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| Jeff Chu (photo: Ryan Pfluger) |
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Jeff Chu is an editor-at-large for Travel + Leisure. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?, a memoir about Christian faith and sexuality, and co-author (with the late Rachel Held Evans) of Wholehearted Faith. He is also a teacher, a speaker, a sometime farmer, and an ordained minister in the Reformed Church of America. He lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., with his husband. Good Soil (out now from Convergent Books; reviewed in this issue) chronicles his experience working as a farmhand while attending Princeton Theological Seminary.
Tell us about the inspiration for Good Soil.
We are living in a moment where things feel chaotic, disorienting, and, many days, so hard. I thought folks might be able to relate to, and benefit from, a story about how the experience of working on this farm changed me, and gave me a bit of hope. Because hope is contagious, if we're willing to share it. We need reminders of growth and possibility, which we are not getting from the headlines. We need stories about flowers and worms and land. Often, those stories contain pain and hardship and difficulty, and even death. But they also teach us about resilience and perseverance, and interdependence and goodness.
Tell us about the spiritual--and physical--nourishment you found at the Farminary.
The farm is the best classroom I've ever been in, because it isn't a controlled environment. You can't keep the mice out of the classroom. You can't plan for perfect weather all the time. You can't demand silence of the birds and the wind.
The group of farmhands and fellow students that I worked with is, in some ways, a microcosm of all the communities we're a part of. We were of many different ethnicities, religious convictions, genders, life experiences, viewpoints. Our shared mission held us together. But that doesn't mean we didn't fight or disagree or annoy each other. Working with those wonderful farmhands forced me to confront things about myself and how I relate to other people.
Being at the Farminary wasn't a one-hour dinner party. This was month after month, season after season, of working the land, cultivating the chickens, trying to keep the greens alive. In that context, you're going to run into moments where your views don't align. Your habits will clash with other people's. You could just walk away, but we also made a commitment. So the question then was: How do we do this together? Because we were responsible for the land, and to each other.
We definitely hurt each other at times, and we definitely helped each other. But that's what love is about. True love can empower you to make something beautiful from something devastating. Good Soil is ultimately a love story. It's about love of the land, and all who depend on the land. I wish that we as a society, as a culture, as a world, would write a better love story.
How did you develop a theology of compost and dirt?
The compost pile was my favorite part of the farm, unexpectedly. It is where we deposit the things that are past their sell-by date--that are rotting, stinky, beyond death. And the beauty of the compost pile is that bacteria and water and worms, and other things that I don't even know how to name, work together to produce something that can foster life again.
That's a metaphor that keeps me going when I have to confront ugly and painful realities. That grief and sorrow will be with us, but death isn't the end of the story. That there is rottenness in the world, but it doesn't get the last word. I don't want to live in a society that refuses to talk about the hard things. That's why I write about a lot of hard things, from my own story and from the land.
The Farminary provided rich metaphors for spiritual life, but was it a struggle at times to appreciate the garden for itself?
We are embodied creatures, though sometimes I've tended to see my body as a carrying case for my brain. At the farm, I learned that I have to recognize and honor my body, even though sometimes I haven't loved it well. The same goes for the land. What is the land, in and of itself, as opposed to what it could do for me, or us? The world around us, the other creatures in it--they're not just tools. How do we appreciate our interdependence, our relationships, the stories they carry? The more time I spent on the farm, the more I wanted to slow down, to observe and appreciate and honor, rather than jumping directly to How do I use this in some way?
Tell us how your work at the farm prompted you to dig deeper into your Chinese-American identity.
Being a farmhand really made me appreciate the culture I come from. Cantonese cuisine depends on good ingredients. It emphasizes freshness, simplicity, and clarity of flavor. I got to grow some things I ate growing up, including long beans and bok choy. And growing something, as opposed to buying it, changes your relationship with that food. It gives you a deeper appreciation for the farmer who got it to your table, and for the hands that transform it from a raw vegetable into a cooked dish.
I came to appreciate my mom and my grandmothers, and all they did to feed me and nourish me. Of course, there have been really hard things in my relationships with them. But being a farmhand compelled me to think about the complexities of their existences, the things that made them who they are. It gave me more compassion, honestly, for the humans I love.
I also deliberately chose to tell the story in a way that was rooted in Chinese culture. I explain in the author's note that I chose a circuitous Chinese style of storytelling, which reflects the messiness and complexity of life. We cycle through the seasons, and we grow and change, even as we come around again. Life isn't linear. Life is cyclical, at least from the Eastern way of looking at things. I wanted the actual structure of the book to challenge our culturally conditioned need for a beginning, middle, and end. This will slow the reader down. And that's a gift.
Do you still garden?
When my husband and I moved to Grand Rapids in January 2020, we moved into a house three blocks from the community garden. So I have a plot where I grow potatoes and beans and tomatoes and peppers. The first two seasons, I planted sunflowers, and the last two I haven't, because they've naturally re-seeded. And now the sunflowers remind me of grace, because they pop up without me doing anything. There are also gladioli in my plot, planted by the person who had it before me. I get a reminder of my limited agency, in the most beautiful way. I get to receive something that I had nothing to do with, and to be thankful for it. And isn't that one of the best things you can learn? To recognize the gifts that are given to us, that are all around us, but that we don't always notice? There's something wonderful and humbling about realizing that, yes, I have a part to play, but it's never just about me. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams