What are they doing over there now...

It’s not often a guy from the inner-city gets to share all about what the farm life has done for him. Yet, from my early experiences of downtown life in Detroit’s Cass Corridor to the Woodward and W. Monterey bus stop in Highland Park. I know I’ve seen a whole heaven’s rowboat full of crazy city stuff, most too traumatic to share. However, between my Detroit experiences and the time I began some sort of farming or another in the last 20 years, I s’pose I’ve seen nearly everything. Aw, I know better, and there may be a few years ahead of me ta’ prove that the amazing and unbelievable never stop happening in life if you carry around perspective with you and keep watching.

I invested a lot of my time in things called hermeneutics (really fancy-sounding critical theory), which allows me to keep several things in perspective. Mostly a Jesus and gospel order perspective, or the perspective of a farmer. Permeating this is a theory of repentant eschapocalyptic theory of faithful social change. That last sentence was a hell of a long way of using ten-dollar (inflation) academic words to describe something that is far removed from revolution. A revolution uses old structures and frameworks, driven harder to perform by new regimes. Without making many changes. Often, what begins as countercultural finds its way back to economic and cultural bondage. The violence only gets worse as the problems that existed before the revolutionaries took control of the means of production continue to alienate human beings from being.

Repentance and eschapocalyptic theory are based on three things. First, the biblical Greek word for repentance is metanoia, and it describes a turning from what has taken your gaze away from the presence of the Creator God of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Metanoia is a rejection of those items and projects that feign not only to have value, but keep the human gaze adhered firmly upon desire and consumer goods laden with false value. Revolution simply returns the insurrectionists to taking control of the golden calf rather than leaving it behind.

This turning away is the eschatological (final things) act of a people seeking radical return to faithfulness and an end to the cycle of dominance economics supported by nothing but mimetic desire (Girard). Eschatology is not a biblical term that predicts the end of the world nor the end of time, history, or difference. The last things are the end of a wretched world of desire, of dominance, of violence. The eschaton ushers in the change of an era, transitioning creation to yet another new beginning with new understandings. A new self-awareness that accommodates critical understandings of others and incorporates aspects of such insight into a perspective of faithful servanthood. This understanding of the creator's written word, the logos of the Christ, directs us toward embodying the change that the divine desires for their creation. This is the revealing, or apocalyptic, nature of eschatological transition. As a people of faith, we are prepared to embody the change of God’s desire and further expose the loving sacrifice of privilege for all that it is.

We are negotiating our way through an eschatological moment in the history of the United States. Desire has become an obstacle to kindness, love, and mutual aid. Community has become little more than a social entity that underwrites our own desires so that we can stand upon the mountain of consumer goods that provide for overflowing profits at landfills. Sandhill has been going alone, and in circles (revolutions), spinning our wheels to decide how to stay alive. The farm has become, in some sense, one of my idols. It may be the time when I give up the farm for universal use and work with neighbors to make sure folks are fed by their own hands, after learning from ours, or accessing resources thought to be too expensive. Sandhill will persevere. Please help us with your donation - new things are brewing.