Latest / Pine Street Pod / “Soil and Soul: On Earth, Food, and What We're Hungry For” Week One: Dirt and Divinity

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“Soil and Soul: On Earth, Food, and What We're Hungry For” Week One: Dirt and Divinity · Pine Street Pod

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: The best antidepressant is free.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm the only one excited about that.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Scientists call it Mycobacterium vacci.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of us call it dirt.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's what you track.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Track into the house on your shoes.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I am not a farmer, I'm not a botanist, I'm not even a gardener.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know what I'm doing up here.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I came across something this week that soil scientists have known for a long time.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: That healthy topsoil contains this bacterium, this antidepressant.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And when you breathe it in, or if you absorb it through your skin like you're working in a garden, it activates the same serotonin pathways as an antidepressant prescription.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you feel calmer, you feel more yourself, you feel grounded.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Soil scientists estimate we're losing topsoil globally hundreds of times faster than it can regenerate.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: A third or more of the world's productive soil has been significantly degraded in the last century alone.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And most of us barely notice this because we treat dirt like it's worthless most of the time.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like dirty is a synonym for bad, like getting your hands into the soil is something to scrub off as soon as you can.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Dirty as a word of degradation when you call someone dirty.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: So all these connotations about the word dirt or dirty, it's interesting that when we read Genesis 2, it's kind of been pushing back on this whole idea that dirt is bad for about 3,000 years.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is we read right past it on the way to the snake in Genesis, because the snake is just way more entertaining.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: What Genesis shows us is before there is farming and before there is climate anxiety or unjust food systems to address, or any of that, there is a question that precedes that.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is at the most fundamental level, what are you made of?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: What are you made of?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible's answer is earthier, as you might presume hearing this text today.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you didn't know, Genesis has two creation accounts.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Genesis 2 is the older of the creation accounts.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't open with something cosmic or esoteric, it opens here in Genesis 2 with ground and the need for someone to till the soil.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So God takes the Adama and forms it a creature called Adam.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Adam is calling now.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: In English, we read Adam and think man, and we think first man, like a proper noun, a fellow with a wife, and a snake problem, and a spectacular fall from grace.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: But that is not what the word means.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The brilliant feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Tribble, who I had the delight of studying with at Wakefora, she spent decades reading this text in Hebrew.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And she translated Haadam not as man or even as Adam.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: She called it the earth creature, a being whose identity is rooted in the ground from which it came.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the word play is the theology.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Adam from Adama, which means earth creature from the earth.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Earth creature from the earth.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot say what a human being is without saying what the soil is.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: They are the same word, except there is one with breath added to it.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we might say earthling, Adam as an earthling.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you want, humus creature, which is just really fun to say.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Humus creature.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Humus, not the dip, humus.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's pronounced differently, you see.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which is also where we get the words human and humility.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: All three words, human, humus, humility, share this same Latin root meaning earth.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: To be human at the most basic level is to be humble, is to live close to the ground, is to live close to the earth.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And to be humble is to remember that you came from dirt.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're reminded of this every Ash Wednesday, from dust you came, and to dust you shall return, right?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: You are made of the soil, and you carry the breath of God.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: My friend Steve Schumaker says, We are mud and spark, we are mud and spark, and we are earthbound and spirit-led.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Adam and Adama.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Phyllis Tribble goes on to talk about this a little bit more.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And before that, we understand that the Bible's doctrine of the human being is in this Adam or Adama.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: You are of the earth.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: You are of the stuff of the ground.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: You are alive with the sacred.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Soil and soul are a compound sentence in the Hebrew imagination.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: They were never meant to be separate.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: So Tribble's insight does something else that matters for this soil and soul series we're going to be talking about over the next few weeks.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: She observes that the original earth creature in Genesis 2, wait for this, is not yet gendered.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Maleness and femaleness enter the story only later when it happens through separation and naming things.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Before that, there is simply earth animated with breath and placed in a garden and given a purpose.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry for all the Hebrew words.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew word is a bod.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Abod means to tend, to serve, to work in the service of something larger than yourself.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: The late great Old Testament theologian Walter Brugeman describes the shape of the Genesis story as what he calls limit within generosity, limit within generosity, meaning that the garden is abundant beyond what you can count or beyond what you can measure.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And within that abundance there are responsibilities, or better yet, relationships.