A Rainbow Neighbourhood

One of the strange ironies of my new life in the country is that my circle of friends out here is much more diverse than it was back in the big city. All our city friends fit in more or less with the granola belt of Winnipeg where we lived. Out here, I count as friends a family preparing for the end of oil, a young fella who burns up the gravel in his monster truck, an organic farmer, a cropduster pilot, a homophobic church granny and two country mamas who have promised to be wife and wife until the end. Each one dear to me in their own way.

Somehow, "tolerance" is not nearly enough to describe either my feelings for these folks or to describe an ethic by which this checkered neighbourhood can move toward what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the beloved community." Tolerance is a rather thin value that comes out of a progressive liberal idea of freedom: Freedom as the right to be left alone. Hardly a community-building vision.

No, we need something else to stir us to neighbourliness. Against the by now well-worn warning that peace is best kept by leaving religion out of things, I am turning to Jesus: "Love thy neighbour as thyself" seems a good starting point. And maybe that's all that needs to be said. That teaching alone takes a lifetime to live into.

But there's more. As a Christian, I recall that the when the Living Truth showed up in person among us, the knives were soon out, in the name of religious purity and state security. That should give me great pause to condemn anyone whose truth looks a little different from mine, particularly if they are in a minority position.

I am discovering that the more my identity is in Christ, the less I need my identity to be propped up and reflected back to me by others who affirm my particular notions and commitments. The more I am in Christ, the more I am free to love others as they are, because I have discovered myself as loved as I am.

Jesus risked his own obliteration in his gift of himself to the world, so I don't see why I should insist my friends recognize Jesus. (By which I could mean that I might wish I could make my homophobic friends recognize the Christ in their persecuted gay neighbour, just as I might wish I could make my antireligious friends recognize the good news of Jesus' gospel.) Before any of that, I hope that in our interactions my friends are able to recognize love.

It really is a rainbow neighbourhood out here, with beauty in every colour. I can't say how all the pieces fit. I don't know how to articulate the deep unity I sense that goes way beyond unanimity.

I do know that all any of us really want is to be loved. Compare that to tolerance. Who of us really wants to be "tolerated"?

Discovered, Uncovered.

Luke 22:54-62

I have often wished to be discovered. I see now that this is not at all what I want. What I want is for a certain projection of myself to be bought and sold in the marketplace, while the truth about my betrayals, my weaknesses, my ugly selfishness remains safely undisturbed.

What power, what love, what forgiveness did Peter encounter that he could lay bare the story of his cowardice?

What successor of Peter has told such a story about himself since?

While Pope Benedict is still busily trying to shore up orthodoxy, the fires of scandal, of sexual abuse, of high level corruption continue to drive the faithful away in rage and disgust.

What we need now more than a rock-solid confession of the faith is a whole-hearted confession of our faithlessness.

GMO's, Science, and the Burden of Proof

Environmentalist Mark Lynas has created big waves among foodies recently by making an about-face on genetically modified foods (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obC2TwtJhuI).

He got to a point where he noted a discrepancy between his activism on climate change, where he was arguing that the broad scientific consensus ought not be ignored, and his activism on GMO food, where he was part of a group that held the broad scientific consensus on the safety of GMO's in deep suspicion. He begin to see the same insularity and circularity in the anti-GMO arguments that he saw among climate change sceptics.

I have not followed the GMO debates closely, but would generally be suspicious of these “Frankenfoods,” a phrase Lynas himself once helped to coin. But I found Lynas' readiness to change his mind based on the evidence admirable. The intellectual rigour that does not allow scientists to pick and choose the results that suit their biases is something we should all aspire to.

Being doctrinaire about GMO food may be precluding some valuable advances. For example, I know that Wes Jackson of the Land Institute has speculated whether GM methods could help in the quest for perennial strains of grain crops. The heavy reliance on annual crops which have to be tilled under every single year has long been a detriment to agricultural soils. Nature keeps the ground covered. Could GM help us do that, and still let us eat grains?

But as little as I know about the GMO science, I feel able to draw some distinctions between climate science and GMO science. I think one can argue that they ask different kinds of questions.

What is the question that climate science has been trying to answer? The questions, as I have understood them, are:

1. Is the world's climate changing?
2. Is there a link between human-caused emissions of so-called greenhouse gases and this change?

The evidence, as it has come in from many independent studies across the globe, has been overwhelmingly weighted to answer these two questions in the affirmative.

What is the question the GMO science has been trying to answer? The question has been, are GMO's safe? It strikes me right off the bat that this is a much broader question than the two questions above. Do we mean by this, “Will humans get noticably sick if they eat GMO food?” If so, I can imagine that this question could be answered in the negative, and still leave out many other questions of safety.

The pattern of agricultural research and development has generally been to propose narrow solutions to narrow problems (e.g. profitability, productivity, pest control) and to review the results in a context that excludes broader factors of health: e.g. Soil erosion, nutrient run-off, watershed pollution, biodiversity depletion, rural depopulation, etc.) If the research on GMO's was broad enough in scope to take all such vital factors into consideration, it would be a first in “agri-tech.”

