Main Street is at once otherworldly and absolutely mundane. Its arteries are lined with blockish, sky-scraping superstructures and sprinkled with neon golden arches which glow like beacons for the hungry, the poor, and the destitute. Main Street’s soundtrack senselessly echoes in a polyphony of dissonant voices, traffic tunes, and melodic advertisements. They call to one another, to no one, and beyond—sending signals without the hope of a response. Main Street is like a stressed nervous system, secreting chemical solutions and flexing automatic muscles, outstretched hands attached to observers collect infinite quantities of information, nearly all of which is sifted, sorted, and deleted in a split second. You couldn’t take it all in, even if you wanted to, and you wouldn’t want to. There are no visible features to betray Main Street’s identity, its uniqueness, if it possesses any at all. Main Street could be anywhere. Main Street is almost everywhere. Luxurious displays strategically arranged, sealed behind glass, contrasted against the dirty body of the street dweller who obscures the charming contents. The narrative is disrupted when a woman emerges, crisp and colorful paper protruding from her shopping bag. She greets the stooped man with shamefully averted eyes. She senses something amiss. He senses resignation to the assigned roles.

I am carried by the current like a tumbleweed, politely swatting away, “May I help you? Are you looking for something?” Actually, I am. I don’t know what, but surely I’ll know it when I find it. The search takes me to vendors, shops, eateries. There are entry fees which I pay by way of purchases I don’t need. Here, I am minding my own role in the social drama, though I have a niggling sensation I’ve forgotten some important line. I’m unsure who I am meant to be portraying, and I worry that I’m doing it incorrectly. When I try to speak, my words come out backwards. I stutter and hum until I’m sweating from the strain of my searching. A formidable force of disconcertion arises, and I have no name for the thing, no knowledge of its source.

“Consumption,” surmises the old man in the park, bent over a chess board, a fuming cigar in hand. I take his answer and turn it over in my mind’s eye, trying on its fit. Consumption seems an apt description. It’s as though naming the thing has given me some sort of power to resist it, but I quickly find as I drift down monotonous concrete slabs that I’m consuming all sorts of things, even as my mouth and wallet remain shut.

A soundless whisper skids across my mind like a glass marble traversing tile. It forms words without sound as if I were reading text from a page. It offers direction, promises safe passage, and leads me to the mouth of an alleyway between two buildings so tall the sunlight above is completely crowded out. The seemingly tranquil stillness before me is disrupted by movement, differentiated shades of darkness which invite me forward into the fold. I have stumbled into a colony. There are parentless children, childless women and fatherless men dwelling together in a makeshift family. Dread chills my innards, pity produces a fearsome headache, and helplessness stiffens my knees. Then the sensations leave me and understanding threatens to set in. I attempt to envision the daily regimens of these outcasts and vagrants but the structure of their days evades me, existing just beyond the bounds of my imagination. Their lives assume templates so dissimilar from my own I cannot even recognize them. These beings defy convention so thoroughly their beauty is rendered invisible in my purview.

I don’t know why I was brought here, but the kinship I feel with these folks is unmistakable. Knowing hands tug at my clothing and frame, pushing me toward an industrial sized dumpster so revolting even the paint on its exterior is wilting away. The invitation is bewildering, and somehow sacramental, so through the looking glass I go. In the rubbish bin, there are 25 nameless birthday cakes topped with unlit candles. There’s all the plastic that has ever been produced, which will not decompose for another 500 years. Designer kitchen salts extracted from melting arctic glaciers. The waterlogged remains of the Great Barrier Reef. The pelt of the last grizzly bear that lived in California. Seventy-two billion pounds of food waste—the annual total in the United States. Fifteen million US households who are hungry. Subsidies which pay farmers to work fallow land. Logic that resists reason. I find other things too—Charles Baudelaire’s “The Eyes of the Poor” and Joan Didion’s iconic line, “The center will not hold.” I discover the answers to Fermat’s riddle and Da Vinci’s code. However, I don’t find the equation to recalibrate distribution, to eliminate waste, to remedy greed. I don’t find the salve to heal a broken humanity. Instead I find a cosmic loom which knits every thread together. Hope and despair in equal measure. Life and death all bound up together. Irresolution and no conclusions.

