On August 31st of this year the farmer and writer Wendell Berry died at the age of 92. More than anyone else, Berry has shaped my experience of helping run the farm here at Barnabas Landing by giving me tangible language for the often hard to express hopes and longings that are at the heart of what we are attempting to do on this little farm. His poems and essays are honest in their assessment of our broken world, but they are solid in their refusal of despair. The work of restoration is always open to us; there is always a way to, in his phrase, “practice resurrection.”

As I’ve been contemplating Berry’s passing and reminiscing on a summer of welcoming all of you onto the farm, I’ve been struck by this thought from him, shared in an interview from a documentary called Look and See:

"This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it all back together again. What you can do, is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them together.”

This summer we had our weekly adult dinner right in the middle of the farm, between the greenhouse and the herb beds and the sweet peas. And it was my privilege to start the meal by standing at one end of the long table, looking down the line of guests, and the feast and flowers from the farm in front of them, and say a few words. I usually started with this…

“Thank you all for being here. This right here — this image of you all sitting down on the farm for a meal — is the vision that keeps us going in the doldrums of winter, when everything is mud and nothing yet is green and all the vegetables in front of us are still hypotheticals and best laid plans. Thank you for being here and completing the vision of the farm, because a farm is not so much for growing food as it is for growing community.”

Our mission statement talks about the ‘restorative beauty of Jesus’ and it is my firm belief that as Jesus restores us to himself he also restores us to each other and all of creation. Reading the news these days it is hard not to see what Berry is saying; it does feel like we live in the age of divorce, an age of splintering families and communities.

Berry’s writing reminds me that the broken nature of our world cuts all the way down to our relationship to the very ground we stand upon and depend on for our survival. But we all are invited to Jesus’ restorative work. We all can find “two things that ought to be together” and put them together.

Looking down that table every week I began to realize that this was a small act of restoration — feeding people from the land that they were sitting on. And looking at the food spread out down the center of the table it was easy to see how the farm both creates and depends on the community in it.

Here are the grilled zucchinis, grown just over there on a garden bed that two fantastic volunteers named Maddie and Keara cleared, prepped with compost, and planted a couple of months ago.

Here are the roasted carrots that just three weeks ago my own mother was saving from the weeds that got away from us.

There are the little glass pitchers of roasted tomato vinaigrette, a recipe that Vanessa and Alpha came up with through their usual kitchen alchemy.

And over there are the tomatoes themselves, fresh off the vines in the greenhouse that our summer staff team, Ian and Kenzie, have been diligently pruning every week.

In one of his essays Wendell Berry writes:

“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives.”

What a joy it has been this summer to recognize that community, to be reliant on it, and receive from it at the table that Jesus is continually inviting us all to join.