August 1, 2006
E-newsletter # 26
Dear Friends,
There are different ways to experience time. Rural Africans look to the sun in the sky to find out what hour it is, urban Americans usually consult a watch or a clock. Looking at our personal calendar, we know that there are four weeks and three days left until we return to Ohio. Our colleagues here in the Joining Hands network tell us that we just completed “eyeKhala,” the month of the aloes, when these plants of the Eastern Cape burst into bloom. The liturgical calendar of Christian churches everywhere has us currently in Ordinary Time.
 Women waiting in line to receive seeds.
Rev. Welile Sigabi’s Eco-Liturgical Calendar integrates many of these dimensions, plus adds details from the agricultural cycle. The chart states that during eyeKhala, July, in the middle of the dry winter season in the Eastern Cape, you can grow vegetables that are relatively draught resistant, like beetroot, cabbage, and onion. But at the end of July, you get ready for more rains and thus for the planting of a greater variety of seeds. In Rev. Sigabe’s churches, the liturgical event of the Blessing of Spring Seeds livens up the otherwise feast-less “ordinary” church season. Last Thursday, we were privileged to be part of a worship service during which a variety of vegetable seeds were blessed and distributed to some 60 families in the village of Soto. The Gospel text was the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30-34). The sermon illustration was a sizeable carrot that had grown from a tiny seed planted last season.
In Eucharistic fashion, women and men came to the communion table to receive spoonfuls of seeds into the cones they had shaped from old newspapers. At the end, whatever seeds had fallen to the floor were carefully collected and bagged as well. The banner on the wall in the previous picture quotes Jesus saying “Ndim Isonka Sobomi”—“I am the Bread of Life.”
The Blessing of the Spring Seeds took place during the most recent meeting of the Sisonke Masilwe Indlala (“Together Let us Fight Hunger”) network in South Africa. This time we gathered in the village of Mooiplaas in the Eastern Cape, at the Methodist Church’s Centre for Sustainable Development. Homegrown vegetables, chicken brought in alive from the farm the same morning, and bread from the wood-fired oven outside fed us well as the Core Leadership Team deliberated future directions for the network.
The SMI statement of purpose includes these phrases: “mobilize for sustainable holistic human settlements” and “seek locally appropriate alternative models that empower poor people.” Can people in rural places create settings that provide sufficient food and shelter and employment to sustain human life without destroying the environment? The response from SMI is a resounding “Yes!”
At the Training Centre in Mooiplaas, the term permaculture is used to embrace a variety of sustainable practices: organic gardening, using all natural ingredients as fertilizers and pesticides, water harvesting to ensure irrigation during dry seasons, brick making using a steel compacting mold to form building blocks from earth and concrete, and even composting toilets recycling human waste in the absence of sewer systems.
The people who received seeds in Soto are also the ones who constructed their church building without any assistance from contractors. They are using the same methods now to build sturdy houses in their village. The seeds and the bricks are small steps to be sure, perhaps on the order of a mustard seed. But it seems to us that the time is ripe for the organizations that make up the SMI network to imagine and to work toward extraordinary things.
Blessed are you, O Lord our God, who brings forth food from the earth!
Susanne and Ken
The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 339 |
