Green Sisters: a Spiritual Ecology

GREEN SISTERS Sarah McFarland Taylor GREEN SISTERS Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2007 Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taylor, Sarah McFarland, 1968– Green sisters : a spiritual ecology / Sarah McFarland Taylor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical refrences (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02440-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-674-02440-0 (alk. paper) 1. Human ecology—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 2. Catholic women—Political activity. 3. Nuns—Political activity. I. Title. BX1795.H82T39 2007 261.8Ј80882719—dc22 2006041343 To my sisters, Anne and Martha, and to all Sisters of Earth List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Introduction 1 Planetary Call and Response 1. The Green Catholic Imagination 22 Varieties of Companion Planting 2. Standing Their Ground 52 From Pioneering Nuns to Bioneering Sisters 3. It Isn’t Easy Being Green 78 Habitat, Habits, and Hybrids 4. “Changeless and Changing” 115 Engaged Monasticism in the Ecozoic Era 5. Nourishing the Earthbody 161 Sacramental Foodways and Culinary Eucharist 6. “The Tractor Is My Pulpit” 183 Sacred Agriculture as Priestly Practice 7. Saving Seeds 210 Heirloom Conservation and Genetic Sanctuaries 8. Stations of the Earth 231 Body Prayer, Labyrinths, and Other Peripatetic Rituals Conclusion 260 Stepping into the Future Critical Mass: Earth Ministries in the United States and Canada 289 Notes 293 Acknowledgments 351 Index 353 Room set up for opening ritual, 2002 conference of Sisters of Earth 23 Greening Marian cairn at Genesis Farm 50 Straw-bale construction: Sisters of the Presentation “Green Welcoming Center” and dining hall 89 Dominican Sisters’ straw-bale hermitage, Santa Sabina Retreat Center 90 Genesis Farm solar panels 98 Gail Worcelo and Bernadette Bostwick with Thomas Berry 116 “Mary of the Cosmos” by Bernadette Bostwick 138 Sister of Charity Maureen Wild steams organic corn in a solar oven 176 Sisters Cathy Mueller and Bette Ann Jaster in EarthLinks’ organic garden 193 Stone station along the Earth Meditation Trail 239 “Stations of the Earth” map 243 Seasonal ritual celebration at Waterspirit, Stella Maris Center 257 This book is an invitation to journey into the fascinating world of “green sisters” as they cultivate a new variety of religious culture on the North American landscape. Often referred to as “green nuns,” “eco-nuns,” or “green sisters,” these environmentally activist Roman Catholic vowed religious women and their emergent movement complicate conventional categories of “liberal” and “con- servative” within American Catholic history. In a political climate that has polarized religious traditionalists and religious innovators, green sisters are both. Their movement is one that “reinhabits” culturally resonant heirlooms of Catholic tradition and vowed religious life, while opening up those tradi- tions to new and imaginative interpretations. Their movement is fundamen- tally countercultural but is so on many fronts at once and in complex ways. These women bring together and successfully blend Catholicism and environ- mentalism, orthodoxy and experience, institutional authority and grassroots innovation, abstract theory and on-the-ground application. A close examina- tion of these new missionaries to the planet demonstrates the role that today’s religious women are playing as active producers and transformers of new varieties of culture and spiritual expression. A brief word about terminology: technically, according to canon law (the law that governs the Catholic Church), the term “nun” is specifically used to refer to vowed religious women who are cloistered from the outside world. But in commonly accepted vernacular, “nun” is also used more generally to mean all women who are vowed members of Roman Catholic religious or- ders. In this book, various sources use the terms “sisters” and “nuns” fairly interchangeably and reflect their common usage. I, however, have chosen primarily to use the term “sisters” because the majority of women in the movement are “sisters” but not “nuns” in the technical sense. I also use “green sisters” because of the three common shorthand terms used to denote “eco- ix x logically concerned and environmentally activist Roman Catholic vowed religious women,” it is the one preferred by the religious sisters themselves.1 Immersing myself in the study of green sisters for more than a decade has been the most challenging and rewarding commitment of my life. It has come with periods of tremendous self-doubt and confusion as well as periods of great joy and satisfaction. Over the years, I have developed strong bonds with green sisters, becoming what Linda Archibald and Mary