ABBEY NEWS
Schedule Change
The schedule for the last three days of Holy Week has been posted. You will find it at: Holy Week Schedule 2019.
Abbey CSA Farm Project Update
We started our CSA program last year. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture where members of the community support their local farmer, gardener, baker, dairy, apiary, etc. by purchasing “shares” of the food product to fully support the efforts of the grower. This relationship helps the small scale farmer realize the most profit for his/her hard effort without losing revenue to distributors and grocery stores. It’s the best way to support local agriculture and help build strong bonds within a community.
We have expanded our CSA garden this year to better serve the members of the community who supported us last summer. We doubled the size of the garden by building growing beds with compost, worm castings, and wood chips, we will continue to use organic growing methods, and plan to start harvesting early season greens in May. We also built an aquaponics system in the greenhouse to see if we can provide winter greens to our customers year round.
We’re very excited for this upcoming season and look forward to serving the brothers, community, retreatants, and visitors to our store with nutrient dense organic produce from spring through autumn. If anyone is interested in purchasing a “share” from our produce CSA they can email our Farm Manager, Porter Hunt, at Porter@geneseeabbey.org.
Adam Barrett
On a cool spring day the novices Fr. John Vianney & Br. Placid and employees, Adam & Porter, prepare the first of several nutrient organic beds for planting of the vegetables.
Lectio Notebook
These relations of grace that characterize the Reign of God must be understood also to include humanity”s relationship to the earth. In the Hebrew scriptures, the people’s relationship with Yahweh included a relationship with the whole of creation, especially the land, and this motif is part of the preaching of Jesus. The earth and its fruit is available not for a relationship of domination and manipulation but as part of a relationship of grace that offers life.
The exclusion of the earth from relations of grace is in part an eclipse of the full Reign of God in our world. It is surely no accident that many of the parables of Jesus invoke agricultural images from the earth to describe the dynamics of the Reign of God in our world: the mustard seed, the leaven, and the vineyard. There is more that a hint in the parables of Jesus that the earth and its cycle of life in an important key to a proper understanding of the present and future Reign of God.
Christ At The Center
Dermot A. Lane
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