Learning

I knew five of the six people who did the Parish Farming Internship with me. I’d shared living quarters with three of them—when I first moved to Norwood, I had a room in what had been an old rectory and what had become a community house, where twelve of us (a mix of families and singles) each had our own space but ate meals and had movie nights together. My longest connections in the neighborhood stemmed from those early days; that house was a launching pad for the rest of my time there, even though I’d only lived there about a year and a half.

Two other people I knew from the neighborhood, and I worked with both of them; the year before, I’d become the director of a community-based nonprofit, and two of my fellow interns (as well as Erin, one of our instructors) ran programs under its umbrella.

The only person I didn’t know lived in Columbus. He’d heard about the internship from a friend who had participated in its inaugural year. I felt bad for him, coming as he was into an environment rife with in-jokes, but he seemed to roll with it.

It almost did not matter that so many of us had lived lives tightly interwoven. The Parish Farming experience was fundamentally different from the other ways our lives had intersected. I’d never before been asked, as we were in an opening exercise, to name the region’s native plants, or to name our local watershed, or discuss in detail the composition of Norwood’s soil. Though I had taken theology classes before, none of them had addressed the suffering and injustices inherent in our current food system, or how it was impossible not to be complicit in these grave wrongs.

I’m someone who would stay in school my whole life if I could, so I relished the classroom elements of our time together: reading assignments, reflection essays, and discussions that lasted a couple of hours or more. But I soon realized my book smarts hadn’t taught me how to nurture tomatoes and peppers, or to quickly assemble pizzas in a restaurant kitchen.

We were taking one of the most basic human activities—eating—and giving ourselves the time and space to let it teach us about our relationship to God and to each other. I can see this about the internship now. At the time, I mostly focused on the warmth of our camaraderie, the joy of unhurried dinners together, and how much coaching I needed to plant seeds properly.