Theology from Gardens and Kitchens

We write from a place. I believe that.

I have sketched the place from which I write on this blog in various ways: I’m a theologian; I’m gay; I live on the margins of church life—in truth, on the other side of a wall that runs between gay people and the church.

I also write from a physical place that, to many people, is almost non-existent: one of those fly-over cities in the middle of the U.S. A small, provincial city that is not very close, even, to some of the power-brokering cities with “brand” in our general vicinity—New Orleans, Memphis, Dallas-Ft. Worth.

I write from an even more specific place, an east-facing room in a house perched on a gently-sloping hill in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, their first eastward escarpment along the banks of the Arkansas River. The chair from which I write overlooks what would, prior to the building of this neighborhood at the turn of the 19^th century, have been a small valley between two slopes running from the river towards the coastal plains of the southern half of the state.

My chair overlooks a garden on which Steve and I have labored, with more or less (emphasis on the latter) success for almost a decade now. The garden was thriving some four years ago, with several plum trees laden with fruit one spring, when the city decided to run a sewer line through the back of the garden, uprooting the plums and two beautiful apple trees we had also planted and tended towards maturity. Though the city promised that it would preserve the garden, its contractors stuck the trees back into the ground just as summer arrived, and of course, they did not grow again. At that point, I gave up on dreaming big dreams for my little garden.

Slowly, though, we have massaged it back into some semblance of a garden, and I write these days overlooking a scene I know I will see only for a few days, since spring is fleeting, and each day brings with it new illuminations. To be specific: I am looking out these days through a trellis Steve has just built on the east side of the house, to support Carolina jasmine and roses. There is a rose we have hauled from New Orleans to North Carolina to Little Rock to Florida, leaving cuttings of it rooted in each place, where thriving specimens of this red climbing rose now bloom.

We first got the rose from an elderly neighbor of ours in New Orleans, on whose shed it grew—Mouton Bickham. We call it the Mouton Bickham rose, though it probably has some other name: we suspect Mme. Isaac Pereire. It is a beautiful, easy climber with quartered bourbon blossoms, light red shading to mauve as they open, with a delicious scent. It grows easily and rewards even the slightest care with a long season of blooms in our hot climate. Here, it is even sometimes remontant, blooming both spring and fall. Since Mr. Bickham, a wonderful, elderly African-American neighbor, died while we lived in New Orleans, the rose means a great deal to us now. Each blossom brings back memories of his cheerful greeting as he sat on his stoop each evening, trying to catch one of the rare sultry breezes New Orleans offers in summertime.

“My” trellis, as I now think of it, is a frame for what grows just beyond the eastern window, just beneath the trellis itself. These days, it’s a wonderful medley: light yellow witch hazel blooms on a bare tree, hanging like miniature Chinese lanterns with the faintest spots of green sprinkled across the yellow; beyond them, spikes of purple flag that have just burst into bloom in the past two days; beneath the witch hazel, tiny narcissus, a deeper yellow than the witch hazel blooms, which the dogs have somehow failed to trample down; and to the north and east, like a haze beyond all of this, the deep red-brown of the smoke tree opening its leaves.

I cherish the scene, because I know it will not last. It will give way soon to something else, all the roses in bloom at once, followed by the intense hot days in which the Louisiana iris, Texas star hibiscus, and pomegranate all bloom on the unshaded eastern side of the garden that gets sun all day long. Hot colors for hot days—scarlet, orange, sun-yellow, with intense greens to frame them.

Why all this garden talk? I don’t know, frankly. In part, because the news often depresses me. I read in one news account today that, as our president cantered and capered this week—this week in which news of 4000 dead soldiers arrived—at a press conference in D.C., the reporters gathered to witness this performance applauded him, gave him a standing ovation.

What kind of world do we live in? What kind of world, now? What kind of world, in which the purveyors of “knowledge” and “information” can applaud cantering and capering atop a mass grave?

Enough. Such “news” sickens me, and I turn to nature for consolation, the starling I see right now, as I type, slowly clacking across the leaves to the bird bath, moving like a ponderous Oxbridge don in academic regalia, intent on a destination only he can see in his own head.

I write about the mundane, the particular, as well, because this kind of writing is an act of defiance—defiance of the norms that tell men (and scholars, and women whose power depends on playing by men's rules) they should write about the serious and not the domestic. Again and again, in my academic career, when I have submitted academic articles in which I reference the homey as an illustration of a ponderous point, I receive the edited article back with notes that, while the “riff” on cornpone may be interesting, it is off-topic.

Not to me. My garden, what I cook in my kitchen, the pollen I washed in dull yellow layers off my front porch yesterday: these are the stuff of my daily existence. My thought arises out of this stuff. Most of the world’s inhabitants live in worlds in which their lives are made of similar stuff. It is only a minority who live and work in academic studies, in high-rise office buildings, who can write while someone else (someone almost certainly female) does the cooking, the scrubbing, the garden-tending, the food-growing, food-selecting, food-preparing.

We need a theology that reflects where people really live and move and have their being. We need a theology—a serious, academic theology—that writes from the kitchen, the garden, the porch that has to be scrubbed daily. We need a theology in which the things that those who live in such places think about are taken seriously, as food for academic discussion.

I write about these matters on my blog because I can do so. For the first time in my life, in my academic career, in my vocation as an educator, I can write about gardens and kitchens as if they matter, and matter ultimately. I can use the homey to talk about God and not have an editor in a high-rise building, for whom someone else cooks and cleans (someone almost certainly female) eviscerate the homey references from what I have written.

In blogging, I believe I am continuing my work as an academic theologian and educator. But I am doing so outside Jerusalem, so to speak, outside the norms and boundaries that dictate what an academic theologian and educator can and must say. In nurturing an alternative discourse field—a new garden—for those of us who want to talk about God, about justice, about peace, about gender, I am, I hope, making it possible for new voices, those that have traditionally not been permitted into the conversation, to sound forth.

I hope. 4000 are now dead. A president capers. Reporters applaud. My voice is tiny. People I know are seriously ill, and my heart is heavy because of this.

But I hope. And so I go on speaking.