As arduous and massive as the research efforts on climate science have been, it seems to me that the burden of proof for establishing that a human activity is causing harm in the natural world is orders of magnitude smaller than the burden of proof for establishing that a human activity is not causing harm in the natural world. We live in a world that is deeply complex and interconnected. The fact that we lack the scientific methodology to trace how the wingbeat of a butterfly can be the beginning of a hurricane does not make this inherited wisdom saying untrue.

A case in point: Colony collapse disorder - the problem of honey bees disappearing by the millions and never returning to their hives - remains a complex and so far unsolved problem. If unmitigated, it threatens around 40% of the world's food crops, which rely on bee pollination. This dire problem is almost certainly multi-factorial. The broad application of insecticides and the disruptive annual transportation of 3/4 of the US honeybee population in and out of the monocultured almond groves of California are among the suspected stressors, but GMO's have not been ruled out. Studies point to sublethal effects on honeybees from exposure to GMO pollen, affecting feeding and learning behaviours. Not enough to kill a bee perhaps, but quite possibly enough to affect colony viability. It begs the question, what is meant by “safe?”

In this multi-pronged attack from a variety of known, suspected and unknown stressors, how large or small of a factor is GMO in colony collapse disorder? This would be difficult enough to say. To say with any confidence that GMO's are not at all a factor in this problem seems very premature. Science admits we do not fully understand the causes. How then can we already rule out GMO as a suspect?

Then there are other questions, which science does not ask. Questions like: Does GMO food overly concentrate the control of the world's food system in the hands of a few multi-nationals? How is it eroding local self-determination, locally adapted foodways, local culture? Are these losses worth the gains? Are we helping or hurting poor farmers by flooding markets with another cheap food that requires high technology and very few farmers? These are not scientific, but moral questions. No doubt there are sciences that can furnish us with data that could make our moral wrestling well-informed, but the wrestling remains to be done, in the arenas of culture and conscience. The laboratories cannot tell us everything we need to know.

To conclude with Mark Lynas that the debate on GMO foods is “over” seems to me to reduce that debate to the narrowest of questions. While there may be some sense in which GMO's have been scientifically demonstrated to be “safe,” they may yet prove to be harmful to much that is rightly held dear.

Newness of Life

As of this September, I'm carrying a column in Purpose Magazine - sort of a Mennonite Guidepost -the kind of thing you'd find on the coffee table or in the bathroom of a nice Mennonite home. You can check it out at MennoMedia.org if you're interested.

The good folks at Purpose said I could post articles here once they were out in print. This one was under the theme of "redemption":

Newness of Life

I've been to visit the Orthodox Mennonites a few times now. They fascinate and compel me, these "plain folk."

The barn-raising I came out for still stands as the deepest sense of "we" that this recovering member of a "me" generation has yet to encounter. It had all the team spirit, the physical strain, the risk of injury, the strategy, and the bravery of a major sports event--that last unitive sacrament of my culture--without any of the aggression; we were profoundly together, without being against anyone else.

 On each visit, their minister takes pains to explain to me that the point of using horse and buggy or hand tools or wearing plain clothes is not those disciplines in themselves, but to "walk in newness of life." Funny, that this fellow with the big salt-and-pepper beard, the quaint Germanic accent, the house, clothes and mannerisms of yesteryear should commend his way of life to me as a way of pursuing "newness."

In my culture, there are endless products and services aimed at selling me that elusive sense of newness, of being reborn: the home renovation, the makeover, the Go Away to Discover Myself trip--all ways of achieving "the new you." In my case, I got suckered trying to reinvent myself by spending thousands of dollars on a triple set of caps and gowns, if you know what I mean.

But what is it that truly frees us to walk in newness of life? The Orthodox Mennonites have decided that beyond sharing ideas and words, Christ-followers need to share life. They fear that the individualized Christian is like the seed sown among the thorns: "The cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing." I fear I have little evidence to counter them.

When I get back in the car and drive away from the horse and buggy folk, I'm left asking myself: How do the technologies I use (or don't), or the standards I aspire to (or disregard), facilitate my walking in newness of life? How do they build up or weaken the "beloved community?" What bodily work is spiritually healing? And perhaps most importantly, am I asking these questions and choosing my disciplines alone, or with soul friends?

Unequal Yokes

Well, the garlic is planted, the pigs are in the freezer and the tomato cages are finally pulled and stacked aside (Thank you, Jenn!). Darkness is falls fast these days; the land is falling asleep. Action gives way to reflection. At last.

I don't know if anyone out there has missed my writing. I have. The process, I mean. It's a more careful way to think.

So, as promised, about the oxen:

At my last oxen-related post, I had one sweetie-pie of a calf named Oscar. By now I have a team of two junior oxen, selected out of a group of four candidate bull calves we tried out this summer. They take a yoke, stop and go and turn when I ask, and pull around a small load on a little sled. They are calm and friendly and really do seem to try their best for me.

It's still mostly fun and games. But the working relationship is real, and every time we do a drill, I'm a little closer to really counting on my boys, Oscar and Ben. I can already see them being a big help hauling firewood out of the bush this winter .

I have to say I'm surprised how natural it has felt to start working with the team. This is a confession as much as it is a boast. This summer I learned that I really do like to be the boss. The word boss, as I have learned, shares its roots with the verb "to beat" originally referring to the one who has the right to give subordinates a beating.

As a stay-at-home Dad of two precocious girls who have learned well to question authority, I have moments when I am wistful for a Father Knows Best household. It would be a lot easier. As a Jesus-disciple, I try to be a servant rather than an overlord in my family and my politics. My efforts are consistently clumsy and at odds with my dominant instincts. But Oscar and Ben don't understand servant-leadership, so with them I am unequivocally the Boss. With animals that will grow to be 2400lbs each, I have to demand absolute respect for my authority. And this is the interesting thing. Although I have been culturally conditioned not to, I found that I knew exactly how to be that kind of guy. What's more, I like being that guy.

I reflected often this summer on the stories of corporal discipline I remember hearing from my mother. She knew her father as a man of great tenderness and love, but she also feared his big hands. There were lines that were not to be crossed, and a price she would pay with her heiny if she did.

That's how I was with my boys. I bottle-fed them, I led them by green pastures, I rubbed and scratched and spoke affectionately to them, but when they didn't listen to commands, I hit them with a stick. Sometimes hard. Sometimes in the face. Just enough to let them know that my commands were non-negotiable, and then when they obeyed, back to the soothing and the petting and the praising. James Dobson would have loved it.

And they got it. The commands were simple and consistent, and introduced with physical cues easily intuited by non-verbal creatures (follow but do not pass your dominant animal; move away from taps and prods; stop if there's a stick in front of your face). And they didn't hold the beatings against me. I remember how grateful I felt when they didn't pull away from my affections after the first time I really had to let them have it. But then I shouldn't have been surprised. I only have to look at Helen and Reba, our two beef cows. Helen used to ram her huge head mercilessly into Reba's side in disputes over prime hay, then later the two would be lavishly licking one another's fur. Today, Reba is dominant and uses her horns to keep everyone else in the herd in line.

Dominance relationships established and maintained through force are the most natural thing in the world. And unlike Christian mutually submitting relationships, I know instinctively how they work. I know intuitively, genetically, how fathers kept families together with a firm hand. I know how kings held kingdoms. I know how masters kept slaves. And I know how a Father, a King or a Master could be at the same time potent and benevolent. It's a queasy thought for a liberal.

The irony is that I have become a "boss" on a quest for a humbler, more peacable way to live on the earth. I'm reading a book right now called The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude by Andrew Nikiforuk. Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor: the oil economy is as morally problematic for us today the slave economy was for our ancestors, and calls for a new global Abolition Movement. He's spot on.  There are plunderous wars, ruinous pollution and corrupting politics all down the supply line of my oil addiction. I want to work with oxen because I desperately want to kick my oil dealer out of my food system, at least.

So have I just traded in one level of violence for another? Me beating animals with sticks instead of US troops kicking in Iraqi doors for my energy requirements?

Well, I don't know. I really do love my boys. There may be army chaplains out there who are counselling Christian soldiers through some convoluted this-is-how-we-love-our-enemy psychology, but I'd be ready to argue that such love is perversely disengenuous, while what I feel for my oxen is not. It is love of an older order. Spare the rod and spoil the ox, as it were. Is there is a place for such relationships even on the road to new order peaceable kingdom relations, where we learn, as the Bible says, to "break every yoke"? Strangely, I think so.

in the furnace of this afternoon

These are hot days. The earth cracks open in a prayer for rain. Every day the wounds gape a little wider. Sometimes deprivation ensures that when the blessing comes, it will reach the deep, dark places inside us. Sometimes it engenders a desperate neediness, a greedy draining of the blessing that stops even a drop of goodness from spilling over us to run back to the river. These are the two parables the earth confesses under my feet while I scythe hay in the furnace of this afternoon. I need them both.

It is to me an unfortunate irony that after hundreds of years of the prophets tying drought to holy judgement that today, in a climate crisis for which we are demonstrably to blame, we have lost the imagination to hear God's word in this drought, telling us some things we'd rather not hear about ourselves. That so many of my co-religionists are at the forefront of denying the signs of the times is painfully sad.

At least it has gotten oppressively hot enough that the city newscasters no longer broadcast an outlook of uninterrupted sunshine as if it were a proclamation of good news.

My Boy Oscar

Here's a baby picture of Oscar, shortly after he got here in mid April. One half Milking Shorthorn, one quarter Brown Swiss, one eighth Jersey, one eighth Holstein, all pretty boy bull calf.

I couldn't say if that feeling welling up inside me was due to his gorgeous dark eyes, or the thought that finally, I was beholding a way of farming that would not give me that sick little feeling every time it ran out of fuel.

More to come.