The main reason I haven’t had an opportunity to write reflections in the past couple months is because I’ve been caring full-time for a family member who is two and a half years old. The joy and the exhaustion are woven fine.

Each morning, this sweet kiddo, (“M.”) begins my day with the same question, the same lesson in living: “Waiting is hard. What are you waiting for?”

I’m waiting for a lot of things. Most of them, I can’t explain to a toddler right now. To simplify things these past few weeks, my answer has been, “I’m waiting for the frogs to start singing.”

Well, my waiting came to an end. The spring peepers started their thin, otherworldly chorus on this past (unusually warm) Palm Sunday morning. That day, the snow withdrew into the shadowy spots behind the west shed and the woodlot. Inspired, I visited the rows of rhubarb, pulling aside the slimy debris of last year’s leaves to find brave red fists of life pushing their way up through softened soil. As happens every year at this time, I start to believe that the season is shifting for good.

Then, on Monday, the temperatures plummeted again and the rest of Holy Week has been silent. Today, April 4, the world outside my window is coated with a gritty layer of ice.

Holy Saturday comes like this in Minnesota—quiet, grey, and harder than I thought it would be. The frogs that started just stopped. The sun refuses to show itself.

But isn’t Holy Saturday that kind of day, though, no matter where you are? Not the cathartic grief of Good Friday, where the worst has already been done and named. Not the astonishment of Easter yet-to-come, where life breaks open again. This is the day in between, where the story seems to have stalled out in the cold.

We’ve come to understand that the turn from March to April — this in-between time — is the moment when when a lot of creatures die, surprisingly. With our care, they made it through January’s icy wind and February’s deep freezes, but in this lingering bardo, they just can’t keep going. I even believe they know that green warmth is just around the corner, but it’s not enough.

This year, it was a couple of chickens, including our old California-born bantam rooster, Joke. He was almost 13 years old, and little M. helped me feed him in his heated garage hospice quarters through February. We found him still and small in the sick-chicken coop one morning when the temperatures dipped just low enough, just long enough. We gathered him up gently, surprised by how light his body felt. The ground was barely workable, but Pastor Christian took a shovel to it anyway, breaking through the crust of icy grass, making a place in the earth.

Our beloved toddler companion, sock-footed and bundled in a blanket, joined us next to the little hole under the lilac. Unsurprisingly, she asked us the only question that ever really matters: “Why?”

I try to tell the truth in a way that doesn’t dim the world’s shine too soon.
He died, I say. Everything gets old and dies.

“But what happened?”

He was really, really old and even with the heat lamp, he got too cold. Sometimes living things can’t keep going.

Wrapped in a tiny cotton shroud, his tail feathers and one foot sticking out, Joke goes into the ground. We cover our dead with the same earth that is just beginning, tentatively, to wake up. This is where my theology is poised either to become real or to dissolve into sentiment. M. is there to help me sort it out.

“Why are the chickens in the dirt?”

I say the thing that is both true for me and that, at this moment, feels like a wager:

God remembers them, and will turn their bodies into flowers.
But not yet.

My little cousin rolls with this proposition, mostly. I’m grateful, in the moment, for the way kids can hold open a future that adults rush to resolve. But I think that Pastor Christian and I feel the Holy Saturday tension of it, standing there in the sleet.

Because it’s only April 4. Because there are no flowers yet. Because the ground everywhere on this farm still feels more like a grave than a garden.

We pile the dirt up over the little grave of a dead chicken who was our companion in this life, and then we go back inside. Little M. eats a snack of carrot sticks and toast without asking or saying anything more.

Holy Saturday asks us to stay in the silence—to resist the urge to skip ahead to blossoms, to resurrection, to the tidy arc where everything broken is already mended. In Minnesota, Saturday, April 4 asks me to live, for a time, in the unresolved space where death is real and transformation is only promised.

The peepers are still out there, though I have no idea what they’re doing to get through this cold. The rhubarb is still there, waiting under the muck with its tight curl of future tart delight. The tiny lilac buds are discernable on branches over Joke’s final resting place. The soil is still holding what has been given back to it through the deaths of countless living creatures.

The sleet falls over all of it. The faith we cling to today is not the bright “I told you so” of Easter morning. It is the quieter, more stubborn act of simply remaining while songless, even while silent. Of trusting that something is happening beneath the surface of things, even when the surface tells a different story.

On Holy Saturday, we want to say to ourselves and to our children, “What we are waiting for is God, who will turn our grief into unimaginable beauty.” But often the most we can manage is quiet accompaniment.

So, we wait. Not forever, but longer than we would like.
Sometimes without any sounds that hint at the resurrecting power at work in the earth.

Maybe the God of Holy Saturday,
whose heart always aches with ours,
who knows what comes next even when we don’t,
is whispering:
Sorry for the silence.

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“Therefore, God, of all the things that are yours
we offer you these, which are yours especially.
We offer them gladly, as Jesus told us.”

Sung aloud over food that we share amongst ourselves – even after saying this is all for God – these naively generous, obediently hopeful words moved me, sometimes almost to tears. And I wanted to pray them on behalf of my community. So I became a priest. Now I speak and sing those words.

This past October, we blessed for the first time bread from wheat we had planted and harvested here at Good Courage, accompanied by wine from our vineyard, made with the help of many hands. As I offered them – the bread and wine which the liturgy calls the Gifts – my voice broke and my eyes filled. Something about being able to offer what we had grown together, ourselves, made the whole ritual so real, so deep with meaning. It felt as though we were truly offering gifts.

As a priest, my job in the world is in large part to keep feasts. Here we are at another one this January. Epiphany is a feast of manifestation—of God showing up, shimmering into view, not in abstraction but in matter. Epiphany’s made of light and flesh. A newborn child and ancient wisdom. Homage and resistance. A mother pondering the meaning of things in her heart. A wild star that bends astronomy toward theology.

Oh, and presents.

The Magi arrive not with ideas or proclamations or even prayers, but with gifts. And not just any gifts. Rocks and sap. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh—substances of the seen and unseen parts of Creation, itself. A hunk of mineral wrested from earth’s dark places purely because it yields to our designs and gleams in sunlight. Fragrant resins slowly collected from wounds in the bodies of trees.

Epiphany means manifestation. This feast is a moment when the divine is made manifest, when earth can be seen in divine light of the star that guides us. It’s part of the story of the Incarnation of Christ. And it goes deep.

Here’s what theologians mean by Deep Incarnation (which I write about in nearly every essay): the reality of Christ’s Incarnation is not merely that God became human, but that God entered matter itself—soil and sap, mineral and muscle, breath and blood. God does not hover above Creation. God sinks deep into it.

The Magi seem to understand this instinctively, judging by their presents. They do not bring God something “spiritual.” They bring what the earth, what the Word-made-flesh, already knows how to make.

And that’s the strange, almost comical truth at the heart of the story:
They give God gifts that God already made.

Which is, of course, how gift-giving with God always works.
What else do we have to give?

If you pray from the Book of Common Prayer, you’ll hear this childlike acknowledgement at Communion. The Eucharistic prayer names our relationship with the Holy One with disarming honesty:
“From your own Creation, we offer you these gifts.”

Bread made of wheat and water. Wine made of grapes and yeast. Human labor layered onto photosynthesis, rainfall, microbial fermentation. We take what has been given to us and we give it back, transformed only by our human attention, gratitude, and time —even those are ultimately gifts from the cells of our hearts and our brains, also created by God.

The Magi do the same gift-giving. Gold does not ‘belong’ to kings, it belongs to the aeons, to geological forces no ruler can wield or sway. Frankincense and myrrh are so unlike anything we might imagine as extravagant holiday gifts; they are not luxury commodities made in a factory, they are the tears of living things, the slow and costly offerings of a tree responding to injury. These gifts are not extracted quickly and they haven’t yet been recreated in a lab. They require patience, restraint, and relationship with other created beings.

It’s impossible not to notice how Epiphany reads differently in this moment of history, ecologically and ethically.

I’ve read that gold is flowing back into favor right now, as economies grow anxious. When our trust in the human dreams of cryptocurrency and bond markets thins out, we return to what feels real. Gold isn’t corruptible code or breakable promise, it’s elemental reality. Human beings can’t make gold (except with insane amounts of nuclear energy to yield a tiny amount, which is usually radioactive and thus not quite as desirable, I’d guess). You can hold gold. You can lose it, yes, but even if you do it will still be somewhere in this world (unlike ephemeral, conjured forms of wealth). You could, if you were feverishly worried, bury it in the ground and dig it up unchanged years later, centuries later even, under the rule of a different king. I get the temptation.

We all know that the mining of gold causes irreparable harm to the environment where it happens. We know that the perilous work of daylighting that desirable mineral is done by people – often children – who are trapped in poverty, trapped in slavery. As a gift, it is hardly pure.

Frankincense, meanwhile, is at risk of extinction. In recent years, frankincense has become very popular in essential oil and herbal healing industries. Not surprisingly, the result of our rediscovering its value is this: The very trees that have perfumed worship for a thousand years are being pushed to the brink by overharvesting, climate disruption, and global markets that demand more than a stand of wounded trees can sustainably give.

Myrrh’s story is the same. Ecological, ethical nightmare.

Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh. These unfamiliar words heard in Christmas pageants and carols, used to bemuse us. Two thousand years on, they’ve become priceless again, the profits spiralling upward to just a small population of wealthy people. Western capitalist culture can only understand the preciousness of Creation tragically, it seems.

This year, Epiphany asks: What does it mean to offer God gifts drawn from a world we are exhausting?

At Good Courage Farm, this question is one we live into. Every offering—every apple, egg, grape, prayer—is contingent on restraint. On saying, “Well, that’ll have to be enough.” On allowing trees to rest, soil to regenerate, animals to live as animals rather than production units. On asking, “What will grow in these years of drought? Survive these new winds? How much can we produce without exhausting ourselves or the land?”

Creation gives, but not infinitely. Gifts require limits in order to remain gifts.

If we hope to live in blessed reciprocity with our Creator, we’re going to have to amend our ways and transform our economy. If we don’t, what sweet smelling smoke will replace incense during our prayers here at Good Courage, at prayers around the world, when the last boswellia trees have died? What will we offer to God on the Table here at the farm when the water all tests positive for PFAS? When the grapevines have all been killed off by our neighbors’ use of auxin herbicides?

Things need to change. We need a spiritual epiphany about material reality.

As poet and prophet Robin Wall Kimmerer cries out, we are meant to live in a gift economy.

The Magi are often sentimentalized as oddball seekers following a star, or cast as proofs that even exotic wisdom will bend at the knee before the Incarnation. But the Magi are also economists of a sort, aren’t they? Foreign dignitaries carrying wealth across borders. Their gifts could have financed armies, maybe. Instead, they kneel before a child and place the earth’s treasures into the hands of the mother of God-With-Us.

The Magi at Epiphany act in a way that reveals what the gift economy looks like: wealth is meant to be returned, given back to God. Holy Communion on a little regenerative farm reveals what the gift economny looks like. What we receive is indeed meant to be given back to God, to the good earth, offered to the common good.

On the Feast of St. Francis, as I prayed over our farm bread and our farm wine, Billy Collins’ poem, “The Lanyard” flashed into my mind. That poem, which I’ve woven into many a sermon, gets at the heart of gift-giving with devastating tenderness.

The poet, recalling his boyhood, describes making a cheap, probably uneven lanyard for his mother at summer camp and offering it to her with some pride and a sense that it could make things even between them. Only later does he realize the absurd asymmetry of the exchange: this lanyard in return for life itself.

“She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.”

And yet don’t we imagine that she receives it with joy?
Not because the gift is adequate, but because it is offered.

That I felt anything special (pride? worthiness?) about the gifts of wheat that we had grown and wine that we had pressed is just as sweetly absurd, as substantively ironic as Collins’ poem. I can’t “grow” wheat or grapes any more than I can make the sun rise, summon the rain, or breathe life into a seed. Growth is God’s gift before it is ever our work, God’s grace long before it is human achievement.

Still, I said — we say, “Here, God. You gave us a blue boat of a home in space, and the miracle of green things that nourish us. You gave us the company of uncountable creatures of beauty and neighbors to love. You gave us your Holy Child as a pattern for that love, and as a promise of salvation. You give us breath and life. Here’s this loaf and this cup, which we made with a lot of help.”

And, yet — surely God’s heart is gladdened at those gifts.
Right?

Epiphany is full of lanyard theology and of ecological ethics. We bring what we can make from what we’ve been given, knowing it is never enough, and discovering that it is received anyway. We can wonder what right relationship looks like with a planet that yields things worthy of being gifts we offer to God.

Deep Incarnation insists that God delights in our offerings precisely because they are material. God does not want our escape from the world. God wants our participation in it, our reverent handling of gold and grain, resin and rain. God is grateful for our thanksgiving prayers and our generosity. The blessed dialogue of reciprocity between us and the Creator of this good world is less the one-and-done formula of “Thank you. You’re welcome.” It’s more “Thank you…no, thank you. Here you go. Oh, thanks again…This is yours. Ah, thanks!…And this is for you.” The gratitude and the giving spiral inward and outward more than upward, it feels.

The Magi go home by another road, Scripture says.
Epiphany always bends the road, doesn’t it?

Once you have seen God manifest in matter, you cannot go back to treating Creation as disposable. You can’t name human beings as ‘other’. I imagine that, for the magi, once you’ve knelt before a child who probably smells like hay and milk, you can’t pretend that God lives only in the abstract. You can no longer live as though there are other people’s children, as though there are creatures who are not part of the Holy Family of being.

At the farm, we do keep Epiphany as a single feast day. It’s also a season, though, and should perhaps be one of spiritual practice. Perhaps of watching light catch on frozen branches as we prune them for fruitfulness, honoring the pear sap flowing from the cuts we make. Of noticing how animals know when the days are lengthening before we do as we gather the first eggs. Of blessing bread and wine every time we gather in hope. Of receiving gifts from land that is not ours and returning them as carefully as possible.

From your own Creation, we offer you these gifts.

Not because they are sufficient.
But because they are real, and good, and true.

