Tag Archives: agrarianism

Gardening as Liturgy: Part 1

In his essay, Think Little, Wendell Berry says that ‘I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening.’ It’s a good challenge to my tendency to assume that big problems require big solutions. I struggle to believe that small, local, personal action could make any significant dent in an issue as massive as the climate crisis.

Berry is not saying that we should opt for small, local actions (like gardening) instead of pursuing change on the level of national and international politics, economics and business. He is warning that we should be sceptical of any ‘big’ ecological solutions that are abstracted from any meaningful, real relationship of cultivation and care-giving with the land.

I think that Berry would claim that the root causes of the climate crisis are a fundamentalist addiction to limitless growth, to ever accelerating technological innovation and to the assumption that bigger is better. He is sceptical of solutions that uncritically perpetuate those root causes and insists that real change needs to begin in cultivating deep, stable, flourishing local economies.

‘Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence – that is, the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods’

‘Word and Flesh,’ in Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (London: Penguin, 2018)

Whether or not gardening really is the best form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment, the claim got me thinking. Perhaps I have too limited, even too secular, a view of gardening. What if gardening is more than just a nice hobby or a good, mindful leisure activity? What if it’s actually closer to a spiritual discipline – a practice that is not merely an expression or outworking of my identity, but is involved in forming and shaping my identity?

James K.A. Smith is a writer I’ve been wanting to explore for a while – I’ve had multiple friends recommend him and read multiple authors who seem heavily influenced by his work. Recently, I finally read Desiring the Kingdom where he unpacks the idea of liturgies. Let me try a brief summary:

Much of western protestant theology, he says, operates with a faulty philosophical anthropology. In other words, an inaccurate understanding of what it means to be human. This ‘rationalist’ distortion, inherited from the Enlightenment, has tended to treat human beings primarily as ‘thinking things’ – as minds which happen to have bodies attached. This has led to an overemphasis in Christian education and discipleship on doctrine, on believing the right things, and a neglect of the importance of what we do with our bodies: practices and rituals.

Smith argues that a holistic, biblical anthropology sees human beings as embodied creatures.

‘What if the core of our identity is located more in the body that the mind? Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly.’

James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 32

Our desires – what we love, what we hope for, our visions for the good life – shape us on a deeper level than what we believe on a purely intellectual level. Hence Smith’s snappy phrase ‘you are what you love.’ And our desires are not innate or static – they are dynamic and fluid – and formed by liturgy. Smith has a specific definition of liturgies: they are embodied rituals that are formative for identity. Liturgies are the practices which shape who we become.

All of us, all of the time, are being shaped by liturgies – whether religious worship or ‘secular liturgies’ like watching TV or shopping – our desires are shaped in particular directions and trained towards a certain imagination of what human flourishing is. And so I want to explore gardening as a liturgy – as an identify-forming habit. In what ways are the mundane routines of sowing and harvesting, tending and weeding shaping what I love, and therefore shaping the person I am becoming? My hope is that the reflections that follow this post will allow me to familiarise myself with Smith’s ideas at the same time as reframing how I think about gardening.

The Blackbirds – part 2

Well, the exile is over and I am back at my potting shed table. I am afraid that the blackbirds leaving their nest was not entirely smooth. Shortly after writing the last blog, there was a commotion in our back garden and I rushed to see the blackbird father flapping around a very near full-grown chick lying with a broken neck just outside the shed window.

I told myself that it is just a bird and that these things happen in nature, but I was still upset.

I don’t know what happened to the other chicks and I presume that is good news. There were three eggs when I first discovered the nest, and I presume the absence of any other casualties means that the other two chicks successfully made it out into the big wide world. Once we were sure that there was no more life in the nest, we took down the box of wood, braced for some unpleasant discoveries. To our relief, they had well and truly moved out and left everything neat and tidy.

It’s been an odd experience. Cohabiting with these birds has been a healthy pin-prick of reality to deflate my all-too romanticised view of the natural world. To a large extent, I have bought into a suburban understanding of ‘nature’ which sees ‘the environment’ in general, abstract terms – viewing the countryside as a place of leisure and beauty but from a safe enough distance to avoid the harsher realities of life in the natural world. As I set out on this journey of agrarianism – seeking after greater fidelity to creation, greater integrity to land and place and local community – I know that I have some painful unlearning to do. It will not be possible to truly care for creation in personal, holistic, non-abstract ways and remain insulated from the realities of death and violence.

But I don’t think the solution is simply to toughen up. I don’t want to replace romanticism with cold indifference to death and destruction. There is something in the sorrow I felt as I disposed of that broken little body – fresh-feathers ruffled and scrawny legs askew – something more than the squeamishness of a sheltered life, something that I think is good. It’s the deep sense that this is not the way that things should be.

Of course, a dead blackbird is a very trivial demonstration of the wrongness of things in our world. But it is still wrong, and in that moment, it got under my skin enough to lead me to place of grief. And I don’t do grief well. I have had the rare privilege of being able to opt out of grief through most of my life. Whilst that’s comfortable, I am coming to realise that it is not altogether good for me. Because grief – lament – is the right response to all that is wrong and broken in our world – whether something as small as a dead blackbird or as huge as wars and pandemics.

Numbness – borne of my unfamiliarity with grief – is a very useful defence mechanism – but it also limits my capacity to engage honestly with reality.

Perhaps then, this unexpected saga with the blackbirds in my shed has helped me to see a little clearer a small part of the journey ahead of me. As I re-root my imagination in the rich soil of agrarianism – as I learn to slow down, pay attention, settle for less, enjoy it more, be a good neighbour and embrace a deeper, more contemplative rhythm of life – I want to do so in a way that embraces rather than escapes the reality of death and violence in our world. I have a suspicion that my capacity to grieve may well be linked to my capacity to wonder and my capacity to love. I cannot grow only two of them – I need all three.