Crnkovich refer to as an “intimate outsider”—one who is never fully part of the community but, at the same time, is intimately tied to it.2 Feminist scholars from a variety of dis- ciplines now frequently speak about the importance of the “view from below,” a research approach that focuses not on an elite class occupying the realms of hierarchical or institutional power but on those operating at the grassroots of society.3 In this approach, the researcher also strives to create alternatives to the traditional vertical relationship in academic scholarship between researcher and researched in favor of a more horizontal and reciprocal relationship. In doing so, the researcher works to replace “spectator knowledge” with active participation in the life events and concerns of those she seeks to un- derstand better. With this in mind, I want to be careful to make the distinc- tion that throughout this book, my intent has been to speak about green sisters, not for them. My knowledge of the sisters’ lives and communities has been filtered through my own experiences and perspectives. The very fact that I am not a vowed member of a religious order, or even a Roman Catholic, builds in a certain amount of distance to this work. In sev- eral consultations with sisters over the years, I have questioned very carefully whether I should be doing this project at all. “Is this intrusive or unwanted?” I have asked. The responses I have received from sisters have been overwhelm- ingly positive, articulating the importance sisters themselves place on the doc- umentation of women’s history and their conviction that a scholarly second- ary source, produced by a women’s historian who has spent a number of years getting to know sisters and their ministries, would indeed be a contribution to scholarship on women and their religious lives. As an “intimate outsider,” and particularly as a scholar-researcher, I offer analysis and critique not endemic to the movement. In doing so, I certainly do not seek to supplant green sisters’ own stories but instead to offer a different lens through which to view the movement both historically and culturally. I hope that such a lens will be beneficial for both those within the movement and the uninitiated. Ideally, by focusing more attention on this compelling movement of religious women, this book will also help to create greater inter- xi est in sisters’ own autobiographies and self-written narratives. Some of those are already in process, and I am committed to supporting these efforts.4 My research initially began in 1994 with a study of the Dominican-sponsored earth literacy center and community-supported garden at Genesis Farm in western New Jersey. Cofounded by Dominican Sister Miriam MacGillis in 1980, Genesis Farm has become an important “seed community” within the movement, providing critical earth-literacy training, informational resources, and networking support, all of which have helped other sisters’ earth ministries to germinate. After spending two summers at Genesis Farm volunteer- ing and attending programs, I expanded my research to cover the propagation of sisters’ earth ministries, organic farms, and ecological centers across the United States and Canada. I have madefieldvisitstomorethanadozenof these ministries, farms, and centers across the country (in states as diverse as Indiana, New Jersey, Vermont, Colorado, Ohio, California, and Texas). I have also attended four of the five most recent international conferences of Sisters of Earth, an international network of environmentally active sisters that meets every two years, as well as other informal gatherings of sisters. In the course of my field visits to sisters and their ministries, at various times I have dug potatoes, shucked garlic, cut brush, mulched, weeded, har- vested, and double-dug vegetable beds for intensive planting. Between the fall of 1994 and the summer of 2006, I conducted both formal and informal interviews in person and by telephone, in addition to sixty-five standardized but open-ended interviews conducted electronically via the internet, for a total of more than one hundred interview contacts. I also collected and made a com- prehensive study of a wide variety of primary source documents, including newsletters, pamphlets, poetry, cookbooks, audio- and videotaped lectures and courses, workshop curricula, fundraising materials, garden handbooks, correspondence, and community statements. Additionally, I studied green sisters’ artwork, crafts, music, performance, prayer and prayer tools, rituals, and ceremonies. My approach to this research has been dictated by a commitment to study- ing “religion on the ground” or what Danièle Hervieu-Lèger calls religion veçue (lived religion). Hervieu-Lèger

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