Thanks be to God.

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Here at Good Courage, the alpine goats and Icelandic horses have put on their husky-thick winter coats, only to have a few miserable days in the low 70s. Ugh. Oh, and the parasites; the bugs and worms are still active in this unusually warm autumn, but animals’ resilience is dropping as their bodies adjust to winter feed. Even perfectly healthy stomachs rebel – sometimes with life-threatening consequences – as herds and flocks transition from pasture to hay or rations. Also, barn moves and pen reconfigurations disrupt herd dynamics just when animals crave stability. Respiratory illnesses flare in the sudden swings between warm afternoons and freezing nights.

November asks a lot of creatures—and even more of their keepers—right at the moment when daylight is slipping away and our endurance is worn thin.

Last year, this time, it was Dalet the Goat who suffered a dangerous case of November. Our four goats bear the names of the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph is a big, ornery guy – mad, I think, at having his…erm… “coin-purse” stolen so early in his life. Bet is our round little doe and Gimmel, her other more tractable brother. Dalet is the fourth of the quadruplets, now 5 years old —goofy shaped, with a hitch in his get-up that makes him walk like a salsa dancer. We love him especially.

On November 1 last year, Dalet fell suddenly and alarmingly ill. After watching him pace and pant and cry and strain, we realized what was happening: urinary calculi (a polite term for a painful and life-threatening pee-pee blockage that afflicts wethered male goats). It is one of those crises farmers dread, a mixture of biology, heartbreak, and the quick math of cost and consequence. After a run to the farm supply store for ammonium chloride and a call to the vet for advice, I realized that we were up against odds too steep even for a sturdy mountain-bred goat. The vet confirmed that it was life and death. “It’s that time of year,” she said. “We just had two goats down with it this morning. One of them got the surgery for it here. The other didn’t make it.”

I came home to the farm where Pastor Christian was watching over the very sick goat and said, “This medicine isn’t going to work. We have no way to get him to the large animal clinic. It’s too late for him, but we can’t let him suffer...”

“I need you to shoot him, Christian.”

How surprised I was to see my buddy and colleague, a skilled hunter and not a fan of goats, tear up at my request.

“I can’t. Why does it have to be my favorite goat?! I can’t do it,” he replied shakily, taking off his hat and putting it on again a few times.

We both had a good little cry, and knowing that I absolutely couldn’t shoot Dalet either (I don’t even know how to hold a .22, let alone use it with the necessary precision), we flailed around for a Plan B. We’d have to ask the poor creature to wait while a vet came from more than an hour away. Anxious for advice, Christian called his wife, Kateri, a gifted and intuitive healer, and I called my nephew, Delaine, an experienced animal handler who bottle fed Dalet and the other kids with me when they were babies. We asked what they thought we ought to do.

Both Kateri and Delaine, on separate calls, said, “Have you asked the goat?”

No, we hadn’t asked the goat. Delaine asked what the options were, so I outlined them. Euthanasia by bullet or by injection. When I mentioned that the vet had done a surgery on a blocked goat that morning, Delaine asked, “How much was it? The surgery?”

“Four hundred bucks,” I answered.

“That’s a steal!” Delaine responded. “Totally worth it, if the goat is up for it. Go ask him.”

Yeah, but I didn’t know how we were going to get the goat to Watkins, an hour away. We’re a very small farm with no stock trailer and a little 1992 Toyota pickup that couldn’t pull a big trailer if we did have one. Christian started to push out the little 5’x8’ enclosed cargo trailer we use to haul 12 bales of hay at a time.

I went into the goat shed, squatted down next to the trembling goat, lying on his side, breathing heavily. I described the whole situation to him in my best chaplain voice. I told him that we loved him and would make the pain stop, but he wouldn’t be here any more. Or, I said, he would have to do some seriously scary things and feel pain for a while longer but we’d do what we could to help him keep living.

To my utter astonishment, Dalet the Goat stood up. So I yelled to Christian that I was putting a halter on him, “He wants to go! Grab some peanuts and a ramp.”

Sure enough, as though he had done it every day, this wobbly, dorfy, trusting goat walked, shaking and feverish to the yard and up the ramp. Inside the little windowless box, he laid down in the bed of straw Christian had made and I shut him into the dark.

I drove off across the Minnesota prairie to a town 40 miles north of the farm. When we arrived, Dalet the Goat walked out of the little box trailer, into the vet clinic, and onto the scale as if he were a golden retriever.

It was as if a voice had said to him, “Get up. Pick up your mat and walk.” And he did. And before I finished my macaroni and cheese at the little restaurant next store, he was cured of his malady. We hoisted his drugged weight back into the box-on-wheels and I drove him home to the barn, where Christian had assembled a recovery pen.

The surgery was $450, more than the goat was “worth” if you reduce creaturely life to the ledger. And after that? Weeks—two months, as it turned out—of careful feeding, medications, monitoring, and prayers whispered in a cold barn. There’s no tallying up the price of those hours.

(There is, of course, the whole separate conversation about the ethics of our spending choices. What higher good could that money have done? It’s an important question, but one too large for this reflection. This reflection is about our relationship with animals.)

We paid a cost. The goat paid a cost in ongoing pain. I paid it on a credit card. And then I kept paying it in hours and vigilance and worry, because that’s what love does when it has taken responsibility for the life of another creature. I found myself coaxing this goat to live – dressing him in pajamas I fashioned from IKEA blankets, watching for signs of infection, cheering every time he peed an ounce on his own. And I found him meeting me more than halfway, in spite of the unfamiliar surroundings and the uncomfortable sensations in his body. I fit all this routine into the usual demands of the farm. Dalet handled it alone, separated from any other being of his own species.

As I watched this goat, so startlingly cooperative and brave, recover from this crisis, I prayed pretty regularly the strangest and most earnest of the berakhot, the blessing that our Jewish kindred offer after visiting the bathroom:

Yeah, there’s a prayer for that.
And there should be.

Together, weirdly, this animal and I chose life for him, and we walked the ragged path of healing. This accompaniment isn’t something you learn in seminary, at least as not it applies to non-human animals. This at-home, so-near care is not a program they cover in vet school, the living with wordless healing, with livestock laundry, with the bills for the heat lamp long after the incision site is closed. The trip from last November to this one was not glamorous. It was repetitive and messy and demanding.

The miracle is not just what God does for us but what we creatures do with God’s help. Healing is cooperation. Desire matters. Courage matters. You can’t add those factors up anywhere other than within the heart.

Here we are a year later, and Dalet is alive. He’s being his caprine self, not surpassingly useful on the farm, but he takes joy in good hay and warm sunshine and will do anything (include pee on command) for a handful of peanuts.

How would I feel about this whole story if Dalet had died? If we had ended his pain sooner, by ending his life? If we had asked him to endure the veterinary care, but he had still succumbed?

Because we all know that so very often, desire isn’t enough. Courage isn’t enough. Healing isn’t enough.

Ultimately, I would know peace, because I believe that whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s possession. But the choices we had made would make a different story, and I can’t say how I’d be retelling that story this November. I know that no matter the ending, the story was about one thing: care.

Dominion as the Cost of Care

Genesis gives us this decision-making authority over the lives of animals. We decided to put Dalet in the trailer. We decide what happens to their bodies. Whether we like it or not, we have dominion over them.

People sometimes toss around the word “dominion” as though it were a blank permission slip: do what you want with the world, with the beasts, with the land. Dominionism informs our agriculture with animals in the United States. The vast majority of livestock operations are owned by people who don’t have a relationship with the creatures whose lives and deaths profit them. There is an express theology that enables some to experience human dominion over creatures by renaming them as “units” in the cost-benefit calculations of a spreadsheet.

But Scripture doesn’t offer that reading with any integrity. Dominion, in the biblical sense, aligns with the shape of the good ruler—one who tends, guards, nourishes, protects, and uses their power to lift up the fragile. And for Christians, the clearest picture of dominion is Christ the King: the one whose crown is thorns, whose authority is measured in self-giving love, whose rule is defined by service rather than domination. The relationship between Christ and creature is one in which the creature — us or actual sheep — are known and called by name.

If dominion is patterned on that kind of kingship, then it will always come at a cost to the one who holds it. The Good Shepherd, not a hired hand, is willing to pay an unimaginable price for the well-being of those in his charge. That’s the dominion that informs our farming with animals.

How then, shall we live?

We try to be good shepherds. Goatherds. Stewards of our kindred creatures.
We have a say in their lives and their deaths, but we know that life and death are actually held in God’s hands, alone.

The goat’s surgery cost money. The months of care cost sweat and sleep. The emotional toll—well, farmers know it. Anyone who has sat up with a sick animal knows it.

And now, this November, our 28-year-old mare is in the care of our university equine hospital, battling colitis with a steady, unthinking, creaturely bravery that humbles me. We’ve signed treatment consents and the vets have spent a hundred long hours giving her fluids and tending her fever. We’ve spent money we don’t really have as an investment in hope. We’ve asked her, not out of hubris, but out of genuine love, “Do you want to be made well?” She’s said yes.

I’ve told family and friends that it feels like we’ve gone to play the slots with our credit card. At a thousand dollars a pull, we watch to see if the spinning numbers will give us and our beloved horse a few more happy years together on God’s good earth.

I’ve been holding my breath every time the phone rings, wondering if our sweet horse, Spá, is feeling just a bit better today. Wondering whether her choices or ours have more influence over the outcome. We know she might make it home only for a little while. That future is held gently in God’s hands, which hold our hands, which hold our animal friend. We know that loving her still asks something of us—steadfast presence, trust, and a willingness to honor her life with tenderness, even when the end is near.

Dominion is costly. Love is costly. Care is costly.

The Tension: Reverence <> Reality

There’s an old farm saying, one I don’t love but I’m coming to understand in my bones: If you have livestock, you have dead stock. Every creature entrusted to us is mortal. We know this. We see them through reverent eyes, filled with wonder at the gifts the Creator has given them; we also lose them, because we are not their Creator and cannot make them live. They are gifts, and they are fragile. We love them, and sometimes we let them go.

But, dang, there’s a lot of money and long moments sometimes between livestock and dead stock. And a lot of deciding. So what is asked of us between those two realities—reverence and mortality?

Perhaps it’s this: to participate in God’s healing work with all the compassion and courage we can muster. To show up with the medicine we have. With the prayers we know. With the humility to acknowledge that we cannot control the outcome, because God is God and we are not. To spend the money when spending it is an act of love, not a calculation. To listen for when the next right thing is gentleness, and when the next right thing is release. To practice dominion as Christ practiced kingship: by kneeling, by tending, by serving life in all its vulnerability.

Our goat is healed now, which is its own kind of miracle. Our mare is in the hands of skilled and kind veterinarians, and we are in the uncomfortable space of “not yet knowing” for certain. And in all of it I feel the Spirit’s life with us moving like a pulse beneath the farm chores: healing as partnership; love as sacrifice; dominion as responsibility, not privilege.

Maybe the insight is simple: whenever we take responsibility for another living creature—whenever we choose love—we enter into the costliness of God’s own heart. And we learn, again and again, that wholeness comes from power beyond us, but also through our hands, our choices, our labor, our willingness to say yes to one more day of care.

Because healing – even for a goat, or a horse, or a human – is not simply a miracle.
The healing work of Jesus shows us that.
Life is a miracle…and a collaboration. It is a calling. It comes at a cost.

Praying November prayers for all of us, friends.

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Jen and I didn’t go (no goatsitters available, alas) but loads of our coolest farmer friends were there. The selfies they sent were amazing. Our organic farmer friends from Glencoe, Matthew Fitzgerald and his dad, Joe Fitzgerald, were on the actual jumbotron behind Mellencamp as he played his set.

My absolute coolest friend, Jesus, was at Farm Aid 40, too, in solidarity. I’m sure of it, because of the story he shares in Luke’s gospel, the one known as “The Parable of the Shrewd Manager.” Jesus loves farmers and fishers, and isn’t shy about advocating for them.

But first, in case you weren’t tuned in to the Farm Aid scene, here are the basics: For four decades, Farm Aid has told the truth about how industrial agriculture and corporate consolidation crush small farmers. The stories shared at Farm Aid indict the empire of agribusiness, which demands profit at any cost. The aid that this massive benefit concert generates is not for conventional industrial farms (monocultures of commodities like corn and soy that deplete and poison the soil, factories where livestock are treated as “units” on a conveyor belt) but for small family farmers who are trying against all odds to feed their neighbors in the face of mounting debt and loss of farmland. While your grocery bill is going up, the amount farmers are paid is bottoming out. Who’s profiting? Is there a more sustainable way to feed our communities? What change do we need?

To hear the answer and to find hope, folks came to Minneapolis to listen to farmers and to musicians. In the words of the organization, Farm Aid 40 united food producers, artists, advocates and fans to reinvigorate support for America’s family farmers as low prices, high input costs, decreasing global markets, corporate consolidation and climate disruption threaten their survival. This year, the message at the “Homegrown Village” outside the stadium was clear: another way is possible—community-supported farms, regenerative practices, local food systems that give life instead of taking and taking and taking it.

At Farm Aid 40, so many voices rang out: Farmers need us, and we need farmers.

That’s exactly what Jesus is telling us in Luke 16, which is (to my farmer’s ears) anything but a parable. I think it’s straightforward, anti-imperial, divinely inspired instruction in one strategy for low-key holy sabotage of oppressive economics. I think it’s timeless encouragement in world-building with God’s help, calling not just rockstars but every disciple of Jesus to defy the empire of industrial ag and to support those who actually nurture the land. Not just as charity, but as an act of faith.

In Luke 16, Jesus is being completely, this-worldly on the level. He is perfectly serious – and not metaphorical – in saying to us, “Be like this guy, this shrewd steward.” You’re going to need farmers as friends, soon, and those farmers need friends right now.

The so-called parable of the dishonest (a.k.a. shrewd) manager in Luke 16 has always made people scratch their heads. Jesus seems to be praising someone who cooked the books—marking down what debtors owed to his master in order to make friends before he was fired. Preachers usually rush to explain that Jesus isn’t telling us to cheat. Then they go on to say how this is a parable about the debt owed to an angry God by sinners, all forgiven by Manager Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. What?? Spiritualized interpretations of this text do ridiculous gymnastics to try to make sense of this as a metaphor about individual salvation and Heaven as our home after we die. Those interpretations still leave people confused and reaching.

