Grace Church|Red Hill
May 10, 2022
Dear Folks,
Like you, I awoke this morning to a picture-perfect day. There’s something about a spring morning in Charlottesville that goes straight to the heart. The fresh air. The clear blue sky. New leaves stirring in the light wind. Who knew that leaves unfurl in so many shades of green? Life provides moments that prevail with possibility.
Grace Church|Red Hill has endured these trying times with a holy resilience that reminds me of a tree whipped by a strong wind, bending yet staying rooted. It hasn’t been easy. Sustaining community during enforced isolation has its challenges, even as it offered possibilities.
I am writing to let you know that I am finally, two years later, taking my much-delayed sabbatical, a real possibility for renewal and growth. In the summer of 2019, the Lilly Endowment Clergy Renewal Program awarded Grace Church|Red Hill a sabbatical grant for its vicar. Now, we have finally resolved, it’s going to happen. The dates are from June 27 to October 27. The GC|RH staff—Hannah Twaddell, Emily Wright, Joanna Currey, Karolina Lopez, and Jo French—along with Rebekah Menning, senior warden, and Laura Farrell and Cynnie Davis make up the sabbatical support team.
The team and I are working on the church schedule for the Sundays I’m gone. We are engaging liturgical leaders, designing the liturgies, and making plans for pastoral care and other duties that will need to be done. As you well know, it takes many coordinated people doing many tasks to make GC|RH hum. I’m certain that in the four months that I’m away, GC|RH will flourish.
During much of my sabbatical, I will be out of town. My major focus will be to look more closely at the words, “interconnection” and “interdependence”—words I have learned in the church and its image of one body with many essential parts and from ecology and its understanding of the ecosystem and its essential life forms in balance with one another. In our culture, the self sits at the center of our concern. During this time, I’ll consider, instead, how the individual self is connected to land, its inhabitants, the people who work it, and those dependent on the food that comes from it. In a basic way, this is an opportunity for me to explore and witness how I am part of the whole. The summary of my sabbatical grant proposal is below.
Even as I will miss GC|RH fiercely, I’m grateful for this opportunity for growth and renewal. Please know that your presence in the life of GC|RH will be vital during this time. I’m counting on it.
And I hope you can get out and enjoy this gorgeous weather!
Be well,
Neal
Sabbatical summary:
I have spent the nearly 30 years of my ordained ministry at the intersection of the church and the land. Even as a seminarian intern serving an inner city parish in Manhattan, the island covered by concrete exerted its prominence in the church’s ministry–an image of a flower blooming through a crack in the sidewalk became the church’s icon. While parishioners, liturgies, and social justice remain central to my vocational duties, I have become more and more intrigued by the gifts and challenges the land and eco-justice present to congregations and the church.
I use the term eco-justice as a more precise term for what I mean by the ministry of the land. I define eco-justice as the right relationship to the earth and all living things and as the means (awareness, advocacy, education, action, liturgy) to restore right relationship. Ecojustice ministry recognizes that much of the earth’s environmental degradation hits the poor and people of color in unequal and very harmful, toxic amounts. And it is the poor who are most likely to live in food deserts where fresh and affordable healthy food is in low supply. Larry Rasmussen points out “that environmental justice is also social justice and that all efforts to save the planet begin with hearing the cry of the people and the cry of the earth together” (Earth Ethics Earth Community, 291).
It is my intention to use the renewal program as a time to focus on the land. I will do this by identifying the land upon which I live – the Piedmont of Central Virginia, the lands which have influenced my life and ministry – the farms, woods, and sloughs in Central Minnesota, the homesteaded land of my great-grandparents in Eastern North Dakota, and the farmland from which my ancestors came–Namdalseid, Norway, and lands upon which religious groups are doing creative ministries. I intend to spend time on these lands with the goal to explore farming in their context, as they encounter climate change, and as a ministry. I will use these visits to reimagine how I might more closely integrate ministry with my ancestral land, the land I know, and the land on which I live. And I hope to deepen my understanding and experience of the spiritual dimensions to farming and eco-justice work as I walk the land of my ancestors, talk to farmers, and witness innovative ways in which ecological farming is part of the healing of the earth. How does working the land contribute to a sense of awe at the cyclical regeneration of new life, to a growing awareness of earth’s abundance and fragility, and to a commitment to eco-justice ministry?
During my sabbatical I will explore how God, through farmers and conscientious eaters, is calling the church to care for the land, its health and the well-being of all living things dependent upon it. I am intrigued by the intersection of faith and food and understand that relationship as a crucial component of the eco-justice ministry that GC|RH is already practicing. The sabbatical will give me an opportunity to live more deeply into that intersection, to breathe it in. That for me will be a time of renewal.