The World Needs Me to Farm

For two summers in college I worked as a wilderness canoe guide. I led folks across vast, mysterious lakes and through ancient, hidden portages. I invited them into participation with the long and steady wilderness rhythms of silence and song, stillness and tumult, listening and response—what Sigurd Olson has called the "singing wilderness"; what I call the "liturgy of creation."

Many of us have experienced this "liturgy of creation" in majestic places like the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, and the Boundary Water. But creation is also singing on farms across rural Iowa. And I have heard it there.

Few have. And of those who have, fewer yet comprehend. On farms the song gets easily confused with other noises. The clatter of "pragmatism," "efficiency," and "economies of scale." As if the first heads of asparagus shooting through the snow on an early Spring day were but another commodity or a good source for healthy calories.

James K. A. Smith has argued that participation in a community’s framework of embedded practices implicitly orients us toward what that community desires as its ultimate end. He calls these embedded communal practices "liturgies." As such, the "liturgy of creation" is oriented towards the ultimate end of the glory of God (Psalm 19, Colossian 1:16). And the elements of this liturgy that are daily practiced across my farm are profoundly articulate in their song. The world needs me to farm because the world needs places where this song can be heartily sung by an expanding chorus of voices.

Phillip Jensen and his family grow several acres of vegetables for the CSA on a farm that they started in rural Iowa, and have a herd of Red Wattle hogs, a flock of hens, and a milk cow.