Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith

by Fred Bahnson

Part spiritual quest, part agricultural travelogue, this moving and profound exploration of the joy and solace found in returning to the garden is inspiring and beautiful.

A POWERFUL, PERSONAL STORY OF HOW GROWING AND SHARING FOOD PULLS US CLOSER TO GOD

Like many seekers of the authentic life, Fred Bahnson sought answers to big questions like What does it mean to follow God? and How should I live my life? But after divinity school at Duke, Bahnson began to find answers not in a pulpit, but at the handle of a plow. After his agrarian conversion, Bahnson started a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina to help its members grow real food and to feed his own spiritual hunger.

Soil and Sacrament tells the story of how Bahnson and people of faith all over America are re-rooting themselves in the land, reconnecting with their food and each other, and praying with their very lives the prayer of the early Christian “We beg you, make us truly alive.” Through his journeys to four different faith communities—Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, and Jewish—Bahnson explores the con­nections between spiritual nourishment and the way we feed our bodies with the sensitivity, personal knowledge, and insight shared by Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben.

Soil and Sacrament is a book about communion in its deepest sense—an inspiring and joyful meditation on what grows above the earth, beneath it, and inside each one of us.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Memoir, Theology, Nature, Christian, Religion

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 2013

Reviews

[Lynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The insights gleaned from this memoir were numerous. First, it sparked a renewed interest in gardening, plant life, and for caring for earth. Secondly, it reminded me that all things are connected. Lastly, it renewed my sense of justice and mercy; that what I have, what I cultivated is meant to be shared. Listed below are some of my favorite quotes:
p.106: "....Finding ways to make love visible. What does it take for this person, this plant, this community to flourish?"
p.116: "Food nourishes people. It's creating justice on all the different levels."
p.138: Quote from Wendell Berry in the text: "If change is to come, it will come from the margins."

[Sherri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an interesting read. As an avid gardener/urban farmer, I loved Bahnson's journey. He honestly seeks to discover how his soul, and love of God, is connected with his heart passion for people and their need to connect with the soil.

I've always had a curiosity and appreciation for the simple life lived by the monks. I didn't realize there were still agrarian communities like this today. I also, value the deeper rootedness and traditions that the Jewish faith offers. Their prayerful patterns of gratitude and honor toward their maker was inspiring. So, I gained a lot of insight from his journey into the various faith based communities.

The quote from Susan Sides, "Everyone who comes here hungers for something. Some hunger for food. Others hunger for community or beauty, but all hunger", was a perspectives changer! It deepened my understanding of the needy and how a community garden can be a healing environment on so many dimensions.

Other quotes that made me stop and ponder:
"Shalom is not the absence of conflict. It is a completeness, an expansive wholeness where God, people, and land dwell together in harmony."

"We are co-creators with God. Creation was not a one-time event, it is on going. We are to participate with our hands. Working in humility before the creative presence of God."

"I wonder if the trinity is a love so uncontainable that it must boil over into creation, into visible matter. Is this how we were born? the universe? love spilling over into life?"

Food nourishes people. It's creating justice on all levels, it's how you reach people. It is the physical embodiment of prayer. To say grace is not only to give thanks to God. It is to become fully human. It's a holy eucharist.

"Jesus used soil to heal wounds." And so many more....

I have a new list of books to seek out after reading the ones that have inspired Bahnson's walk through the subject.

The author helped me to see that I'm certainly not on this journey alone. After reading it, I'm more at peace with my own need to be on my knees, thankful, hands in the dirt, co-creating with the Father with seeds and people.

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Won this book on Good Reads Giveaway.
While reading Soil and Sacrament: Four Seasons Among the Keepers of the Earth by Fred Bahnson, I remembered the days when my parents were gardeners and raised a lot of the food for our family. Although my father worked during the day, he would come home and head to our small garden for the evening to water and weed and tend the soil, so I could relate to this book about searching for meaning of life by growing your own food and returning to the soil as a way to stay spiritual. Fred Bahnson, the author, is searching for that simple life that probably his parents had on their farm years ago before the big grocery stores and the bigger farms who now produce most of our food. Society has come to depend on these farmers and grocers to provide them with all of their food in one form or another now and to have a small garden just isn't worth their time anymore when it is at a grocery store that is open 24 hours a day whenever they are hungry or craving something. This book reminds us that there is more to consuming food for pleasure and how there are organizations that are helping others find themselves by taking care of the earth while producing crops and sharing the results with others and in doing this finding a spiritual closeness to God. At the end of this book I got the impression that Fred has been looking for his roots and finally found it when he moved his family back to his parents farm. I recommend this book as it will help others think more about what is happening to the earth and a way some religions and other soul searching people are returning to their roots.

