{"id":424,"date":"2013-08-28T17:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-28T17:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/billykangas\/2013\/08\/soil-and-sacrament-an-interview-with-fred-bahnson.html"},"modified":"2013-08-28T17:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-28T17:01:00","slug":"soil-and-sacrament-an-interview-with-fred-bahnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/billykangas\/2013\/08\/soil-and-sacrament-an-interview-with-fred-bahnson.html","title":{"rendered":"Soil and Sacrament: An interview with Fred Bahnson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
<\/a><\/div>\n
This week I had the opportunity to chat with Fred Bahnson<\/a> to talk about \u201cSoil and Sacrament\u201d his new book on faith and food, and his journey to find God in both (available\u00a0now<\/i><\/a>\u00a0at many fine retailers). Take a look!<\/span><\/div>\n
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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 \u201celevator pitch\u201d for our readers what would it be?<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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FB: \u00a0I 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.<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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The Orant:\u00a0People 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\u00a0<\/span><\/i>IS\u00a0the end goal of\u00a0writing\u00a0<\/i>Soil and Sacrament.<\/span><\/div>\n
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FB:\u00a0My great fear is that people would think \u2018Oh-this is just another gardening or food book.\u2019 There already plenty of great books out there on\u00a0gardening. \u00a0My intent is not primarily to get people into the\u00a0garden, per se. My main hope is that by reading the stories in this book people would get more connected to God\u00a0through\u00a0the\u00a0materials\u00a0that make up this word; through connecting\u00a0directly to soil;\u00a0through a\u00a0garden; through\u00a0relationships 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\u00a0connect\u00a0people with God. I want people to see the world itself as something sacramental.<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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The Orant: Can you explain what you mean by this sacramental worldview?<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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FB: I\u2019m not a sacramental theologian, but for me a\u00a0sacramental worldview\u00a0<\/i>means that God comes to us through the things of this world. A splash of wine and a\u00a0piece\u00a0of bread suddenly become filled with God.\u00a0God\u00a0embraces\u00a0the material world as good and meets us in these things in a mysterious way.\u00a0The 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\u00a0around\u00a0us.\u00a0This encounter can also extend to the soil. We can recognize the God of life in the ground and the\u00a0garden.\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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The Orant: When did soil become so spiritual for you?<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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FB: I\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0grow up farming or with any interest in\u00a0gardens. In\u00a0divinity\u00a0school I read\u00a0Wendell\u00a0Berry and that captivated my attention. Then I worked with Mayan coffee farmers down in\u00a0Chiapas\u00a0Mexico. That encounter changed the way that I saw working with the land and marked my agrarian conversion.<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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The Orant: How did you start\u00a0gardening?<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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FB:\u00a0I had a kind of rooftop conversion\u00a0experience\u00a0where I was wrestling with what I should do next and I read a passage in Isaiah which stated, \u201cthis is the way walk in it.\u201d 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\u00a0calling\u00a0to feed people.<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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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\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Bread for the World\u00a0which\u00a0engages\u00a0hunger in more systemic ways. What made you choose to feed people on such a small scale, one tomato at a time?<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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FB: At the time I was working for Christian Peacemaker Teams doing non-violent\u00a0activist work and was\u00a0frustrated\u00a0not seeing results. We were working on systemic issues and not seeing change. Systemic issues can become abstract. Working in a\u00a0garden\u00a0is\u00a0concrete. It\u2019s 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\u2019t empower those you feed you can be doing more harm than good.\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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The Orant: There are lots of ways to\u00a0peruse spirituality and\u00a0gardening\u00a0without being a part of the Church, why do you choose to do it\u00a0<\/i>in\u00a0the church?<\/i><\/div>\n
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FB:\u00a0I can\u2019t not be in the church. A lot of days I don\u2019t want to. It\u2019s a love-hate relationship. I stay\u00a0because\u00a0it\u2019s the community Jesus calls me to. It\u2019s hard to imagine not being part of a fellow body of\u00a0believers. Another desire in\u00a0writing\u00a0this book was to meet a wide spectrum of believers doing work similar to mine.\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The Orant: Soil to sacrament documents your transition from running a large scale community\u00a0garden\u00a0to taking a\u00a0pilgrimage\u00a0through 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?<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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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\u00a0garden\u00a0as 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\u00a0writing full time.<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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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\u00a0movement.\u00a0This led me to do a lot of research.\u00a0I chose the\u00a0Trappist\u00a0because I needed to be rooted in a tradition and as the oldest agrarian tradition in the world I found a good foundation there.\u00a0I also needed to visit a Protestant community garden because a lot of Protestant churches are getting into this\u00a0movement. I chose The Lord\u2019s Acre but I could have\u00a0chosen\u00a0any number of gardens. \u00a0I also wanted to make sure I represented the\u00a0Pentecostals and was able to work beside\u00a0Pentecostal\u00a0coffee Roasters in the Tierra Nueva community. \u00a0Going to the Jewish\u00a0Adamah 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.<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The Orant: What was the biggest challenge for you in this journey?<\/i><\/div>\n
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FB: The biggest challenge was being so attracted to each place that I wanted to sign up. I wanted to become a\u00a0Trappist\u00a0and work with\u00a0Susan\u00a0at the Lord\u2019s Acre and roast coffee and become\u00a0Jewish.<\/b>\u00a0<\/u>I wanted to claim each way of life for my own.<\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The Orant: So why the title\u00a0<\/i>Soil and Sacrament?<\/i><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
FB:\u00a0It 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\u00a0was drawn to the resonance of the word \u201csacrament.\u201d 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\u00a0metaphor\u00a0for the way God nourishes us.<\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The Orant:\u00a0What do you say to someone who says, \u201cI 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?\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
FB:\u00a0Get 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\u2019s disconnected from its\u00a0origins;\u00a0you 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.<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The Orant: What would be the required reading for someone who want to learn more\n<\/i>

FB: In the back of\u00a0Soil and Sacrament\u00a0<\/i>I compiled a list of readings. Here are a few\u00a0recommendations\u00a0from there:\u00a0Scripture\u00a0Culture\u00a0Agriculture\u00a0<\/i>by Ellen F. Davis. Another Great book is\u00a0Food and Faith\u00a0<\/i>by Norman\u00a0Wirzba. And you should deffinitly read\u00a0the Sabbath\u00a0<\/i>by Abraham Joshua Heschel.\u00a0In learning about the soil start with Wendell Berry, but also read Berry\u2019s great influence Sr. Albert Howard. His book\u00a0The Soil and Health<\/i>\u00a0is great. Wes Jackson\u2019s work is great. I\u2019d also suggest reading good poetry. We need to recover the vision of the world as holy. Good poetry helps us do that.<\/b>\u00a0<\/u>Scott Cairns poems are particularly good, and are very sacramental.\u00a0<\/b><\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
The Orant: What\u2019s on your bookshelf these days?<\/i>\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

FB: I\u2019m\u00a0reading this amazing book called Unapologetic, by a British writer named Francis Spufford. Best thing I\u2019ve read in a long time.\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I had the opportunity to chat with Fred Bahnson to talk about \u201cSoil and Sacrament\u201d his new book on faith and food, and his journey to find God in both (available\u00a0now\u00a0at many fine retailers). Take a look! The Orant: Fred is an author, gardener, and the director of the Food, Faith, & Religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1678,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSoil and Sacrament: An interview with Fred Bahnson<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week I had the opportunity to chat with Fred Bahnson to talk about \u201cSoil and Sacrament\u201d his new book on faith and food, and his journey to find God\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/billykangas\/2013\/08\/soil-and-sacrament-an-interview-with-fred-bahnson.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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