Community Gardens: A Conspiracy of Abundance

Several months ago, I heard a TED lecture by Ron Finley that flipped on a light-switch for me. You can view it here, although it is not entirely work safe (Rated PG for mild language):  http://on.ted.com/Finley

A self-described “guerilla gardener,” Finley began planting food gardens on abandoned city lots in south-central Los Angles. He was concerned that not only were too many people going hungry in his neighborhood, but that they when they did eat, they were eating the wrong kinds of foods.

“People are dying from curable diseases,” according to Finley and in his neighborhood, “dialysis centers started popping up like Starbucks” due to the lack of access to healthy foods. In South-Central Los Angles, “The drive-thru is killing more people than the drive-by,” he quipped.

I stumbled on this video at the same time I was reading a book entitled, “Slow Church” by authors C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison. In it, they posit that the “fast food” culture has also infected our nation’s spiritual nourishment with over-reliance efficiency, predictability, and quick fixes. Surrendering to the “cult of speed,” we engage in scripted worship and attempt to apply church growth models with little consideration of the local context.

 

The authors note in the final section that Nature itself offers us an

 “economy of abundance.”

All human economies operate under the law of scarcity. The harder something is to create or obtain, the more the item “costs.” Scarcity drives prices up; while abundance drives prices down.

The reason Ron Finley has witnessed a steady decline in healthy foods in his neighborhood is due to the abundance of unhealthy alternatives. The reason why a cheeseburger costs less in Oak Ridge, than say a market fresh salad, is because the fresh vegetables are less abundant in most of our restaurants.

Ironically, this is actually the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Nature tries to teach us in our relationship with the Earth (and we happen to live on a very fertile portion of it!). I personally believe that God’s economy, like Nature’s, is an economy of abundance: one healthy apple tree produces as many as 100+ apples in a given year. Each apples contains an average of four seeds. That one tree is capable of producing hundreds of trees! This is an economy of abundance, not scarcity. And it works for most everything that grows – beans, squash, okra, peppers, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, corn, etc.!!  

So if God and Mother Nature have co-conspired to provide human beings with an economy of abundance, why are there millions of people in the United States, and several hundred people in Oak Ridge, without access to healthy food? Worse than that, why are some of our neighbors going to bed hungry?

There are several reasons, but here are my top three:

1.    The cult of speed. Most Americans are over-worked and under-paid. Our schedules control us far more than we control our schedules! In the “cult of speed,” taking time to exploit the abundance we are provided in a garden feels more costly than simply grabbing the fish sticks from the freezer and opening a box of dehydrated mac-n-cheese.

Time gardening is time we could be doing something else, or so the argument would go. However, the research suggests that the “something else” we are doing, isn’t nearly as healthy for us as gardening, which multiplies the problem. Research reveals gardening is good for both body and soul and well worth the time we spend in the dirt.

2.     Lack of vision.  Let’s face it, it is very hard to imagine cutting back our city’s hunger problem with fresh vegetables in a community garden. Kids want those chicken nuggets, not fresh okra. One garden, or a dozen gardens, won’t get a kid eating more green. If we’re totally honest even as adults, the super-bacon cheeseburger from our favorite fast food chain sounds better to most of us too.

I love what Ron Finley discovered however in his gardening initiatives: “If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. When kids grow tomatoes, kids eat tomatoes.” It’s hard to imagine a healthy alternative, when the opposite is thrown in our faces every week. We’re bombarded with fast food commercials – nobody advertises fresh kale. Our minds and our senses are constantly bombarded with an “anti-visions” of fresh food and therefore it is difficult to see beyond them.

When we (especially we as churches) dream up solutions, they are often “fast” solutions, like food pantries filled with canned, and often overly-processed, vegetables. It’s easier for us and easier for our visitors to simply take a can off the shelf and send them on their way. In so doing, we unwittingly reinforce the “cult of speed.” Furthermore, we offer a “disconnect” between food and its source (work!) under a banner of benevolence; and though the content is different, the delivery system is very similar to that of a “fast-food” establishment.

