Abundance

Review: The Serviceberry

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Cover image of "The Serviceberry" by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, illustrations by John Burgoyne. Scribner (ISBN: 9781668072240) 2024.

Summary: A day of picking serviceberries leads to an extended reflection on natural abundance, reciprocity, and gratitude.

An invitation to pick serviceberries results in an extended meditation by Robin Wall Kimmerer on “abundance and reciprocity in the natural world,” in the words of her subtitle. She marvels at the abundant clusters of berries, rapidly filling her pail. This is sheer gift, both to her and the birds filling their bellies” with berries. All one can do is give thanks for this gift, and share the abundance. As she does so, she considers the web of reciprocity the berries represent. Bushes nourished by fallen leaves, birds nourished by berries. Birds spreading their seeds, spreading the bushes to new locations. Kimmerer recalls how the berries are part of the traditional Potawatomi food economy.

It’s an economy unlike the market economy that dominates most of our economic transactions. Instead, Kimmerer reflects on the gift economy her serviceberry experience represents. Specifically, it reminds her of the source of the gift and how that implies care both for the source and for the gift itself. And she considers how commoditization of gifts promotes accumulation rather than sharing, scarcity rather than abundance.

I was struck by how contrary to our individualism are the gift economies she describes. Instead of accumulating paper currency or its equivalent, the currency of gift economies is gratitude and connection. The prosperity of each is shared in the anticipation of enjoying the generosity of others. One charts, not the flow of money, but relationships. Kimmerer points to the potlatches of Pacific Northwest people as a well-known example of gift economy.

She reflects on ways gift economies function in our mixed economies. These range from free garden produce stands to Little Free Libraries (and their larger tax-supported counterparts). They include public parks and lands that we all enjoy. The latter part of the book then considers the ethic of honorable harvest in gift economies, versus the unchecked extractive nature of our commodity economies. Through a question posed by a fellow tribal member, she queries, “If the economy requires people to consume more resources than the earth can replenish, just to keep the whole thing from collapsing, isn’t it time for a new economy?”

Kimmerer is not an economist but an ecologist. But what she observes from her ecology and the wisdom of indigenous peoples, makes a case for economists to begin thinking about that new economy. What is most notable for me however is that Kimmerer’s ecology and her gift economy are full of gratitude, generosity, joy, connectedness, and wholeness. It is not an ethic of fear, guilt, or burden, or survival of the economically fittest. There is a goodness about what she describes that is perhaps the most powerful argument for devoting ourselves to learn the gift economy. G’chi megwech, Robin Wall Kimmerer!

Review: Participating in Abundant Life

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Participating in Abundant Life, Mark R. Teasdale. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022.

Summary: A holistic vision of salvation that includes material standards of living, quality of life, and eternal life under the rubric of abundant life.

Mark Teasdale is a professor of evangelism who works with churches reluctant to engage in evangelism to help them demonstrate and proclaim God’s saving work. For many of us, when we think of salvation, it means being restored to right relationship with God through the cross of Christ and having the hope of eternal life through his resurrection. Teasdale would affirm all of that but in this book, proposes that salvation is a far more holistic idea in scripture that has to do with human life and well-being both materially and spiritually.

The opening chapters of this book ground this claim in scripture. He proposes that there are three measures of the abundant life of salvation: standard of living, quality of life, and experiencing eternal abundant life in Christ. He both believes that this holistic vision allows the church to pursue the abundant life with people not ready for entering into a relationship with God in Christ. He contends they are experiencing salvation when we address everything from poverty to health care. This allows us to make common cause with those who do not share a Christian worldview but care about improving the standard of life of people and their quality of life.

Teasdale recognizes the danger that without the gospel of eternal abundant life, this can simply become humanitarian aid and social work. These are good but not all the good God intends for people. What differentiates Christian salvation are Christians working in community that demonstrates its spiritual hope as they invite people not only to receive goods and services but to receive these in the context of a spiritually robust and caring community, ready to speak of their hope.

The use of standards of living and quality of life allows both individuals and churches to have measurable goals and metrics as they share abundant life. The appendix of the book includes examples of both personal and corporate metrics churches can adopt and adapt.

Biblical scholars have long known that the language of salvation encompasses far more than just our eternal destiny. What this book does is work out what this might look like in the church’s life, both in the believer’s enjoyment of abundant life and the sharing of that life with those who do not yet believe. Instead of a program, Teasdale offers a paradigm shift while encouraging congregations to set their own measurable goals to address standards of living, quality of life, and the embrace of eternal life in Christ that together encompass the abundant life.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Abundance: Nature in Recovery

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Abundance: Nature in Recovery, Karen Lloyd. New York: Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2021.

Summary: A collection of essays describing both the loss of and recovery of abundance in the natural world, where people have caused harm and brought renewal.

Karen Lloyd is a border stalker. In this collection of essays, she describes her journeys throughout the UK and Europe at the border of where human activity is intersecting in the natural world–both for ill and for good. She describes her project using the ornithologist’s term of “getting your eye in”:

“When I turn on the news or read a newspaper, I am assailed by all the losses in the natural world. The natural world is being flushed out. In the natural world, there are no rites of passage to cope with this. Sometimes, frequently in fact–I am overwhelmed by all the losses and the reporting of all the losses, and what I want to do is get my eye in, in a different way. I want to use my binocular vision to look at and think about abundance and what that might mean. I want to take my binoculars into the field and see if it is still possible to see abundance–or something like it” (p. 14).

