50 years ago, September 28, 1974, Debbie and I were married in a ceremony with way too many clergy, down by the duck pond on our seminary campus in Ohio (MTSO—Methodist Theological School in Ohio).  Surrounded by a sacred human community of seminary students and faculty with family gathered from far flung coasts, we sang our songs, vowed our vows, placed rings on the proper fingers and shared the joy of our first wedded kiss.  In that Garden we got our start, hand-in-hand before the altar of a gnarled stump made wise by its persistence.  We were not to be alone.  Ducks quacked from the pond close by.  Turtles snapped and dragonflies chased.  In the shallows, the Great Blue Heron crept through pond scum to spear a sleepy frog. Overhead the kestrel flew home with a shrew for her mate.  At woods edge, the groundhog, who had snatched way too many tomatoes from our seminary garden that summer, wore a holy smirk.  Earthworms beneath us renewed the humus.  Mushrooms beside us made life from death.  Every Eden has its Tree of Life.  This was our first.

For our Jubilee, we were eager to return to that altar of origin.  You have to get those “before and after” pics to show the kids right?  So we borrowed a friend’s Tesla and drove 3,000 miles from Oregon in June.  I KNOW.  I KNOW.  Just last week, we saw a bumper sticker on a Tesla reading “I bought this Tesla before Elon Musk went weird!” It is what it is.  We stopped in Bloomington to see Chuck and Jan Foster.  Chuck was our Christian Ed prof and the lead officiant in our original gig.  Jan hosted the rehearsal dinner at their home, arranging all the nuptial flowers they’d planted in their home garden that summer, just for us.  Since our visit Jan has died, returning to her Ground.  Such is the circle of life.

Arriving at the seminary, they put us up for two nights in the same student dorm where we first knew each other in our young naivety.  Somebody had burned the stump to the ground a few years after our wedding, so we did our best to find the magic spot and snap the ‘after’ shot.  I know y’all will be thinking to yourselves “Wow, they haven’t aged a bit in all those decades!” So be it!  Knowing how United Methodists are always in search of new altars, we kept searching the premises.  Of course we’d heard of Seminary Hill Farm so we met up with Laura Ann Bergman, a recent MTSO graduate, who runs the farm’s CSA and coordinates volunteers.  She spent several hours with us, telling the stories and sharing the farm.  I would say ‘OMG.’  But it’s really more like ‘HRGOHWGIT!’  I mean ‘Holy Regenerative God of Humus, What Got Into Them?’  God is doing a new thing there! We perceived it and it’s Freeking Awesome.

Back in our time this used to be a campus of academic red brick and studious gasoline-manicured lawns.  The turf where Debbie once integrated the male-dominated-after-class flag football game now grows long rows of spuds breathing the afternoon air and beds of succulent asparagus watering the mouths of those who taste and see.  Where a vast sod desert once lay,  stands a diverse cornucopia of hoop houses full of greens, multicolored plantings of peppers and tomatoes mulched with homegrown hay.  A mobile henhouse just arrived, anticipating a harvest of cackle-berries and chicken poop to compost the soil.  I think there was even okra!  

Most of the campus lawn hasn’t been mowed for sometime now as the land is slowing going native.  A block of buildings are heated and cooled from geothermal wells beneath the pathways seminarians walk daily in search of the Divine.  A ground-mounted rack of 60 solar panels, facing the same dining hall where we cut our chocolate wedding cake, makes it clear and visible what our people believe.  If we got married on the same site today, we’d probably just walk up the hill above the pond and eat cake in the big glass greenhouse.

And here’s the thing, the 60 member Community Supported Ag (CSA) scheme planted there keeps Seminary Hill produce on the menu of the seminary dining hall and abundant on the tables of 60 households across the larger neighborhood.  Seminarians don’t have to imagine what “every family sitting beneath their own vine and fig tree with none to terrify them” looks like (Micah 4:4).  They re-create that economy every day.  In that gracious space, one suspects Jesus is most of the time mistaken for the Gardener and community members, with soil under their fingernails, have a hands-on chance daily to discern where their real treasures lay.

What it has meant to revisit our first Eden after 50 years is more than a homecoming.  As a clergy couple we started marriage and ministry by the duck pond and launched westward, wide-eyed and determined to save the world and transform the entire church while raising a family.   As we were leaving, the language in our United Methodist Discipline had just been changed to read “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” and we would spend the next 5 decades trying to convince our LBGTQ+ neighbors we were weren’t what our denomination said we were.  Since we packed our bags and set out for our first appointment in Idaho, 2/3 of critterkind have vanished from the face of the Earth as humanity has cursed the ground and climate in every realm possible.  And now, in the bloodied aftermath of the 2024 Election, all Creation groans once more as we begin to see what acrid adventures our choices will spread across neighborhood and landscape in life and death, blessing or curse.  

Today I have to say we’ve also persevered and persisted and we’ll keep on persevering and persisting until the time our bodies are celebrated in ash and compost.  The Jubilee fact is, across our communities of faith, we have spawned new ministries of social holiness and regenerative justice never dreamed of. We have supported CSA farms and marched with field workers.  We protest modern lynchings.  We create community gardens in food deserts where church lawns once ruled.   We cover church tops and parking lots with solar panels.  Just this spring we, at long last, replaced that language of hate with words of justice and hope, while, at the same time, we have called for Creation Justice organizing in every Annual Conference.   We have advocated tirelessly for divestment from fossil fuels and one day soon, we will join that cloud of witness among our brothers and sisters of many faith traditions and fully divest.

Returning to our first Eden has gifted us an unbelievable validation in a time when, more than ever, we all need to trust our validity.   I said we have persevered and we have.  For how many decades did we think we were the only ones, as we experimented with new ministries we didn’t know anyone else was trying or even cared about.  It was lonely.  So yes, revisiting a transformed campus reaffirmed the original vow we took standing before the old gnarled Tree of Life 50 years ago.  We are not alone.  We are made for each other.  Of each other.  We will not be alone.

As we finished our tour of the place in June, we asked Laura Ann Bergman if she had recommendations for good eating places in town.  Pondering for a moment, she said, “You know what, why don’t you eat with us out here tonight.”  Stupidly, I replied, “Will there be rhubarb pie!?!”  She gathered asparagus and romaine from Seminary Hill and later that evening her husband, Jeff,  joined us with lamb chops from their home place.  He grilled the chops, asparagus and romaine and the four of us dined around a picnic table with a couple seminary interns.  Surrounded by these heavenly hosts we realized we were literally 100 feet from where we first laid eyes on each other in the dorm parking lot in 1973.  At the close of our wedding that next fall, we had served each guest with the bread and the cup, a small eucharist in those inspired woods.  But this time was a much larger Communion.  And we had home baked (still warm) rhubarb pie!  Thanks Laura!

I leave you with this blessing, born of that community of seminary caretakers, hung permanently on a hoop house wall.  In these days of deep grief, anger, and paralyzing uncertainty, I suggest we pray this prayer together often, cling to it as we cling to one another.  Embrace it.  Live it.  Organize on it.  It is  The Soil Keeper’s Prayer:

We give thanks for the blessing of all life on Earth.  We give thanks for the Mysteries of the elements blending into infinite forms: our shared heritage.  We honor the divine nature of All That Is, as Rivers running into the same Ocean.  May the light move through our hands and steady our feet as we travel this Sacred Way.