[Annette]

Hmmm..... The subtitle on this copy (the real book, not an electronic version!) is "A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith." (So, you know I'm really a cataloger...)

We heard this local author speak at the library, and I like his book even more than I had dreamed I would. Fabulous writing, fabulous thoughts.

Among his four communities are Mepkin Abbey which we've always treasured and God's Acre in Fairview, NC, where the leader, Susan Sides, says, "I have a mustard seed, and I'm not afraid to use it."

One of the people I'll keep in my heart is a man who used to be involved in protests who decided to use his time and energies much more profitably by working in community gardens, in working for something he really believes in rather than against things.

Well worth reading.

[Demi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit to a significant bias reading this book--Fred is my cousin, and I have grown up listening to his stories from Chiapas, Anathoth, and beyond. (I have also grown up listening to him and his wife Elizabeth play fiddle and sing, and I have distinctly happy memories from their wedding day.) Reading this book felt like an extension of our family dinners and gatherings, an expression of faith and giving that has always been the core of our fellowship together. It was a treat to read, and I am thrilled to share that feeling with any and everyone who reads what cousin Fred has to say.

[Leigh Kramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written exploration of the relationship between faith and food, especially the garden and soil. But I hasten to add, this is for more than gardeners and farmers. It's for all of us seeking, all of us eating. The writing is alive and the content moved me time and again. I wanted to underline whole chapters and often shared quotes with friends. This is a book I'll return to often.

[Colette Nies · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want to waste your time on high-school level writing, coupled with an extremely arrogant, privileged, white man's perception of quasi-theology go ahead. You will be disappointed. This book made me angry (obviously). The author should write about his own gardens, however, instead, he wrote of idealizing others in their own spiritual journey. And the excessive quotes by Herschel in the Jewish section was over the top. Being that I worked in Acteal with the tribe he spoke of years before, I can verify that the amount of factual information he got wrong was maddening. I do not doubt his passion for gardens and even for God and I appreciate the sections where he got out of the way and didn't talk too much about his own holiness. I had to read this for class and it was the only reason I finished it. At what point is some random journal by a privileged white guy in his youth important? It's not. There are 100 books in Ecological Theology that have value and this isn't one of them.

[Mar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reminds me of a lot of spiritual memoirs currently on the market. Bahnson, burned out with ministering to others, visits various monasteries and community garden cooperatives that are self-sustaining and benefit the community and those who live/work on them. Along the way, he tries to come to terms with who he is and reaffirm his own calling in life as he re-connects with creation--the earth and his family--and learn from the spiritual connections others have.

Not overly engaging and well-written, but not awful. I personally liked the religious groups he lived with for a while--Catholic brothers and Jewish community. With all spiritual memoirs, I think it is most meaningful to the person who experienced the crisis and the experiences; ultimately, you have to search out your own answers--rather than live vicariously through the experiences of others. So for me, once I've read 1 or 2 memoirs, they lose their appeal.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the assigned book club choice for the RHUMC book club. I enjoyed learning more about the organic gardening process as well as the different approaches to religious based spiritual gardening. Working in the margins, with soil and people, is an illustrative theme. But I got a little lost in the theological discussions and perhaps missed this book’s primary point.

Borrowed from mom.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t hate this book, but it didn’t really speak to me either. I was also a little thrown off in the last section when the author described his time at a Jewish farm since I was expecting all of the locations he visited to be Christian.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You may not have heard, but I was voted Best Looking Monk in Monastic Quarterly four years running.” p.32

Best quote in the whole book.

[Fully Yours · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really beautiful set of stories, and a diverse array of experiences related to food and spirituality. Highly recommend!

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this one from the author at a writer's retreat sponsored by The Sun magazine for its readers and contributors. The author was a sensitive and inspiring instructor, and after I got home and read this memoir about finding his spirituality in farming, I felt I knew him better.
The book describes different farming communities he visits and the people who make them work. All have a spiritual purpose to their tilling of the earth. A refreshing and thought-provoking memoir. I hope he writes another.

