As I walked into the office on Monday, I was met with the peaceful background noises of 7 a.m. traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue and an empty office to myself for a short while. I spent the beginning of my morning reading out of James K.A. Smith’s third volume in his cultural liturgies trilogy titled “Awaiting the King.” As I was reading, what struck me was his idea that every act, whether secular or religious, intentional or unintentional, is a form of worship.

An hour later, my site mentor walked into the office, and after some small talk, she gave me one of my assignments for the week: a theological reflection on the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I was simultaneously excited and anxious for what I would uncover in this assignment. I’ve done my best to craft a narrative of some of the more significant moments in this experience. However, having spent nearly eight hours in the museum between two days, these are merely a few of the many moving moments I had the privilege to experience.

The museum is laid out as a “journey” through African American history, so it is set up for guests to wind their way through a mile and a half of 400+ years from slavery to the present. At one point on the journey, during the period of Reconstruction, I turned a corner and was immediately brought to an abrupt halt. There, encased directly ahead of me and staring back at me with the empty, yet ever-present face of evil, was the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member. I was paralyzed by the reality of its gaze. As I got closer I began to feel the very real aura of intimidation that filled the room around the hood. Poised only a foot away from me, illuminated by an eerily dim light behind the glass, and surrounded with pictures of horror outlined in red for viewer discretion, was a mask that another human being wore with great pride.

I stood there, stunned with fear, confusion, and sadness. My initial reaction was to distance myself from the people who wore these hoods. It felt right to label them as “demons” or “monsters,” but never as people. How could someone standing for so much hate, bigotry, and vile racism be in any way similar to me? It’s often easier and more comfortable for white folks like me to see the ways that we differ from groups like the KKK because it allows us to distance ourselves from the realities of our own racist tendencies. It allows us to continue to turn a blind eye towards the deeply engrained beast of racism that lurks in our own lives. We must learn to use the hood as a mirror. We must allow the chilling gaze of the hood to penetrate our own walled off lives and painfully illuminate our similarities with the Klansmen that are deeply buried in our own lives.

While I was standing there, caught in a storm of emotion, a white mother and her young son walked around me and passed by the hood. The little boy tugged on his mother’s arm and asked her, “Mommy what is that mask?” His mother looked down and said to him “That was worn by a group of mean people a long time ago.” My stomach churned when I heard this. I wanted so badly to correct her. My mind raced back to this past August when those same hoods terrorized my city. The KKK is not a past event. As unnerving as it is to admit, the KKK is a present reality. As the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney of Brite Divinity School said earlier this year, “we live in an age of unhooded white supremacy.” The response to this must be one of swift and unwavering opposition. If not, we run the risk of propagating a false story of the arrival of this so-called “post-racial society.” The presentation of this hood in the museum is a startling reminder of a dark past, but as James Baldwin, a celebrated champion of black culture, says, “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought” (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time). We must accept the past, understand its implications for the present, and act accordingly for the future.

In another section of the museum, I viewed Emmett Till’s casket. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was lynched in Mississippi in the 1950s after being accused of flirting with a white woman outside a grocery store. I was especially struck by the pictures of him as a young boy. I can see Emmett Till’s face all over the place today. I can see him in the playful faces of children who run around in parks as we walk past or in a childhood friend who looked a lot like Emmett when he was that age. Unfortunately, he can also be seen all too often on the news amidst the most recent case of police brutality in this country.  He is in the face of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Christian Taylor, Tamir Rice or any number of other victims. Emmett Till became an icon of the civil rights movement, and his legacy lives on today. He reminds us that the beast of white supremacy and racism continues to be fed by something deeply engrained in our society. It’s a beast that must be pried out from the caves of our Constitution and the depths of our Declaration. It will be liberating for some. It will be painful for most. However, if the values that we hold dearest are the same values that continue to disgrace the brutally murdered body of Emmett Till, it is of the utmost importance that they be uprooted and destroyed immediately, whatever the cost.

“Food is about the relationships that join us to the earth, fellow creatures, loved ones and guests, and ultimately God. How we eat testifies to whether we value the creature we live with and depend upon. To eat is to savor and struggle with the mystery of our creatureliness.”