If you spiritualize this story, it makes absolutely no sense. At best, the most common otherworldly interpretations of this story insist that its moral is “wealth is spiritually risky but generally okay, and so long as you’re occasionally charitable with some of it, you can still go to Heaven when you die.”

But what if Jesus is saying something more radical than we’re led to think?
(I mean, he almost always is.)

It’s not a parable, friends. It’s an account of the collapse of an empire built on extraction and debt, and it’s a map toward the life God hopes we’ll choose next…hopes we’ll choose again.

You’re still reading. Cool.
OK. Here how I see the story of the shrewd steward…

Here’s the scene: A guy works for a wealthy landowner —he’s a middle-management-level agent of empire, really. The kind of guy who pays attention to which side of the bread is buttered and takes jobs accordingly. He has power only because he enforces the system of debt extraction that keeps tenant farmers poor. But when his job is about to be taken away, he decides to turn the system on its head. Instead of squeezing peasants for all they owe, he slashes the debts. He uses his last moments of authority to redistribute wealth, relieve burden, and restore community.

What do you notice about this story? I notice that the debts are not measured in coins, but in food. The debtors are farmers. They produce wheat and olive oil. They know how to grow food, and they are strong enough to dig. I notice that the manager, whose life has been spent at a desk, is worried that his body just isn’t up to the work of feeding its own needs.

And a key noticing for me is the Greek phrase that’s usually translated as “eternal habitations”, and usually interpreted to mean “our future homes in Heaven, where we’ll go when we die” – those words, αἰωνίους σκηνάς, can be translated just as faithfully as “age-old tents”. Like so many of Jesus’ stories, it beomes a story about this world and all the half-baked spiritualized goofiness just falls away. We’re left with something that makes perfect sense and is consonant with the Reign of God as Jesus reveals it: This debt-based system will fail you. God alone feeds you through Creation’s goodness. Bread for bodily strength. Wine to warm the heart. Oil for gladness. Make friends with farmers so that when Rome collapses, you’ll be welcomed back into these families’ age-old tents, into your people’s traditional homes. Back into the covenant your ancestors had with this land before the bankers, soldiers, and tax-collectors showed up.

This is the way to think and act, Jesus says, as exploitative empires flail and fall apart around you. This manager guy wakes up and thinks outside of Rome’s temporary box. He remembers what really keeps us alive: food and community. Jesus’s calls us to imitate him! What’s worth imitating is the steward’s courage to use what little leverage he has to feed the village and starve the empire. What this character remembers is what we must remember: our ancestors (who may well have come from a continent other than the one we live on now, and been mid-level agents of empire, themselves…but that’s another post…) lived in covenantal relationship with the land and with one another.

Extractive economies break those relationships and insist that there is no other way to live. It’s simply not true. When the empire collapses—and it will—Jesus agrees that we’ll all need friends strong enough to dig, to tend olive groves, to keep life going after the system falls apart. And they’ll need us.

Ledgers are not real wealth. Farmers know this. People who organize farmers know this. The folks of Farm Aid, the folks who gather at Good Courage, the folks who followed Jesus around the Galilean countryside, we all notice that the capitalist math just won’t math for much longer. Only what God gives us through the goodness of Creation can possibly be considered “the true riches”.

It’s clear in Luke 16, and it’s clear in this century’s cries for justice and dignity for farmers. My father-in-law’s songbook held this chanted slogan of the Farmers’ Union from back in the Great Depression, calling on midwestern farmers to strike against foreclosures:

Let’s call a Farmers’ Holiday,
a Holiday we’ll hold!
We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs
…and let them eat their gold.

I think it would make a fine refrain for John Mellencamp’s next Farm Aid anthem.

I think it’s the song the shrewd steward was singing to himself as he walked out the door on his last day at work.

Make friends with farmers so that when the empire’s economy of debt and extraction collapses you’ll be welcomed back into right relationship with what was always yours - community, tradition, soil.

If Jesus had been the closing act at Farm Aid, rather than a presence among the crowd, he’d have ended with the same mic drop as in Luke 16:
“You cannot serve God and wealth.”

The choice is stark. We can align the way we feed ourselves with empire and its endless extraction, or align with God and the community of Creation.

Hear the invitation, friends, in the songs and stories.
Hear the urgent, revolutionary exhortation from the Redeemer of the world.
Now is a pretty good time to make friends with your farmer.

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The word “fruition” has been part of my vocabulary for most of my half-century of life. I like it. I use it differently, now, than I might have before becoming a fruit farmer. If you use this word, occasionally, too, you likely notice that there’s only a certain category of labor and hope that it applies to, yes?

Nothing that takes ten minutes to accomplish, no matter how significant or skillful, is something that “comes to fruition”. How long do we need to give a thing before we can use the word fruition to describe its completion? It carries seasons in it, that word, and it contains both the satisfaction of harvest and the sweetness of fulfillment.

It hints at weary joy.

The growing season at Good Courage is coming to fruition, now. We are joyful, and we are weary. When the bluestem grass on the prairie turns luminous in the evening (meaning 4:30, now…dang!) sun, and the honeygold apples glow on the branch, we can see and taste the work of the season gathered into fullness. It is not just that something has ended—it’s that the end itself is beautiful, nourishing, and good. In a world where so much feels uncertain and half-finished, where the works of generations seem to be ending by coming undone, fruition reminds us that there are things that come to ripeness, things that can be savored and shared. As the psalmist sings, “You crown the year with your goodness, abundance flows wherever you pass” (Psalm 65). God is still making abundance possible, even here, even now.

September on the farm is a moment when fruition and frost are what we’re living for. Yes, the fruits are sweet and abundant, but the trees and vines, the squash and the sunflowers—they are pouring out every last drop of life’s energy into seed and fruit. The bees are worn thin with their gathering, waking cold and immobile in the morning-chilled dahlias and michaelmas daisies. The tomatoes are still twining green and laden with shades of orange and red, and they are newly fragile; we break the plants apart on accident as we pick in the evening shade. We too are stretched by the work of bringing it all in.

I finish most September days grateful and exhausted, saying,
“Okay, it can freeze, now. Bring it on.”

Sometimes it seems as though the whole Creation is panting with the labor of harvest, almost longing for the first frost to ease its striving. Frost, when it comes, is the friendliest of enemies—it settles gently, silvers the fields, and tells the weary land and its creatures, “Rest. That’ll do.” In these anxious days, that reminder is gift: the labor is real, but so is the call to rest. We are so many of us trying to hold our communities together with our bare hands. Even the fruit that falls to the ground – the institutions we can’t save, the ways of living that have reached this season’s end – all of it becomes soil for the season that is coming. Fruition is a pattern that brings grief and life. Frost enhances the sweetness of a fruit’s sugars for a moment, even, just before it finishes off both the fruit and all of the pests that have troubled us, the pestilence that we’ve struggled against. This is important to know.

Even more important to remember, about all that comes to fruition:
Within every ripened fruit, gathered or fallen, is the seed of next season.

In this place where we live and grow, the frost comes with a message of difficult hope: Only the cold yet to come can crack open those seeds, scar them into germination. But they will grow. Spring is not a one-time affair, friends. There are uncountable good harvests ahead — and so much good work.

My prayer for all of us is that fruition and frost might together speak a word of hope into our own season of cultural and spiritual upheaval. While the news cycle delivers complete misery every ten minutes, underneath that frenzy of short-lived and violent grasping for power is the truth. The truth – that only love frees us from fear – is what will come to sweet fullness, in time. The fruits of that truth – justice, kindness, gentleness, self-control – may feel hard-won, but they do come to ripeness.

And even when the air grows cold and we worry what will wither and when, we know that the ripening is how God gives us the seeds of what comes next and the energy to tend them.

The sweetness of the present moment and the chill that closes one chapter both carry God’s assurance that nothing is wasted, nothing is lost. Past, present, and yet-to-come are braided together by grace. So let’s take heart: in the fullness of this season, amidst all its changes, we are invited to trust that God’s goodness is still ripening, still flowing, still bringing life. Look for it.

All that God longs for will most surely come to fruition.

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Have I said this before?

If I haven’t, you can surely tell that I am disinclined to mow as soon as you step onto the farm, especially this year when the early and late rains have been ample.

Our wonderful dairy-farmer neighbor, Loren, came to the farm early on in our tenure. He stopped by on his tractor to advise us about haying the 2 acres of grass and alfalfa where our horses are now pastured. I love to tell the story of how very Minnesotan he was when he surveyed the place, the whole 18 acres of which was an overgrown mess from which you could hardly discern the fruit trees. We were falling behind with each passing week. Loren looked around from the high point in the pear block and said, as politely as possible “Now, I know you ladies are sticking with that…you know…organic way. I’m just wondering…are you allowed to mow the place at all?”

We laughed. Yes, organic fruit farmers can mow. We just don’t have time.

And we don’t like it much.

Not only because mowing is time-consuming and fuel-consuming (though it is), or because the mower smells and sounds like misery and cuts a path of small violence through the orchards and fields, here.

I hate mowing because I stand in awe of grass.

I hate mowing because it erases the light. In the slanted sun of late afternoon, the prairieland that surrounds Good Courage is made of spun gold. In the evening, the grassland is luminous. Have you ever walked through tall grasses in the blue hour and seen the fireflies rise like stars from the fields? That doesn’t happen in turfgrass. It only happens where we leave the land alone long enough for wonder to emerge. For grass to grow.

Here at Good Courage Farm, the grass is more than backdrop—it’s habitat, food, carbon sink, soil-saver, and sacred text.

We steward mostly fruit here, but the farm's first miracle of abundance is not orchard or vine—it’s grass. Grass is what built the prairie, what became the soil that yields apples and wine for us today. Again, I don’t mean turfgrass. I mean grass like Scripture means grass. Grass, a diverse multitude clothed in seed and adorned by neighboring forbs that flower, filling only the expanse allotted it by Creation’s self-sustaining design.

Turfgrass is an abomination. While it’s true that turfgrass is the #1 cultivated plant in the United States by acreage - 50 million acres (that’s way more than corn, even), we’re not fans of that Minnesotan love of mowing acres of homogenous fescue. Maintaining lawns and other turfgrass areas consumes 800 million gallons of fossil fuels (for mowing) and 90 million pounds of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. All this to perpetuate the class symbol of owning so much land that most of need not produce your own food, but can be ‘wasted’.

Our grass is a mix of orchard grass and a bunch of native prairie grasses like bluestem, side oats gramma, switchgrass…and yeah, a certain amount of fescue. The grassy bits of the farm are where you find chickens scratching for bugs between currant bushes, where you see soil held firm on the slope of the vineyard, where a feast and a home is laid out for our wild pollinators.

Grass is a kind of ostinato bass line in the symphony of a regenerative farm.

Mowing vs. Grazing

The hardest part for me about mowing the farm comes out of my mouth in a mantra of lament as I drive the zero-turn around: “But this is food. This is food. This is food.”

We don’t have enough animals to convert all the grass into other forms of life. So we do have to mow.

Here’s a thing I’ve come to learn: mowing and grazing do very different things to the land. Mowing is uniform, indiscriminate, and unresponsive. Grazing, on the other hand, is selective and interactive. Animals nibble one plant and leave the next, drop manure that feeds the roots, move on and allow recovery. Grazing—with rest—invites the grasses to deepen their roots, till their own soil, and thicken the pasture in response. Some research is showing that the saliva of grazing species – horses, cattle, bison – actually contains enzymes and vitamins that encourage grass to regrow! Mowing can weaken grasses over time. Grazing (done right) heals.

When I have a moment to watch our horses, Einsi and Spá, graze, I am astonished that their very being converts grass into strength. The Western world measures our industrial capacity in numbers that approximate how many horses a given engine replaces, but really, all that power begins with grass. No motor can ever replace that light-eating green force; it still traces its capacity back to photosynthesis, even if across aeons. We should maybe rate our tractor in terms of “grasspower” rather than horsepower.

After all, grass is pretty good metric of power. It’s even a decent icon of the Holy, a glimpse of that God who has created all things, seen and unseen. Especially unseen. What happens above ground is only half the story. Prairie grasses in Minnesota—big bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass—can send roots 6 to 10 feet into the earth. Imagine that: a network of life reaching farther down than the height of most trees. No lawn does this. Turfgrass is shallow, thirsty, hungry for fertilizers and fuel. It's not meant to survive here without constant human intervention. It’s not habitat. It’s not food. And it’s not good stewardship.

The Bible Knows Grass

The Bible knows this truth, even if we’ve forgotten it. Isaiah 40 reminds us:

All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades… but the word of our God will stand forever.

Psalm 103 echoes:

As for humankind, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone.

And Jesus says, with gentleness and exasperation all at once:

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow… If God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will God not much more care for you?

We often read these verses as warnings: “You are nothing. You fade.” Okay, true. But what if we’ve only heard part of what the Spirit is saying? What if to be called grass is not a judgment—but a blessing?

Let Us Be Grass

If humankind is grass, then we still belong to the good earth. We are woven into the cycles of growth and decay, of rooting deep and returning to the soil. We share in the miraculous gifts that we see in the prairie. We are not here to dominate or to manicure, but to flourish briefly, gloriously, in the light of the sun, and then to make way for what comes next.

And grass knows how to make way. It dies back every winter and returns stronger. It hosts insects and shields the soil. It knows rest and rhythm. It feeds birds, bison, my Icelandic horses. It houses our native bees. It has become the deepest, richest layer of topsoil on the planet. It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is, and still it is miracle enough.

Walt Whitman, whom I loved as a teenager, who spent his life listening to America’s wild edges, once asked:

“What is the grass? … I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.”

Whitman knew that grass was not just background—it was a sign, a symbol, a sacrament. He understood what Isaiah hinted at: that to be like grass is to be part of something deeply alive, fleeting, sacred.

