Roots of Justice

by Jonathan McRay
Delivered on 7/22/18

-Moment of silence to honor the land, the indigenous people, and those who have been enslaved here

My mother’s father grew up in a farming family. Not one that farmed for much money, but one that raised hogs and grew gardens on rented land. After my grandfather grew up, his parents bought land and built their house with their hands. Just before I was born, my great-grandfather was crushed by his tractor on a steep hillside. Years later my great-grandmother sold the farm to divide the inheritance money between her two children. I don’t think my granddad ever fully recovered from losing his dream of farming that land. But a decade ago he and my grandmother bought land, where he grew a large garden in the late evenings after work and on the weekends. Earlier this summer, they finally moved out there.

My grandfather doesn’t speak much, mostly humming and rubbing his hands together, but when asked why he plants a garden every year despite limited time and old age, he replied, “I try to stop, but every spring the soil sings to me.”

I have several bookshelves devoted to an agricultural library and none of those books say why they do what they do with half of my grandfather’s eloquence. Few of these authors introduce their practical guides with an emotional invitation to see what they love about their land. A language of sustainable agriculture must be informed by emotion, a feeling in the body as much as, if not more than, philosophical or scientific thoughts. I want a vision of agriculture that, like my grandfather, trusts that the soil does indeed sing in the spring.

I want this because the most innovative techniques of “carbon farming” or “regenerative agriculture,” or for that matter restorative justice, won’t save us if we’re not cultivating reverence for the world. They won’t save us because they won’t last without reverent affection that supports them beyond burnout. I didn’t grow up farming, so I’ve needed handbooks and workshops about practices for sustaining our soil, but how about practices for sustaining these practices? What about ongoing steps for cultivating affection?

I suppose I’m trying to say that sustainable agriculture and culture can only be sustained by practices that might best be called spiritual. Now, in the past I’ve been pretty allergic to that word and the wispy ways I’ve seen it tossed around. But I’m not talking about otherworldly or unworldly beliefs. I’m describing a way of experiencing this world: the soils that grow our food, the water we drink, the harvests we eat, the relationships we depend on as gifts of life. We are called to care for these gifts. By spirit, I really mean what animates us, inspires us, keeps us going, like a deep breath or a cool wind. How do we sustain our spirit? I care about this spirit as a grower who plants trees and sows seeds, as a facilitator who tries to make the energy of conflict flow as easily as possible. 

Pierre Rabhi helps me make this point. He’s a French Algerian farmer who wrote a short novel with a wonderful title: As in the Heart, So in the Earth: Reversing the Desertification of the Soul and the Soil. He tells a story about how industrial development eroded the culture and ecology of a fictional North African village, and the people’s attempts to revive their traditional wisdom with help from modern agroecology. Rabhi insists that we can’t just learn the visible material ways in which the earth sustains us; we’re far too “hypnotized by a science that itself is becoming more and more enslaved to the profit motive.” He believes, and I’ll quote,

that only the dimension of the sacred can provide a measure of the awesomeness of our responsibility. By sacred I mean a sense of humility in which gratitude, knowledge, wonder, respect, and mystery all come together to inspire and enlighten our actions, transforming us into beings who are truly present in the world . . .

We know by reason, but we also know by our senses, our imagination, our intuition, our memory, and our emotions. We know by wonder and gratitude and respect.

Michelle Alexander said something remarkably similar. Alexander wrote The New Jim Crow, documenting how segregation didn’t end but is undercover in our judicial and prison systems, especially with the new name mass incarceration: the incredible escalation of imprisonment, an increase of 500%, over the last thirty years. Alexander once described herself as a liberal civil rights attorney who believed that justice is only achieved through lawsuits and legal reform. But she’s now a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, even though she had little religious upbringing. She explained her decision because of a change in her way of knowing:

I don’t view mass incarceration as just a problem of politics or policy, I view it as a profound moral and spiritual crisis as well. I think that racial justice in this country will remain a distant dream as long as we think that it can be achieved simply through rational policy discussions. If we take a purely technocratic approach to these issues and strip them of their moral and spiritual dimensions, I think we’ll just keep tinkering and tinkering and fail to realize that all of these issues really have more to do with who we are individually and collectively, and what we believe we owe one another, and how we ought to treat one another as human beings.

Doing justice and tending land aren’t simply technical tweaks or piecemeal policies, but shapeshifting stories and practices about what we are for, what we love, and how we want to live together. We search for justice because of our love for living things: tending to their needs, holding ourselves accountable to their healing, and making our relationships as right as possible so everyone can be fully and wholly themselves. That’s how I define restorative justice.

In light of this, I went foraging through the thickets and groves of Christianity, my inherited religious tradition, to see what might be growing there. Could my heritage teach me this shapeshifting way of knowing? I wanted to look first into what had been culturally given to me instead of cherrypicking from someone else’s orchard. I’m looking for ways to cultivate affection and sustain my spirit for wonder, gratitude, and respect.

In my haphazard searching, I remembered that the Apostle Paul offered signs of the spirit in action. He called those signs fruit, the produce of the spirit, and he gave the fruit names: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I’d been searching for tenets for a sustainable culture and agriculture, and maybe here they were. They’re even appropriately called fruit! I now say them out loud each morning, not as standards to achieve but as practices to form relationships with what I care about. Or maybe they are in fact fruit: the result of growth and the seed for more growth. They’re what we sow in order to grow and plant again. And we aren’t going to reap what we don’t sow. We harvest the fruit because we planted its seeds.

