Sacred Air: Breath of Life Saturday February 18th, 2012 9:00 – 1:00. 

Sacred Air: Breath of Life

Registration: $25.00 per person – includes Book: A Time To Plant and community meal.

We are honored to have several of the leaders of the 2011 Festival of Faiths on our program this year.

Our first speaker is Kyle Kramer, who directs the graduate lay ministry program at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, a Benedictine monastery and school of theology in southern Indiana. He is also an organic farmer. His most recent book: A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer and Dirt, will be our primary text. He is one of 24 Catholic Climate Ambassadors, designated to discuss the moral implications of climate change.

Our panel discussion will include several different perspectives of Sacred Air. Kathleen Lyons, PhD., is Professor Emeritus at Bellarmine University, and is the Festival of Faiths Coordinator, and she will provide a Christian view. She will also introduce the Sacred Air: Faith In Action Tool Kit, Volume 3, which we will use for our final work session following the panel discussion. Todd Graddy, LCSW, MS, Yoga Alliance RYT 500, will provide a more ancient view from Sanskrit teachings on Sacred Air and Health.

Tom FitzGerald, JD., and recipient of the 2008 Heinz Award in the Environment, will provide the legal perspective on Clean Air.

After our workshop on Sacred Air: Breath of Life, we will again enjoy a meal of local food, and fellowship.

Kyle Kramer opens is most recent book – our text – with his discussion about coming home: From “Chapter One: Coming Home”

In Scripture, blessings empower characters to do things that they might never dare or manage on their own power alone. God blessed Noah, and on the strength of that blessing, Noah and his family repopulated and remade the earth after the flood. God promised a blessing to Abram, which gave him the courage to leave a familiar place and people, venture out into unknown terri­tory, and ultimately become the father of a nation. Jacob wrested his brother Esau’s blessing from his father Isaac, and later, on the bank of the Jabbok, wrestled a blessing out of God, who renamed him and renewed the promise that his posterity would become the people Israel. Ron’s blessing worked similarly on me. That same afternoon, I bought the property.

Mr. Kramer also contributed to the Sacred Air: Faith In Action Tool Kit, with the Benedictine perspective:

Benedictines make a vow of stability: they commit their lives to one particular community in one particular place. This “vocation of location” might seem provincial in comparison to the modern American ideal of mobility and cosmopolitanism,

but it enables Benedictines to practice responsible stewardship of creation.

When you live in a place long enough, you pay attention to the place itself and the people, plants, and animals that inhabit it. This attention leads to knowledge of a place’s gifts and limits. Such intimate knowledge engenders personal investment,

affection and love. Knowledge combined with love is the most solid foundation for real environmental responsibility.

Stability also means that Benedictines are able to make long-term commitments necessary for ecological stewardship. Few of our global environmental issues can be solved quickly. Healing degraded land takes generations, and even green technologies, such as solar panels or green building techniques, have long-term economic paybacks. Because Benedictines think in terms of centuries, they are acutely aware of their

responsibility to future generations and able to invest the time and capital to ensure the continued life of their community, as well as the planet. In a fast-paced, novelty-worshiping modern world, patience and long-term commitments are a radical stance, since “radical,” translated literally, means “rooted.”

Mark 16:15 “And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to all creation.”

Writer, teacher, and farmer Kyle T. Kramer presents the honest, humorous, and uplifting story of coming to know God and himself and beginning to understand life as prayer in A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt. For Kramer, this came about through rejecting consumerism, creating an organic farm, and raising a family in rural southern Indiana.

In his moving debut book, America columnist Kyle Kramer recounts the sometimes-gritty story of how he came to experience the joys of real community through a journey of honest reckoning with his own ambitions. For Kramer, this story involves lots of dirt.

In the summer of 1999, Kramer, an earnest and high-achieving private school teacher in Atlanta, decided to forgo a promising academic career. Instead, he heeded the voices of the unlikely prophets in his life and purchased a block of hardscrabble land in southern Indiana in order to start a small farm. Tending it back to health—one difficult lesson at a time—Kramer founded Genesis Organic Farm, built a self-sustaining and environmentally friendly home, and began to fully embrace the Benedictine traditions of physical labor, prayer, and hospitality. A Time to Plant is a deeply human story of one man’s attempt to make simple living a reality as a spiritual discipline for himself, as a model for his children, and for the good of creation.

Foreword A Time to Plant

This is a very lovely and heartening book, and it should remind us of several things. One is that we need to be open to learning—to mentors of all kinds. It did not surprise me in the least to learn that Kyle got some of his early inspiration from the wonderful writer and teacher Scott Russell Sanders, and by extension from his guru, Wendell Berry. Nor was I surprised to learn he had a mentor, a faux uncle, who helped him find the right land and make the right plans for it. We live in a world where the easy and obvious transmission of practical knowledge, father and mother to son and daughter, has largely broken down. We need to be radically open to hearing what others have to show us.
Two is that we need to be open to where the Lord is leading us. This book offers, among other things, an interesting journey across various parts of the country, the various sects of Christianity, and the various possibilities for romantic attachment or some other path. It seems to me in reading that the author has done a more-than-average job of listening for that still small voice, and paying attention even (especially) when the advice it offers is not precisely easy to follow.

Three is that the world we are now moving into will demand of us different skills than the ones we grew up assuming we’d need. On a planet radically damaged by climate change and a host of other environmental ills, we’re not going to be able to count on the remote systems that have for some decades brought us food and energy as if by magic. Instead, we will need to count on ourselves, but even more (thank heaven) on our communities. The skills of hospitality that Kyle and his wife model for us are as important as any of their talent for husbandry of the land—they remind us how we will get through the time to come, and happily.
This book and the story it tells may seem in some sense quiet, mostly confined to a small parcel of land. But it strikes me as a fine and hopeful adventure, one that should give heart to all kinds of people as they try to figure out where they’re called to be. It’s written with a generous spirit, less instruction and exhortation than the slightly subversive insinuation that something fine and lovely is within our grasp as well.

Bill McKibbbben

Festival of Faiths is a sustained series of annual events and programs, scheduled each year over the course of several consecutive days. Our mission is to celebrate the diversity of our faiths, be grateful for our unity and strengthen the role of religion in society.

We accomplish our mission by exploring how the different participating faith traditions address a common issue, topic or theme.

Pisgah’s Academy Day is a precursor event to the Festival of Faiths

Learn more about the Festival of Faiths: www.festivaloffaiths.org