Until we become grass, I think that we should, as the poets and prophets suggest, measure the meaning of our lives by grass.

In that spirit, I will keep resisting the urge to mow where I don’t have to. I will keep listening to the fields for their firefly songs. I will let the poultry and the ponies graze and trust the pasture to teach me again how to live.

Surrounding Good Courage Farm’s 18 acres of fence fruitlands are 68 acres of restored wetland prairie. I want to be buried out in the grassland of the farm. Not sure that will happen, but I’m putting it out there. Because truly, grass is the flag of my disposition. And if Isaiah is right and we are nothing more than grass, and if Jesus means it when he says that God cares about grass almost as much as God cares about us human beings, then well, grass is worth knowing and loving.

Worth being and becoming.

What do you say?

Let’s be grass.

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We hear it asked in dozens of different voices, even different languages in our currant rows. We ask it in our own voices, Jen and I, standing under one of the 14 varieties of plum tree that live and grow here at Good Courage Farm. How can we know if this is ripe, without picking it too soon and ending any possibility of ripeness? How can we be sure not to miss what is ripe and ready?

I wish I could offer the ministry’s volunteers more than a couple rules of thumb, but it may be the case that berry picking is an art best learned in childhood, when every way of knowing is still open too us, every kind of learning equally valid. I can say, “The darkest purple berries should give a little under a gentle squeeze between your finger an thumb. Pick those.” Yet it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Meeting and knowing the ripeness of fruit is a far more subtle and wholly sensory thing. There’s simply the unavoidable need for at least a dozen hours with a thousand individual fruit—and a farmer’s practiced attention. One day the berry is nearly there. The next, it's fragrant and heavy and about to drop. With currants, they lose their slight gloss, deepening to a matte violet-black. They soften slightly to the touch. It comes off the stem with the lightest tug. You can almost hear its readiness, if you’re quiet enough.

The same is true with plums. A green plum swells and flushes; then one day, its skin takes on a matte blue bloom, and it feels heavier in the hand. There’s a scent, too, that wasn’t there the day before—a fullness you can’t measure, only notice.

Side note: Okay, apparently it can be measured in some ways. Would it surprise you to know that in industrial agriculture, ripeness in berries – blueberries, for example – is identified and graded by machines? It is. Like writing poetry, this not work that I need to know can be done by a robot in this world. I don’t want the sweetest parts of living to be handled by soulless, disembodied intelligence. But it is: ripeness has become a data point on a robotic conveyor belt. The blueberries that you buy (and that I buy, too, because it would take a miracle to grow a blueberry in our ultra-alkaline soil, here) have all met the gaze of a massive optical sorter on their way to your breakfast bowl. Coupled with cameras that detect multiple wavelengths of light, there are algorithms and deep learning models out there in fruit-packing plants, doing the work of our human eyes and fingertips. Machines are busy even now, somewhere, analysing the size, color, shape, and weight of grocery-store berries and plums, selecting and rejecting accordingly.

But what joy — and what wisdom — can be had only in seeking and choosing sweetness out under the hot sun?
What is the difference between analysing acceptability and discerning ripeness?

Ripeness is a matter of attention—of deep sensory discernment. We don’t train our eyes to catch the difference between red and red-enough. That knowing comes through attention, day after day, berry season after berry season. Our fingers learn what “ready” feels like. The work is slow, patient, reverent. Wendell Berry (the cosmos gave him that name, yeah?) called this embodied learning, this attention — so utterly different from artificial intelligence —“material intelligence”.

It’s also a kind of spiritual knowing. In the berry field, material intelligence is intertwined with the life of the spirit. Some decisions can't be rushed. Some seasons require us to wait, to observe, to hold still until the fruit is fully formed. A soul’s knowing, like a berry, ripens in its own time.

What are you discerning these days?

Know that discernment is not analyzing or sorting, nor is it guessing or strategizing. It’s not forcing a choice. It’s standing in the orchard of your own life and learning to see what is quietly becoming ready. The writer of the book of James says, “The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near” (James 5:7–8).

I love that: strengthen your hearts. That’s the discipline it takes to wait well. To watch with care. To trust what is unfolding. To discern ripeness.

So when I kneel in the currant rows, eyes scanning first for the darkest fruit, almost disappearing into the leafy shadows, I think of all the noticing, the wondering, the deciding that is ripening in me, too. I’ll be praying for the strength of heart it takes to choose this way of knowing.

Not yet, not yet... yes, now.

The harvest comes not with haste, but with holy attention.

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Even though Good Courage Farm is primarily a perennial fruit farm, my wife Jen lives to plant vegetables each year. She has stacks of seed packets on her bedside table in every season. On the back of any of those seed packets, one finds lots of helpful numbers about how deep to plant the seeds, and how far apart. Another number indicates how many days it is from planting to maturity: 52 days. 67. 85.

Plant your sweet corn in mid-May, and you’ll be roasting ears by early August, if you’ve kept the weeds and raccoons at bay. Everything’s on a schedule in the vegetable field. The rows fill in with their succession of crops with (more or less) clocklike precision.

I’m not big into planting seeds, which is why I was game to take on fruit farming in the second half of my life. I love that we don’t have to plant anything, really. Our orchards are mostly between 6 and 12 years old, and we only planted a few of those trees. They persist, year after year; I just show up in the same place and find them blooming and fruiting. Jen plants her vegetable seeds for extra joy and more nourishment.

From both the house garden and the established fruit plantings, I draw regular lessons about the nature of time. In particular, about the Greek notions of chronos and kairos, which have become Christian theological concepts.

Chronos is countable time, like the number on the seed packet.
Kairos is time as the seed itself knows it, time like berries ripening —
how and when they will.

Of course, the seed packet wants us to believe that its numbers will always be correct, but reality is different. Meteorological summer started June 1, but the unfolding of the season happens as it will. June gets hot, early, sometimes and the lettuce bolts. If rain comes for days and days and days, the tomatoes sometimes stay green in spite of their label.

That said, the “days until harvest” on a packet of pepper seeds is a pretty good place to start. Chronologically speaking.

Now, fruit is different.

Currants—our next summer crop at Good Courage Farm—ripen when they’re good and ready. They carry no seed packet promise, no countdown clock. Berry harvest has been off by as much as two weeks across the six years we’ve been tending these fields of currants. One June may be flush and early; another may come slow and stormy. One week the bush is a tangle of green berries. The next, the sun has shifted something inside them, and you taste that the time is now. Kairos time.

Chronos is the time we measure.
Kairos is the time God meets us in.

Chronos is our weather app saying that rain is expected at 10:15. Chronos is the fifty-five minutes you need to bake your rhubarb pie. The feed truck that will come on June 30. The unchanging rhythm of weeks across which we see the moon filling and emptying herself of borrowedlight. The cadence of six days of work and one day of rest.

Kairos is the ripeness of a moment. The fullness of time, when God steps in. It defies numbering. Kairos is when your body tells you to stop even though there’s still work to do. When the barn swallows return and stitch the sky with their holy embroidery. When a child speaks a first word — so clear! — and you know that this changes every moment to come. Kairos is knowing time not by the date on the calendar, but by the depth of color in the cherries, or by the appearance of the blue darning needles in the tall pasture grass. “Oh, it’s that time…” Kairos is the kind of time that can’t be planned or forced, only received.

One is not more real than the other. Kairos isn’t ‘better’ time than chronos. They’re different experiences of the same reality. Kairos doesn’t always flow sweetly, like honey. I don’t think we could handle a lifetime of kairos. That’s God’s milieu.

Chronos and kairos contain one another. They only have meaning to our human hearts when we can dip in and out of each, feeling the difference —one a stream, the other an unfathomable pool.

Chronos contains kairos. On a toddler’s birthday, the bright number 2 festooned from backyard trees and bouncing on every balloon – 2! 2! 2! – means something because it contains sleepless nights of tender care that we never tally. The smallness of “two” contains the hope of every day of that child’s life yet to come, kairos days beyond our sight.

Kairos contains chronos. At the bedside of our beloved, at the threshold of the next world, the space between breaths stretches to hold every one of the perhaps thirty-three thousand days that have been given as gifts. We want to remember, to count and name every day in those vigiling hours, yet the numbers we would need to count the days don’t come to visit us then. Still, every one of the days is there in the room, still there even after the breath stops.

Kairos and chronos are two ways to know one reality. That said, the lives of most Americans these days are spent indoors - 21 of every 24 hours away from the sun and soil, out of earshot of the beating hearts of other creatures or pounding rainstorms. Our lives are short on kairos.

It is so much easier for me to move in and out of chronos and kairos, to occasionally find myself at their astonishing confluence, when I’m standing in a berry field. At any hour of the day or night, time flows out of Creation, through my hands and feet, into my awareness. The less I’m outdoors, in contact with other creatures (meaning the more I am indoors, in a human-made environment), the more stuck I remain in one experience of time. Usually chronos.

Time feels different in these six years I’ve lived and worked on a farm.

I am learning to keep time from the plants and animals here. What surprises me is that other creatures know both chronos and kairos time. The hen who chooses a moment and will not be moved from the nest knows somehow that in exactly 21 days, eggs will suddenly be replaced by chicks. Knows that she can make it until then without food, without moving. Our ponies know when it’s 5:00 a.m., even as the solstice passes and my own morning chore alarm slips ahead of the sun by a couple minutes each day. They wait at the gate as if they had pocket watches. The sparkling metronome of fireflies is reliably precise, the different species pulsing in a slightly different rhythm from one another so that they can be found and known.

They can’t count time, non-human creatures, and yet they can.
Every creature is gifted with the capacity to slip into kairos time —
that includes you.

Outside the house is where I come to meet God outside of time. What if kairos is the best name we can give to God’s temple? God’s holy court, which we find is built not out of stones but out of time, consecrated not by human hands but in and through the goodness of Creation.

Psalm 84 sings it: “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere.” The psalmist may have meant the courts of the Temple in Jerusalem, but I read the word ‘courts’ to mean that unbounded space in time so near to God that everywhere we’ve already been seems like elsewhere. I read ‘courts’ and I think of the slow-ripening currant field outside my window. There, I find that one day of God’s nearness outweighs a thousand of my busy-ness. One kairos moment outshines a year’s worth of well-planned agendas.

And yet, we can’t dwell there always, in that timeless temple of God’s nearness. Chronos has become our habitat, where we live with calendars, reminders, news feeds, end dates.

Peter, writing to the early church, had something to say about this tension. "With God," he wrote, "one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day" (2 Peter 3:8). He was trying to comfort a small group of people, living under Empire, who felt abandoned by God’s delay in coming to set the world right. I feel you, ancestors. For those of us braced against these four years, faced with 1,304 more days of struggle and rage, chronos is a timeline we’d rather not inhabit, days of past and future tragedy stitched together by lies. We pray and act every week, hoping that we can bend the moral arc of the universe bend a little more tightly. We need change, ASAP, and we wonder what in the world God is waiting for.

Why do the seeds of justice not come with a “days to harvest” label?

Yet the God of the ripening berry is never late. Also, God is never early.
God is on time—just not always on our time.

Our time is made of hours and days that we still give to the work of nurturing, tending, preparing, even though we may not see the harvest.

On the farm, we live in the both/and of chronos and kairos.
The daily and the divine.
The carrots and the currants.
You live there, too, neighbor in time.
We watch the weather, plan our pruning, get the irrigation system going in spring. Chronos matters—we need to show up, prepare, weed, wait. But we also need to watch for the shimmering edge of kairos, when the fruit is ready before we expected. Or when we’re stopped by a hawk circling, or a stranger bursts into tears at the taste of black currants, or we get news of a friend’s death while surrounded by elderflower that smells like heaven.

Those are the moments when time thins. When something eternal slips through.

Attending to these moments grounds us in this good world. Connects us to other beings. Even if we think we experience the moment alone, it connects us to the whole.

Perennial crops teach patience. They ripen on their own schedule. They carry memory in their roots. A bush remembers drought. A tree remembers pruning. And somehow—somehow—they still bear. Sometimes wildly. Sometimes stingily. But always according to a wisdom not our own.

There’s no forcing a currant to ripen. But when the time is right, you’d better have your bucket ready.

Maybe that’s the invitation. To live with a little more kairos in our chronos. To let Creation teach us what kind of time we’re in. To remember that you are the seed, not the number on the paper envelope – let the measure of days between you and maturity be an invitation, not a stick.

Some seasons ask us to mark the days and keep the schedule. Others ask us to wait and watch and trust the slow ripening of God’s goodness. You may not know what kind of day it is until you taste it.

So bless the days that feel long and fruitless—God is not slow.
God is ripening something.
Bless the days that fly by with gladness—God is near.
And bless the days that break your schedule with beauty or grief or joy.
Those might be the days God is most at work.

You just might be standing in the courts of God, one moment at a time

.

Parables from the Farm

Theological reflections on soil and scripture drawn from the rhythms of life at Good Courage Farm

By Kerri Meyer

It’s turtle season again, and the painted ones are on the move. Tuesday last, I was coming home from meeting a dear parish family at the funeral home. Our friend – their father, husband, anchor – had died unexpectedly. As I came around the big east-bending curve of County Road 115, our road, I saw her: a dessert-plate-sized dome of black and gold and orange, parked mid-lane like she had all day to get where she was going.

Let me say that I know that if I die suddenly, dear friends, the odds are good it will be because I have pulled over, as I do, and stepped onto some concrete ribbon somewhere where the speed limit is 65 miles per hour. For a turtle. Or maybe because I have swerved, driving 65 miles per hour myself, to avoid killing a monarch butterfly and I ended up meeting some immovable object. Compassion and speed are a risky mix. If I end up being right about this, forgive me my folly.

I passed over this week’s turtle, her fragile body neatly between my tires, and then watched a box truck pass over her in my rear view mirror. Praying aloud and watching the traffic, I pulled over, threw the car in reverse, and drew up alongside her with my door open so that the next cars would pass us in the far lane. (It’s reasonable to critique these actions.) I grabbed the creature out of the road, giving thanks that she was miraculously intact. Placing her in the ditch on the far side, aimed toward the wetland in the direction she was already heading, I blessed her and told her that she needed never to do something so dumb again if she could help it.

And I thought, as I do every single time I do this, if I were a turtle, wouldn’t that seem kinda like the hand of God?

Wouldn’t it be terrifying to my turtle self, and wouldn’t my comprehension be pretty much limited to “I got grabbed” by something I knew only as a hand? I mean, there’s no way that a reptile, with her head tucked so far back in that intricately colored shell, could have seen or felt much more than my hand. How could she know anything else about me as a human being? That I have legs, too, or eyes, or a blonde chignon? Or that I’m dressed in priestly black for a different occasion of life and death, not this one on the roadside? Could she know that I am inordinately fond of turtles? There’s just no way.

At best, that turtle grasped only the hand that grasped her.

In Byzantine iconography, the hand of God often appears at the top of the panel, descending from a golden arc. Just the hand—no face, no body—just a gesture from heaven, reaching down from glory into the gritty world of human need. Sometimes it offers a blessing. Sometimes it steadies a prophet. Sometimes it lifts a saint from the depths of despair or death.

It’s a bold and simple visual theology: God intervenes. God touches the world with care. Also, you probably can’t comprehend any more of God’s self than this.
Let’s stick with a hand.

The first time I saw an icon that featured the Hand, I was like, “What the actual heck?” It seemed almost silly. The artist saying, through shapes and colors, “I don’t know anything, really, about God except that there’s a hand.” Of course, it’s a workaround for the artist who takes seriously the prohibition against graven images, but who wants to be clear that God is active and present in what’s happening in the scene.

I’ve thought about that Hand a lot across the years—not while praying with or writing icons, but while standing on the gravel shoulder of various county roads. That unexpected lift from danger, that awful and invisible grace swooping down with no warning. You’re making your way through a hard and dangerous landscape, and something picks you up and sets you gently where you need to be. Odds are good, you had no idea what peril you were in. Odds are good, you thought you knew where you wanted to go, but were never exactly sure what it would take to get there.

I have run-ins with this icon of the Holy, this disembodied Hand, daily on the farm. Each encounter becomes a parable in which I’m the creature and all I know is I once was lost, and now am grabbed. I tell you, the Hand in iconography makes complete sense to me, now.

There are the kingbirds, caught in the vineyard netting every morning in August, panicked wings flapping deeper and deeper into trouble. I cup them gently, unwrap their feet and flight feathers from the nightmarish nylon line, and release them skyward. Sometimes, they fly clear across the wetland to get away from me, and sometimes they go just a few feet to rest in the hedgerow—maybe just to reorient, or maybe to see if they can take all of me in, not just the hand.

There are the junebugs, floating belly-up in the bottom of a water bucket, flailing. The garden spiders in the summer kitchen sink. The bumblebees bumbling against the panes of window glass. The ducks who get shut out of the coop because they stayed out past the automatic door’s curfew. Grabby mercies happen here, and with the kinds of creatures that normally go unnoticed, missed, or dismissed. Maybe you, like me, are chronically in touch with your inner four-year-old and sensitive to such things. These are small acts. Not everyone chooses to grab creatures this way, and for good reason. Once you start, you see that you can never be everywhere at once, saving every small, imperiled thing.

I see myself, feel myself, in these terrified (but rarely remorseful) creatures.

Yet, in these grabby parables, we are not only the lifted — we find ourselves doing the lifting up. What all of these little dramas have in common is my whispered line, spoken to the bird or turtle or pretty little bug, “Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.”

Even though I know that they can’t.

Sometimes, I’ve been too late to save the [insert small creature here] from humanity’s need to get where we’re going. Sometimes, I stop anyway, lifting the broken body off the shimmering hot asphalt and laying it softly in the green grass where it will melt back into Life.

My own longing to save gives me a glimpse of the heart of God. Out there is a benevolent Creator, I believe, who has at least a Hand and a Heart. That One, always in the right place at the right time, wants more than anything to save. My own choice, over and over again, to stop everything else that I’m doing so that I can lift some creature up – no matter whether creeping or crushed – cracks open for me that promise: “So, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s possession.”

If the icons are windows into the Holy—and I believe they are—then each of us, at some point, has been that frightened prophet or flailing bird, that vulnerable little living thing stuck in a place we didn’t know how to escape. Each of us has known that Hand—God’s hand—descending from who-knows-where doing who-knows-what.

Through a friend. Through a stranger. Through a mercy we didn’t see coming. We get grabbed – ever so gently. Carried. Saved. Reoriented.

Each of us has been that Hand, too, says St. Teresa of Avila. Says St. Gregory of Nyssa.

The prayer book says, “In your mercy, Lord, deliver us.” I pray this pretty often these days. We could use some benevolent hand sweeping us up to safety, pointing us in a better direction. Perhaps in your life, you’ve known that deliverance to come with trumpets and earthquakes; I have, but on a very few occasions. More often, it comes in the form of a quiet gesture, like a farmer pulling over on an empty country road.

In scripture, a few stuck creatures (human ones) ask Jesus for mercy. Those moments in which Christ reaches out and touches individuals with compassion are not peripheral to the Gospel — they are the Gospel. Moments when we act with compassion, no matter how inconsequential the results, are not peripheral to the Gospel, either — they are the Gospel. They are Salvation in miniature, icons in motion. They remind us that we live in a world where grace still interrupts, where the Divine still kneels down and cradles the smallest, homeliest creature in their moment of need.

And so we keep watching. We keep reaching. We keep pulling over.
Knowing that the bird is us. The turtle is us.

And the Hand of God, it turns out, sometimes looks like yours and like mine.

Share Parables from the Farm

Here at Good Courage Farm, we often quote the mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote that the Holy Spirit is green. Everything we see that is green is the lifegiving power of the Spirit at work, and within us is a greening sap, she wrote, that enlivens our faith and moves us toward transformation and growth.

If the Holy Spirit is green, and if the persons of the Trinity are consubstantial – that is to say, of the same essential nature – then something green flows through that divine, dancing group of Three who are One.

You with me?

On Trinity Sunday, of all days, I find myself wondering: what if the miracle that is green bears witness to something deeper about God’s whole self? What if this day, with altars and preachers decked in white, is the threshold to the great, green growing season of Pentecost because the color itself is a key to understanding God in a new way?

Our forebears in faith – St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, the Celtic mystics – taught the doctrine of vestigia Trinitatis, the idea that God’s Triune self has left imprints of the mystery of One in Three everywhere in Creation. Like footprints or breadcrumbs, the Trinity has left little clues everywhere that what seems like One is in fact Three, and vice versa. People continue to draw on natural metaphors to illustrate the nature of the Holy Trinity – shamrock leaves with their three lobes, water in its three states, the human brain with its capacity for memory, understanding and will.

You can be sure that plenty of theologians pushed back against this doctrine, or at least cautioned against it, because it presumes that Creation can be “read” as a revelation of Godself just as reliably as Holy Scripture. If that interests you, there’s meaty stuff by Barth and others about how far we can take vestigia Trinitatis in our search for the Holy. It’s safe for you to assume that in this writing and everything else I write, I take the Book of Creation as a primary source of encounter with the Creator. I read it right alongside the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, with equal reverence and a certainty that as an ensemble, these revelations contain all things necessary not only for salvation but for life abundant.

Green has always been my favorite color, which made me a weird little kid.

Chlorophyll — that unassuming pigment, omnipresent to the point that we sometimes don’t even see it, is acked into every blade of grass, every leaf of June. It is what makes life on this farm, and really all life on earth, possible. It’s the quiet convertor of sunlight into sugars, into food, into breath. Without it, you and I would have nothing to eat and nothing to breathe. The trees would stand still and empty. The vines would never fruit.

I’m a big fan of chlorophyll.

In seminary, I took a course on ecological liturgy with Dr. Mary McGann. As a final project for that class, I thrifted a glass goblet and set sparkly gems into it in the molecular diagram of chlorophyll. I gathered my kindred students and professor around an altar, at the center of which was that chalice, filled with water. Round it I piled growing wheatgrass and freshly-trimmed grapevines, lit with dozens of beeswax candles. In an apologetic ritual asserting that what is in, with, and under the elements of Holy Eucharist–right there with Christ–is God’s gift of photosynthesis, we gave thanks for the Holy Spirit, present through what comes to us through the color green. I wish I could show you a photo of that nature-nerdy chalice of water, with its dollar-store emeralds, but it got broken by our cat just a few days after the semester ended.

(I suppose my Bishop could be reading this right now and feeling wary of any permissions we have for Rite III worship here at Good Courage Farm. Hey, Bishop!)

But truly, if we embrace vestigia trinitatis as an affirmation of God’s unity-in-Diversity, of God’s diversity-in-unity, can’t we wonder if chlorophyll is a kind of icon — a living, photosynthetic parable of the Holy Trinity?

Now, I know we’ve inherited all sorts of language for God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Lots of images, too, with a real focus on two guys and a bird. Those names and pictures carry beauty, but also baggage, and sometimes distance. They are too concrete for some folks. But the Trinity is too abstract for most folks, so we keep searching for illustrations. When we find traces of the Trinity in the rest of Creation, the deeper pattern and the relational mystery they point to are anything but abstract. It’s as real and grounded as leaf and light.

I’m also a fan of process theology, which I barely grasp.

The main idea is that God seems to be harder to pin down as a being and more akin to the very act of Being. So, photosynthesis, being a process, seems like a good starting point for a God that is always Becoming.

So let me offer you this, not as a doctrinal claim but as a farmer’s reflection. The Trinity, as I’ve come to glimpse it, lives in the pattern of photosynthesis.

Light. Green. Breath.

That’s how life comes.

• God the Creator — the Source — is so very like sunlight. Radiant, generous, endlessly pouring forth energy. Unresting, unhasting, and silent, as the hymn says. Present no matter what clouds affect our perception. Always giving. “Imagine a Love like that,” says the poet, Hafiz. “It lights up the Whole Sky.”
  
  If you are humming “Immortal, Invisible” right now, I want to be your penpal.
  

• Christ — the Incarnate Word — is a whole lot like chlorophyll itself. Hang with me, here. Christ and chlorophyll are mediator. The one who receives who takes the light into the matter of being, the one who translates what is beyond us into what can nourish us. Chlorophyll is the green aspect of grace: taking mystery and transfiguring into a glorious sweetness that the world can’t live without.
  

• And the Spirit? The Spirit is like the released breath. The oxygen, the byproduct, the blessing. Ruach. Proceeding from Source and Mediator, if the Creed is your companion. Actual inspiration, filling the lungs of the world. Flowing through absolutely everything.

  

  Light, green, breath.
  Creator, Christ, Spirit.
  Source, sustainer.

Of course, the mystery of the Trinity can’t be reduced to a plant metaphor any more than it can be boxed up in a creed. But I do believe God delights to be known in the things God has made. And if that’s true, then chlorophyll might be one of the humblest theophanies around.

I mean, think about it: it’s hidden in plain sight. It’s both seen and unseen. It works quietly. It collaborates. It is absolutely essential to the flourishing of life. I know a few people who bear the Spirit like that, too.

What if, as the theologians of the earliest and the most mystical traditions, we thought and spoke about vestigia Trinitatis — traces of the Trinity — showing up all over creation. Not as proof texts, but as echoes. As shadows of the divine community, woven into the created world. I see it in chlorophyll, and I want to know where you see it.

I think that having eyes and hearts for viriditas and for vestigia Trinitatis is more than making clever comparisons. It’s a real longing to know God. Photosynthesis isn’t just a process — it’s a pattern. It’s a model of relationship: mutual, creative, life-giving. And that’s what the Trinity is, too. Not hierarchy, not abstraction, but relationship. A divine ecology of intermingled, generous love.

We are living in a world in need of breathable air — and not just oxygen. We need spiritual breath. Fresh air in our theology, our politics, our liturgies. I think that starts with paying closer attention. To our own breath. To the leaves. To the greenness of things. The Spirit is often nearer than we think.

So maybe this Trinity Sunday, don’t worry too much about getting the doctrine right. Take a walk instead. Sit beneath a tree. Hold a leaf up to the light and look for that green shimmer. What if grace reveals itself to you there? What if you become a theologian of the Trinity just looking at a blade of grass? The world deserves, longs, to know what you see.

I tell you what Mary Oliver has already told us:

“Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

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𝅘𝅥𝅮 Praise is yours, God, in your holy place.*
Now is the moment to keep our vow, for you, God, are listening.

All people come to you bringing their shameful deeds.*
You free us from guilt, from overwhelming sin.

Happy are those you invite and then welcome to your courts.*
Fill us with the plenty of your house, the holiness of your temple.

You give victory in answer to our prayer.*
You inspire awe, God, our savior, hope of distant lands and waters.

Clothed in power, you steady the mountains;*
you still the roaring seas, restless waves, raging nations.

People everywhere stand amazed at what you do,*
east and west shout for joy.

You tend and water the land. How wonderful the harvest!*
You fill your springs, ready the seeds, prepare the grain.

You soak the furrows and level the ridges.*
With softening rain you bless the land with growth.

You crown the year with riches. All you touch comes alive:*
untilled lands yield crops, hills are dressed in joy,

Flocks clothe the pastures, valleys wrap themselves in grain.*
They all shout for joy and break into song.

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Regenerative agriculture is more than a method—it’s a spiritual posture. A covenantal relationship. It’s how we listen to the land and return to the God who shaped us from its soil. It’s the art of living in deep harmony with Creation; it’s happy by-product is abundant, good food for people.

But what is regenerative farming, really?

Rather than start with science or statistics, we’re turning to Scripture. Specifically, Psalm 65—a harvest hymn, a watershed psalm, a praise-song from people who knew how to pray with the land.

So I asked three questions I hear often—from curious neighbors, skeptical farmers, and faithful friends. And I let Psalm 65 respond, line by sacred line. I’ll drop those verses in, featuring my favorite adaptation from the (unauthorized yet beautifully durable) Roman Catholic translation from the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.

1. Isn’t regenerative agriculture just a trendy way to say “organic”?

Psalm 65 responds (Verses 5,11):

People everywhere stand amazed at what you do,
east and west shout for joy.

