The Two Sides of Every Circle
Even in the most assured vessel of a Christian congregation, that devilish division emerges
Last weekend I attended the Rogue Food Conference (RFC) co-hosted by my favorite farmer, Joel Salatin, which was being held for the first time west of the Mississippi in Washington state. It was a one-day event of interesting speakers and exhibitors which satiated my need to rub elbows with people intimately involved in the small-scale production of food at the local level.
The main theme was food sovereignty and protecting our food supply from government overreach and regulations that often have no basis in safety, affordability of, or clear access to food. Many of these regulations come across as a bully move to the little guys. Why does a bully intimidate the weaker guy? Insecurity. Jealousy, Fear of loss of power or status. It’s always by force, manipulation, ridicule, and shaming – it’s never by cooperation, true power, fairness, or even logic. Unfortunately when the FDA, USDA, or any state health or agricultural agencies come after small farmers or food producers, it’s often to maintain their might and restrict our rights.
The RFC folks come from a foundational worldview (if I may translate what I gather from them) that we all have a right to access, grow, buy, raise, or barter whatever we want to feed ourselves and our families. This inherently acknowledges that what is considered good food, nourishment, and health is subjective. And we each have the right to pursue that which fits into those categories for ourselves.
The day after the conference they were holding an informal Q&A so that folks could discuss specific issues they were having, clarify confusion, and maybe do some brainstorming about how the movement could keep gaining momentum.
I was jazzed by the commitment to farming, animal husbandry, good quality food, and the friendly supportive community that I saw. So I made the drive back out to Orchards, WA the following morning. The Q&A was being held right before Sunday morning church service and many of the attendees were dressed for church. So the venue had a bit of a religious air that morning.
Although I was raised Catholic, I have not been an active churchgoer for years. I am deeply curious about Christ, the Bible, and the teachings of Christianity, as I am curious about most religious belief systems and how they overlay with culture and more esoteric spiritual concepts like “energy, awareness, consciousness”, etc. I am fairly comfortable integrating into a Christian community and have respect for the constructs of the Sunday religious service. More and more I can feel the Christ love emanating outward when I am interacting with or surrounded by a group of “believers”. It’s exciting to feel this.
All of this background is relevant to form the lens through which I saw the events of Sunday morning unfold.
Examining the issues around food sovereignty through a Christian lens within a Christian community made complete sense to me. God created nature. Nature supplies the best essential nourishment. When we access our food directly from natural sources, health and strength permeate the whole. We are healthier, the earth is healthier, the animals are healthier, the soil is healthier, the ecosystems are healthier, communities are healthier, plants are healthier. Everything is much more aligned with how our complex natural world was created to be in perfect balance between giving and receiving, yin and yang, caring for and being cared for.
I felt like I was in a high-energy flow state in a room where God was being prepared for, people were respectfully cleaned up and dressed up, knowledgeable integrous presenters were standing at the ready, and the unity of community was palpable.
The pastor of the congregation, who was acting as facilitator, had smartly prepared an outline. He started the conversation off with some pointed questions to Joel and John (Moody), including a bible passage to illustrate the direction he was steering us in. However, quickly I realized that he had an agenda. And that for all the bible passages and preaching of Christ’s love for everybody, he held a worldview that was based on the old tired dichotomy of “Us vs. Them”.
He framed his questions and supporting references as “we on the right”, “us conservatives”, “our Christian community”, etc. Yes, I understand that we need and use identifiers to name our communities and to define and explain our beliefs and views and backgrounds, etc. But as his questions and the subsequent answers from Joel and John rolled off the reel, it became disappointingly evident that the presentation was representative of a specific polarity. And by nature of that polarity, there had to be sides.
I mean look all around you. Almost everywhere we are goaded into taking one side or another on practically every issue, situation, and story. We are constantly being told that there ARE sides. If there are sides, the implication is that there must be a right side and a wrong side. Better choose wisely!
Of all the earthly topics, food is one of the universal basic needs and rights. Without food there is no life. Perhaps one day we will evolve to survive and sustain ourselves on air alone (there are actually rare individuals who are doing this already!), but until that time, food = life.
So at a conference that is integrating food education, production, and access into other societal issues of freedom, sovereignty, human rights, religion, local community, economy, etc., one might think that we could move beyond the us vs. them mindset. I can only hope, I guess.
What it says to me more than anything is that a divisive mindset is pervasive. It’s like a temptress. It’s almost like a mandate. It’s so ingrained that it’s beyond habitual. We hardly realize when we are perpetuating polarities anymore. We justify them, sure, but more concerning is that we don’t even know that we’re doing it.
(Even writing this article, I am asking myself which side, or way of being am I purporting to be right or better than the other? What is shrouded in the subtext of my ideas, observations, and words? Clearly I believe following nature is a better way than embracing synthetic technologies in food production. And I can back that up with all sorts of evidence and arguments. But it’s still my belief that I hold to and by me stating it as a better way, there must be another way that I don’t think is so good. So there you go: a polarity! See what I mean by it being so deeply ingrained? It’s going to take a spiritual wrecking ball to start to turn this ship around! Man, we’ve got a long way to go.)
