CHAPTER 1
Begin with Dirt
From a Geranium Field in Rwanda
Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
MATTHEW 13:3B–8
This letter is written to folks who walk through this world feeling a bit lost. It is both a prayer and a reminder that we can never be truly lost because we are always part of the farm no matter where we are. We have stardust coursing through our veins, oceans for tears, and dirt in our bones. "We are dirt and to dirt we shall return" is the mantra of faith. That is the humbling and freeing truth of the human condition. An old friend used to express it more gently by saying that all our journeys begin and end with God. The first of these letters begins with the simple remembrance that we are made from earth. The gift of our lives is to prepare our soil to bear good fruit and then let it all go. It is what holds the world together and makes us a family.
Over the years I have fallen in love with dirt. I have no idea when it began; maybe in my childhood. Maybe it was the morning glories that trumpeted in the summer mornings like a faithful muse. They would climb out of the ground from volunteer seeds scattered the spring before. Maybe it was watching the transplanted black-eyed Susans grow from a small bundle that didn't look like it could live to take over a garden. It could have been the first time I grew a carrot and imagined magic taking place beneath the dirt as my carrot was forming like a flower bouquet hidden beneath a magician's colored scarf.
I have thought of dirt daily since I began thinking about writing these letters from the farm. I have thought about the red clay dirt in the American south, the rich black soil found in the north, and the dusty earth of the deserts where I have walked. I especially think of dirt when I am in places like Botswana, Uganda, and Rwanda. When you drive in a car there it is necessary to alternate between rolling the windows up and rolling them back down because while it's hot in car , its worse to have the dirt that's kicked up from the road blowing into the car. Dirt is a constant topic of conversation: Is it dry season or wet season?
When my family and I were in Rwanda this year, we drove for hours down bumpy dirt roads to geranium fields. The dusty red dirt layered our clothes and skin, reminding us that dirt has always been here. We drove to the fields where women survivors of the genocide have formed a cooperative to grow geranium. This cooperative has been a partner of Thistle Farms for more than six years and supplies us with geranium as well as eucalyptus, lemon grass, and patchouli. We saw the places in the fields where twenty years ago women on their knees dug up the bones of those they loved who had been murdered and buried in the fields. Now they are still kneeling in that same dirt, digging up weeds and rocks to plant a field of herbs that will become the healing oils Thistle Farms uses in all our products. The planting and tending of these crops for more than a decade has produced such rich soil that things grow thirty and sixtyfold. We are visiting this year in the dry season and watch as some of the women spend all day on a foot pump, watering so that the geranium can thrive. The bright cloth of the workers' clothing, rich green herbs, and the distinctive smell of manure fill the senses. In this space it is all about dirt and there is only farming. Only growing, weeding, tending, and reaping. It feels so simple and beautiful sitting in the field.
It makes sense that Jesus was all about dirt. He wrote notes in the dirt in the face of danger, used dirt to make a healing mud, and told the disciples to shake it off their feet when they found no peace in a town. In the heart of Matthew's Gospel Jesus is in the thick of dirt. He is giving the disciples a road map of how to travel into cities, preaching and teaching. He is focused on dirt and seeds and what needs to be rooted and tilled and tended in the midst of foreign occupation, poverty, hostility. It is so radical. There is so much injustice, so many principalities to rail against and instead he preaches about dirt and seeds. You think he is going to condemn the institutions and maybe demand some kind of military revolution to fight against the oppression. Instead he focuses four parables in a row on something very different: the dirt and seeds growing in us. He starts with the idea of plucking seeds on the Sabbath, then talks about the sower and the seed, then about those who put the weeds among the wheat, and finally about the mustard seed.
I wonder if the disciples weren't puzzled about why he was so focused on dirt and seeds. The lesson of the sower may be one of the most radical in the Gospel. Jesus is turning the soil to uncover roots, to find out what is really planted in our souls. He is inviting us to grow good fruit and to weep at the parched nature of our being. We need to till the earth of our hearts, watering it and weeding the unruly places that cause us to stumble. Dirt is universal and timeless, thank God. Dirt is the community in which all things grow.