– Norman Wirzba, Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating

I’ve been reading Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating by Norman Wirzba and while I feel compelled to share my newfound insights into the “holy and humbling mystery” of food, the ironic reality is that I’ve recently been struck with food poisoning.[1] At the moment, I’m feeling adverse to anything ingestible and during my short hiatus from food, I have reluctantly been absent from the Abundant Table Farm. Additionally, I have been absent from shared meals and by extension one of the most ancient and essential forms of community. Wirzba describes the connective power of food in that, “Eating joins people to each other, to other creatures and the world, and to God through forms of ‘natural communion’ too complex to fathom.”[2] Food, then, is a delightful sacrament which makes tangible participation in the invisible network of aliveness which connects all organisms to each other and to God who is the “Life of all life.”[3]

This portrait strikes me as beautiful and simple in its undeniable truth. Of course, each of us “knows” in some abstract sense that all living things are linked together by some shared life-force we may consider to be “sacred” (or we may simply refer to as carbon). We “know” in the vaguest of terms that our human lives depend upon food which further depends upon flora, fauna, and some mysterious conditions that constitute healthy ecosystems. However, when the experience of food is reduced to transactional procurement, a preparation process defined by convenience, and lone consumption, the sacramental dimension of food feels stretched thin to the point of disappearance. Rather than a reminder that “we participate in a grace-saturated world, a blessed creation worthy of attention, care, celebration” I would suggest the average dining experience is a process characterized by quickness, convenience, and an ability to adapt to the individual wants and needs of any given consumer.[4] Food is conceptualized as fuel, a commodity, not a sacrament, and not even a fundamental human right.

In this way, my unfortunate and laughable food-poisoned state is a fitting analogy for the present topography of our food system. Consider Wirzba’s succinct declaration, “Despite what food markets say, there really is no such thing as ‘cheap’ or ‘convenient’ food.”[5] Instead, there are processes which transform the earth’s gifts of food into a carefully constructed product which allows for consumers to divorce themselves from the true cost of the life and death they absorb without thought or reverence. If we as consumers are not paying the true cost, I wonder where the price is being exacted. Is the weight of our irreverent eating taking a toll upon our lands? Our soil and water quality? Is the true cost being carried by the exploited laborers who harvest the nation’s food supply only to face the highest rates of food insecurities themselves? The fact is, “To eat is to be implicated in a vast, complex, interweaving set of life and death dramas in which we are only one character among many.”[6]

Here is an invitation to learn a bit more about those other characters. Recall your narratives about food—what are your cherished food rituals? When has food been a source of personal challenge? Labor over a meal with loved ones or with strangers—receive hospitality and give it away. Share the dish duties. Deviate from your old recipes. Improvise and eat playfully, creatively. Introduce yourself to a new vegetable. Acknowledge all the sanctity a pomegranate possesses. Read poetry before dining—better yet, sing poetry over your plate. Buy local and know your farmer. Strive to eat justly, without cruelty. Confront your own creatureliness. Give thanks and live!

[1] Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Micheal Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 119.

[4] Wirzba, Food and Faith, 2.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 4.

Ventura, California, is a coastal city where grandmotherly mountains morph seamlessly into the seemingly infinite Pacific ocean. The water’s cool breath mitigates the heat of the ever-present sun and creates a consistently seventy degree oasis. It feels fitting to compare Ventura to Eden with its year-round growing season and nutrient rich sandy-loam soil, a product millions of years in the making as mountains gave way to erosion by winds, rains, and the slow tectonic shifts of the land. In case I have not described a place befitting of the Eden comparison, Ventura country is an agricultural epicenter known as a global supplier of strawberries. The extensive strawberry fields, their neat rows populated by teams of harvesters, are visible from the California 101 freeway and almost every other roadway in the county.

In the past week, I myself have become intimately acquainted with the process of plucking these red-ripened strawberries from their leafy habitations. My work is punctuated with pauses here and there in order to taste the warm flesh of a berry nurtured to maturation by the light of the sun and expert care by the hands of farmers Reyna and Guadalupe, the two farmers who manage The Abundant Table’s small organic farm. If I’m honest, the sublime scene I described above—standing tall in the fields with a box of freshly picked strawberries on my hip, sweat on neck, and dirt all over—was precisely the romantic vision which initially kindled my interest in farming. Can you relate to this confession? Have you ever read poetry by Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, or Annie Dillard and then resolved to live more connected with and attentive to the land? Have you ever thought of uprooting your current constraints and pioneering a new path as a wildflower farmer, an urban agrarian, or a naturalist poet? I have a sense I’m not alone in this. The earth enchants the soul; its holiness at once both mysterious and self-evident. Wendell Berry remarks, “We did not make it. We know little about it. In fact, we don’t, and will never, know enough to make our survival sure or our lives carefree.”[1] And yet for the overwhelming majority of Americans, connectivity to the land is a remote reality.

