June 17, 2011
Farmer and writer Kyle Kramer discusses healing and hope
Kyle Kramer listens to a question during discussion of his book, “A Time to Plant,” in the Woodward Center at St. Benedict Church in Evansville. (Message photo by Paul R. Leingang) Click for a larger version.
By PAUL R. LEINGANG (Message editor)
Kyle Kramer believes that “we are called to fall in love with the world,” and that we have to acknowledge that the world “is very degraded.” Our redemptive work is our way of living out the resurrection.
References to faith and agriculture flowed easily during his June 11 presentation to a small group at St. Benedict Cathedral in Evansville. He sees “love as the nature of God and the personal connective force that binds us together.” Love is “the glue that connects us all” to the earth and to each other.
Kramer’s audience include people who had read his debut book, “A Time to Plant.” The book’s subtitle is “life lessons in work, prayer and dirt.”
“I conceived this book as a love story, as a series of love stories actually,” he told the group.
He fell in love first with a set of principles, and bought “a rough and humble piece of property” in Spencer County.
He fell in love with the land. “It spoke home to me in the midst of all that ruin.” He felt “wedded to that piece of land.” He has made a commitment to the place — much in a similar way as the monks of St. Meinrad with their vow of stability have made a commitment to their place.
In his early years on the farm, he “very quickly discovered how crazy the collision is between ideals and reality.”
In love with the land, his challenge was to stay in love.
Kramer’s book tells how he negotiated that collision of ideals and reality, and how he received “the great gift of finding a life partner.”
He acknowledges that with the help of his wife, Cyndi, and many friends and neighbors, he has turned that land into “a (mostly) working organic farm.”
From his beginning efforts in “a kind of Daniel Boone mentality,” he came to realize that “the healing of land requires the healing of community.”
Kramer is not too sure the world can be healed, but he has hope and the beginnings of a plan. “Love works — when it works — by invitation, not by coercion, scolding and guilt,” he says.
If degrading agriculture practices are to be ended, if people can work together toward a sustainable earth, “I don’t think the way forward is by screaming.”
He invited his audience to know that there are ways for them to have an impact on the world, by growing food on their own property, even in the city; by ending dependence on highly processed and unheal-thy foods, and by living with hope.
Kyle Kramer’s book: A Time to Plant
Papeback, 192 pages, Imprint: Sorin Books, from Ave Maria Press, $15.95.
Writer, teacher, and farmer Kyle T. Kramer presents the honest, humorous, and uplifting story of coming to know God and himself and beginning to understand life as prayer. For Kramer, this came about through rejecting consumerism, creating an organic farm, and raising a family in rural southern Indiana.
In his moving debut book, America columnist Kyle Kramer recounts the sometimes-gritty story of how he came to experience the joys of real community through a journey of honest reckoning with his own ambitions. For Kramer, this story involves lots of dirt.
In the summer of 1999, Kramer, an earnest and high-achieving private school teacher in Atlanta, decided to forgo a promising academic career. Instead, he heeded the voices of the unlikely prophets in his life and purchased a block of hardscrabble land in southern Indiana in order to start a small farm. Tending it back to health — one difficult lesson at a time — Kramer founded Genesis Organic Farm, built a self-sustaining and environmentally friendly home, and began to fully embrace the Benedictine traditions of physical labor, prayer and hospitality. A Time to Plant is a deeply human story of one man’s attempt to make simple living a reality as a spiritual discipline for himself, as a model for his children, and for the good of creation.