…

You crown the year with riches. All you touch comes alive:
untilled lands yield crops…

Regeneration is more than a rejection of chemicals. It’s a deep alignment with divine abundance. It begins with paying attention to Creation’s elegance, with “standing amazed at what God does.” When we notice a pattern in our ecosystem that’s life-giving, we try to imitate it. Psalm 65 attributes very few actions to people. It is instead a praise-filled litany of all that God is doing, all the verbs that are God’s own to-do list as the Divine Gardener of the Cosmos. It’s God who tends, waters, prepares. We learn to farm by imitatio Dei — what God does, we try to imitate.

We used to be USDA certified organic here, but we dropped that certification in hopes of a more relational, reparative approach to growing food. Psalm 65 doesn’t talk about certifications or inputs—it speaks of the Creator’s intimate care: visiting, watering, softening, blessing. Now, Jen and I as consumers still value the little green-and-white circular label; it has been a fairly trustworthy indicator that food we buy is free from highly-toxic pesticides and herbicides. That said, organic sprays still kill bees and monarchs along with cutworm and codling moth. The word “organic” doesn’t encompass life-giving practices in the Psalm, where we sing that God’s touch means that Creation comes more alive. That’s the power we want to align our lives with. Organic just isn’t enough for us.

Organic farming is focused on what we subtract from conventional ag. Regenerative agriculture isn’t mere abstention from harm—it’s active participation in healing.
This way of farming follows the pattern of and seeks the promise of life abundant for all Creation.

Regenerative agriculture imitates the divine rhythm in Psalm 65. We notice in awe that in Creation, even untilled lands yield crops. We say, “Let’s imitate that!” We build soil rather than strip it. We catch water rather than drain it. We plant with prayerful hands and harvest with humble joy.

It’s about noticing, loving, restoring — because that’s what we see God doing in Creation.

2. How does regenerative agriculture actually heal the land?

Psalm 65 responds (Verse 3):

All people come to you bringing their shameful deeds.
You free us from guilt, from overwhelming sin.

Psalm 65 names the truth plainly: “Our sins overwhelm us.” The psalmist may have meant ritual failings or moral lapses, but I hear in this line a litany of modern ecological transgressions—tilling that erodes, spraying that sterilizes, extraction that exhausts. Much of conventional agriculture treats soil like a substrate, not a living community.

But healing begins with confession. Regenerative agriculture names what has gone wrong and responds not with punishment, but with tenderness, the same tenderness God shows toward human beings and toward the earth from which we are formed.

And just as God started our human story with a handful of earth, the healing of our food and farming systems starts with the soil. I notice that Psalm 65 gives soil its own couplet! As the psalm says, God softens the land—not with brute force, but with blessing. Practices like cover cropping, composting, and no-till mimic this divine gentleness. Turning away from the idol of maximum annual yield, stopping the assault that is mechanized efficiency, we start to nurture, as if the soil were our sibling. As if it were the very essence of our being. Because it is.

Psalm 65 (Verses 9-10)

You tend and water the land. How wonderful the harvest!*
You fill your springs, ready the seeds, prepare the grain.

You soak the furrows and level the ridges.*
With softening rain you bless the land with growth.

If God treats the soil with such care, so then should we.

3. But can it really bring hope—to farmers, to communities, to the Earth? What is the real potential of regenerative farming?

The practices of cover cropping, limited tillage, livestock integration, and ecological restoration are scaleable, but my lived experience of regenerative farming is at the family farm level.

Small landholders are losing the struggle to hang on to their farms, as global ag corporations engage in violent landgrabs. Every minute, an acre of land that used to be a family farm comes into the hands of a major agribuisness entity. Farms that are embedded in local ecologies are replaced by the sin of stupidity that is monoculture. Psalm 65 doesn’t sing the praises of tens of thousands of acres of a single commodity crop, we notice.

The myth of the Green Revolution, the belief that only modern, industrialized agricultural can feed the world, paints this transfer of land as progress. But that myth just doesn’t bear out in the field. Not only can small farms feed the world, they are feeding the world now. On every continent, data show that farms of fewer than 5 acres are reliably more productive than very large operations. More than a third of the worlds calories are produced on small, family farms, in spite of systems stacked against them. Arguably these smallholder are more healthful calories, too, since commodity agriculture produces mostly corn and soy that are fractionated and fabricated into sugary, fried, meaty foods.

Regenerative practices are proven. They’re in place in communities in every country. What we need is policy that supports small farmers who are feeding their own communities (not the entire world at once) this way.

To that end, I pray Psalm 65 often, leaning on this verse:

You give victory in answer to our prayer.*
You inspire awe, God, our savior, hope of distant lands and waters.

Farming regeneratively brings me hope. What God is doing in Creation brings me hope. It brings hope to a world beset by an extractive, neo-colonial global food system.

Sigh.

Most importantly, thought: Regenerative farming also brings joy.

Joy is the sound the land makes when it is well cared for, when it is restored to wholeness. In the psalm’s final line, flocks and grain appear in the same breath—a quiet witness to a profound truth: livestock and crops belong together. Creation is a whole.

Psalm 65 responds (Verses 12-13):
…Hills are dressed in joy,

Flocks clothe the pastures, valleys wrap themselves in grain.*
They all shout for joy and break into song.

At Good Courage, we see this all the time. Ducks waddle between vineyard rows, browsing weeds and chasing bugs, being their full duck selves. Chickens scratch and peck through the orchard, fertilizing as they go, fulfilling their creaturely call. Swallows make meals of the blackflies that want to make meals of us, and bats manage the similarly motivated mosquitos. Green lacewings protect the trees from oystershell scale. Barred owls feast on voles, preventing the voles from feasting on our apple trees. Frogs, snakes, dragonflies, herons, all woven together in a sturdy, shining fabric that monoculture can never replicate or surpass.

This integration is not characterized by efficiency, but by a divine elegance. Most importantly — it’s joyful. It looks, smells, sounds, and tastes like joy. Psalm 65 describes the wholeness of Creation as a kind of music: the whole landscape cheers and sings for joy.

Regenerative agriculture doesn't just feed the body
—it restores right relationship.
Between humans and land.
Between crops and creatures.
Between praise and practice.

It brings me joy that I couldn’t know otherwise.

Let the Earth Praise

Okay, Psalm 65 is no farming manual. But it is a witness—a testament to a world in which God and ground are not far apart. A world in which water blesses, soil rejoices, and flocks and fields sing together.

Regenerative agriculture is one way we begin to live in that world again. Not just by technique, but by trust—that the same God who frees us from our error is also the One who heals the land. Our vocation is just to join in and receive that healing.

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It would make a pretty good band name, maybe? “Priscilla and The Marys.” Some days, they’re about as loud as a rock concert, the six peafowl who call Good Courage home. These feathered kindred are neither wildlife, nor livestock, nor pets. They come and go as they will. They can be invited but not compelled to sleep in a shelter, preferring the highest branches of the silver maples, even in storms. They’re in-between creatures — walking, squawking parables of death, life, and the meaning of radical hospitality. And they have names.

So, I’m not writing here about how peafowl as a species got their name, though sometimes we wonder if it’s because of their love of peanuts or their pea-sized brains, which nevertheless do a decent job keeping them alive 95% of the time. For the record, the word peacock only applies to the males. Females are called peahens, and they raise peachicks. (Or they try, anyway.) Now you know.

I mean how the two score feral peafowl—mostly peahens—earned their names as long-term guests of this farm. They deserve names, since they’ve insinuated themselves into daily chores, weekly planning, and regular storytelling sessions. Even now, the youngest of the current band, Solomon, is outside my window as I write. They deserve names—and good ones, because peafowl are among the oldest artistic symbols of the Resurrection.

That’s why I was delighted when Priscilla made the farm her home in the summer of 2019. If not her home, then at least her babies’ nursery. The interns spotted her first and then noticed the band of five—or was it six?—peachicks running around the vineyard and the south orchard. I remembered that the Rev. Rick Fabian, one of the founders of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, once gave me a peacock puppet for Christmas, explaining that frescoes and mosaics of the birds adorned ossuaries and altars from the earliest Churches.

So Priscilla, mother or grandmother of all the semi-wild peafowl at Good Courage Farm, was named after the Christian woman buried in the catacombs under Rome alongside martyrs and popes. Priscilla’s tomb was adorned with frescoes depicting scenes from her life, including one of her in “rich liturgical dress” (according to the Office of Tourism), standing in the orans position, like a priest celebrating Eucharist. The Vatican denies that this is evidence of women’s priestly vocation, claiming her arms are raised in prayer simply because she’s really, really happy to be in heaven.

Priscilla the Peahen managed to get three chicks to maturity that first, which was a miracle on a farm filled with dogs, cats, the occasional fox, and one clueless farmer. They stayed together as a family flock for a year or two, so that winter there were four feathered symbols of the Resurrection living in our frozen woodlot. You are correct. Peafowl are not native to Minnesota.

It’s tempting to recount the whole miserable, tender story of their first winter here, but there are already several episodes dedicated to that saga in my old Preaching to Birds and Cats podcast. I named those chicks Francis (after the saint, obvs), Pascal (after the Resurrection), and Temple Grandin (hoping to channel some animal-whispering wisdom). Every day I brought them warm water and food in the tractor shed, which looked not unlike the setting of Fra Filippo Lippi’s nativity scene in his Adoration of the Magi.

Ironically, poor Pascal didn’t survive long past Easter. He was tended in his final days by caring folks at a vegan farm sanctuary in Wisconsin.

Showing zero gratitude for my hospitality, the other three birds bailed and left the farm. After a year’s absence without leave, Priscilla returned (yet another dramatic story) and laid a clutch of four eggs right where the solar panel crew arrived to install our array in 2022. I haven’t podcasted that story yet, but I should.

I ended up incubating those eggs and raising the chicks. One, a creamy-colored black-shouldered hen, I named Providence—an obvious theme in the story of pea-eggs saved from a skid steer at the last possible moment. (A nod also to one of our Oakland backyard hens named Providence, who had a near-death experience, too).

The other three matured into peahens, indistinguishable from one another, and were named Mary, Mary, and Mary, after the oft-confounded women of the Gospels. Once, I took an accidental pilgrimage on foot to the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and only there noted the names of the witnesses of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. On feast days, we invite the birds into our farm liturgies as “The Three Marys of Illustrious Renown,” as in Celtic hagiography. They’re happy to participate loudly in worship, especially given unfettered access to the big barn; they’re happy, too, not to participate, but only in trade for peanuts.

When one of the Marys whom I raised is in need of peaparenting—say, stuck up on a steel shed roof in subzero temperatures—the full names come out: “Mary the Wife of Clopas, get down from there before you lose your feet to frostbite!” There are probably many similar sentences said daily on the farm that have never before been spoken in the English language.

.Again, ironically, Providence only lived a year. She was injured, but I may have hastened her death by trying to care for her myself rather than relying on her namesake to see her through.

We never had a male make it to maturity—until this past year. Francis (renamed Frances) came back as a grown peahen and had one chick, whom we named Sylvester, after the pope who reigned while Priscilla was serving the church as a woman priest. Sylvester didn’t survive the hard winter of 2022.

Given our track record, we probably shouldn’t give the peafowl such grand names, popes and virtues and all that. They don’t seem to live fully into those names, or even survive them. Still, this year Temple Grandin—a grand dame now at six years old—has given us our first actual surviving peacock. For a while we couldn’t tell the gender, so we alternated between calling the baby El Niño and La Niña, since 2024 gave us both weather patterns. But he’s a true peacock. And he’s gorgeous, even without the fantail that he’ll grow in the next year. Because of his finery, his incoming splendor (which there are just teenaged hints of in his feathers), I named him Solomon. He’s here on the farm now, strutting around all goofy-fancy with the cousin of the Marys, whom we’ve named Elizabeth. Occasionally, we mix her up with all the other hens, but she doesn’t seem to mind; she’s sure in the knowledge of her self.

Animals with names on this farm get special attention. Their stories get woven into our own. Their graves get markers and their burials accompanied with prayers. Bearing names only in the imaginations of we who give them, they become emblems of the relationship we have with all their creaturely kind. Yet the Creator has names for them that we will never know, can never speak.

Each of us is known this way by God, I’m sure. By an affectionately given, lovingly spoken name. You too, are known, and named, and watched over day and night as you come and go.

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When you buy a farmstead, more often than not it comes with piles of stuff. Rocks, manure, brush—yes. But weirder things, too. Sometimes taking possession of a farm means taking on buildings – sheds, workshops, whole barns – piled full of farmy things. Our farm came to us that way, with three generations of things mostly unrecognizeable to us at first: parts for our tractors that you can’t get any more, a dozen PTO shafts, bins to the ceiling full of bolts, hinges, scraps of wire. Balls of baling twine. In our case, we’ve got unicycles and a prosthetic leg that belonged to the former owners. And a granary filled from floor to rafters with salvaged barnwood and window screens —maybe from our buildings, maybe not.

Is this useful? Should we sell it?
Is it garbage?
Ugh, we bought it, but should we cut our losses?
Chuck it. We can get another one if we need it.

Part of the work of taking on this farm has been to discern what should be discarded and what is a resource. Sometimes we ask questions out of being pretty new to this vocation: “No, for real, what is this, and do we need it?” Sometimes the question comes out of the vocation itself, which is stewardship, “Can I avoid landfilling this thing, made of trees or mined from the earth or produced with so much energy?”

Maybe this either/or question is useful for us as we tend the farm, but ultimately, I hate asking this question. Neither of these options is a good answer in our relationship with the material universe. There’s so much of Creation embodied in every material thing — how could it be otherwise? I wish “resource” and “junk” weren’t our two default choices. We need a more reverent stance about stuff.

And that’s what I want to dig into this week, having preached the lectionary this past Sunday. Dig until we get to the quiet but persistent heresy in the Christian imagination—the dangerously limited options to perceive the entire earth either as a resource or as disposable. Since one day it will be burned up or cast aside, and the faithful will float off to heaven, the planet is nothing more than a backdrop to an anthropocentric plotline about human salvation. If the only thing that really matters is our souls, our individual ticket to eternity, then our relationship with this world is nothing more than a distraction.