We are now, and have been for a long time, seeing the fruit of our dominant agricultural and cultural spirit. The spirit and systems that erode and deplete and pollute the earth are the same ones that disproportionately imprison people of color and displace communities from their homes. This is monoculture and mass incarceration: extraction of soil, water, people, and debt; disconnection of cycles of nutrients and healing; waste of energy, money, and opportunities; enslavement of seeds, workers and, constitutionally, of prisoners; extermination of plants, bugs, and people that are labeled pests; and uniform solutions to complex and contextual relationships. This spirit doesn’t grow from wonder, gratitude, and respect. It comes from violence and waste, and as adrienne maree brown tells us, “What you pay attention to grows.”

Instead of the bottom-line of profit and punishment, can we ground our justice and our farming in love? My friend Cornelius and I are trying to do this. We cultivate a forest farm along the worn-out but resilient banks of Blacks Run. In the nursery, we grow beautiful and useful trees and other plants for food, fuel, medicine, mulch, fodder, carbon converting, air conditioning, soil building, water healing, and beauty. We tell people our work – farming like the forest, healing our watershed, and the practice of restorative justice – is rooted in love and living soil.

With all that said, I’d like to share fruit for a sustainable spirit, signs for a loving land care, where the roots of justice grow. Lists like this are of course no substitute for felt sense and lived experience. I offer this list as a guide. Or maybe, I offer this prayer as a spiritual discipline for attuning to the land we care for.

Love is the nurturing care for growth. Caring for means caring about and not wanting to harm the individual or the whole. Tending depends on tender love, in relationships with people and with the land. It also depends on fierce love that gets angry when needed to protect against violence and waste. If we do not love the place and its creatures, then we will not be the ones to offer sustaining solutions. We won’t sustain what we don’t love.

Joy is the passionate celebration of living things. It finds profound pleasure, and even humor, in the art of caring for the earth, caring for people, and sharing the surplus. Joy is the experience of love and begins to confuse work and play. Without joy, nothing is very satisfying. Joyful caretakers might even start blurting out words like “delight” without blushing.

Peace is the moving rhythm of seasonal cycles. Instead of fighting, it’s content to go with the flow of the place, making peace with land by ceasing all warfare language and activity; keeping the peace of the place by maintaining order, of nutrient and water and carbon cycles, energy flows, and the soil food web; and keeping the peace of the people by setting limits to growth, by repairing what can be made right, and redistributing access to wealth and land so people can continue caring.

Patience is the attentive watchfulness for ripe moments. It’s not a bored or complacent composure. Patience prepares for the ripeness of the season, both with crops and with change. Forcing the earth or the community ahead of their readiness only leads to bitterness, but it does everything within its power to cultivate the conditions we need. Patience doesn’t control the weather or social climate, because it can’t, but it endures and persists by strongly and actively shaping for the right time when the conditions we need are slow in coming. Patience gives up perfectionism in favor of timely growth, rotations of rest, and deep committed roots.

Kindness is the tender treatment that adapts to our kin. It treats everything in kind, not treating everything the same way, but in keeping with common kinds, true to their nature. Kindness respects our kinship with and our likeness to other living creatures and their right to be fully themselves. Our care imagines what our soils, plants, and animals might feel like, because we know what it feels like to be grounded, to grow towards light and warmth, and to be hungry and fed. Kindness imagines those locked up, kicked out, mistreated, and ignored feel these ways too. The land and its creatures are friends, and kindness treats them that way.

Goodness is the confident affirmation of the inherent blessedness of life. It confirms the dignity of living things. This place where we live and work is good as itself. Not from our engineering, not because of cheap real estate values, but as a place that is part of the earth. Plant and build and work in ways that praise this goodness and make it visible. Growth is good enough and, as a farmer friend often said, “Good enough is good enough.”

Faithfulness is the ongoing commitment to cultivation and care. It commits to the place and trusts in the desire for life to grow itself. It’s devoted to cycles and flows of life, loyal to loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, and good ways of relating. This care is also true to its word: not deceptive or misleading in what it does or grows or who actually does the work. Faithfulness is reliable; as much as it’s up to itself, it’s not going anywhere because it’s given itself over in trust.

Gentleness is the soft touch that respects the goodness of all kinds. It looks for practices that nurture instead of control. It’s compassionate toward limitations and makes changes gradually so that the land preserves the ability to heal itself. Show tenderness to the growth of soil and the flow of water, to our working bodies and the bodies of others working with us. Gentleness is considerate, meaning both thoughtful and empathic. For the sake of care, it imagines how its actions might be felt. Everything responds to good treatment.

Self-control is the honoring ability to make decisions for our lives and land. It doesn’t try to make a killing; it tries to make a living by having enough. Another kind of self-control is the power to determine our lives, from saving seeds to resisting toxic wastes dumped near our homes to participating in processes to repair harm and injustice. Self-control can be faithful to land because the caretakers are empowered to stay there, and it insists that those who do the work own the land and benefit from its abundance. This care honors migrant workers by giving ownership to the caretakers that actually do the work but are denied the title of farmer. It recognizes that people of all colors, but especially black and brown and native ones, have been forced from their land. Self-control repairs the violence and theft as much as possible by telling the truth and advocating for repaying what’s owed. Self-control protects loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, and gentle ways of relating.

The Apostle Paul said there’s no law against such things. But he was wrong. The laws of our society often spoil these fruits by expecting us to be satisfied with and endorse institutions that prevent our abilities to heal. This spirit must be personal, but it must also be economic and therefore cultural. What we practice within ourselves scales up, and what’s scaled up shapes what we can practice. I’m advocating for a loving land care from which restorative justice can grow. As I see them, the fruit of the spirit are practices for and evidence of a land care that is loving and sustainable, and here these words are bred close to synonyms. That might actually be the best way to summarize what I’m saying. Love and sustainability become synonyms when we know every spring the soil sings and we grow as a harmony.

After all, we will be known by our fruit.