It is the first Saturday in November. Back home the evening will be falling on family--grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts, and my brother--as they rest after Plowing Day. This annual occurrence was a yearly fixture each fall and consisted of my grandpa's friends, relatives, and neighbors bringing their draft animals and plowing the field next to his farm. It was a way to keep alive traditional farming practices, spend time as a community, and feast together. As I write this, sitting at my desk in Winnipeg, the snowflakes continue to gently fall, gathering in soft mounds, covering the earth. I am afraid, honestly, of this settled indication that winter is here. Last winter was brutal: a level of physical coldness and emotional despair I had yet to experience.
If there is one thing I have learned since last winter, however, it is the power of hope. More specifically, the ability to place trust in the power of hope. In the case of winter, this means trusting that spring will come and trusting in my own ability to find moments of unadulterated happiness among assignments and snow plows. In the case of despair, it means seeking out the Plowing Days of the world: traditions of heritage that are movements of hope. I am taking an Introduction to International Development Studies (IDS) course this semester. As one of the older students in the class, I sit and watch the worlds of first year's topple. I worry. I remember all too vividly my own first semester in post-secondary education. The simultaneous stumbling as the rug of religion had been pulled from beneath me and grasping as I realized the grave danger our planet and world is in. In recapping these months to my sister earlier today, I described my way of coping as "drinking a lot and running away." After my year in Alaska, I did not know how to handle the hasty cultural transition and the accompanying worldview shift. So I became itinerant. I went to Detroit for three weeks and stayed for three months. I lived out of my backpack for a few weeks. I moved back to Alaska. I almost stayed. I spent the weirdest day of my life in Seattle. I road-tripped through Colorado. I came to Winnipeg. I traded CMU for MDS: a terrible idea with the state my mental health was in. I went back to Kansas. I glimpsed the home I could have embraced. I meandered. I returned to Winnipeg. Somewhere in there I fell in love and fell away and learned to live without meat, gluten, dairy, or stability. In the shifting, in the constant pattern of "hellos" and "goodbyes," in the falling in love with places and people only to leave again, in the finding lost I failed to stay found in the hope of home and community. I critiqued the small little town in Kansas from which I hail. Blaming it for the terrible theology I left with, the status it gave me that no one really has, the backwards and backwoods car-driving, cattle-eating, Republican mindset it ubiquitously has and is not. I forgot about the thriving farmer's market. I overlooked neighbor's cutting neighbor's wheat to hate on corporate agriculture (which is helping me through University I might add), and I sighed at having to leave forgetting the ones who have returned. It's not a place where people bike to school with jars of homemade borscht in their backpacks. Yet Kansas, with its cars and combines, is as guilty of hope as it is of carbon emissions. It is not the world of urban, Winnipeg Mennonites. It does not have to be. It is the place where I walked barefoot, dry soil between my toes as I learned to garden. It is the place where I was a speaker, storyteller, student, and sass before I was aware that my femaleness made me unsafe and a sex-object. It is the place where I learned to share what I had with neighbors and strangers in need. It is the place where I fell in love with the land and my space in creation. Where I learned the importance of family and locality by butchering hogs, baking bread, canning pickles and jam, and schlepping a feast to the barn for my grandma on Plowing Day. That small little town in Kansas is far from perfect. But it's rolling wheatfields and Sunday services, it's potlucks and dusty dirt roads are home in a way that Superstore and Wellington Crescent, downtown coffee shops and traffic lights never will be. It was a place where what is considered "radical homemaking" in the urban world was a way of life. It was not until I came to CMU and attached theological significance to subsistence practices that I realized the hope that exists within my hometown. It's the first Saturday in November. The calendar is a reminder of assignments upcoming. The snow is a reminder that there are seasons of stillness that will eventually lead to new growth. And Plowing Say is a reminder that the hope-providing work to be done in the world is already under way.
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Elizabeth SchragAdventurer. Biblical and Theological Studies major. Borderline Vegan. Rebel with a cause. Archives
March 2017
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