Something radical has changed within me. Waking up in the morning with a sermon in my head has been weird; so was learning to listen to the people’s stories with one ear and to God’s story with the other during pastoral visitations; but that’s not it. Considering my fairly recent conversion, it feels strange to take pleasure in slipping into my alb on Sunday mornings or sporting a more formal wardrobe on a daily basis so that I, a church intern, would not be caught off-guard by some parishioner in my dirty jeans and T’s. But that’s not it either. Something radical has changed so deep within in me that I am no longer able to look back at the things I know oh-so-well and view them the same way I did before.
Having spent nearly a year away from my native country in an environment soaked with theology, ethics, apologetics and Biblical studies and dripping with liturgically informed, historically grounded, authority-in-the-field supported and poignantly articulated opinions, I have come out a changed person. Like an exile by the rivers of
Babylon, I had to re-think my understanding of God as I saw Him leave the temple I had constructed for Him in my homeland. I have rammed my head into some complex theological issues and even more complex solutions proposed by leading theologians. The brain concussions that resulted from these collisions have often left me in a spiritual vertigo out of which I was supposed to construct a systematic theology of sorts. My world was shaken up, whirling and swerving within the safe walls of the divinity school.
Now, that change that I am about to describe did not occur exactly in the divinity school hallways or classrooms, though they were a part of it. My spiritual “aha’s” happened in reaction to the lectures and conversations that filled those spaces, but also as I was running away from them. For one or the other reason, I just do not handle people who can combine Wendell Berry, Thomas Aquinas and a Cappadocian father into one sentence to make a logical statement too well. While I might appreciate their theological genius, a down-to-earth part of me wants to challenge them and ask them to show their hands and their side so that I might see their wounds inflicted by living out that profound idea in the world. Since such behavior is not considered friendly or socially acceptable, I tend to run away from these conversations and hide in a small rural church called Cedar Grove UMC, my field education placement.
It is this church and this community that I must thank for converting my heathen vision of the earth and the land into the one of Christ. Somehow, when we were breaking the bread together at the altar and in their homes, when we were sharing the cup of salvation in the sanctuary of the church and in the Holy of Holies of our lives, these people managed to open my eyes to see that it does matter where and how the wheat for that bread was grown and who and for how much pressed these grapes to make the juice for Sunday morning communion. I have come to witness the very finest examples of how ecology and theology co-inhabit the lives of devout farming theologians and I have been convinced.
Maybe due to too few years I have been a Christian, or the difference in theological emphases of the different denominations that happened to shape me during that short time, the concern for the wellbeing of the earth and those who work it managed to slip by me. Surely, I did know people who were pro-active in advocating their little “green” thing, but since my encounters with the pro-nature advocates mostly included hippie-dopie-ying-yangy-mother-earthy types with pantheistic understanding of the world, I did not see how that piece could fit into my newly acquired puzzle of Christian worldview. I must give credit to those divinity school professors who opened my eyes to see the importance of conserving the resources, caring for the land, eating locally, farming organically, and above all, gave me a theological lens to view God’s gift of land, but I just needed to taste and see it for myself.
And what I saw was good. Here in Cedar Grove, the good earth, once scarred and poisoned, was being given its Sabbaths and was slowly resurrecting to new life. The community built around the tradition of farming was re-imaging the ways to be faithful and fruitful in their lives when tobacco was no longer an option. The community garden, six months ago only a vision, was sprouting and bringing forth the abundance of food that could be shared with the hungry while at the same time re-orienting its tenders to acknowledge the earth as God’s way of providing spiritual and nutritional nourishment for God’s people.
Yet, there is some built-in compass in me that insistently points to a little blob on the map called “Lithuania” and forces me to ask the hard questions about how that “good” which I saw, tasted, touched, smelled, and heard will translate into the reality of the people that I am a part of. How can that sense of community built around God’s good earth and worshipfully tending it together be re-created in a unique and culturally appropriate way back home?
My heart flutters when I think about how God’s kingdom can come one step closer or God’s will be done on earth through supporting local organic agriculture, through creating communities where hunger is not an option, through shaping an alternative vision of faithful community in rural areas. Yet, the reality to which God is calling me is both radically different from this utopia and desperately needy of one.
God is calling me to minister in the land of farms and forests, rolling sandy hills and plains of fertile black dirt. God is calling me to serve the people who just by looking over their shoulder can see their parents and grandparents tilling the land with a horse-drawn plow; who, if they look really closely, can still see the black-green markings from weeding the greenhouse on their hands. God is calling me to live among the people whose rhythm of life through generations has been determined by the cycle of nature and work surrounding the land. God is calling me to come back to the country where the first piece of literature in the native language of the people was a Lithuanian version of Hesiod’s “Works and Days,” an ode to the life of a land-tilling peasant.
And yet, God is calling me to the place where over the fifty years of Soviet oppression the practices and the values of a farming community were suppressed and that void was gradually filled with alcohol and abuse. The sandy rolling hills and the fertile black plains were collectivized, forcibly snatched from the hands that lovingly tended them for centuries and turned into the possession of the state that had to meet the goals of a five year plan economy. The emerald green forests of curly pine trees, white-trunk birches and broad-shouldered oaks became resources to be utilized for the purposes of heavy industry so that the glorious mother state could win the economic race against the abominable West. The folk that once knew how to rely on the earth for sustenance through wars, oppressions, revolutions and other man-caused disasters were forced to depend on the state to determine the sources of their livelihood.