So even though I don’t think anyone that was at the church that morning is ever going to read this (or by divine guidance, maybe they will!), I want to encourage everybody to turn up your own self-awareness, put on spectacles of scrutiny, and ask yourself frequently: am I contributing to a polarity? Am I being polarizing in my words, beliefs, attitudes, chosen groups, reading materials, or practices?
We all have choices to make. And each choice made means leaving all the other options off to the side. It’s near impossible to hold ALL the choices and possibilities within ourselves at the same time. So give yourself some grace around this. Although it may be possible - I once heard it said “All at once is what eternity is.” That has stuck with me for years and I go in and out of understanding what it means. It’s something along the same lines as “there is only wholeness”, “we are all one”, “there is only one universal consciousness”, and “as above, so below”. The macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm. The same patterns play out over and over in all natural systems. Everything is the one thing.
So when the pastor argues that it’s “the left” misunderstanding and misrepresenting “the right”, and that the right is aligned with conservatism, and that Christians are fundamentally conservative, and that Christians have a direct line to God, then the obvious inference is that the right is connected to God and that the left is removed from God.
If God is the creator of nature and natural law, then we must respect nature and abide by natural law. So “the right” must know and can be trusted to uphold more natural ways of food production and natural health practices. (*Alert: polarity emerging here. Are you spotting it?) The conclusion being that the left is technology based, agnostic, maybe even destructive of nature, and/or that they have a tendency to misappropriately elevate the natural world to a god-like status, e.g. tree worship. And the right is…well…right.
Let me illustrate from my own a-ha moment years ago how sides exist not on a line, but in a circle. The inference here being that sides are a false construct and that continuity, unity, infinity are closer to Truth (capital T). This might encourage us to ask new questions to help us come out of being polarizing thinkers.
I attended naturopathic medical school in Portland, Oregon. Naturopathy in that community is associated with hippies, nature-lovers, tree-huggers, environmentalists, liberals, and the left. Even as I type this, I see how bizarre all the assumptive associations are. But I, like many of my classmates at the time, lumped it all together. We were these progressive people studying such extreme subjects as homeopathy, herbal medicine, nutrition, as ways to cure and prevent disease! We were “alternative”.
The medicine, even though steeped in old world traditions, folk healing, maybe even paganism, was considered alternative because it wasn’t mainstream. We thought that we were left of mainstream, progressing far beyond it.
Our education included midwifery and home births, questioning vaccination, awareness of environmental pollutants, detoxification, and energy medicine, alongside science, pharmaceuticals, minor surgery, and public health. We were so far outside of conventional medicine.
We were bringing practices grounded in nature and living systems back to the people. The people who had fallen off the path with fast foods, sedentary lifestyles, synthetic pharmaceutical pills, toxins in air and water, and a disconnection from the natural rhythms of life. The medicalization of normal life occurrences like childbirth and dying. We were radically progressive but patently rejected. We had to forge a way into the public’s awareness, always educating, convincing, arguing, advocating for a more natural approach to health and healing. That was in the late 1990’s.
Fast forward to now when the internet is exploding with life hacks and natural medicine secrets. The average Joe knows what the microbiome is and knows that food choices affect health. Functional medicine doctors (who branched off of the philosophy of naturopaths) are in demand, “complementary and alternative medicine” is offered at the Mayo clinic, and the public is more awake than ever that pharma is more about profit than people’s health and that our “healthcare” system is basically a ruse. Alternative medicine isn’t so radical and alternative anymore – it’s becoming the norm.
But I digress…. back to the line becoming a circle…
Sometime during my stint at naturopathic school, it started to come to my attention that there were people in very conservative religious communities who were espousing the SAME types of healing that we were! This “religious right” had a keen interest in herbs, high quality foods, homeopathy, homebirths, and prayer for healing (a type of “energy medicine”).
I think my mouth actually hung open for awhile as it sunk in. These people on the far right of the spectrum held the same beliefs as these other people on the far left of the spectrum. When the two ends of the line are joined up, they form a (gulp) CIRCLE!
Whoa. That really tripped me out for a while.
But then it completely delighted me.
I felt a weird sort of relief seep in. At the time I didn’t realize why I felt relieved – I just thought I had come up with a cool theory. I was really in my head about it.
Years later though it sunk in for me that we are more alike than we are different. And that finding our commonality strengthens us. This “circle of health beliefs” is a small illustration of how We are all One; Our true nature is not polarized, different, and divided; it is unified oneness.
Last Sunday following the Rogue Food Conference, I wish that I had raised my hand and respectfully pointed out how the pastor’s point of view perpetuated a divisive polarity and how it came across as a weakness, rather than a strength, which I’m sure was the opposite intention.
His words and the perception of him as a leader would have been so much more powerful had he had the courage and the wherewithal to join the two ends and speak from the center of the circle to the whole, about the wholeness.