The food we eat connects us with our neighbours, both locally and globally, shaping (or destroying) our world in profound ways that frequently go unnoticed. How can we resist consumerism, build community, and work toward a more just world through the way we eat? In an article published this week in Christ and Pop Culture magazine, I explore these vital questions with my husband, Andy, who–as a farmer practicing sustainable, small-scale agriculture, brings insight from the frontlines of food production.

Here’s an excerpt:

“For millennia, food has been woven into the fabric of every society on earth as an important marker of cultural identity and belonging, a means of building and maintaining relationships, and a way for communities to grieve, celebrate, and worship together. In many parts of the world, gathering, growing, and preparing food makes up a significant portion of daily life: people are intimately involved in the process of bringing it to the table. For most of us in Western cultures however, food has increasingly become a commodity or a consumer experience. We want it cheap, we want variety, and we don’t want to have to do the dishes. Fast food and pre-made meal services abound; we are disconnected from the places our food comes from, detached from the people who grow and prepare it, and ignorant about most of its journey to our plates…”

Head on over to Christ and Pop Culture to read the rest!

In the pre-dawn darkness, we crunch and slosh through wet snow toward the warm, yellow light that glows from the window of the basement suite where we meet each Wednesday morning for neighbourhood prayers. As we approach, other friends are converging on the same red door. Inside, we gather in a circle around the roaring gas fire with our steaming mugs of coffee, we pray a brief liturgy together, and then we spend time in silent reflection, writing prayers for forgiveness and healing.

One by one, we then roll our prayers into paper cones and brave the cold of the morning once more to kneel in front of a low table, where we light the paper cones from a candle and watch our confessions burn down to ashes in a clay bowl. Then the bowl is brought back inside, and we pass it around the circle.

We turn to each other, one at a time, dipping our fingers in the ashes of our collective prayers and drawing the sign of the cross on each other’s foreheads with the words, “Turn away from sin, and be faithful to the gospel.” Live in the hope of the good news that God is remaking the world and remaking each one of us. Choose to participate in the transformation. 

The ashes on our faces remind us that we are dust–that we will die someday–so that with the humble knowledge of our mortality and dependence on God, we can live well in the finite space and time we have been given on this earth. Ashes are also a sign of repentance: an acknowledgment that the injustice and pain we see in the world has its roots in our own hearts, and that the greed, corruption, and violence we see writ large in our society is mirrored in the selfish individualism of our private lives. On Ash Wednesday, we stare reality in the face: I am not separate from the racism, the environmental destruction, the refugee crisis, or the social inequality I see around me. I am complicit. I am part of the problem.

This year, Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday fall on the same day. It’s an unlikely combination.

In popular culture, Valentine’s Day is a holiday to celebrate romance: the day to take your lover out for a candlelit dinner, or make a statement by buying chocolate or flowers or jewelry or a card. It’s a private, inward-looking affair, and somewhat exclusive. But still, the vibe is supposed to be light and fun, even sappy. No one talks about death on Valentine’s Day–they talk about undying love.

Next to all that candy-coated glitz, Ash Wednesday is a bit of a bummer. Most of us would prefer not to contemplate the uncomfortable truths that we are going to die, and that while we are alive our own brokenness means that we harm others in myriad ways, intentionally or not.

However, I believe that this humbling, brutal honesty with ourselves and this commitment to addressing our own faults and failings comprise the necessary starting point for cultivating authentic love.

Experiencing God’s forgiveness and healing for ourselves allows us to truly see and love another person, a community, or an entire world, with all of its shadows and imperfections. Living in the awareness of our own fragile humanity inspires compassion by connecting us with the suffering of others.

So this is my valentine to the world: to commit to that hard, loving work of turning from sin and living faithfully into the vision of God’s kingdom. Happy Ash Valentine’s Day.

