I’ve always enjoyed that closing scene in the Whoopie Goldberg comedy movie Sister Act when Pope John Paul II visits the San Francisco convent where lounge singer Delores-turned Sister Mary Clarence directs the St. Katherine’s Choir in a stirring rendition of “I Love Him.” The story is fictitious of course but the pope did make an extended visit to the U. S. where he made explicit reference to charitable obligations to the poor. This was during his unprecedented trip to the American heartland in 1979 that was hosted by the Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa, and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. John Paul celebrated an open-air Mass where a vast crowd of some 300,000—the largest in Iowa history, had assembled on a broad hillside at Urbandale, Iowa’s Living History Farms.
Pope John Paul II at Urbandale Living History Farms (1979)
Local St. Mary’s parishioner Joseph Hays had sent a hand-written letter to the Pope inviting him to witness the church’s “Community in the Heartland” ministry of rural study and outreach. The pontiff’s decision to visit the Iowa countryside led to weeks of preparation by members who broke from customary harvest routines to host the special ecumenical event. Surrounded by area church and civic leaders, the pope led the service from a massive platform fashioned of white oak from a century-old corn crib. The temporary sanctuary was draped with an enormous quilted banner designed by Fr. John Buscemi of Madison, Wisconsin showing a cross with four colorful contoured field patterns symbolizing the seasons. From this peculiar setting, Pope John Paul II delivered a homily urging his hearers “in the middle of the bountiful fields at harvest time” to embrace “three attitudes… for rural life”—humble gratitude, land stewardship, and generosity toward the poor.
In an address ten years later commemorating the church’s “Declaration Nostra Aetate” regarding mutual respect and cooperation among world religions, John Paul II mentioned the notable contributions of American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) to interfaith dialogue. A longtime resident of Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky, Merton also fostered fellowship with prominent Asian and Native American spiritual leaders and formulated a corpus of ecological writings permeated with contemplative appreciation of nature and agrarian endeavor. In his poem “Trappists, Working” (1942), farming is likened to a liturgy of worship amidst outdoor sanctuaries of divinely bestowed sun, wind, and “walls of wheat.” “Landscape: Wheatfields” (c. 1950) likens faithful soldiers of the faith to shocks of grain sheaves awaiting transport in holy service of others.
American farmers participated more directly in domestic gleaning programs in the 1980s as well as in similar global aid projects. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, a group of Pacific Northwest growers formed WestWind Ministries in 1991 in response to appeals from newly independent Russian leaders to provide food and medical assistance to schools and orphanages in the Russian Far East. A coordinated “Operation Karelift” effort involving the National Association of Wheat Growers, Washington-Idaho Pea & Lentil Association, and The McGregor Company of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon led to delivery of over a thousand tons of aid to areas in greatest need. Farmers hauled truckloads of wheat for processing into flour while Northwest barley, lentils, and beans were combined into nutritious soup mixes.
Sara Quinn, We’ll Still Be Here When This Is Over Cover Montage
“The colors of their flag mirror the blue skies and their fields of wheat and sunflowers. …I hope one day, the Ukrainian farmers will be able to return to their fields.”
Tumbleweird 7:4 (April 2022) / Courtesy of the Artist
When Russian President Boris Yeltsin made an unprecedented visit to Seattle in September 1994 to report on newly normalized relations between the two countries, he cited “this help in our hour of need” in the context of the food campaign as a key factor in his historic decision. Yeltsin’s gala reception was hosted by Washington Governor Mike Lowry, himself a native of the Palouse Country hamlet of Endicott, Washington, where his father, Robert, had managed the local grain grower cooperative in the 1950s. Lowry’s dedication to humanitarian causes and migrant farm worker causes was the subject of many tributes following his passing in 2017. Officiant Kacey Hahn of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Renton opened the late governor’s memorial with explicit reference to moral responsibility from Leviticus 23:22: “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner.” With the outbreak of war of Ukraine in February 2022, many of the original KareLift partners joined with other groups through “Operation Harvest Hope” raise funds and send Northwest commodities to help feed the several million refugees who fled the conflict to safe havens throughout Europe. The war between Russia and Ukraine—nations that provide nearly one-fifth of world grain exports, destabilized global wheat markets and put at significant risk the wellbeing of millions living in the Middle East and North Africa who depend on imports and subsidized bread.
Kansas farmer-philosopher Oren Long has contributed for decades to agrarian periodicals and his local paper, the Valley Falls Vindicator, to offer insight on topics ranging from food security and social unrest to seed rates and meaning in art. In a 1983 New Farm article, Long underscores the vital understanding that rural experience is at once terrestrial and transcendent. “My farm is my refuge from the deception and hopelessness that haunts this intrusive commercial world. …I am an inseparable part of a great biological scheme of things and the greater contribution toward the complexity and harmony of that scheme, the greater will be the beauty of my world and the greater my significance to it.” In this way rural experience is understood to impart beauty to life in ways long expressed by agrarian painters and writers who have shown the abiding value of sowing, reaping, and other “cooperative arts” practiced with attention to land care and the less fortunate.
Mid-Columbia Symphony and Mastersingers Ukraine Benefit Concert, Kennewick, Washington (March 26, 2022)
Johannes Brahms, A German Requiem to Words of Holy Scripture, Op. 45
Sie gehen hin und weinen / und tragen edlen Samen, / und kommen mit Freuden / und bringen ihre Garben.
(They go forth and weep, / bearing precious seed, / and come with joy / bearing their sheaves.—Psalm 126:5-6)