3.     The free-loader problem. Anyone that’s managed a food garden knows that it is a thousand times easier to find people during the harvest season than it is the planting season. People would rather pick than plant – that’s just human nature.

Our tendency is to not want to put in any more sweat equity than we have to on things, especially when others aren’t doing the same. “If I help the needy, I would rather just write a check,” we say. “It’s easier to do a can food drive for the hungry.”

Welcome back to problem #1 – “the cult of speed.” Samuel Johnson once said, “What is easy is seldom excellent.” In fact, Nature again teaches us that “easy” often leads to atrophy -- from our own body’s circulatory system all the way to our Western ideals – easy leads to unfit solutions.

The garden teaches us an economy of abundance, but more than even that, I believe it teaches us patience. Lasting change is typically slow change – this is true in biology and spirituality. The best minds and hearts that I have ever known were as patient as they were exacting. I would be willing to bet that the best communities are too.

Community gardens have the potential to be both. I would like to return with a second part to these ideas, offering some practical ways they could be realized in Oak Ridge.

In a given week…

I sit faithfully by the hospital beds or holding the hands of a weeping wife or mother.

I walk among the headstones with grandchildren, searching for the calm, wrinkled hand that once gave the kind of sweet pinches upon their cheeks to calm their little fears.

The divorced father will sometimes walk with me along the riverside, fishing rod slung across his shoulder, and turn in a moment of vulnerability and weep.

The young addict phones at midnight as the shame rockets through his veins much faster than the heroin. He is ready to give up.

I watch the tears well up in the eyes of a college student, alone and afraid after giving her best to a man who took it for granted. We patiently wait for the right moment to depart, the dusk my family enjoys feels a world away.

I am there when the news comes… the word “cancer” falls quietly over the doctor’s lips. I see the tremor in his wife’s hands and hear the silence peel away the noise of the office.

She confesses the brokenness of solicitation in the corner of the busy church. The need to feed her children. The disgust she felt wrapped up in the lingerie of survival. I brush back the tear and we pray.

The phone rings at 2:00AM. Startled and still groggy, I attempt to talk the young boy into laying down the gun he points at his own head.

I stand up on any given Sunday and look out to the masses that gather. I see their faces. In almost all of them, I see even their homes. Nights I have spent, holding a glass of wine, asking about their photos on the walls or the books on their shelves.

I stand up on any given Sunday, somewhat afraid that what I say might be received as an accidental disclosure of a sin or a tragedy gone by.

I look intently into her eyes and read what she is unwilling to say. I see the regret etched in the wrinkles along his cheeks and know better than to ask. The shallow breaths are enough of an exchange between us.

From the podium, I see the way he wiggles when I speak of ethics. I watch his wife nestle close in forgiveness and see the wall between them of a forgiveness he will not give himself.

From the podium, I see the woman whose bruises have healed and whose blood still stains my sneakers from that time I pulled the man off her.

I stand and with every effort attempt to provide those in attendance with the memories that make them weep and with even more effort attempt to provide them with a hope they find hard to feel.

In any given week, my inbox is loaded and my cell phone bombarded with need. I am asked to absorb so much pain or to provide a wisdom I feel that I don’t have, or falsely supply in vanity or ego.

In any given week, I feel alone. No one ever asks how I am doing, nor do they know the weight that I bear. No one asks me to a casual conversation, or invites me to unpack my own pain.

And in all the confessions I attend, never once have I felt a place close enough to confess myself.

With all the deaths and funerals I have overseen, there’s never a question regarding the things inside me that die and are buried with each one.

My tears are always shed alone and there is but one who knows of them.

I have learned and come to accept that a clergyman is a pain sponge. That wringing out the pain is an act of heroism and stamina. And that the more I can squeeze out of me, the better prepared I am to absorb next week’s delivery.

It’s a road I don’t have to walk alone, despite the many hours I chose to. The man who absorbed the world’s pain is with me. And what he takes from me, he owns completely.

I’ve found in any given week, I have to find the will to let go. And in the darkest hours, he calls me and takes the complied grief from my hands.

In any given week, I know the darkness is losing because I take from many and I am absorbed by one.