In the year and a half since moving to Canada, much has changed for Andy and me and our lives look drastically different than they did in India. Yet I continue to be amazed by the threads of continuity woven into our story; the dreams planted in that season of life that continue to grow and bear fruit in unexpected ways even now. In India, our neighbors were village migrants who had reluctantly left their land to eke out a precarious existence in a polluted city with dropping water tables, and living alongside them sparked Andy’s interest in learning about sustainable agriculture to address poverty at the roots. Last month, that dream began to germinate when Andy got a job working for a small-scale farm just outside Vancouver!

I never pictured myself married to a farmer–though my first literary crush was Almanzo, the brave, resourceful protagonist of Farmer Boy from the Laura Ingalls Wilder books my mom used to read to my sister and me at bedtime. Years later, my farmer husband is  pursuing his dream of sustainable agriculture to address poverty at the roots. Andy has committed himself to learning the intricacies of nature and the wonder of humbly working alongside God to cultivate what we cannot manufacture. I could not be more proud of that [often rain-soaked] man in muddy boots who comes home exuberant after each day outside on the farm. Here he is, in his own words, explaining this new season of life:

One month ago, I quit my job in the city and became a farmer.

How did that happen?

It all began one sweltering afternoon two years ago, I was riding the public bus in India with my colleague, Govind. Reflecting on the challenges of doing community development in our city, Govind remarked that people in the villages were much more invested in their community and land than people in the slums. Living as squatters in the city, there was little incentive to invest long term in their communities or the land on which they lived. Our neighbors were further disempowered through the loss of family networks in the village, and they couldn’t use their agrarian expertise in the city—which meant they were usually left doing tedious, dangerous, and low-paying jobs to make ends meet.

Govind (on my left) and I facilitating a community meeting in India.

Govind’s comments reinforced the many conversations Trudy and I had with our neighbors in the slum, the vast majority of whom had recently migrated to the city due to lack of land security, land holdings that were too small for conventional agriculture, and declining soil productivity–all of which made it hard to earn a living as farmers, as their ancestors had done. Especially after visiting some of our friends’ home villages, I began to dream about doing community development work “further up stream” in an agrarian context, enabling farmers to make a meaningful choice about whether or not to move to the city.

A new season and a new community

While we were still in India, I was introduced to a Christian conservation organization called A Rocha, which seeks to show God’s love for all creation through hands-on conservation projects, environmental education programs, and sustainable agriculture initiatives. This includes restoring salmon habitat, training young scientists, inspiring school children, and providing fresh vegetables to low-income families. Love for people, place, and our planet are the threads that tie together and motivate A Rocha. A Rocha’s work is done in the context of community and with the aim of building bridges between people of diverse backgrounds as we all strive to care for—and be cared for by—the places we call home.

In February, I was hired as an Assistant Farm Manager with A Rocha’s Sustainable Agriculture program at the Brooksdale Environmental Centre in Surrey, BC. While getting my hands dirty (literally) with planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting, I’ll also be putting my business skills to use by selling our produce to restaurants and supporting A Rocha’s Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) Program, in which CSA members commit to the farm by paying in advance for a weekly harvest box. Throughout the growing season, they then enjoy produce that is healthy and fresh while getting to connect with the farmers who grow the food that they eat.  Our CSA program currently supplies about 100 shares, which fund the bulk of the program costs. The rest our budget comes from small grants, sales at market stands, and fundraising.

The farm team: me, master farmer Paul, and fellow assistant manager, Lindsay

Many people have expressed surprise when I tell them that I am working as a farmer.  I have never farmed, have always lived in cities (some of the largest and most crowded on earth!), and spent my university years studying international business.  And yet…  I have a deep desire to work with my hands, to grow real food, to learn about how to care for a piece of land (and it’s non-human inhabitants). I’m also excited to do all of this in the context of community, working alongside volunteers and interns who are also learning.  A Rocha’s Brooksdale Environmental Centre is just such a place: a living laboratory where people come together to learn about and experience the goodness of God’s creation. This is an opportunity to gather skills that I can use to help small-scale farmers steward their land well and avoid the trap of urban poverty that our neighbors experienced in India.