[Tracey Howe-Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love reading how different faith groups all come to the same conclusion that working the soil is not only important to the survival of the Earth, but also the fulfillment of the soul. This is definitely worth the read if you are looking for a greater connection between gardening/farming and spirituality.

[Chandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the subject of gardening, Behnson completely won me with his journey from his bucolic community farm to other similar outposts around the continent. Overwhelmed with the mundane problems of running Anathoth, his church's upstart serving a food-insecure community, Bahnson takes a leave of absence, traveling "as an immersion journalist, but also as a pilgrim" (11), and I pilgrimaged along with him. No gardener myself (though I did pick up a few tips from the read), I found myself contentedly joining Bahnson in his forays.

It's tempting to summarize Bahnson--to list off places visited and lessons learned: welcoming in the outcasts of drug dealers and parolees at Tierra Nueva, drawing parallels between mushrooms and prayer lives with monks at Mepkin Abbey, bringing Sabbath and Sukkot to life with a Jewish farming community in Connecticut. But the worth of Soil and Sacrament is, as it should be, in the journey. As Bahnson goes from one farm to another, he and the reader both pull bits and pieces along the way, not only the victories but the failures, the messes.

My only minor complaint stems from how the book wraps up--or, rather, doesn't. While I appreciate that Bahnson doesn't distill everything for the reader, I finished the book wondering about how his journey affected his faith. As the Author Notes will tell you, Bahnson no longer works at Anathoth, and there is no indication as to whether that decision was influenced by his trips, or how. Understandably, he seems very drawn to each community while he's there, but I'd be interested to know what's remained, what's dovetailed together for him now that he's back home.

In a final weaving of theory and practice, Bahnson concludes the book with several practical steps as to how to go about setting up your own community gardening venture, whatever that might look like. Inspiring and grounding, this memoir leads you to look around at the fields you've been given, and leave you asking how you can best serve it, and your community through it.

[Fr. River]

This book touched my heart and enlivened my spirits. I live in the heart of the City, I work with people who have little hope, use drugs, and I find myself simply wearing out. This book brought renewed hope. It is a book of Bahson's spiritual journey in find Jesus in the soil and in working with ecological farms.


Several nuggets I found in the book:


At Mepkin Abbey, one of the monks commented: "I see work as a very incarnational. Jesus became flesh, muscle, sinew. He put his body where the question was and then he walked the question....That is until away avails itself to the seeker. A way which becomes the Way, followed by a sudden and overwhelming desire to walk in it." In North Carolina he quotes Rosetta at the Lord's Acre: "Food nourishes people. It's creating justice on all different levels. When people are fed, they are warm and relaxed. It's how you reach people." And like her I prefer feeding people to marching in protests.


I do a lot of hard, heavy cooking, I feed a lot of people a week, it is at the heart of the ministry that I do--to me it becomes the Eucharist to those I serve, and this is what Bahson is saying in the food produced by the soil Jesus becomes present. He calls us to get back to the land, to renew our environment through our actions., Deo Gratis! Thanks be to God!
--

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't like this one as much as I thought I would. Fred Bahnson worked as the director of a church-based community garden in rural North Carolina, but after 4 years he was burnt out and frustrated with church politics over the garden. To remember why he was drawn to church-based community gardens he visits other faith-based gardens and also remembers back to some of his earlier experiences that drew him to the garden/spiritual parallel. There were some aspects of the book that were very interesting, but the overall tone was kind of a downer and there wasn't a clear direction with the stories - the chapters went back and forth in time and it was sometimes hard to follow. Overall, it was OK.

A quote I liked:

"Donny believed you had to find good soil to farm, but I saw it the opposite way. You start with what's at hand, and by adding compost and green manures and other soil food, you improve it. You 'avad [service] the soil by giving more to it than you take away. And then you shamar [keep or preserve] it, that is, you stand back and watch and allow yourself to be amazed at God's mystery unfolding before you." (p. 179)

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I LIKED it. I consider 3 stars high praise because there are many, many, many books I don't like.

The book blurb says, "moving and profound." and I agree. The writing is coherent and thoughtful; the subject is worthy of attention.

Readers interested in philosophical/theological musings will like this book. Those who want action in a plot/narrative will probably get bored. I would have given this book 4 stars if the writing had been zippier; The vocabulary and sentence structure lean toward academic, which makes sense; Fred Bahnson has a PhD and has taught theology in colleges. That is not to say that it's droning or pompous. As I said, I liked the book.