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The limits are what make the garden a covenant rather than a commodity.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: We've heard a lot about God giving human beings dominion over all of the earth.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: This changes our relationship to the land.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It changes our relationship to the earth, not as something to escape where we climb up into the spaceship and go into heaven.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: It gives us a responsibility, not dominion as lording over the land, but relationship to the land, and that changes everything.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because who cares if the earth is going to burn eventually?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we neglect it.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: What Brugeman says here is we are in relationship to it, to be stewards of it, not to dominate it.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So a bod, this tending, is for the record the same root used in Hebrew for worship.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: This tending is about worship.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Caring for the land in the Genesis imagination is a form of worship.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's a form of dedication and devotion to God.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So every time you pull a weed, you are technically doing worship.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us should tell our kids this or our grandkids this.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: She is a member of the Pottawatatome Nation, and she is the author, as many of you know, braiding sweetgrass.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: She's doing a kind of theology of the land at a popular level.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't use that word for it, but she describes a forest floor where wild leeks and wild ginger grow side by side.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: The leeks provide canopy shade.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the ginger holds moisture that the leeks need.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Mutual flourishing for the common good of the forest floor.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: She calls it reciprocity, and she asks, what is the role of the human being in this web of relationship?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Even as wild leeks and wild ginger are in relationship to one another on the forest floor.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Her answer is rooted in her own tradition of relationship to the land and in a teaching that is at least as old as Genesis.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Her answer is gratitude.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Her answer is gratitude and participation.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: The human being is a full member of the community of life, as the web of relationship.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: That is a bod.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: That is tending, and that is the work of the garden.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Kimmer has kindred spirits in the Christian tradition, too, because John Philip Newell or J.P.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Newell, as he asked us to call him, when David and I had this great opportunity to interview him for this the number one faith and spirituality podcast out there called Hyphenated Life.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Our COVID college project, which maybe will resurrect it at some point.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: But J.P.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Newell is this Scottish theologian.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: He spent his career recovering the Celtic stream of Christianity, which has really shaped us as a community over the last several years.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: He describes a way of following Jesus that never divided the sacred from the natural world.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: In Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, he argues that the Celtic Church preserved a truth, the dominant tradition slowly buried in Christianity, that creation is revelation.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Creation is revelation.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: The earth is the second scripture.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: We have the Bible as scripture, and we have the earth as scripture.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And God still speaks through both: through the soil, through the watershed, through the snow on the peaks of the Indian Peaks wilderness.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we hope.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Celtic Christianity, J.P.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Newell would say, was always the most down-to-earth branch of the faith.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because Christ and creation go together.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: When I was on Iona about a decade ago, there was this sense of people in the ancient world, as we were taught and learned there, worshipped outside.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know anything about Iona, there is some wild weather out there that can be very dangerous.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was this beauty of the wildness of creation, and there was beauty in the order of the Abbey Church there on Iona.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: There was this sense of Christ and creation rooted in the sacred ground there.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the earth is a second scripture.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the monks who prayed in that wild weather on Iona, on the coast, in the mountains, were going deeper into the world.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: They felt called to go deeper into the world because that is where they believed God dwelled.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: In every wave, in every stone, in every blade of grass on the hillside.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: The tragedy, J.P.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Newell names, is that Western Christianity learned to love God while treating the earth as disposable.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to say treating the earth like dirt, but that would be a good thing.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: A temporary waiting room for a purely spiritual heaven.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: We've made salvation entirely about the soul.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we orphaned our bodies.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we orphaned the land.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Boulder has kept a version of this flame alive longer than most places.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: There is a reason people feel something transcendent or feel connected to God standing at the base of the flat irons at dawn.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: If we read the Bible with imagination, I would say, as the Bible was intended to be read, Psalm 104 knew all of this that we've heard today.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: The psalmist looks at the earth and sees relationships, springs that give drink to wild animals, trees watered abundantly, the earth itself, satisfied by the work of its creator.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Norman Wursba, who I understand Emma Leets got to study with at Duke, which is awesome.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's been doing groundbreaking work in this field, and he writes in agrarian spirit of our silent meditation for today.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Wurzba says, to be a creature is to be embedded in networks of interdependence that make life possible.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: To be a creature is to be embedded in networks of interdependence that make life possible.