She begins her journey with the “murmurations” of starlings over East Cumbria and their response to the attempt of a peregrine falcon to penetrate the flock Her travels take her to the Netherlands, and attempts to site some of the wolves and jackals that are gradually returning and the debate over protecting these animals in what was once a natural habitat. A trip to Extremadura in southern Spain leads to sightings of vultures, harriers, and an abundance of bird species in a national park also devoted to wool production and lumber production serving the human population while preserving the natural environment allowing vultures to soar thermals and others to thrive.

We follow her and friends attempting to save a bird with a broken leg in eastern Hungary while chronicling the loss of the slender billed curlew, last sighted there. She describes efforts in Scotland to preserve beavers, that had slowly been eradicated by farmers and hunter. She witnesses the architecture of beaver lodges and dams, and the balance struck of running “beaver deceivers” through dams to pipe excess water through to regulate pond levels without disrupting the beavers efforts.

One of the more creative chapters was “Eighty Fragments on the Pelican” a “weird and perfectly adapted species. The most riveting chapter describes her time in the Carpathian forests of Romania, forests under threat of logging and an endangered habitat for bears. She takes us on a hike following bear tracks with a guide as well as her son, learning along the way not to get between a mother bear and her cubs, a hopeless situation.

As she observes the efforts of those seeking to balance human and natural interests and preserve abundance, she identifies their work as “cathedral thinking”–an attitude of planning and working that thinks in terms of future generations, even for centuries. She tells a wonderful story of Hatidze, a sixty year old woman in a rural village in Macedonia, who keeps bees, is never stung though not wearing protective gear, taking half a comb for her family, leaving half for the bees, exemplifying an ethic of respect and reciprocity.

This is a moving collection of essays. I felt I was present with the author on her travels. I was watching out for those bears, and reveling with her as she watched the vultures ride the thermals. She captures the joy of those working on the front lines to preserve and restore abundance and the love of these creatures. LLoyd articulates something often lacking in our environmental debates–the recognition that we must love what we seek to preserve and that there is a joy to be found in natural abundance.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Slow Church

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slow churchSlow Church by C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Summary: This book argues that the church has been “McDonald-ized” and that just as the Slow Food movement has returned to embracing food that is good, clean, and fair, so the church needs to embrace an ethic of quality, an ecology of reconciliation, and an economy of abundance.

Slow church. That’s not what I wanted when I was growing up. I wanted to get my weekly dose of church and get on to more interesting things. If the authors are to believed, the church growth specialists gave my generation what we wanted–fast church. Messages that cut to the chase, efficient, homogeneous organization that led to big box churches that provided a great show. For a time, I was part of such a church in another city, typically driving 10 miles to attend. But it seemed totally unconnected to the place where we lived and so when we moved to our current home town, we found a church in the neighborhood, which in recent years has come to embody many of the things the authors of this book describe as part of the “slow church” movement.

The authors describe an approach to thinking of the church that gives words to much of what we were looking for. They believe that God’s redemptive work is slow and values the unique qualities of people and place and gifting that our particular places of worship reflect. They organize their approach around three categories.

First they think in terms of ethics. What is the good to be pursued in the life of a local congregation? It begins with a sense of place that takes time to become a community that shares life together and learns how to serve the mix of people in a real neighborhood rather than efficiently reaching a “market segment.” It encourages stability that takes time to understand a place rather than our restless mobility. It values patience that is willing to suffer alongside others and walk alongside the people of one’s community through the seasons and changes of life as Christ is formed in us.

A second emphasis is on ecology. It focuses on the connectedness of all things and all of life as opposed to fragmenting life, and groups of people into segments, often with the result of dividing them against each other–young and old, liberal and conservative, poor and affluent, and even humans versus the rest of creation. It cares about the dehumanization of work and fosters good work based in our neighborhoods. It celebrates sabbath where God provides enough in six days for us to live seven.

A third focus is on economy. Will we join the culture’s economics of scarcity or the kingdom economy of abundance? This means noticing all the abundance God has placed in the people and physical resources of a church and a community and responding with gratitude and hospitality. And in a wonderful connection with the slow food movement, it means reveling in the fellowship of the table, having rich conversation over good food.

This book is particularly important for churches that take seriously the work of “re-neighboring” and community development in transitional or struggling communities. It is also important for churches in more suburban “communities” that often don’t have a real sense of community and place, and are at great peril over the long haul.

The authors challenged me to consider how, even though I am in a church that is seeking to become these things, I am embedded in a “fast church” life and way of thinking that is formed more by my culture than the church community with which I identify. I work in a ministry that is not located in the community where I live, where I travel extensively, and work with colleagues in a tri-state area, and more widely with individuals throughout the country as well as an extensive virtual community. As I write today, I don’t have good answers to resolve this tension. But this book serves as impetus for a conversation, maybe a slow conversation, but one that I recognize needs to begin in my life.

How about you?