Our only job, from this miserable theological point of view, is to decide whether we’ll use this world up or just toss it aside.

This “escapist eschatology” (preached stridently these days, even by atheist billionaires) has shaped Western thought for centuries, especially informing how we treat the rest of the created world. It suggests that the planet is a sinking ship, and we’d best scramble aboard the lifeboat of personal salvation. And sadly, it’s often rooted in misreadings of Scripture—particularly of Revelation.

I sighed when I saw the lectionary for this Fifth Sunday of Easter:

Ugh. How often has this verse been used to suggest that the cosmos’ Omega point is obliteration instead of transformation? (When that Omega is Christ?! What??) How often has end-time prophetic vision been used to teach the faithful to not give a damn about this one precious planet we’ve been given?

What are we supposed to do with it if we’re deeply in love with this heaven, this Earth?

Thank God the readings for this past Sunday also included Psalm 148.

Psalm 148

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Across the heavens, from the heights,*
all you angels, heavenly beings, sing praise, sing praise!

Sun and moon, glittering stars, sing praise, sing praise.*
Highest heavens, rain clouds, sing praise, sing praise.

Praise God’s name, whose word called you forth*
and fixed you in place for ever by eternal decree.

Let there be praise: from depths of the earth,*
from creatures of the deep.

Fire and hail, snow and mist, storms, and winds,*
mountains, hills, fruit trees and cedars,

Wild beasts and tame, snakes and birds,*
princes, judges, rulers, subjects,

Men, women, old and young,*
praise, praise the holy name, this name beyond all names.

God’s splendor over all the earth, over all the heavens,*
gives strength to the nation, glory to the faithful.

A people close to the Lord.*
Let there be praise!

When we listen closely to John’s whole vision—and listen to it alongside that psalm—we hear something else. Not abandonment. Not erasure. But renewal. Restoration. Resurrection.

Tragically, and I do mean tragically in terms of consequences, many American Christians read Revelation 21 disfigured, stretched to its neoliberal-neocolonial capitalist limit into Bible versus biodiversity. Solid statistics show that it’s not only a majority of evangelical Christians but a decent chunk of mainline Protestants, too, who believe that God is going to destroy the earth and swap in a new, better world. That Jesus will swoop in and rapture a chosen few human beings, while the rest of our kindred creatures— spotted owls, coastal redwoods, monarch butterflies, right whales, prairie milkweed, and polar bears—burn in the background.

This exclusive, obsessive otherworldliness has justified so many sins against our Creator and against the Creation that God called very good. When the only two options for our relationship with material reality are “resource” or “scrap”, it’s hard to find a spiritual stance with any love or care in it. All of humankind’s thoughtless pollution, relentless extraction, ceaseless consumption flow from the belief that this world is just a waiting room for heaven. A space full of raw material that we get to label as resources to create disposable things.

But that is not the vision Revelation offers, not if we have read the whole story of poets and prophets that lead up to that last chapter. New Testament scholar Eugene Boring makes a vital distinction: God does not say, “I am making all new things.” God says, “I am making all things new.” In God’s dream, our life within this earth is not discarded and upgraded to the next model. This precious earth and all that it in it is redeemed.

Psalm 148 makes this plain. That glorious litany of praise is not metaphor. Created things are actually praising their Maker. I hear it every morning on the farm.

The planet is a chorus in the middle of a liturgy.

Sun and moon, praising.
Fire and hail, praising.
Mountains and hills.
Wild beasts and domesticated animals.
Fruit trees and cedars.
Creeping things and flying birds.

All creation joins in the great hymn of praise—not with words, but with being. The flourishing of a tree. The leap of a fox. The dance of sunlight on a Minnesota lake.

It is all praise.
It is already ancient.
It is always, always new.

If this is true, then asking those extractive, escapist capitalist questions — which I’ve internalized — applying them to a world in the act of praise, is senseless. “Is this useful? Profitable? Wasted?” These are never questions we ask when we hear liturgical music, when we offer our own prayers of praise.

To be clear: I’m not denying the impermanence of the planet. Someday, the sun will flame out in its death throes and the whole solar system will indeed be obliviated. What I reject are these notions, drawn from reading the last chapters of the Bible in a vacuum: that God, the Creator of all things seen and unseen, would form this choir only to silence it out of vengeful rage; and that we should therefore live as if nothing created has any inherent sacredness, This is utterly incongruent not just with the first chapter of the Bible, but with just about everything in between, particularly the Psalms and the Prophets. And most especially, escapist eschatology is incongruent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Revelation can only be rightly read through the Incarnation and Resurrection. And that changes everything. Because in Christ, God does not reject matter—God inhabits it. God takes on flesh and walks among us. And in doing so, God declares once and for all: creation is not a failed experiment. It is the home of all that God loves.

“See, the dwelling place of God is among mortals.” Heaven does not snatch us away. Heaven comes down. In the Gospels and in Revelation. This is not a vision of escape—but of embrace.

This is a third option, beyond questions of usefulness or uselessness, beyond profit, or waste. The earth is neither a resource for us to deplete, nor a passing-through place filled with things to be cast aside.

The planet is God’s and so is all that is in it.
Its purpose is praise.
Its destiny is praise.

If it’s a chorus, Creation’s beauty matters. Its suffering matters. It is not just the stage for our human salvation story. It is the story, sung as God’s magnum opus. It is where life abundant unfolds, because that is the promise and purpose of the Incarnation and Resurrection. And it will only end when it is gathered up in Christ – not in annihilating silence, but in perfect wholeness.

What we do to Creation, for Creation, with Creation, that’s not separate from our faith. It is our faith. To respond to Jesus’ new commandment to love our neighbors, we must love the earth that feeds them. The rivers that quench their thirst. The forests that shelter their ancestors’ dreams and their children' s hopes. The air that carries their songs.

We are called to counter apocalyptic fear and greed with our own strains of Psalm 148’s biodiverse love song. To counter end-times escapism with a very-present connection to all that God has made, with neighbor-love that embraces all. To counter the either/or fallacy of a profitable/disposable earth with a new theological option: Creation is the chorus of praise that rings throughout eternity. There is nothing in a chorus that can be sold or lost, used up or discarded.

Standing in the doorway of my cluttered granary, I catch a glimpse of a red bird and wonder whether it’s an ordinary cardinal or a rarer scarlet tanager. Even that wondering is something I want to let go of. I listen for the bird’s song, but only hear the wind in the ‘worthless’ box elder trees. I step onto a ‘lawn’ of chickweed and plantain, a weedy expanse. I am holding an armload of scrap wood to hold down some frost blankets.

I stop asking questions.
What I need is here.
I let myself sing.

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Our farm takes its name, Good Courage, in part from our relationship with a beloved place up in the Cascade Mountains, Holden Village. That little Lutheran retreat center is dear to Jen and to me and to countless others who have deepened their friendship with God through the beauty of those evergreen-forested ridges and alpine lakes, and through the Creation-affirming community of Christian practice. The Prayer of Good Courage is spoken every day in that place, as visitors and villagers leave to return to their life and work back home down the mountain.

In 2015, Holden survived a wildfire season that burnt nearly one million acres of Washington State. As the Wolverine Fire burnt down the valley where the village of cabins, chapels, and an ice cream parlor is nestled, we watched the satellite images and prayed. How Holden was preserved – a saga of the very best courage of its leaders and of the firefighters in that region – is its own miraculous story for another time.

After the fires passed, Holden Village was a postage stamp of life left in an expanse of utter devastation. The images of the fire and its wake that were sent down were breathtaking. This wasn’t the kind of fire that is part of a healthy Cascade ecosystem. It was one of these wildfires of the anthropocene, kindled by extreme climate patterns of drought and wind and fueled by the impact of human activities that have suppressed the place of fire as a force for renewal in God’s Creation. In places, the ash was heart-deep.

Equally breathtaking was the story that came down from that high, remote place about the faithful crew of people who returned to the village to begin the backbreaking, heartbreaking work of restoration. On one school bus ride up the switchback road to Holden, some long months after the fire, someone saw a glimpse of green out the bus window. The crew poured out of the bus and each of them fell to their knees around a seedling. They returned to the bus, singing hymns of praise to God and telling stories of that time when they had all been evacuated, or had stayed, and had been so afraid. But this time, the stories felt different in the telling.

Hearing this, Jen and I both said to one another, “As soon as they can receive visitors, we have to go back to Holden. We have to go and see.” So in 2017, we were among the wave of teachers and preachers for the return to summer village life for visitors. It was with joy and trepidation that we got on that yellow school bus at Lake Chelan. I had to ask myself – probably like the disciple Thomas had to ask himself when returning to that locked house where his friends had experienced the unimaginable: “What is it I hope to see?”

What was I longing, needing, expecting to see with my own eyes that I hadn’t heard about? The damage? Could it really have been that bad? Or proof of the miracle, a blessed home for our community still standing? Was that sight a miracle only in light of the extent of the catastrophe?

Like Thomas, I suppose, I needed to see all of it: the ash and the seedlings, the breathing body and the scars, whatever had been changed forever and whatever had been saved somehow.

As expected, we set out upwards along the winding mountain road from Lake Chelan, jagged like a scar across a lunar landscape. Ridge after ridge of charred trees. Blackened earth. Cinders a meter deep where once there had been lush alpine woods and meadows. Only variations now on the color gray.

And then, the old school bus rounded the bend into the valley shaped by Railroad Creek. Abruptly, the view was transformed and everything in view awash in shades pink and green, the mountainsides alive with color.

Fireweed.

A tall, billowy purple wildflower that is often the first plant to spring up in the wake of fire, fireweed was blooming in waves across the burned hillsides. It seems clear that God made fireweed to bring healing to whole landscapes. Cinders may be a scar, but so is this glorious wildflower. Its roots stabilize the slopes. Each plant sends out the seeds for 80,000 more plants. Not long after the first bright pink spire pushes its way up through the ashes, the whole ecosystem will begin to heal.

In that penultimate chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus responds to Thomas’ hard-won belief in His Resurrection saying, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” I’ve counted myself among these blessed crowds of the last 2000 years, having not seen or touched the truth most dear to me. But the closer I get to the land, the more I feel in my own body that I have seen and I have touched the Risen Christ. I see the scars and the glory everywhere I look in Creation. Hasn’t all that exists - not one thing having been created without Christ - shared in the mystery of the Resurrection? After all, John’s own account wraps up saying that Jesus did many signs on this side of the tomb so his disciples might believe.

I’ve seen those signs, and I believe.

Resurrection seems to hold both the scar and the salvation together. And we can only brush our fingertips along the mystery of it all when we witness both.

I see Creation’s scars standing and looking out from the high places on Good Courage Farm (which are not very high, but afford some perspective). Our 103 acres are wrapped all around by monoculture, by industrial commodity cropping that leaves the earth lying wounded. The empire’s extractive relationship with the land means that fields are tilled again and again and again until there’s no life left in the soil. Where there used to be diverse birdsong, there’s a uniform green silence, rented land managed with pesticides and herbicides. I look across the street from the farm and see the Crow River, which binds our whole watershed. I don’t touch its waters because I know that they are desecrated with chemicals that won’t go away. That river is forever scarred, the prairie topsoil forever lost.

But I also know now that no landscape is beyond God’s resurrecting power, because I see that renewal every day on our farm.

We don’t have fireweed, but we have fireflies. They, too, are signs of resurrection.

One in three species of fireflies (or lightning bugs, if you prefer) is at risk of extinction because of degraded habitat. They can only return to and thrive in places where the water, the plants, and the soil are enjoying restored health. Our regenerative farming practices are restoring those gifts from God. So even though the corn and soy fields surrounding our farm are silent and dark at night, within the blessed bounds of our messy few acres, there is a galaxy of small, living lights that show us the way forward. That show us the way home.

In the science and work of ecological restoration, there’s a term of art for meadows like those near Holden, and for farms like ours in Minnesota: “resurrection zones.” Devastated microecologies can recover, miraculously. They bear scars and signs of life. In fits and starts, they emerge from fire, flood, contamination, sometimes with new kinds of trees, sometimes with creatures not seen there in decades. The wounds remain. And beauty is reborn, anyway.

To all of us who doubt – no matter whether you doubt the harm, or doubt the reasons to hope – I invite you to be like Thomas. Show up anyway, and see for yourself. Be willing to look and to touch both the scars and the beauty that springs up alongside them.

The whole cosmos groans for redemption, says Paul. We who doubt ask for signs, marks of that redemption. And the Resurrection is God's first answer. Jesus, says the writer of Revelation, is “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead,” The firstborn—not the only. That means others will follow. That means the Resurrection is not just a one-time miracle. It’s a pattern. A promise.

Beloved, here’s our call as Easter people who live on the Earth — not only to acknowledge the damage we humans have done to the planet, but to bear witness to the healing that is already happening. To join in the sacred work of tending and restoring and planting hope.

Because the same God who raised Jesus from the dead is still raising things from the dust and the ash. Still bringing life out of scorched earth. Still sending fireflies into the night.

So whether people say they need proof that the planet’s life-giving systems are coming unraveled, or they are desperate for proof that any part of this broken world can be healed, I don’t have to argue.

Thanks to this farm, thanks to Holden, and thanks to so many places of good courage, I can just say: Come and see. And while you’re here, reach out and touch.

Because the scars are not fake news, nor is the Resurrection a faith-filled fantasy. It’s all happening here and now—in bodies and in soil, in water and in spirit.

In fireweed and in fireflies.

Encountering the Resurrection isn’t witnessing scars or hope. It’s witnessing both.
And we, like Thomas, are invited to see, touch—and believe.

Amen. Alleluia.

At Easter, the acoustic backdrop of the farm is frog song. Underneath the robin’s refrain before dawn, underneath the crowing cockerel, there’s a seamless sound-tapestry of trilling that comes from the prairie potholes in the wetland that surrounds the farm. There are many species singing in many octaves even now as I write this. Being from the Midwest, I can tease out the thread that is the bullfrog’s croak from the green frog’s pizzicato notes from the canary-like whistle of the spring peeper. The spring peepers are my favorite choristers.

