Task #1 was to run an experimental 6-week webstore modeled off Ojai Farmstand based out of the Churches that hosted last year's festival. Task #2 was to help organize and attend the 2018 festival. Those two tasks are inextricably linked, but this post focuses on the second one: the festival.
I want to spend some time unpacking the meaning of this festival and the reasons behind it, particularly what motivated us to literally leave our farm behind and drive with our family from one corner of the country to the other in order to participate. Catholic Rural Life Festivals don't happen everyday, so the first question one might ask is: what is it? That's a good question. Why Catholic? Why rural? what do they have to do with each other, and what is there to celebrate? The roots of such a festival reach all the way back to the story of creation. Two passages from the book of Genesis serve as our starting point. Verse 1:31 reads: “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” Verse 2:15 continues: “God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” Without getting bogged down in biblical analysis, it is clear from these verses that God's creation is truly good, and humanity’s roll is to steward and a care for that good. Put most simply, that is what we are celebrating - the sheer goodness and beauty of creation. It's easy, especially in the modern world where we tend to live surrounded by our own recreations of God's world, to lose a sense of gratitude for the incredible gift of creation. The Catholic Rural Life Festival calls us back to our senses and helps us to look with new eyes at the simply glorious world we have been bestowed with. Although cities have an essential role to play in society and culture, it is the outlying rural areas surrounding cities that keep them grounded in their roots. Just as a plant will die when cut off from its roots, so will cities and all people suffer and die to the extent that they cut themselves off from their natural roots in the countryside. As Catholics, we recognize not only the dependence of cities upon the countryside for their physical nourishment and survival, but also for their spiritual survival. The Catholic Rural Life Festival is nothing other than an affirmation of Catholic principles and teachings which speak to the essential role of the countryside and rural culture as a whole for the good of the Church and all Society. It was with this in mind that Pope Pius XII would say in 1946 that “Great care must be taken to preserve for the nation the essential elements of what might be called genuine rural culture.” Almost 150 years earlier, his predecessor Pius VII affirmed the specific dignity of farmers and those who work closely with the land. “The farmers' calling is a sacred calling … because he collaborates with God in continuing the work of his creation.” There is hardly a pope in the last 150 years that has not in one way or another addressed the integral importance of rural culture. I could mention quote after quote to this point, but I will mention only a few more from recent times. In 1981 Pope St. John Paul II wrote “It is necessary to proclaim and promote the dignity of work, of all work but especially of agricultural work, in which man so eloquently ‘subdues’ the earth he has received as a gift from God and affirms his 'dominion’ in the visible world. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said, “the rural family needs to regain its rightful place at the heart of the social order.” Most recently, Pope Francis promulgated an entire encyclical on the urgent need for all to work for the good of creation, which he terms “Our Common Home.” The words of the Popes all come back to Genesis 1:31 and 2:15. Creation is simply good, and Mankind's original task is to care for it. At the Festival this weekend, we will be living this out in several concrete ways. We are coming together to celebrate the sheer goodness of the gift of creation. We are gathering in prayer to express our gratitude for that gift and to praise its Creator. We are working to bring back practical elements of rural culture that have a tendency to be lost in our modern world full of conveniences. We are affirming the vocation of farmers by supporting their work with multiple celebratory meals sourced from their own local farms. We will thank those farmers explicitly at the meal. We will join Fr. Paul Dumais in a blessing of the fields of a local dairy farm. We will celebrate with live folk music and a communal contra dance, both invaluable contributions and social underpinnings of local historic rural culture of New England. We will appreciate the artwork of a talented local artist who takes his inspiration both from his Catholic faith, and his rural lifestyle. That's a lot to pack into one weekend. Finally, but definitely not least important, we are coming together to have a conversation about all these things, and their relationship with one another. These are things we need to be talking about, and asking ourselves what place they have in our lives, in the Church, and in society as a whole. That's the conversation we drove 3,000 miles to have. My guess is that most other attendees won't be traveling quite as far… We hope you can make it! I'll have more to write about these topic going forward. We're looking forward to a great festival!