Every remembered place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened only toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

— excerpt from A Timbered Choir (Prologue) by Wendell Berry

There a few writers who capture the “placelessness” of contemporary society as well as poet, author, and farmer Wendell Berry. As a millennial formed in the crucible of technology and transiency, I feel haunted by Berry’s descriptions of the pervading monoculture in the United States, a culture defined by consumption and disconnection from geographic location. Indeed, our historical moment is one in which travel-for-the-sake-of-travel is a prevalent past-time, social media has rendered space and time basically irrelevant in the spread of information, and the majority of the World’s population lives in urban areas with limited interaction with their terrestrial environments. I think I am unsettled by Berry’s words because, admittedly, I recognize within myself a propensity toward these lifestyles and so I feel a sense of complicity in their problematic byproducts—American imperialism, desensitization to reports or images of violence and suffering, urban colonialism, just to name a few. However, despite the strange ways globalization has impacted my development, I feel a kindred attraction to alternative modes of existence, ones that value place and people, soil and thrift. I wonder, what does Wendell Berry’s deeply rooted witness have to teach me, the placeless?

As I was reading “Covenantal Economics” a marvelous chapter by Ellen Davis, I was captivated by the notion of “kindly use” a term which arises from none other than Berry himself. Davis explains that “kindly use” is, according to Berry, the spiritual discipline of “caring for land in its particularity” which demands a kind of “local knowledge.”[1] This sentiment is indisputably wise, intensely practical, and very lovely…but what wisdom does it hold for those of us who are not interacting with the earth in our daily work, let alone “caring for land”? Perhaps Davis and Berry are speaking to something deeper, something having to do with stewardship and paying attention. Davis clarifies, “Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility.”[2] Which leads me to believe kindly use points toward a larger ethic, an ethic which insists that humanity and creation are designed to live in mutually constitutive relationship, and that humanity ought to reverently “tend and keep” the lands we only temporarily inhabit (Genesis 2:15).

This introduces another countercultural characteristic of kindly use—an “economics of permanence.”[3] When I first considered an economics of permanence, I wondered if Davis and Berry were speaking in contrast to the placelessness and transiency I described above. However, the more I contemplate an economics of permanence, the more it seems to be something else, something any individual can and ought to practice regardless of the measure of stability in one’s life (lest we forget stability itself a great privilege). Perhaps an economics of permanence necessitates that we would treat our land and our resources with a boarder vision in mind, one that extends beyond ourselves into both past and future. Consider that land you which sustains you, your loved ones, your livelihood. Who and what inhabited the same land previously? What are the stories of the land, the people who did or did not practice kindly use? Did they leave in their wake a generous coverlet of nutrient rich topsoil and a vibrant watershed? Or did they prioritize extraction and profit making, perhaps stripping mountains of their covers and protective skins? An economics of permanence demands acknowledging, addressing, and responding to such histories. It also necessitates looking forward and implementing practices which will benefit the generations to come, generations that will live under the approaching shadow of Climate devastation and its fatalistic effects. An economics of permanence challenges us frail and finite creatures to ponder and live into a world bigger and beyond us—the Great economy of the Kingdom of God, where all living things exist in symbiotic relationship with one another.

[1] Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: an Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge University Press: 2009), 108.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

“What a time to be alive.” These are the words that I’ve heard probably most frequently during my time here in DC. It’s a complex time of disappointing politics and incredible community organizing. I’m consistently torn between feelings of deep grief and lament for the injustices that are unfolding before my eyes in this country and in this world, and feelings of inspirational hope from the community organizing that demands accountability and responsibility from our political leaders. I’ve seen our Attorney General use scripture as a weapon to defend unjust policies. I’ve seen our president use and encourage a rhetoric of egregiously hateful and derogatory language towards a group of people who are fleeing for their lives. However, I’ve also seen resilient community organizers call people to action and rally thousands of people to protest and speak out against these political failures. I’ve seen the Church, although admittedly somewhat waveringly, stand in opposition, condemn these injustices, and defend the actuality of scripture’s contents. What a time to be alive.