There is something about a field where forgiveness, hope, and memory are sown. There is something particularly beautiful about a field that has known death beginning to grow new life. The soil and seeds Jesus describes are the same soil and seeds that we are standing in, here in Rwanda. This farm reminds me that the dirt in the parable is connected to this dirt and all the soil is connected as well. One person does not get good seed and good soil and another just rocky ground or a path. It's all part of the same ground and only in community can that dirt become rich soil. There have to be seasons wherein you lie fallow. All soil is worthless unless we work together to cultivate it. If I try to farm alone, the soil I tend will be parched in a matter of months. The Good News is not so much that rich soil can produce a hundredfold, it is that the rocky, parched, and weedy soil of this world and in my heart can bear new life. Working together, remembering that we are all dirt, makes it possible for all of us to cultivate the good soil of a life of faith. All soil is connected. Rocky soil becomes aerated by digging up roots and rocks, and using compost to make it rich. Dry soil becomes fertile with water and thin soil, easily scorched, becomes thick by building up beds, digging ditches for irrigation, and allowing seasons to lie fallow. Dirt will be our companion our whole lives; together we can make a rich field that will bear unbelievably sweet fruit.
God stir the soul. Run the ploughshare deep. Cut the furrows round and round, overturn the hard, dry ground, spare no strength nor toil, even though I weep. In the loose, fresh mangled earth, sow new seed. Free of withered vine and weed, bring fair flowers to birth. Amen. —Prayer from Singapore Church Missionary Society.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
1. How would you describe the "soil" from which you or your community has sprung?
2. How is God calling you to tend and cultivate this soil?
CHAPTER 2
It's Not What You Believe, It's How You Live
From the Healing Garden at Thistle Farms, Nashville, Tennessee
All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts.
ACTS 2:44–46
This letter should simply be addressed: Dear child of God. When a drunk driver killed my father, when I was five, my mom immediately became the single, poor mother of five children at the age of thirty-five. Mom says one of her memories of those first weeks was the outpouring of letters from friends who had heard the news. Someone addressed a letter to her with the simple salutation: "Dear child of God." She said it was about all she remembered from the many notes of sympathy. It must have reminded her that she was not outside the realm of grace and protection as a child of God, that there was still a child in her that belonged to a loving family, and that the weight of the world was indeed not on her shoulders. So when I receive letters from people asking advice about starting a social enterprise or speaking their truth about their brokenness, sometimes I have the clarity to address my notes back to them: Dear child of God.
I got a note recently from a young man asking some of the basic and important questions of faith. The questions he asked felt both innocent and universal: Is there really a place called heaven? Do I have to believe in the virgin birth? What does it mean to say you believe in resurrection? Huge questions all contained in one fairly short Saturday morning e-mail.
It's one of the sweeter e-mails you get as a priest when somebody is willing to trust you with the basic questions of faith; it is a gift not to be taken lightly. I took a walk and thought about the best way to respond in love to this beautiful letter. As I walked, there was a surprise spring "snowstorm" created by a stand of cottonwood trees. The cotton was flying everywhere. There were places where the down was two inches thick, covering the trail like a cumulus cloud. It felt just like the surprise of resurrection, when all of creation pours out joy and wonder in the midst of our lives. We all walk around like this young man with his questions or the disciples after the resurrection, wondering what we are supposed to believe and what we are supposed to say about our beliefs. Every one of the Gospels contains the tender and beautiful truth: we cannot fathom resurrection.
In Mark 16, after the resurrection, Mary Magdalene and one of the disciples go back to tell the story and none of the other disciples believe. In John 20, all the disciples are gathered in a room together. None of them recognize the risen Lord among them. In Luke 24, the beloved disciples walk the road to Emmaus and cannot fathom the idea that love is not dead. They do not suspect that it is Jesus incarnate among them. Miles and miles they walk together. All four gospels share the story that the community closest to our Lord cannot fathom resurrection. Do you remember the story when Peter gets up and reminds the scattered flock of what the old prophets and Joel had said (Acts 2)? "Your young men and women will prophesy. Your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams. The Spirit of the Lord will be upon the men and the women to see and speak this truth." Then he goes on to talk about what David did. David rejoiced in his heart because the presence of God was with him. Peter goes on to say that the community needs to do three things—be in fellowship, live in generosity, and break bread. That should be the response, he says, to the unfathomable truth of resurrection. It is not "tell me what it is I have to believe." That has never been the journey of communities coming together. The most beautiful prayer in the whole Gospel is, "Lord, help my unbelief."
