Genesis Growers

I love broccoli and spinach. At about this time last year, however, I realized how bored I was with my two favorite vegetables. I craved variety. I would do something extreme.

So I signed up with Genesis Growers, a community-supported agriculture program run by Farmer Vicki Westerhoff.

Note: Farmer Vicki provided the pictures included with this post. Go to her website to learn more about her philosophy, her farm, and how to sign up for nine months of great eating.

Every week from April through December I drove to the drop-off point about a mile from my house and picked up a box of produce. Occasionally my boxes contained broccoli or spinach or other lovely greens like chard or beet tops. They often included some of the best baby lettuce I've ever tasted. They provided us with asparagus, melons, strawberries, peaches, carrots, corn, peppers, zucchini, cauliflower, plums, apples, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and many other readily identifiable vegetables and fruits.

They also introduced us--and this was the fun part--to untried vegetables, ones I'd walked past at Whole Foods but had never bought. Here are some of the foods I prepared for the first time, thanks to Farmer Vicki: bok choi, napa cabbage, kale, sugar snap peas, bekana, white icicle radishes, spaghetti squash, mizuna, daikon radishes, kohlrabi, lemon basil, purple carrots (gorgeous raw, sliced on the bias), autumn poem, sessantina grossa.

To see a picture of the contents of one CSA box, go to this earlier post. In it I also recommend two fascinating books about food.

It's the off season now in the Midwest. CSA farmers are working in their greenhouses, but deliveries haven't begun. Farmers Markets won't open for another six weeks. This weekend I bought broccoli and spinach, still my favorites, but I bought other things too. I was pleased when the cashier at Jewel pointed to my bag of fennel and asked, "What is it?" A year ago, I wouldn't have known either.

If you live in Chicagoland, you can still sign up with Farmer Vicki. Choose spring, summer, fall, or any combination. You can also sign up for fresh eggs--flavor you won't believe--and gently grown chicken. If you live elsewhere, find a CSA or farmers market near you by checking one of these links in the left-hand column: Eatwild, Family Farmed, or Local Harvest.

Come Be My Light

I have begun reading the controversial book about Mother Teresa’s struggles, Come Be My Light (Doubleday, 2007). The author, Brian Kolodiejchuk, MC, sets her private writings in their historical, religious, and biographical context. His description of the mystical tradition of interior darkness, especially as described by the sixteenth-century saint John of the Cross, is both accurate and troubling. Here are some excerpts about “the painful purifications one undergoes before reaching union with God”:

They are accomplished in two phases: the “night of the senses” and the “night of the spirit.” In the first night one is freed from attachment to sensory satisfactions and drawn into the prayer of contemplation....

Having passed through the first night, one may then be led by God into the “night of the spirit,” to be purged from the deepest roots of one’s imperfections. A state of extreme aridity accompanies this purification, and one feels rejected and abandoned by God. The experience can become so intense that one feels as if heading toward eternal perdition....Prayer is difficult, almost impossible; spiritual counsel practically of no avail; and various exterior trials may add to this pain. By means of this painful purification, the disciple is led to total detachment from all created things and to a lofty degree of union with Christ, becoming a fit instrument in His hands and serving Him purely and disinterestedly. (22–23)

I find it hard to reconcile this kind of mysticism with an incarnate God who is the source and redeemer of “created things.” But perhaps I am misreading “total detachment.”

Mother Teresa did not try to escape created things. She did not reject the physical world in favor of spiritual experience. Her lifelong ministry to the poorest of the poor plunged her into more physical reality than most of us could bear.

Road to Cana

Most Wednesday mornings I attend a church history class at St. Mike's. We've been reading the church fathers, and their opponents, on the nature of Christ. In what sense is he human? In what sense divine? How many persons--natures--wills--are present in Christ? Did the human Jesus have access to divine wisdom and power? Did the divine Jesus truly suffer and die?

For some 500 years the church struggled to define the indefinable. The Nicene creed, developed in the fourth century, affirms that Christ is both God and man:

eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

Despite the creed, quarrels about Christ's nature raged on for another century and a half. Gregory of Nyssa described the high level of interest among Constantinopolitans:

Every place in the city is full of them: the alleys, the crossroads, the forums, the squares. Garment sellers, money changer, food vendors--they are all at it. If you ask for change, they philosophize for you about generate and ingenerate natures. If you inquire about the price of bread, the answer is that the Father is greater and the Son inferior. If you speak about whether the bath is ready, they express the opinion that the Son was made out of nothing.