Growing a community of support

   

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is a book about “getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America”—a memoir of his early years as a lawyer for death row inmates in the Deep South, and the trajectory that eventually leads him to broaden the scope of his work to include wrongly imprisoned individuals across the country. In the wake of events in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere over the past year, this book is more relevant now than ever. Through his story, Stevenson offers Americans a compelling challenge, rooted in love: to look critically at our history of racial oppression and to rethink our criminal “justice” system in light of the ways in which that historical violence has bled through and continues to deform that system today.

The story follows Stevenson from Harvard Law School to an internship with a legal aid nonprofit in Alabama where he is confronted for the first time with real people facing the death penalty. After graduation, he returns to Alabama to continue advocating for innocent men on death row, and over the next several years goes on to discover just how widespread the dysfunction, corruption, and injustice in the American legal system really are. Stevenson’s legal work expands over time to include advocacy for children who have been sentenced to die in prison, and “lifers” or death row inmates whose intellectual disabilities, mental illness, and traumatic histories were not taken into account during their trials. The common thread between all of these individuals is that race and poverty have made them unable to defend themselves in the legal system: they are powerless to resist wrongful imprisonment and extreme punishment.

Stevenson gives historical and statistical context to the personal narratives he tells, presenting them not as mere anecdotes, but as powerful, symbolic examples of a larger whole. He writes that the United States has the highest incarceration rate of anywhere in the world: 2.3 million people are in prison, and another six million are on probation or parole. A quarter of a million American children—some as young as twelve—have been sent to adult jails and prisons where almost 3,000 of them are serving life sentences. Furthermore, many people are imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. “Writing a bad check or committing a petty theft” can result in decades of prison time or even life imprisonment, and there are now “more than a half million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses.”

People of color make up the vast majority of the prison population, and Stevenson describes the way that mass incarceration continues the racial terrorism of the Jim Crow era into the twenty-first century, impacting racial minorities in much the same way as did segregation laws in the early twentieth century (Michelle Alexander makes the same point in her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness). Justice Bureau statistics show that black men are four times more likely than whites to be shot by police. Black and Hispanic youth in urban poor neighborhoods face “random stops, questioning, and harassment” from police which increase risk of arrest for petty crimes and often result in criminal records “for behavior that more affluent children engage in with impunity.” The results of this racial discrimination in police work and the court system are clear: “one of every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison,” but among black males, that number is one in three.

Parts of Stevenson’s book read like the suspenseful courtroom scenes of a crime thriller. In recounting the stories of people like Walter McMillian, a black man framed by local law enforcement in Alabama for the murder of a young white woman, Stevenson draws the reader into the unfolding drama through descriptions of tense days in court, emotional dialogues with McMillian’s family, and heated confrontations with corrupt officials.

Throughout Just Mercy, vivid character development restores names and faces to the children, women, and men whose suffering is ordinarily hidden from view within the prison system: the grief-stricken man who is executed before Stevenson’s eyes, the terrified young teenager serving a life sentence for shooting his mother’s abuser, the loving mother of six who is incarcerated for capital murder after a medical examiner falsely asserts that her stillborn baby was born alive. In these heartbreaking pages, readers encounter not only tragedy and injustice, but individuals who have maintained hope, resilience, and compassion in the midst of it all.

Yet Just Mercy does more than simply relate the facts, or tell a good story. It digs down to the heart of the issue, examining the deeper psychological and spiritual reasons that we as a society have supported and allowed mass incarceration and harsh punishment for the most vulnerable people in our midst.

Reflecting on the brokenness he has discovered in himself through his personal involvement with the poor and the incarcerated, Stevenson writes, “So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken… we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments… we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.”

Stevenson has learned from his years of working to reform the legal system that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” He asserts that “we are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated,” and the only way to reclaim our humanity is to realize “that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”

Just Mercy is an invitation for all of us to do the kind of honest soul-searching that will uncover this vulnerable, flawed humanity, and to refuse to comply any longer with a system that denies it.