Earth’s Easter Story

I live on a ridge top in a Christian intentional community in rural Kentucky. Together we have bought land, shared prayer and built resource conserving houses. I moved here to answer a call to become a steward of our eight acres, to live responsibly and lovingly among it. What I have learned is that I am not a mere observer, a custodian in a watch house. As I peel away layers of modern conveniences, I have found that I am a part of a holy, circular cycle.

In an attempt to live closer to the land, we have built homes that require us to spend time watching the world around us. My living room windows overlook our vegetable garden, a small orchard and a wooded hillside. In the summer the garden is a jungle of vines and bushes jeweled with ruby tomatoes, golden peppers and ivory eggplants. The woods provide a background of green and are thick with life. Yellow finches, Indigo Buntings and Downy Woodpeckers populate the treetops; chipmunk, rabbit and ground hog the forest floor; pill bugs, beetles and a broad host of micro-organisms the soil below. By winter time the land has been transformed. The vegetables have all died, the orchard and woods are bare branches of grays and browns and only animals with the colors of earth or wet bark remain. All are preparing, waiting for the warmth of Spring to bring forth new life.

By observing God’s rhythm I am beginning to learn how to live comfortably within them. This requires more time and labor than life in a typical suburban home but, in the monastic tradition of ora et lobaora, I find that my daily chores draw me deeper into my relationship with God. I find my prayer is no longer just a pause between my tasks of everyday life; my everyday life tasks are prayer. I have discovered that I had been lulled by the comforts of our industrialized world into a sleepy unawareness of my vital link within this land’s wonderment and my understanding of earth’s Easter story

As is with all people of this world, my basic needs are dependent on my access to water. When I lived in town, I rarely considered my water’s source nor where it was destined after my use. I’d turn on a faucet to take a shower, the pipes provided me with all the flowing water I desired and the sewer lines whisked it away. Now, my water comes from rain collected off of our roof, entombed in our cistern and rises again to quench our thirst. This immersion into the Easter waters requires that I am mindful of how I use it saving it for tasks that are life supporting.  I must adjust my use according to the seasons, heavily conserving during the dry times of summer and saving indulgences (ie: a hot, deep bath) for when the winter rains come. When I pray water’s prayer, I recognize the life it holds and take care to honor this sacred gift.

After we wash, the used water irrigates our vegetable garden. Waste water contains rich nutrients from bits of vegetables and sloughed skin cells. It can also contain life robbing toxins so we must watch what we wash with and what we wash off. Chlorine kills good soil bacteria, animal fat suffocates vital soil micro organisms, and high amounts of salt burn delicate root ends. Avoiding these are no longer an intellectual exercise in environmental stewardship that I fudged on from time to time during my town life. It is a practice that protects our food supply. When I pray soil’s prayer, I recognize it as the holy tomb holding the promise of resurrected life.

The seeds that I place in the soil are wondrous packets of ancient existence. They are children of children of children whose basic elements have been used and reused from the days of Jesus’, from the time of Moses, from the time of the first plant, the first spread of land, the first breath of stardust. A billion deaths and resurrections.  These tiny tombs combine with nutrients from their loamy home then emerge to produce green and fruit.

We eat this food with its many minuscule cells of nutrition and energy and change it into muscle and blood. Our body then produces byproducts containing nitrogen, potassium and minerals which we eliminate.  When I lived in town, these valuable elements and minerals were expelled into our toilets, washed through miles of pipe then isolated in a sewage treatment plant.  In our community, we can not squander either these nutrients or the water used to get rid of them. We collect our waste in 55 gallon drums and mix it with other left over organic by-products: saw dust, kitchen waste and garden weeds. We carefully compost it and, after a safe amount of time, return it to the earth. When I pray element’s prayer, I find that the maligned and discarded are transformed in the darkness of the compost catacombs into cleansed, fertile soil ready to rise again as food.

In our country’s attempt to gain food and water security by centralizing and enlarging food production, water collection and sewage treatment we have disallowed our part in these living cycles. We are thus jeopardizing the very essentials of life that we have been attempting to secure. Our collective forgetfulness has denied our integral role in the Christian story. We have created a land of death without resurrection and it has had grave consequences.

Off the farmlands of the mid-west, billions of tons of topsoil have been washed down the rivers in a slurry of sediment and chemical fertilizer. It takes 1000 years to create an inch of Iowa topsoil but because of poor erosion management, one inch was washed away in one day during the floods of 2008. Decades of rain and floods have carried chemical fertilizers down the Mississippi River where they have concentrated in the Gulf of Mexico. Here, an oxygen depleting bloom of algae has created an 8000 square mile “dead zone” that can’t support marine life. Meanwhile, in the Southeast, water scarcity from the on-going drought has pitted suburban Georgians against the commercial fisherman of Apalachicola Bay Florida and Atlanta’s water hungry power plants siphon away endangered aquatic habitats.
Even as this is happening we still use millions of gallons of treated drinking water to wash away tons of nutrient rich household waste that is then sequestered in sewage treatment plants. We continue to blanket our food fields with artificial fertilizers killing not only marine life a thousand miles away but also the life of the soil. God has given us all the fertile soil and nourishing rain that we need to support life yet we blindly break the cycle of life, death and resurrection by which they function.

This crisis is a call for meditation on our place in the Easter story. Some may say we are beyond redemption swirling in a death spiral of global warming with its ever worsening storms, droughts and floods. But as a Christian, I must remain hopeful. I must continue to believe in the resurrection. Water conservation, composting and nutrient recycling are more than responsible stewardship. They are a Christian call to take part in God’s restorative love. Praying water’s, soil’s and elements’ prayer we become direct observers of how God can take what was dead and resurrect the world anew. We become Mary Magdala at the tomb watching the stone roll back.

Margie Stelzer lives with her two children, husband, and three other families at Curtis Pike Community in Richmond, Kentucky.