Building, Farming, Singing, and Praying. These are the four pillars of common life at St. Dunstan’s.
At this infant stage of our school’s campus, building naturally takes up most of our time and mental energy. Song and prayer find their place in the rhythms of our work life at St. Dunstan’s; our days together begin with prayer and often a hymn. I’ve noticed that the hymns we pick tend to focus on God’s nature as creator and sustainer. It’s only natural given our surroundings. We have been granted a beautiful little slice of the world to steward—and stewarding it needs. This is where the farming part comes in.
God placed Adam in the garden for work. Agricultural work to be specific.
“And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” Genesis 2:15 KJV
Note that this is a whole chapter before the fall of Man. The thorns and thistle come later (bittersweet vines and ailanthus too?), but the work is not a curse. Let me repeat that. Work is not a curse.
We have been given a role to play in the stewardship of nature. Many farmers such as Joel Salatin and Elliott Coleman are showing that agriculture does not need to have a net negative impact on our environment. Our goal at St. Dunstan’s is to usher young men into that calling as they learn to grow and cook their own food in a way that is attentive to the ecology and history of the place where God has put them.
Good farming requires people. The kind we are doing requires lots of people. At the risk of sounding like a kitschy Wendell Berry fanboy (which I am), I look forward to the day when our 176-acre campus is filled with students, faculty, and families milking cows, growing tomatoes, and slinging homemade sourdough loaves from woodfired earth ovens—but there’s a lot of work to do between now and then.
They say the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. That’s how we are reclaiming our lovely but long-neglected farm and campus. While necessity, again, calls most of our attention to building right now, we still take every opportunity to hack away at bittersweet vines, dig in new garden beds, and cut fence posts from our locust grove. Because farm work is good work and we want our boys to do good work.
This spring we started our first section of garden on a southeast-facing hillside near the campus entrance. So far we have grown bushels of tomatoes, sweet corn, onions, potatoes, cauliflower, beans, kale, summer squash, winter squash, basil, romaine lettuce, red leaf lettuce and armenian cucumbers. We have started seeds for our fall crop, which Lord willing will be harvested by our first round of Joshua Program students. Please pray that God brings the right young men to St. Dunstan’s this fall. We’ve just planted a lot of brussels sprouts and somebody needs to eat them.
