Easter Sunrise
I’ve been inspired this week by two writer/artist/theologians who bring an ecological lens to their reading of the Bible. I can’t recommend more highly the this interview with Vanessa Chamberlin called A Spirituality of the Land. The following heartbreaking poem from
had some influence on this week’s newsletter, and I thank him dearly for sharing it. Click just above or HERE to read David’s poem in its exquisite entirety.
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
Garlic grows greenly upward. Currant buds swell in anticipation, as do the bellies and udders of expectant Ewes and Cows here at the Farm. Aspen catkins shine brightly, backlit by morning Sun rising from the East—or is it the Son of God rising on this morning after Easter? Yes, the word Easter comes from the direction we might turn to offer our thanks for the miracle of life rising once again from the cyclical—and ecologically imperative—deaths we call night and winter. We celebrate Easter near the vernal equinox, when the East-Anglians held feasts for a goddess with a similar name. Every son has a mother.
I don’t write much about my experience attending church in this newsletter. I could say that it feels too controversial, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Perhaps I don’t write about my ongoing encounter with the stories of Jesus, Mary and the others because it feels nearly impossible to disentangle them from the religion that rose up in their name. A priest once said to me, “I am not a Christian. I am a Christ follower. If I didn’t have a congregation to care for, I’m not sure I would be attending church.” This woman carries a fierce love for life and a remarkable capacity for honest heartbreak. She continued, “I read all of your newsletters Adam and I’d like you to know that you and your neighbors are practicing Galilean Christianity.” This wasn’t the first time I’d been told something like this, but it was the first time the word Galilee had been inserted to differentiate between a group of simple country folks practicing neighboring and the institutional church that followed.
That the remembered story of a radical rabbi gave rise to a religion that rode around the world on the tip of a sword might be one of the great ungrieved tragedies of our time. A man who refused to defend himself against the brutality of the occupying Roman army became a justification for the brutal doctrine of discovery. The memory of a man who practiced and preached voluntary impoverishment became part of the foundation myth for the project of ecological warfare we call the American Dream.
Let the following two stories sit next to one another. The first, from the Gospel of Mathew 19: 16-22. I draw here from both the ESV and the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament:
A rich young man approached the rabbi and asked him how to attain eternal life. Yeshua reminded him of the moral codes of his people, and reminded him to love his neighbor as himself. “All these I have kept,” the rich man said. “What have I left undone?”
Yeshua replied, “Take all of your possessions and give them to the ones who have none. Come and walk the good road with me.” But when the rich man heard this, his heart fell to the ground. He hung his head for he had many possessions.
After the rich man walked away, the rabbi turned to his disciples and said, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” In the First Nations Version a moose stands in for the camel. Either way, they simply won’t fit through. The rabbi remains stubbornly insistent that the accumulation of possessions will not allow life to be sustained.
This story took place in the heart of civilization at a time when many of the world’s people still lived in intimate, mutually sustaining relationships with their home landscapes. I keep imagining Yeshua with his hand extended, offering to walk his people out of civilization altogether. As the story goes, the society into which he was born turned down his radical invitation, continuing instead to convert a once-verdant and forested landscape into cities and dust.
Fifteen centuries later the people of the conquered, converted, and heavily-deforested islands we now call the United Kingdom began a project of imperial expansion on the vast and verdant continent where I was born. They brought their swords, their bibles and their civilizing habit with them. The people they encountered here hardly looked human to their civilized eyes, for they had no interest in the accumulation of possessions. Dr. Merrill Gates, a self-proclaimed “friend of the Indians,” described:
To bring the Indian out of savagery into citizenship we must awaken in him wants. In his dull savagery he must be touched by the divine angel of discontent…Discontent with the teepee and the Indian camp…is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars!…Here is an immense moral training that comes from the use of property. Like a little child…the Indian must learn that he has no right to give until he has earned, and that he has no right to eat until he has worked for his bread. Our teachers upon the reservations know that frequently their lessons…are effaced and counteracted by the Indians’ old communal instincts and customs. We have found it necessary, as one of the first steps in developing a stronger personality in the Indian, to make him responsible for property. Even if he learns its value only by losing it, and going without it until he works for more, the educational process has begun. (quoted in Money and the Soul’s Desires)
What the heck happened to the Jesus story as it traveled from the sea of Galilee to the palaces of Rome on to the green isle named for the Angles—also the namesake for the Anglican church I attend—and then across the Atlantic to the old growth forests and peoples of North America? Instead of trying to answer such a vast and urgent question in a page or two, I’m going to tell you a simple story of what happened when I arrived at church yesterday for the Easter service.
As usual, I slipped into the pew behind my friend Kitty. Kitty was carried into that church as a babe in arms ninety-five years ago. Let that sink in for a moment. Last spring, after twenty-five years away, I walked back into the church for reasons mostly unknown to me at the time. One thing I did know was that I longed to meet some of the old people who grew up in this town. If my efforts to create a community farm would have any integrity, they would be informed by the old stories. When Kitty greeted me on my third week attending church, she laid her bony hand on my forearm and said, “I know where I am now that you’re here.” I had been thinking something similar: “I know where I am now that I sit behind you every Sunday morning and allow the words of the Lord’s prayer to flow from memory: give us this day our daily bread, and so on.”
A few weeks later I discovered what Kitty actually meant. She is almost completely deaf. Now that I speak and sing loudly just behind her right ear, she can once again follow along in the service booklet. She thanks me for helping her in this way every single week.
Kitty hasn’t been well recently. At least twice now I’ve walked in to see her husband Bill sitting alone, my heart dropping in my chest. I had heard that Kitty might not make it for Easter, so I was overjoyed to see and greet her when I arrived. She pointed toward the small table next to the altar and said, “The wine and water are reversed. The wine is supposed to be on the right.” Her husband Bill shrugged. He doesn’t walk any faster than her, and Norm and Mother Patty looked like they were ready to begin. I took a chance. I hurried up to the front and whispered to them, “I have a message from Kitty. She thinks the wine is in the wrong place.” Norm looked over. “Oh boy, she’s right,” he said. He corrected the error. The service could now begin. When I returned to my pew Kitty took hold of my hands and thanked me profusely.
Once we got to the hallelujahs in the opening hymn, I began to cry. I don’t gain access to my tears often, and never have I cried at church before. But here I was singing a song of thanksgiving a few feet behind Kitty’s right ear, in a mostly-empty church so very far away from the garden where Mary wept on that fateful morning. The Easter story had snuck in through the back door and invited my heart to break wide open. The Easter story offered to wrap me in an ancestral cloth woven from dislocation and loss interspersed with brightly colored threads of neighborly love and care. Just when the story of my people seemed unbearable, I was reminded that a few of them still gather to face East and praise the great miracle of life rising once again from the ground.
A blessed Easter to you,
Adam
Needed this, thank you always Adam
Adam, thank you for sharing the piece about the conversion of the Indians. It's given me a new perspective on property ownership. Also, your story about Kitty touched my heart. your writing is achingly beautiful, as is your reading.