spent hours slaving over these chores but I suspect that in reality,
I was lucky to produce a few handfuls of peas between episodes of “Lost
in Space”. Thanks to my parents’ diligence, however, by the
end of each fall our two chest freezers were full, dozens of canned tomatoes
lined the shelves, and potatoes, apples, carrots, and squash were tucked
into the cave-like root cellar that my father had dug into the side of a
hill. My father’s passion for gardening was born of a very practical
desire to feed his large family on a professor’s income, but he also
loved the challenge of trying to find just the perfect combination of plants
that would keep away pests, or the perfect variety of a vegetable that would
grow well in the Geneseo climate. He gardened organically long before it
became popular not out of an environmental ethic but because using chemicals
felt to him like cheating. If, after all, a person can’t beat a brocolli
worm in a battle of wits, my Dad felt they don’t have much to brag
about, and so my father took on the challenge of self-sufficiency with a
vengeance. Not only did he grow our own vegetables and raise our own meat,
but he scoured the natural world for any additional sources of food he could
find. Growing up we sampled milkweed buds (pretty tasty with butter and
salt), cat-tail stems (a little like cucumbers), burdock root (kind of bland
and hard to dig), chickory tea (pretty mild), and dandelion wine (pretty
nasty, but then at that age I thought all wine was pretty nasty).
And of course, my father’s culinary adventures produced many stories, like the time the root beer bottles exploded in the basement, or the day he wrestled our dog for its freshly killed woodchuck and then fried it up to see what it tasted like – the woodchuck, not the dog. (And if you want to know, you’ll have to find your own woodchuck because I refused to eat it. My father insisted it tasted like strong chicken but if I’m going to eat chicken, I’d rather not eat one that tastes like it spent the day working out at the gym.) One of my Dad’s favorite stories, however, was of the year that he decided to grow spinach. Now, being a teenager, I didn’t actually pay much attention to the details of my Dad’s gardening forays but I gathered that spinach is a pretty fussy crop. My father spent most of one summer trying to nurture those delicate spinach plants but they wilted at the least amount of heat and shivered when the thermometer dipped slightly below the ideal. And the spinach was such a timid plant that every weed that stepped root in the garden managed to bully the spinach into submission so that my father had to constantly hoe and pluck and weed to clear enough space for his tender spinach sprouts to grow. In spite of his efforts, however, by harvest time the spinach patch yielded only a few dismal leaves and Dad had to admit defeat. We would not have home-grown spinach to put on our table that year, or any year the way it was looking. And then one day, my father came into the house holding a book in his hand and shaking his head in dismay. “You will not believe what I just discovered,” he said to us. “You know all of those weeds I have been yanking out of the spinach patch all summer? They are called lamb’s quarters, and according to Euell Gibbons, lamb’s quarters are not only edible; he says they make a nutritious substitute for .... spinach!” In fact, lamb’s quarters are full of beta-carotene, calcium, potassium, iron, and vitamin C. Lamb’s quarters grows in old fields, vacant lots, abandoned construction sites, and about anywhere it can get a toehold, and it is resistant to most insects. In other words, the earth had been producing the wild equivalent of spinach in my Dad’s garden all that summer in abundance, but my father had been uprooting the wild plant in his determination to force domestic spinach out of the soil. Within days of reading Euell Gibbons, however, my father had gathered a full harvest of lamb’s quarters to stock our freezer and he never tried to grow spinach again. And for those of you who are curious, lamb’s quarters are, I have to admit, the tastiest of the wild plants my Dad ever made us eat. I recently attended a conference in Syracuse on “Indigenous Traditions and Sustainability” At the conference, representatives of the Haudenesaunee [Hoe-den-i-shawnee] Confederacy – the six American Indian nations in New York state – discussed their traditional teachings and how those teachings might be applied to our current environmental crisis. One of the teachings that received a good deal of attention during the conference was the one which says, “We should use only what is given.” Certainly this is a summation of my father’s lesson that long ago summer: the earth was giving him lamb’s quarters in abundance but in his ignorance, he couldn’t see the gift and instead wasted his time on the futility of trying to eke out a spinach crop. But we don’t need to go outside of our own religious tradition to find the wisdom of that Haudenisaunee [Hoe-den-i-shawnee] teaching because it can be found in our own teachings as well. In the creation stories and in the psalms and prophetic writings, the Bible tells us that God has provided for us an abundance of blessing from the earth. Psalm 65 declares, “You crown the year with your bounty; the pastures of the wilderness overflow.... the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.” The decorations on our altar on Harvest Sunday remind us of the world as God has envisioned it for us: an earth overflowing with riches and all we need to sustain life. But what happened to the promise? If this describes the world as God intended it, then why is there not enough food to feed all of our people? Why are deserts gobbling up the fields that used to produce crops? Why are so many species vanishing for lack of adequate habitat? Why are townships fighting over water rights? What happened to the abundance we were promised? Well, the answer is there in the story in Genesis. In Genesis chapter 2, God places Adam and Eve in a beautiful flourishing garden and tells them that they can eat of anything there, except for the fruit from two trees. And of course, we know how the story goes: instead of using only what is given, Adam and Eve take what they want. They ignore the abundant gifts God has provided and plunder God’s garden, stealing from the garden the one fruit that was not theirs. Imagine that you were invited to someone’s house and they offered you a fresh pumpkin pie but instead of accepting the pumpkin pie, you ran into the kitchen and grabbed an apple pie that they had been saving for their grandchildren’s visit and you stuffed it down your face. To accept the pumpkin pie is to use only what is given but to take the apple pie that was not offered is to plunder the home in which you are an invited guest.
What would it look like if we began to really live the teaching of Genesis? What does it mean practically to use only what is given? As my father learned, it could be as simple as choosing to plant crops that are naturally adapted to our region rather than forcing other crops to grow through the use of heavy pesticides or genetic engineering. It might mean eating more local food. In the southwest arid regions of our country, it would mean learning to love native plantings instead of insisting on lawns that require huge amounts of water. When we consider our sources of energy, applying the teaching “Use only what is given” would force us to ask the hard question, “When sunlight is freely flooding our land and winds constantly stream across the globe, but we have to drill down hundreds of feet to pump oil out of the hidden cavities of the earth, which source of energy is really given to us and which are we insisting on taking?” It is, of course, impossible after centuries of assuming that we can have whatever we are ingenious enough to take to suddenly return to Eden, but as we work to repair the damage we have done to God’s garden, I think it is helpful to consider the teaching of Genesis and make it a foundational ethic: “Let us try to use only what is given.”
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