The fellowship Peter spoke of brings us together and we see resurrected love all around us, especially in places we did not expect. We see it in falling cottonwood. We see it on strangers' faces. We see it when we thought people were dead and they come to new life in the understanding that love heals. That is what fellowship and community do: we love each other with radical hospitality, without judgment, and we watch each other spring to new life. This young man's heart will not be changed by reciting the letter of the law, it will be opened through experiencing the spirit of the law.
The second aspect of the early communities following the resurrection was to live in the hope of generosity. That is how that community was marked. Everything we grow in the gardens at the Thistle Farms' residences and everything we offer as gifts to residents and graduates is the result of the generosity and love of a whole community. Every woman who graces the door gets a huge basket. Every year there are retreats, new clothes, matched savings, and gourmet meals ... all because people give in gratitude for all the mercy they have known. The generosity of community grounded in love is unbelievable. When we experience the generosity of a community over many years, we don't need to know another thing about their beliefs, really. Those actions tell us what we need to know about each other: that we can live in fellowship with deep generosity and we will not have need if we can share with a generous spirit.
And finally, a community's faithfulness is known by the breaking of the bread. There is beauty in the breaking of the bread when we feel fed, not judged, accepted for who we are. My prayer for community is to keep breaking bread together, finding room for all of us around this altar so that we can go into the world surprised by all the ways resurrected love looks and acts.
So, while the letters from young seekers and questions from the depths of our own hearts will always arise, we remember it is not what we say, it is how we live. We are called to faithfulness by living generously with one another, in fellowship, around the breaking of the bread.
Shana, a leader of the sales team at Thistle Farms, was born into addiction, sold into prostitution about the age of twelve, and trafficked around the United States. At fifteen, she tattooed across her chest "Trust No One." She says that she didn't believe anyone could help her, that God loved her and that she knew better than to trust anything. Finally, after years of addiction, abuse, and heartbreak, she found her way to Thistle Farms. She came into the residential community and learned that the biggest lie that she'd ever been told (after dropping out of school in sixth grade) was that she was stupid. She can run spreadsheets and track four hundred and thirty stores like nobody's business. She has helped grow the retail aspects of Thistle Farms by more than 70 percent over the last two years. Her first year here was the first time she had celebrated Christmas sober since she was a small girl. It was her first time to actually make a wish list of some things she would like. The first time to ask for anything and think there is a chance in hell you will get it.
While all of us were stressing about the demands of retail at Christmas, we still held our daily circle. The circle is a sacred space where we begin every work day at Thistle Farms. We light a candle and remember all the women still on the streets, still in prisons and jails, all looking for a way home. My hope that particular day was to hurry up and finish with the meditation circle so we could get on with the work. But then Shana stood up in the middle of circle and did the first cartwheel of her life. If you have never seen an adult woman do her first cartwheel, it is stunning. That cartwheel was the culmination of years of work and willingness to fumble in the dark, trusting that the path will appear. The spinning in the circle was like resurrection itself. Watching her, I understood that she knew she could trust that everyone in that circle loved her. Shana hadn't come into the community believing she would one day be free enough to do a cartwheel. It was the hard work she had done—living in fellowship, sharing what she had, and participating in the recovery traditions—that allowed her the gift of flight for a moment.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
1. Whose actions show you the resurrection?
2. How has the breaking of bread and fellowship deepened your faith?
CHAPTER 3
Pray to Get Out of the Way
San Francisco, California
And Peter took [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
MATTHEW 16:22–24
It would be a great gift to think of this letter having a butterfly effect of a peaceful presence somewhere in this world full of turmoil. The butterfly effect is the idea introduced in chaos theory that a small change can create a big difference. In other words, a butterfly can flap its wings in one part of the world, and the wind can be changed and may even cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe. The wishful hope is that a prayer for peace could change the balance of peace in this world. That a small act of love can change the balance of love. That our work could make a difference in this world. I understand why people get fearful in their role as a pastor or mentor: it can feel fraudulent, acting our parts as insightful gurus into the spiritual issues plaguing our world even as we are filled with hidden doubts in the face of injustice and oppression. Gratefully, there are times in the face of injustice and oppression when we move beyond ourselves and feel compelled to speak and act.