Interestingly, my book has a different subtitle than the one listed here. Mine says, "A spiritual memoir of food and faith, " which I think is accurate. I think the other subtitle, "four seasons among the keepers of the earth" is more accurate, but perhaps too specific for the scope of the book.

After reading the book, I've come to admire Fred Bahnson's lifestyle and values. I would enjoy meeting him, and congratulating him--he has courageous convictions and he lives by them.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

There seems to be a growing fascination in our culture with wanting to know where our food comes from, and a desire to get back to a simpler way of living. There are plenty of books out there on these topics. But this book focuses on the spiritual benefits of a life lived in connection with the land. The author spends time with groups of people from different faiths who are involved in community gardens. He first spent time with some monks, and one thing that has stuck with me from the book was when a monk said something to the effect of "we have a moral obligation to grow a vegetable garden". The author has a very peaceful voice, and a compassion for those less fortunate in money or life circumstances. In one instance a woman was caught stealing watermelons from the church garden that he ran, and instead of turning her away, they helped her plant a garden of her own. An enjoyable read!

[Deirdre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fred Bahnson takes readers along on his own journey of faith. Feeling a deep spiritual need to feed the world, he tackles small areas at a time, starting in community and faith-based gardens. His search for balance takes him to Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, to a Pentecostal farm, an experiment with former drug addicts turning to the land for comfort and an ancient Jewish harvest festival. He and the people have profound spiritual experiences tied to the soil and each other. A moving book for anyone of any faith, especially if you care about the land and see the future as one of collaboration, rather than separation. Another great book for book clubs to discuss from many angles. A book I will reread.

[Deb Midgley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fred Bahnson takes us on an unique journey through various faith-based agarian communities, linking faith to the soil. Along the way he connects how we nourish ourselves both spiritually and literally, by eating home grown, organic food .Fred,himself, toiled in a faith-based community called Anathoth whose goal was to feed the poor. From discussing the original garden (Eden) in Genesis to learning about current faith-based gardens,I was eager to learn how different movements- Catholic, Protestant,Pentecostal and Jewish, have become part of movement that brings faith to the land. This book made me reflect on the importance of organic, the feeding of mankind's poor, and how this all interrelates to our faith. It was an interesting journey that provided me with "food for thought"!

[Dave McNeely · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a wonderful match of fascinating content coupled with beautiful prose. Bahnson wrote this book after serving as the Founding Director of Anathoth Community Garden in Cedar Grove, NC. This book - part memoir, part practical theology - alternates between Bahnson's journey to and through Anathoth along with his other explorations of a cadre of diverse faith-based community gardens in the United States. Well worth the read for anyone, regardless of your interest in food & faith issues.

[Joan Huyser-Honig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among all the books that deal with some combination of theology, gardening, farming, and eating, Soil and Sacrament is the best I've read. Bahnson weaves real life stories and personal revelations with thoughtful reflections on Scripture and the clash between industrial and sustainable food systems.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this spiritual memoir. The author shares his journey of connecting faith with his love of community gardening. The author visits four successful community gardens and shares with the reader his insights about living purposefully, gardening practices, and how faith, people, and the land are all interconnected bringing about community.

[Pat Loughery · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and engaging book - part memoir, part theology of food, part ecology. Very well written, and much more approachable than other (also excellent) work by Bahnson or his colleague Norman Wirzba.

[Marianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me want to run away and join a community gardening community, and I am not the least bit interested in working the land. Symbolism runs deep in this book, but not in a sentimental way.

[Jamie Howison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this one very gradually in the context of a book group, but suspect that I'll re-read it sometime over the summer. A really fine set of stories and musings on the connections between food, spirituality, faith and community.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

One man's journey to find God in gardening. He travels to different faith-based community gardens and ponders how his spiritual life is interwoven with his natural life. Quite introspective. There are some challenging ideas here!

[Kelly Buntin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth the time invested to read and distill the information shared about different types of community gardens . I would recommend this writer/gardener's story about his personal path of learning about growing your own food lifestyle.

[Cara Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the spiritual and food are your passions, then this is an absolute must-read. I loved his journeys with the land, and how he incorporated non-threatening parts of Christianity and Judaism ( in particular) into his story. Lovely.