Many live, at best, removed from and insulated against the rhythms of the natural world and, at worst, with worldviews which assert humankind’s right to dominate, commodify, and deplete the land. As someone located within the Christian tradition, it grieves me to witness how scriptures, doctrine, and tradition have been co-opted by colonialism and capitalism to perpetuate a “functional Docetism” which “has numbed Christians to the escalating horrors of both ecological and social violence, because spiritual or doctrinal matters always trump terrestrial or somatic ones.”[2] Contrastingly, the Bible and the Hebrew scriptures in particular offer “a story and a discourse about the connection of a people to a place” and ecological stewardship as “implicit in that story’s insistence upon the land’s sanctity.”[3] In this vein, Ellen Davis, Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School and author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, suggests agrarianism as a hermeneutic, or in other words, a lens through which one might read the scriptures and thus distill pertinent interpretations, meaning, and wisdom. Furthermore Davis claims, “Reading the work of contemporary agrarians can make us better readers of Scripture.”[4] That is a surprising suggestion amid a historical moment when most folks have little connection to the elements, let alone the process of food production. However, I wonder if each of us is nearer to the ethics of land and food than we might imagine:

Our largest and most indispensable industry, food production entails at every stage judgments and practices that bear directly on the health of the earth and living creatures, on the emotional, economic, and physical well-being of families and communities and ultimately on their survival. Therefore, sound agricultural practices depend upon knowledge that is at one and the same time chemical and biological, economic, cultural, philosophical, and (following the understanding of most farmers in most places and times) religious. Agriculture involved questions of value and therefore moral choice, whether or not we care to admit it.[5]

Davis’ framework, which connects spiritual matters with the physical matter of land and its proper or improper usage, invites me to revisit my strawberry scene and tease out some of the unseen complexities.

For one, my experience on The Abundant Table’s farm is inextricably shaped by social location as a college-educated white woman endowed with various sorts of capital which have allowed for my educational and immersive internship experience. My willful presence is so viscerally contrasted from the overwhelming majority of farmers in Ventura County, many of whom are Latino/a and working grueling 12-hour shifts for shockingly low wages. The gravity of the realization pains me when I feel the ache of my thighs and lower back from just a few hours of farm work. Farmer Reyna has shared with me a small glimpse of her experience working within conventional agricultural operations where farmers like herself monotonously harvest hundreds of acres of monocrops dusted with chemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. These conditions lead to horrendous illnesses, such as various cancers and late-onset asthma, not to mention the devastating effects upon the soil and the pollution to the surrounding air and water supply. Reyna compares these experiences to her time at The Abundant Table, where farmers are paid living wages and organic practices are used in ways that are honoring of the land and what it grants. She affirms, “It’s important that all work be dignified…My dirty clothes are my professional uniform. I believe it’s very important that youth have opportunities to work in the field and grow their own understanding of farm work, so they can begin to respect and value this work and the tremendous physical strength and earth-literacy it requires.”[6]

The earth-literacy Reyna describes is a lexicon I am continuously cultivating. As I explore and experience the uniqueness of this bioregion—where mountains dissipate into ocean and an intricate network of estuaries and waterways form a living, breathing watershed—I simultaneously encounter the historical, cultural, and religious narratives which have grown over these lands, and in the midst of all this newness I, a visitor, ask, what does this place and its people have to teach me about encountering the Triune God? What does it mean to join The Abundant Table community in the work of doing justice and loving mercy by transforming existing food systems? How can I live into the divine calling to recognize my location within creation and my responsibility to it, and to grow into a disciple of this particular watershed?

[1] Wendell Berry, foreword to Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, by Ellen F. David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ix.

[2] Ched Myers, introduction to Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice, edited by Ched Myers (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016), 5.

[3] Berry, foreword to Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, xi.

[4] Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Sarah Nolan, Erynn Smith, and Reyna Ortega in “Growing from the Edges” from Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice, edited by Ched Myers (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016), 151.