As I buy groceries at Trader Joe's, I don't hear a lot of discussion about Christ's nature. Christology is, however, an important theme in Anne Rice's new book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (will vampire lovers and goth kids start reading Athanasius?). My friend Cindy Crosby's insightful review, "Truly God and Truly Man," is Books and Culture's Book of the Week. Cindy writes,

Rather than soft-pedal her beliefs, [Rice] lays them out plainly in the reader's letter at the front of the novel. "I believe in Him as God and Man, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who came down on this earth to be born amongst us, live and work with us, and to save us. This Jesus is Sinless. This Jesus created us." No pussyfooting around here....

Rice wisely seizes on the interior conflict between Jesus as God and as man to create the tension that holds the story together—the same conflict that has seemingly paralyzed other novelists. Rice shows the audacity of an outsider to the Christian publishing world (where most of the novelizations of Christ's life have been created) and rushes in where the proverbial angels might fear to tread. But it is Rice's courage in tackling her subject matter—while still holding her protagonist in reverence—that elevates The Road to Cana above its predecessors in the genre.

Publishers Weekly's starred review, quoted on Amazon's web page, praises Rice's theologico-literary feat:

If it is possible to create a character that is simultaneously fully human and fully divine, as ancient Christian creeds assert, then Rice succeeds.

Gather round, children, and listen--good stories make good theology.

Pontoon

From Garrison Keillor, Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon (Viking, 2007), 166:

Dorothy said she believed in letting bygones be bygones and each to his own and live and let live. "There is too much backbiting and malicious gossip in a small town and that is the truth and everybody knows it," she said. "It wouldn't hurt people to be a little more forgiving and tolerant. That was how Evelyn was. She used to say, 'There's a lot of human nature in everybody.'"

Give me a break--or a Sabbath

Years ago while driving in England, my husband and I encountered a "no" sign by the side of the road. Trouble was, it didn't tell us what not to do. Did it mean no parking? no overtaking? no hitchhiking? no tractors?

I grew up in a Sabbath-keeping community. Every Friday at sundown, a nonspecific "no" sign seemed to hover over our town. We knew it meant no working--that was straight from the book of Exodus. Our parents were pretty sure it meant no TV (except when JFK died on a Friday), no radio (except for stations that broadcast classical or religious music), no newspapers (though we could read religious magazines).

What about play? Well, probably not your usual games (so my friends and I invented "Bible ping-pong," where you shouted out a memory verse every time you served). Certain games had been developed for our limited market--Going to Jerusalem, Bible Seek--but they were about as exciting as Chutes and Ladders.

That left us with interminable nature walks. Sitting around the house with our parents and their friends. Or, more likely, hanging out with our own friends, gossiping and plotting what we would do as soon as the sun went down Saturday night. Sabbaths were long. God must have invented them to give us a taste of eternity.

In retrospect, these days of enforced inactivity sound idyllic. Maybe we didn't appreciate them because people had not yet learned how to be maniacally busy. Our parents worked hard, but they were usually home, off duty, by dinnertime. They did not generally help us with our homework (in those days, it was assumed that school was for the students, not their parents), and they rarely carpooled us to extracurricular activities.

For that matter, we didn't have all that many activities beyond the school day. A sandlot baseball game now and then, a "young people's meeting" at the church Friday evenings, a weekly piano lesson (generally within walking distances, and we walked a lot)--that was about it.

The biggest difference, though, was that we didn't live electronically. The personal computer had not been invented, so we did not have e-mail, blogs, facebook, computer games, blackberries, or Google-assisted net-surfing. Our ears were free of ipods and bluetooth headsets. We communicated by handwritten letters, which took from three days to a week to cross the country, or by telephone; and the only way to move around the house while talking on the phone was to buy an extremely long coiled cord which inevitably got tangled up in whatever else we were trying to do at the time.

Multitask was not a word.

We had Sabbaths then, and we didn't appreciate them. We are on call 24/7 now (and proud of it!), and we are desperate for relief. Check out Mark Bittman's excellent article in today's New York Times, "I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really," in which he recommends restoring sanity by keeping a secular Sabbath. Writing this on my computer on a Sunday morning before church, I think he's absolutely right.

Munchies

The wife of an aging, infirm relative informs us that he is now on Marinol, a synthetic marijuana (who knew)? Contrary to her hopes, it has not yet made him mellow. Rather, he is acting like an insane three-year-old. It has, however, cured his anorexia.

Uncle Sam doesn't eat local

Can't find the fresh food you crave at Jewel or Dominics? King corn (and soy) may be at fault. Check out this op ed piece in today's New York Times.

Jack Hedin, a Minnesota farmer, writes that "consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect."

If you haven't yet read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, get yourself a copy at your bookstore, the Morton Arboretum gift shop, or Amazon (only $9.60!). It is absolutely not a tendentious, finger-wagging book. It is full of fascinating facts that you will find yourself reading aloud to patient family members. You'll really empathize with Farmer Hedin after you've read Pollan.