By Roger Hudson | FāVS News Guest Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
This was a first in the Pacific Northwest, if not the United States.
An ancient wheat, sourced from the original Eden* and now grown on the Palouse south of Spokane, was used to bake a loaf of bread for Holy Communion.
And on Easter morning at Green Bluff United Methodist Church, as the words “The body of Christ broken for you” were spoken, history was made. This loaf of bread baked partly with Amber Eden, an ancient landrace wheat, was shared with communicants
The significance of this loaf is twofold. Firstly, the location from whence the wheat is sourced. Secondly, the wheat is grown regeneratively, which means it cares for the soil of the Palouse as we imagine it did for the soil of Eden.
The Earth didn’t shake. Nor did the heavens fall. Neither did the loaves in the surrounding supermarkets — baked with wheat produced by industrial agriculture that is progressively poisoning our soil and food — shriek in protest at the first sign of their replacement.
For in the breaking and eating of this loaf, resurrection quietly became a present-day sign that a miracle is happening in the dying soil of the Palouse, bringing it back to life in what promises to become a cascading effect of healthy soils yielding healthy bread nourishing healthier people.
And, when placed upon the altar as sacrament, a gardening of soil and soul takes place as the living Christ, ever creative and creating, is “made known in the breaking of the bread.”
Wendell Berry, an American farmer, poet and philosopher, takes us deeper into this matter, inviting us to consider if Holy Communion might at times not be a sacrament but a desecration.
“To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”
(Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
This particular Communion loaf used at Green Bluff UMC, grown “knowingly, lovingly, skillfully and reverently” by a farmer we know, helped make the resurrection powerfully clear this Easter in at least two ways.
Firstly, action. Baked with grain from Eden, the loaf is a summons to work toward the biblical vision of Eden — of creation thriving because everything is in its right relationship with everything else.
Communicants are called, then, not to wait for judgement, or the end times as some mistakenly do, but to actively strive with Christ toward the Eden of a healthy, joyful, thriving Earth.
Secondly, the loaf baked with regeneratively grown wheat embodies just how we are to do this — by practicing regenerative lifestyles ourselves. Regenerative agriculture produces healthier soil and food, and we need to do all we can as consumers to support the growing numbers farming this way.
But beyond buying food grown responsibly, there are organic gardens that yield healthy and affordable food to cultivate in our neighborhoods. There is soil to rebuild, rivers to protect, wildlands to preserve and an atmosphere to keep unpolluted.
Which makes this loaf provocative, prompting among us the phrase, “It’s all about love. No bluff about it.” The phrase is just a whisper at the moment. But it suggests the Communion loaf we use matters.
If the loaf is lovingly produced, it is a sacrament. If not, it is a desecration. And this becomes important when it is the sacramental, which will seed in us the love our struggling world and creation needs.
All are invited to come “taste and see,” to sample in the one loaf the goodness of heaven and Earth, which is meant for the one world we know.
Do come. But be prepared, having tasted what is good, to leave as ones who have been commissioned. With the words, “As on the Lord’s table, so on the kitchen table,” all are sent forth, like Christ, to love the Earth and its goodness and to perhaps start in our own kitchens with what we eat.
Green Bluff Methodists are wrestling with how to faithfully live into such a commission. Small steps are being taken. Planting a Garden Cathedral behind the old schoolhouse is being envisioned as a place to reconnect the soil with the kitchen with the altar as a way of enacting the prayer we routinely pray each Sunday: “Thy kin(g)dom come, on Earth as it is in heaven.”
Amen?
*Don Scheuerman is one of the co-founders of Palouse Heritage. They have sourced some original wheat seed from a river valley where Eden was located and are now growing it locally on the Palouse using regenerative agricultural practices.
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