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: It is to be constituted by relationships with soil, water, air, sun, and all the living beings that share this planet.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis tells us who we are in relationship to the land, and it tells us what we owe to the land, not what the land owes to us.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we are not just individuals who don't need relationships anymore than the ginger doesn't need the leak on the forest floor.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: We are part of a web, a set of relationships, an entanglement with the earth that goes all the way down to the molecular level and all the way up to the breath of God.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: A great example of this is right here in Boulder County.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you got to see the art exhibit that is up in the gallery now, but there are 20 photographs that are hanging on the walls back there this morning.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they are part of an exhibit called Faces of the Front Range.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're by Colorado documentary photographer Anton Tishkin.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Anton spent time with farmers around Boulder County, and he was looking for what he calls the small gestures, the shared labor, and the everyday details that reveal how a place is lived.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: He went to places like Jacob Springs Farm and he photographed the faces of the people who grow our food in Boulder County.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, These are your neighbors.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us drive past their fields on the way to places like Eldora or Rocky Mountain National Park.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, isn't it funny that we drive two hours to stand next to a mountain?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: But we aren't as likely to slow down or stop to savor a field for ten minutes from our house.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: The labor in those fields is sacred work, and we see it in the faces of the people in those photographs in the back.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: The opening reception for this exhibit is coming this Friday, February, or February.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is it February?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: October 2nd, this Friday, 5 to 8 o'clock, right in our gallery.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: At 6 o'clock, Leah, uh Leah Cousin, who's part of All Souls staff, she runs Backyard Roots.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, she's going to be serving farm to table appetizers Friday night back there, starting at 6 o'clock.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: So a little commercial, if you want to make it a date night or a night out, uh, come and see those photographs, and uh they do what good art always does, which is uh change the way we see.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: What occurs to me in planning this series is that the land never really belongs to anyone.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: That is Torah.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: The people who grow our food are partners in the sacred work of feeding the world, feeding our community.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: They are Adam, caring for the Adama.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And when you stand in front of these photographs, let yourself see clearly, these are people carrying the breath of the divine into the soil every single morning.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you might be fans of Chef's Table on Netflix, and there's an episode in season one that features a guy named Dan Barber.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: He built his restaurant, Blue Hill, at Stone Barns on a working farm in New York.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Netflix describes him as a dedicated farmer and food industry revolutionary leading a fight to change the way we think about and grow our food.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And in the episode with Dan Barber, uh, it shows how his entire cuisine is organized around the soil and the season and the farm and the hands that touch the ingredient on the way to the plate.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: He built this restaurant on that working farm.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he has this culinary philosophy that I think is right here in Genesis 2 because it's both about soil and soul.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, some of you brought food today for our pineapple.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Had potluck in just a little bit, and you made something, or you stopped somewhere, or someone in your house spent time in the kitchen on your behalf.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever it is, the butternut squash soup, the salad, the bread, the dish you almost forgot in the fridge.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: It started in the soil.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: All of it began as dirt, animated by water and sun and the thousand-year wisdom of farmers who figured out how to tend it tenderly.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Someone's hands touched it.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Many hands touched it, probably, the farmer who planted it, the person who harvested it, the driver, you.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: The theologians call this the Eucharistic structure of creation.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: The Eucharistic structure of creation.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that eating is never merely eating.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is always a form of communion with the earth that gave it, with the people who grew it, with the God who bent down into the dust and breathed into it.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: The first Eucharist was a meal where people sat together and they broke bread and they said, This is who we are.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is where we come from.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this belongs to all of us.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: So this is what we are doing today.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: Our potluck is a kind of liturgy of the land, if you want to think about it differently.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So as we think about sitting down to our tables this week with our friends and family this week, before we eat that meal, I wonder if we could just stop and pause for five seconds and trace where that food came from.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Fork, to plate, to kitchen, to truck, to field, to seed, to soil, to rain, to sun, to hand, someone's hand.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: The hands of a farmer in Boulder County who got up before dawn and believed that growing food is worth the life they're giving to it.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of that long line of remembering, we arrive at the beginning, and it's a garden, a breath, a creature made of earth who is beloved.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: We are all mud and spark, earth bound and spirit-led, human, humus, hummus, humility, one word with three faces, all lead us back to the ground, to the earth, to the soil.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: So welcome to soil and soul, because those words have never been two things.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: We made them two things.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: We called one holy and we called the other dirty.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: We spent centuries chasing a purely spiritual salvation in Western Christianity while ignoring the creation that nourishes us all and that we are called to be in relationship with.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Soil and soul rise and fall together, and scientists call it dirt.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible calls it sacred.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever has ears, let them hear the Amen.