Along with the land, the shared practices and virtues that were passed along from generation to generation through common back-breaking labor in the fields and in the barns were embezzled. The sense of township which arose from farming together, from the communal narratives that carved out a place under the Sun for each member of the village family, and from one’s relationship to the land and the natural world were violently destroyed and erased. Instead, a surrogate community of collective farms, compulsory celebrations and parades, and an imposed narrative of the mother state and deified political leaders was introduced.
The community was the first, but not the only virtue to be done away with. The practices and the wisdom of self-sustaining farming that involved the optimal use of the land and recycling of all farm waste, planting crops that naturally flourished on the particular soil while preserving it, plowing with a light plow which only turned over the fertile layer of the ground without eroding it were replaced with pesticide-herbicide laden industrial farming that paid little attention to erosion, pollution or communal losses. The generation of my parents still smiles and cries at the same time when Khrushchev’s corns are brought up.
After his visit to the United States, impressed with vast plains of corn and the versatility of the crop, the party secretary ordered the majority of the fields in the
Soviet Union to be sowed over with corn. Since most of the traditional agricultural practices had been eliminated, the food production in the
Soviet Union did not amount to even a half of what it used to be. Meanwhile, the growing population in the cities demanded more and more food. Corn, a cheap and easy to grow source of carbohydrates, should have been the perfect solution and helped the Soviet Union to catch up with and even supersede the
US. If there is one crop, however, that never did well on the Lithuanian soil and in Lithuanian climate, Khrushchev got his finger on it. Most of the corn that was planted went to waste or, at best, to silos. Whatever little was determined to be suitable for food industry was turned into a soggy, tasteless mass formed to look like bread that rolled around one’s mouth refusing to slide down the throat into an empty stomach. People ate it only because nothing else was available.
The fifteen years after the fall of
Soviet Union brought little hope for most of the farming people. While some have successfully decoded the demands of the market economy and adapted their farming methods and crops to fill the niche in the food production chain, others are struggling to make it from month to month. Unemployment, fierce competition with Western greenhouses and orchards, crop prices that mock the very lives and labor of the land owners, and despair that hangs low over the rural areas define their daily existence. Even the traditional crops like sugar beets and wheat are threatened by the surge of low-priced foreign products. The agricultural regulations of the European Union molded to benefit large industries and corporations are squeezing the landowners tighter and tighter forcing many to sell their farms to housing developers or major land owners and leave their native soil for the work in the city or even foreign countries. Others try to find their way to survival by wandering the maze of subsidies and grants.
This is the land that God is calling me to; this is the people to whom God is sending me to bring the Good News. If I claim that the Spirit of God is upon me anointing me to bring the Good News to the poor, I immediately imply that the Spirit is also driving me to preach and teach in the Lithuanian countryside, to the people whose hands are soiled with dirt, whose shirts are soaked with sweat, whose spouse is trying to drown the uncertainty of tomorrow in the bottle of moonshine, whose children have left home for the city without any intent to come back… If I claim that the land is God’s way of communing with humanity, that God created the earth and said that it was good and charged humans with a responsibility to tend it, I cannot avoid returning to my people to speak of the river of God that brings healing to the poisoned and scarred land, that offers new life even to the dead seas, that restores the dignity of the crushed. I cannot escape my calling to be a prophet with dirty fingernails and handfuls of dirt standing on the soil soaked with spring rain and praying together with my people for God’s blessings over the harvest.
Moreover, God is calling me to go to the city, to go to my
Nineveh, and to call people to repentance from complacency and mindless investment into the structures that oppress their farming relatives. God is calling me to wander the streets and the shopping malls proclaiming the year of jubilee and freedom from spending the money on the goods that even after they have been transported for hundreds and thousands of miles, have changed several hands and had every possible tax added still cost cheaper than the local products. God is calling me to plead on the behalf of those who cannot make their living because their brothers and sisters can have a choice of ten different kinds of milk or bread in the grocery store. God is calling me to preach about the dignity and the sanctity of our bodies and the importance of nourishing them in the way that glorifies the Giver of every good and perfect gift instead of satisfying every whim or craving with easily accessible imported nothings. God is calling me to work for the sake of those who cannot afford to make those choices just because a ten cent difference for a kilo of apples determines their ability to afford any fruit at all.
God’s call to proclaim jubilee economics and to re-member the farming communities is not my personal call; it is a call that sounds over the whole Lithuanian church, a call that rolls over the hills, tolls from the belfries of gothic cathedrals, echoes through the forests, rattles down the cobblestone streets, flows with the rivers, blows in the breeze, grows with the wheat and the sugar beets, speaks through the stories of the old and cries out from the voices of the young.
This transformed vision of my land upon which I grew up is a strange gift that two communities,
Duke
Divinity
School and Cedar Grove, somewhat unknowingly have given me. One has driven me out of the university walls into the countryside and the other has forced me to come back to Wendell Berry, Thomas Aquinas and the Cappadocian fathers with new eyes. Somewhere in the midst of that going back and forth my vision has been converted and corrected. No longer can I watch a news report on the farmers blocking the roads to get the government’s attention to the prices set for their produce and write it off as the farmers’ inability to produce marketable goods. No longer can I pretend that ecology can be attended to only when country’s economy is strong enough to afford it. No longer can I cheat myself into believing that the money I spend on my daily groceries amounts to so little in the country’s economy that no one will notice the difference. Something radical has changed within me.
Washington, D.C., was an old dream of mine. From there it made sense to travel to NYC where my aunt lives. And since I am looking at doctoral programs in Boston University, I went up there too. Here is a brief account of my wanderings.
