POINTSOFVIEW | AT HOME ON EARTH
By Kyle Kramer
Pioneers 2.0
Kyle Kramer
EarthandSpiritCenter.org
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mid the twists and turns of COVID-19, I have been paying attention to some interesting trends. Many employers, whose workers are staying productive while working from home, are planning to encourage more remote work even beyond the pandemic. The virus has also motivated many people to leave cities for less densely populated areas—from wealthy individuals setting up shop in their second homes to scrappy millennials disillusioned with city life. Many of these people plan to make this relocation permanent since new ways of working remotely now make that more feasible. As someone who has spent most of his adult life living in rural areas, I’m very hopeful about this trend. Eighty percent of the US population now resides in cities, which has led to overcrowding, glaring social inequity, and environmental challenges. It’s also drained the countryside of the critical mass of people required for healthy rural economies, agriculture, and cultural life. A significant demographic shift to the countryside could potentially reverse both of those problems: Everyone could win. As the Church tries to find new ways to be Church during and beyond the pandemic, I’m excited to imagine how Christians and other people of faith might move to the countryside and craft new forms of intentional discipleship, devotion, and prophetic witness—and do so, as much as is possible, in community with others who share similar values and commitments.
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
Fortunately, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The Christian tradition has a long, venerable history of intentional rural communities in various forms. Beginning in the third century, Christian hermits fled to the Egyptian desert to escape persecution and, later, what they saw as the decadence of imperial Christianity. They left the cities for solitude, but they ended up forming communal monastic cultures that would sustain Christianity and Western culture through the Dark Ages and beyond. Recent centuries have seen the rise of Anabaptist communities such as the Amish, Mennonite, and Bruderhof movements. More recent still have been Catholic Worker farms and other intentional Catholic communities like Bethlehem Farm in West Virginia. Some of these movements and communities may be more radical than most of us could or would commit to. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we can try new, bold, risky things even—and especially—in how we live out our spiritual commitments. And this “new monasticism” could take any number of forms, with varying degrees of commitment. Regardless of the particular form they take, new ways of inhabiting rural areas as an act of faith and discipleship would have many common threads, like the “Twelve Marks” or “Nine Vows” articulated by the New Monastic movement. These might include spiritual formation and daily contemplative prayer;
LEFT: COURTESY OF KYLE KRAMER; RIGHT: KAYCO/FOTOSEARCH
Kyle is the executive director of the Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, which offers interfaith educational programming in meditation, ecology, and social compassion. He serves as a Catholic climate ambassador for the US Conference of Catholic Bishopssponsored Catholic Climate Covenant and is the author of A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt (Ave Maria Press, 2010). He speaks across the country on issues of ecology and spirituality. He and his family spent 15 years as organic farmers and homesteaders in Spencer County, Indiana.
16 • October 2020 | StAnthonyMessenger.org
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