This past week, I caught myself repeating this phrase almost daily. My week was full of events that I could talk about individually for hours. I could tell you about a gathering of public theologians I attended for the official publication of a statement signed by over 300 religious scholars condemning the actions of President Trump’s border policies. I could tell you about hearing widely respected religious leaders like Sister Simone, from Nuns on the Bus, or Rev. Adam Taylor, the new executive director of Sojourners, denounce this administration’s recent actions. I could tell you about being speechless as I witnessed one of the most impressive demonstrations I have seen in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building by the Women’s March where almost 600 women acted boldly in solidarity with the detained immigrants by performing acts of civil disobedience and being arrested. I could tell you about the pure excitement my office felt when the Farm Bill, which we have been exhaustively lobbying for, passed the Senate on Thursday. I could tell you about thousands of people who marched down Pennsylvania Ave. in 100-degree DC heat to make sure their voices were heard.

In a conversation that I had with my site mentor—Jane Adams, Domestic Policy Analyst at Bread for the World—on my first day there, she said something very intriguing to me about lobbying and activism. She said “MLK is always remembered for his speeches and marches on Selma or Birmingham, but what was most important and what changed history was not the marches or the speeches; it was when he sat down and wrote the Civil Rights Act and put all of the protest’s energy into concrete law.” I was caught off guard when I first heard her say this. My default reaction was to defend the civil rights movement’s organizing skills; however, after thinking about this a while, I realized the point that she was making. The reality of our political world means that if we want to see real, lasting, sustainable change in society, it has to be drafted into law. After being wrapped up in a week of protests, marches, and letters, I realized that while all are necessary aspects of positive change, none are sufficient on their own.

After some more reflection on this conversation, I was posed with the question, “What does all of this actually do?” I found myself unable to answer the question. I was looking for the direct, real impact that each letter or march or petition brought about. I had to get myself to step back from the energy of the movements that I had been wrapped up in this week and ask myself this very challenging question. These groups are writing letters and petitions and organizing thousands for marches and protests, and hundreds are putting their bodies on the line in acts of civil disobedience to protest, but what do each of the acts bring about? Are they effective in catalyzing the desired change? Are they enough, or should we be taking more drastic measures? Are they a privileged response that protects our own self-purity, or are they actions of solidarity and calls to action? What does all of this actually do?

I decided these questions were probably out of my very limited scope of understanding, so I decided to ask my theological mentor, the Rev. Dr. Kris Norris. On our walk back from the release of the letter signed by over 300 religious scholars, I asked him what his thoughts were on all of this. He responded by saying that things like letters and petitions are always necessary as the initial steps for building a movement. While they might not seem to do anything drastic in the immediate, they provide a source of guidance and tethered direction that people can always refer back to and see exactly why the movement matters or what the foundational principles of the movement are. They serve as cornerstones for bigger things. It’s not that they aren’t effective, but as Jane said, they don’t independently cause systemic change. This means that letters and petitions serve as a necessary initial mode of action in order that other forms of protest can be successful after the fact. It also means that they are not enough on their own to cause change.

After working with Jane for a couple days and seeing that the realms of policy and protest seemed to be a bit disconnected, I asked her about how policy answers the demands of protests and how protests influence policy. Her response was quite inspirational. She talked about how policy must take a more realistic approach than protests do, but protests are necessary in deciding how much compromise has to be achieved. For example, if literally everyone in the US decided they were going to protest  for something to change, very minimal compromise would be necessary. The amount of compromise is usually inversely related to the support of the protest; as support decreases, necessity to compromise increases. Policy has real impacts and has the potential to change lives, but it can only be effective if citizens are politically aware individuals making sure not only that their voices are being heard, but the voices of the marginalized are also being heard.