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Hey Folks, Max and Deirdre writing together here...
A few weeks ago, we took an amazing trip with the whole family to Maine. Back in March, our good friend and band member Margaret asked us if our band Hidden Fifth wanted to play a concert as part of a Catholic Rural Life Festival being organized by Fr. Paul Dumais of St. Joseph's Catholic Parish in Farmington, Maine. Although we hadn't played a full theater show in 4 years, we were up for the challenge, and said yes! Boy, are we glad we did! The Festival spanned 4 days of amazing events from Sept 14-17. Fr. Paul described the event as a "Conversation on Nature and Grace" bringing together Catholics to both reflect on the ramifications of our faith on rural living, and to celebrate that life fully. One good way to describe it was a combination of a spiritual retreat, and a grand celebration of rural values such as food, farms and folk music and dancing. The festival combined common prayer, classes on homesteading skills, lost culinary arts, common meals, talks, presentations, contra dancing, and our concert. Upon arrival, we were hosted at the beautiful Morrill Farm B&B in Sumner, ME. The B&B is on a working farm with dairy, pastured broilers, and a beautiful farmhouse and barn from the 1700s! The Family has also built their own private chapel on the property, and part of the festivities for the weekend took place there, including a procession through the fields, and blessing of the fields and barn. We got an extended tour the first morning, and were enthralled by the beauty of the farm, and the hospitality of our hosts. We played our concert on Friday night for festival attendees and the show was open to the public. It was a fabulous evening of music and dance, and we don't know whether we or the audience had a better time that evening! We definitely want to play a show in Maine again! The venue was a beautiful old Church converted to a concert venue. Saturday night we attended a 5-course farm-to-table dinner featuring food from 14 local farms! The parish provided free babysitting for the kids, who got to eat wood-fired pizza cooked on-site, homemade french fries and homemade ice cream from a local dairy farm. We thoroughly enjoyed being able to eat our meal without chasing kids around, and the nice ladies helping out commented that Declan really knows how to eat a lot of pizza! Since we don't generally feed him pizza at home, we guess he figured he had better stock up! We have no doubt that Siobhan took advantage of the quantity of pizza too, and the fact that Mom and Dad weren't in the room to curtail consumption. The dinner was followed by a contradance, and we danced every single dance. Deirdre started out by wearing Declan on her back, and then when he fell asleep (we had some late nights that trip!), we put him down on a lambskin in the hall, and kept on dancing! Siobhan danced almost every dance, and did a great job for a 4 year old dancing at 10 pm! We were also excited to meet 4 staff members from the national non-profit Catholic Rural Life. We have been members of CRL for the last year, and it was exciting to talk to them about our farm, and new website www.youngchristianfarmers.com. They gave some great talks over the course of the festival. It's hard to convey just how amazing of a trip this was for us. All of our life's passions came crashing together at this event. Folk Music + Farming + Faith + Community + Contra Dancing + Local Food + Beautiful Rural Nature + Traditional Skills + Stimulating Intellectual Conversations. We could not even soak up all the goodness that was happening there in the four days that we had. It inspired us to live out our values to the fullest, and we were so honored to take part in, and even contribute to the festivities. We could go on and on and on, but we'll let some of the photos speak for themselves. We were inspired to reflect deeply on how our faith compels us to work hard to restore the rural family to the American cultural landscape. We encourage all our Catholic brothers and sisters to work for the same goal, which Pope Benedict considered an important need for our times. "The rural family needs to regain its rightful place at the heart of the social order." Even if we don't all live in rural areas, we all as eaters depend on rural families to provide us with our most basic life's necessities, so we are all in this together, and we all benefit greatly from a robust culture of rural living. One concrete way to do this is to become a member of Catholic Rural Life, which needs members like us to support them in their important work of ministering to these rural communities and building them up. |
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