This week I had the opportunity to chat with Fred Bahnson to talk about “Soil and Sacrament” his new book on faith and food, and his journey to find God in both (available now at many fine retailers). Take a look!
The Orant: Fred is an author, gardener, and the director of the Food, Faith, & Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Tell me Fred if you had to boil this book down into an “elevator pitch” for our readers what would it be?
FB: I think of this book as a spiritual quest. The book is about a journey toward a life of being more alive. For me being fully alive is about being more immersed in God and more immersed in the land. This book tells my story about reconnecting with both.
The Orant: People are talking about this book making them want to get their hands literally dirty, by starting a garden of their own. Is this what you are hoping to accomplish with this book, if not what IS the end goal of writing Soil and Sacrament.
FB: My great fear is that people would think ‘Oh-this is just another gardening or food book.’ There already plenty of great books out there on gardening. My intent is not primarily to get people into the garden, per se. My main hope is that by reading the stories in this book people would get more connected to God through the materials that make up this word; through connecting directly to soil; through a garden; through relationships with the local farms in their area. This book seeks to address the issues of connection. Reconnecting people to each other and the soil and how these thing might connect people with God. I want people to see the world itself as something sacramental.
The Orant: Can you explain what you mean by this sacramental worldview?
FB: I’m not a sacramental theologian, but for me a sacramental worldview means that God comes to us through the things of this world. A splash of wine and a piece of bread suddenly become filled with God. God embraces the material world as good and meets us in these things in a mysterious way. The problem comes when we no longer can see the world in this sacramental way, and lose our ability to recognize that God is present in the world around us. This encounter can also extend to the soil. We can recognize the God of life in the ground and the garden.
The Orant: When did soil become so spiritual for you?
FB: I didn’t grow up farming or with any interest in gardens. In divinity school I read Wendell Berry and that captivated my attention. Then I worked with Mayan coffee farmers down in Chiapas Mexico. That encounter changed the way that I saw working with the land and marked my agrarian conversion.
The Orant: How did you start gardening?
FB: I had a kind of rooftop conversion experience where I was wrestling with what I should do next and I read a passage in Isaiah which stated, “this is the way walk in it.” I realized the way God was showing me was feeding people. The new found love I had for working in the soil was not just a passing fad but became a vocational calling to feed people.
The Orant: You found a new vocation to feed people, but you choose to do it in a very small way. I myself work for an organization called Bread for the World which engages hunger in more systemic ways. What made you choose to feed people on such a small scale, one tomato at a time?
FB: At the time I was working for Christian Peacemaker Teams doing non-violent activist work and was frustrated not seeing results. We were working on systemic issues and not seeing change. Systemic issues can become abstract. Working in a garden is concrete. It’s one on one, person to person, feeding real people rather than working on abstract ideas. That work changed me from a charity model to an empowering model. If you don’t empower those you feed you can be doing more harm than good.
The Orant: There are lots of ways to peruse spirituality and gardening without being a part of the Church, why do you choose to do it in the church?
FB: I can’t not be in the church. A lot of days I don’t want to. It’s a love-hate relationship. I stay because it’s the community Jesus calls me to. It’s hard to imagine not being part of a fellow body of believers. Another desire in writing this book was to meet a wide spectrum of believers doing work similar to mine.
The Orant: Soil to sacrament documents your transition from running a large scale community garden to taking a pilgrimage through a number of faith-based agrarian communities. Can you explain what inspired you to make this change, and the process you used to determine the communities you would visit?
FB: Although I describe my four years building Anathoth, which was and is an amazing garden, in some ways the book is the story of my burnout. Given that I viewed the garden as my vocation I threw everything I had into it and then some. In the 4 years I was there I was working at an unsustainable pace. I just realized I needed to take a step away. After I pulled back my wife and I moved up to the mountains, started a mini-farm and I started writing full time.
As I wrote, not only did I want to tell my own story, but I also wanted to tell the story of the wider food & faith movement. This led me to do a lot of research. I chose the Trappist because I needed to be rooted in a tradition and as the oldest agrarian tradition in the world I found a good foundation there. I also needed to visit a Protestant community garden because a lot of Protestant churches are getting into this movement. I chose The Lord’s Acre but I could have chosen any number of gardens. I also wanted to make sure I represented the Pentecostals and was able to work beside Pentecostal coffee Roasters in the Tierra Nueva community. Going to the Jewish Adamah Farm in Connecticut brought it full circle back to the roots of our faith. Jews have a long history of combining food and faith in a way I find very compelling.
The Orant: What was the biggest challenge for you in this journey?
FB: The biggest challenge was being so attracted to each place that I wanted to sign up. I wanted to become a Trappist and work with Susan at the Lord’s Acre and roast coffee and become Jewish. I wanted to claim each way of life for my own.
The Orant: So why the title Soil and Sacrament?
FB: It encapsulates what the book is about. The word sacrament has a lot of metaphorical resonance. I find metaphor a more compelling way to look at the faith than doctrine or theology. I was drawn to the resonance of the word “sacrament.” In my journey God comes through soil. There is no other way that God feeds our bodies. Everything we eat has passed through the soil. Soil is a metaphor for the way God nourishes us.
The Orant: What do you say to someone who says, “I want in. I want an agrarian spirituality, I want an ecological world view, I want to connect my soul to the soil. WHAT DO I DO NEXT?”
FB: Get involved with the sources of your food and those who grow it. Most of us get our food from the grocery store which is food that has no story. It’s disconnected from its origins; you have no idea how the earth or workers were treated. In as much as people can reconnect with the sources of their food and the people who grow it, they are taking a big step and opening doors to relationship.
The Orant: What would be the required reading for someone who want to learn more
FB: In the back of Soil and Sacrament I compiled a list of readings. Here are a few recommendations from there: Scripture Culture Agriculture by Ellen F. Davis. Another Great book is Food and Faith by Norman Wirzba. And you should deffinitly read the Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. In learning about the soil start with Wendell Berry, but also read Berry’s great influence Sr. Albert Howard. His book The Soil and Health is great. Wes Jackson’s work is great. I’d also suggest reading good poetry. We need to recover the vision of the world as holy. Good poetry helps us do that. Scott Cairns poems are particularly good, and are very sacramental.
The Orant: What’s on your bookshelf these days?
FB: I’m reading this amazing book called Unapologetic, by a British writer named Francis Spufford. Best thing I’ve read in a long time.
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