I’ve carried around the parable of spring peepers for a long time and preached it on and off again for the last twenty years, so you might already have heard my likening of a tiny amphibian’s life cycle to God’s work of Salvation. If the root of the word ‘parable’ means that we toss out two unlike things next to each other so that, in being observed side by side, they might reveal something new about the other, “The Easter Frog” is certainly a parable. Turns out, chorus frogs like the spring peeper are about as unlikely a perfect revelation of Resurrection as you could imagine. At least on this side of that great mystery revealed in a garden in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

Some of us came up in Christian traditions that made no space for doubt or reason. The singularly bonkers proposition (to use our Bishop’s preferred adjective for the claims of our faith) that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is a bridge too far for logical, science-loving minds. Some minds end up leaving the Church, taking their longing hearts with them. And some of us come back, not because our skeptical questions have been answered but because we are drawn back in by something embodied. Maybe because of the Sacraments. Maybe because the choir needs more tenors.

Some of us come back thanks to singing frogs.

So, spring peepers are usually heard and almost never seen. They’re tiny, the size of my own thumbnail. You’ll think I’m making this bit up, but I’m not: They bear a cross on their bodies. Pseudacris crucifer (crucifer meaning ‘cross-bearer) is their Latin name, because there’s an X-shaped cross on their back. Their range stops a bit east of the farm, so I’m mostly likely to hear them when driving with my windows down on my way to the Chrism Mass at the Cathedral in Faribault, Minnesota on Holy Tuesday. I worry about our Northern frog species, because research is showing that global increases in average winter temperatures mean that they’re waking up earlier and earlier each spring, sometimes before there is anything for them to eat. (Scripture seems to indicate that the newly resurrected need to eat, yes?) But that worry is for another post.

Rewind a few months with me. The bonkers part of this parable started back in late fall, when the frog’s body sensed the dark and cold coming on. God’s genius has bestowed strange, extraordinary abilities on the spring peeper – gifts and graces probably outside the creature’s own control. In lay naturalist terms: As winter approaches, these frogs’ blood glucose levels go through the roof (not unlike kids with Easter baskets at this very moment, am I right?). The fluid inside all of a peeper’s cells turns to antifreeze. What’s between the cells stays watery and starts to get slushy as temperatures drop. Every frog here at Good Courage Farm found a cozy, muddy bit of a permanent pond last fall, and some time in November it took the last breath it would take for about 6 months. And then the frogs all froze. Solid. Frozen lungs don’t breathe. Frozen hearts stop beating.

Here’s a link to a PBS page with fun FAQ answers about frozen frogs. A frozen frog is, by many definitions, clinically dead. But since this state can be spontaneously reversed in many reptiles and amphibians, we’re going to need to find another word for what’s happening here, at least philosophically. Brumination is science’s term…aaaand… yeah, the frog still looks dead. But we have to ask, as Easter people and frog fans: What is death, again?

Fast forward to right now — April, in Minnesota: In the spring (you’d guessed that by their name, yes?), the peepers thaw. When temperatures warm, the muddy waters and the frogs’ bodies actually return to life. I can’t even imagine what this is like. Was there a light at the end of a long tunnel? Is the waking painful? What have they been thinking about, these tiny creatures, for lo, these six months?

Once awakened from death, though, it’s clear what the spring peeper thinks about. Come Eastertide, all they want to do is sing. Being resurrected, all they want to do is find their peeps (I know, sorry) and cling to one another. They just want to form a choir and sing.

I feel ya, frogs.
Alleluia!
Alleluia!

Can I get an alleluia?

I love the science of this. And there’s mystery in it still, for me. Like, I can’t guess how many frogs are outside my window in the wetland beyond the deer fence, out there proclaiming the Resurrection. One voice starts in, and multiplied it soon becomes an Easter chorus. I can’t understand the language of their hymn, but I’d be willing to bet they’re singing Psalm 118:

“I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of God.”

And there’s power in this Easter chorus: My windows shut against it can’t stop the frog song from filling my house and my head. They are so loud, the singing resurrected frogs. For a season, I’ll wake to this choir daily. I’ll fall asleep to it, or likely be prevented from sleep by it. This is the song-force of life abundant promised to us in Christ. It won’t be closed out. It won’t be silent. It won’t remain in the dark earth.

Here’s what it comes down to for me: I love the gifts of science. And I believe that all things were created through Christ, and not one thing came into being without Christ, as John’s Gospel offers. And I can feel in my bones that all of Creation is redeemed and renewed in and through Christ, as Paul writes to the churches is Rome. My reason and my love of Creation inform and renew my faith, and vice versa. Christ is not only the firstborn of the dead but the very pattern of Resurrection. I can believe it, in part, because I can see this pattern — this truth — in Creation all around me. Green blades are actually rising from the grain Jen buried in our field. The ancient grafted stumps of fruit trees are blooming. The silence of death is overtaken by birdsong and frogsong.

Resurrection is a hymn that all of Creation sings.

Where are you hearing its strains, beloved friends?

Easter blessings to you all. Christ is risen, indeed.

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Jesus Christ the Appletree: A Field-Grafting Theology of the Crucifixion

Here we are in Holy Week, following Jesus on the way to Golgotha. In a world filled with suffering, we might wonder why the story of salvation has to take this turn, why the Crucifixion is part of what God is doing in the world. I wonder, anyway, even as a preacher and pastor. Seminary didn’t end up providing me with a satisfying theology of Christ’s Passion and death on the Cross. As an Episcopal priest, I lean more into theologies of the Incarnation and the Resurrection in my sermons and in my own prayer life. If you and I are meeting for the first time in these words, I should confess that I bristle at substitutionary atonement and usually settle for but struggle with moral influence theory. As a fruit farmer, though, I’ve encountered something in Creation that helps me not just glimpse but actually gaze on the Mystery of the Crucifixion.

Let me share it with you this Holy Week.

Last May, one of the pear trees near our barn bloomed so gloriously in “springtime dress of leaf and flower” that I photographed it from every angle and posted it on Instagram. The next day, my wife Jen flew home from teaching in California to spend summer, as she does, home at Good Courage. Fresh from the airport, eager to return to the land, she grabbed a saw and—unbeknownst to me—went straight to that tree and began pruning it. Still in bloom.

When I say ‘pruning,’ I mean butchering. When I say ‘saw,’ I mean handheld chainsaw.

Coming in from rounding up ducks in the vineyard, I walked along the bend in the path toward the barn and was met by this sight: every flowering branch of that pear tree in the mud. The trunk remained, hacked and raw, a stump with stubs where branches used to be.

Jen was standing back twelve feet or so from her work, admiring what I could only call carnage.

I lost it.

“Are you out of your mind? That was the most beautiful thing on the whole farm and the first thing you do on arriving is to kill it?” I was yelling through tears.

It wasn’t dead. We both knew that. But I wept anyway. Stomped off and slammed the porch door anyway. I deleted the social media post because I couldn’t bear to see the image or read friends’ and strangers’ comments about its beauty.

What I also knew then was that Jen, my spouse of fifteen years, is a master pruner. I didn’t know at that moment – but might have guessed – that in the barn’s walk-in cooler, she’d saved the best pear scions we’ve grown, planning to graft them onto the sawn-off stump of that vigorous old tree so it might bear better fruit. Fruit that lasts.

I know that Jen’s wise. I know she lives in hope. Still, every spring, I doubt her and all this pruning. Ugh. The loss. The flowers trampled. The stump. It feels like a punch in the gut. Did you have to make that cut? To that tree?

I no longer doubt the grafting, though.

Grafting is miracle work. It’s where our crazy ‘what if?’ human ideas are met by Life’s relentless desire for itself. Nearly every apple you’ve ever eaten was from a grafted tree. In a graft, a grower joins two plants—rootstock and scion—so their living tissues heal together. The rootstock determines hardiness and size. The scion determines fruit. A bit of Honeycrisp twig grafted to a rootstock will still bear Honeycrisp fruit, but the root might make it tolerant of more cold or keep it under 8 feet tall.

Grafting is an existing scriptural image of our life in Christ. Paul draws on the image of a grafted olive tree in his letter to the churches in Rome. He writes of nourishing sap and support flowing to both natural and grafted branches from one root. His point is ecclesial and relational, as he explains to emerging Christian communities — wrestling with exclusiveness, envy, and prideful rejection of the other — how both Jews and Gentiles have come to be part of the Body of Christ. His readers would all have had a basic understanding of the art grafting, so he doesn’t elaborate on how and when the wild and the cultivated varieties become One.

My imagination is less intrigued by Paul’s us/them categories of branches, and more inspired by wondering what grafting might reveal about the mystical union of Christ and the human soul. I’m interested in the how, when, and why of our connection to that nourishing sap. Here’s what I know about the how: The one necessary thing in any kind of grafting: the cambium of both rootstock and scion—the green, vascular layer—must touch. They must fuse together. That thin layer, green like the Holy Spirit according to Hildegard of Bingen, is where life flows. Access to that greenness demands that both rootstock and scion be wounded.

The most extraordinary form of grafting requires the rootstock be gravely wounded, even as to death.

Top-working is extreme grafting. It’s a kind of field grafting that allows a farmer to use an old root and trunk to grow new fruit. Instead of replanting a tree and waiting a decade for it to bear, you cut it down and graft new varieties onto the stump.

At Good Courage, our predecessor farmers did just that. They sawed off the oldest apple tree on the farm—just above knee height—and cut carefully into the bark to insert twigs from a Snowsweet apple. (Snowsweet is a paradisal, flowery-sweet Minnesota variety of apple stays snow white even after being sliced—flesh unstained.) Not every graft took. But some did. And the tree lives again in a different form, bearing lovely fruit on new wood.

I’ve asked Jen to keep that gnarly old Snowsweet. Because in it, I see Christ—crucified and risen.

Top-working is a gamble on life. You only do it when the root is so vigorous it can offer more to a graft than to its old self. And when you long for fruit you haven’t yet tasted enough of. A sliver of scion grafted to that stump grows like it’s powered by every drop of rain and every shaft of sunlight that’s ever fallen on our farm. Jen’s top-grafted pears from two seasons ago are already as tall as ten-year-old trees—and more alive.

So in this way the shadow and the light of the Crucifixion dapples our orchard: To top-graft, you must cut down the tree. Only then can its life-energy surge upward into the tender grafts. That ancient trunk, severed, becomes source. The full force of the earth flows up and out through it into new life.

In the Silo Chapel here, we sing the very old Advent carol, “Jesus Christ the Appletree,” all year round. We’re not the first to liken Christ to a tree that bears fruit. The hymn doesn’t follow the image through Passion and Resurrection—but grafting does.

Why the Cross? Why must Christ be cut down? My best answer used to be: so we could hear the breadth and depth of the words, “Forgive them. They know not what they do.” Those words still save, and I cling to them. But the apple tree offers another glimpse of the Mystery of the Passion: Perhaps Christ is cut down so we all might be top-grafted.

We are fragile twigs. We cannot bear good fruit apart from the One through whom all things were made. We are not hardy enough, rooted enough. But what if a Root—ancient, holy, Spirit-green—were willing to be cut down, that we might be grafted in? What if, as Paul writes to the Romans, “the Root is holy, so then are the branches made holy”? All the branches, all holy.

What if salvation is the work of a God who, like a farmer at the turn of winter into spring, has saved uncountable slips of scionwood, waiting for this right season, longing for sweet fruit?

Well, then. Abiding in Christ the Appletree we might have a chance at bearing the fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

Then, dear kindred scions, from all of us grafted into the Tree of Life, as the poet Rumi says, “the Friend will have something good to eat.”

In Christ crucified and risen, perhaps God gambled on divine, existential, salvific top-work—so that the sweet potential of our souls might be harvested in this lifetime.

If that’s what the Cross means—axe and graft, death and life—then I can’t help but sing hymns of solemn awe for the One who gave himself for us. I’ll be singing them in our orchard this Holy Week, as the spring sap rises in all that I see.

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Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

This is Parables from the Farm—a weekly harvest of words from my life at Good Courage Farm, where scripture meets soil, where ancient wisdom and regenerative farming intersect. Here, you can read what I’m reading from the Bible and from the revelation of Godself in the great Book of Creation, which I study as I kneel down in the dirt. This where I’ll be writing to share what the Holy Spirit is up to at Good Courage. The farm is a sweet little fruit-growing, Gospel-watered piece of earth in rural Minnesota, where ducks, blackbirds, and barn cats are the most regular participants in Morning Prayer and the where compost pile preaches resurrection in slow time. Our farm home is home to an agrarian ministry and to countless kindred creatures.

I’m an Episcopal priest and a fruit farmer, and for the past several years I’ve been learning that the parables of Jesus are less like stories carved in stone and more like seeds—meant to be planted, tended, even reinterpreted through the rhythms of the land.

Every week, I’ll share reflections shaped by:

• the language of scripture, especially Jesus’ parables,

• the daily and seasonal work of regenerative farming,

• the wisdom of the liturgical year, which mirrors the turning of the seasons,

• the wild wonder of incarnational theology,

• and the stories unfolding in the orchard, the vineyard, the Silo Chapel, the chicken yard, and the compost heap.

You’ll find new parables and old ones reimagined. Prayers shaped by pruning shears. Meditations on mustard seeds and volunteer squash. Song lyrics caught out of the morning mist. The occasional story about goats or geese or the Kingdom of God.

This space is for progressive Christians, curious seekers, clergy and laypeople, gardeners, theologians, tired activists, and anyone longing for a more rooted, spacious, and regenerative faith. My hope is that Parables from the Farm will help you and me to hear the Gospel again—not only in a book, but also in our bodies, in the turning seasons, in the breaking of bread, and in the living land.

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Thank you for reading. Thank you for listening. May the soil and the Holy Spirit speak.

With prayers for all our Good Courage,
The Rev. Kerri Meyer
✝️ Farmer. Priest. Sower of stories. Imperfect disciple of Jesus Christ.

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