April 2010: Kathryn Dean

Kathryn Dean is an editor who bought a 90-acre farm near Guelph six years ago and moved out from Toronto alone. She attends St. John’s Anglican Church in Rockwood. Alex Newman interviewed her in her large country kitchen, amidst tall cupboards, well worn counters, shelving stacked with china cups and baking ingredients, and a cat dozing in the window.

What made you buy a farm and leave the city life you’d created?

First of all, farm life wasn’t a foreign concept to me. I was raised in Stoney Creek on a farm that supported five families. It was hard work, but everyone pulled together and my memories are mostly good ones.

I had observed urban sprawl eating up farms in the fertile Toronto and Niagara regions. The Green Door Alliance (an organization saving green space in Pickering) estimates that we’ve been losing farmland at the rate of about one acre per hour in the Greater Toronto Area.  

As an editor, I had worked on several books that had an influence. Peter C. Newman's Company of Adventurers, a history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, reinforced my love of the land and outdoors adventure. The Dispossessed by Geoffrey York made me feel keenly the social injustices perpetrated against Native people in Canada, and I deeply identified with one Native woman in particular. I had edited scholarly work by geographers analyzing urban sprawl who seemed neither outraged about nor prepared to remedy this social ill.

At the same time, I observed churches doing good work in overseas or city missions but neglecting the crisis of creation stewardship.

I had a conviction that God wanted me to save farms. So I worked to set up a farm trust allowing farmers to place a covenant on their land deed, indicating that if sold, it must be used, either in part or wholly, as farmland. Called the Ontario Farmland Trust, it has so far saved one farm and is working on some more. It’s a very slow process, because the average farmer needs that land sale to retire on; if it can’t be developed, they get less.

I was also thinking that maybe God wanted me to have my own farm. It may sound idealistic, but I wanted the farm to be dedicated to God and never go to urban sprawl. I wanted it to be set up against spiritual forces of darkness and be a place of refuge and reconciliation, and a place where people could pray for those things and the environment, but also pray for farmers and their communities.

I looked for ten years. I wanted a larger piece of land as a carbon sink, to absorb carbon dioxide and help reduce the effects of climate change.  Eventually, I found this place within my price range because the house was not in the best shape.

How did you prepare for the move?

I did a lot of research – taking a course on Christianity and the environment from Loren Wilkinson of Regent College (given at Wycliffe College) and a course at Au Sable, a Christian institute in Michigan devoted to the study of environmental issues.

I read a lot, especially the Bible, looking for verses on creation and animals. For example, Colossians 1:15-17 (passim) says, “Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation [not just the human world] … and in Him all things hold together.” And Romans 8:22 reminded me that “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.”

My understanding of creation – reinforced after moving to the farm – is that nature is gorgeous and yet fallen, and it can be cruel at times. This is so unlike some pagan religions, where, for example, the spirit of a tree might be worshipped. It’s not that God doesn’t want us to love trees, but we need to be aware that just like people, they can be good, but they can hurt – if they fall on you in a lightning storm, for instance. I definitely don’t accept a naïve embrace of nature.

Who were your spiritual models for the move?

St Hilaire Faniel, a Haitian pastor who started a mission to feed some of the poorest children in Port-au-Prince, was an inspiration for me to put my faith into action. A convert from voodoo, he had the deep faith and courage to set up this mission in the face of spiritual opposition and financial hardship.

St Francis of Assisi, of course. Wendell Berry, an American farmer whose Christian beliefs permeate his writings about sustainable agriculture and healthy rural communities. Loren Wilkinson, who stuck his neck out and allowed himself to be arrested for opposing logging in B.C. Joe Sheldon, an instructor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, who has done a lot to get American Christians to understand the environment’s importance.

William Wilberforce was also a spiritual model, because he refused to accept that slavery was a fait accompli and couldn’t be overturned -- I’d like to think the same about urban sprawl and paving over farms unnecessarily. He kept at it and didn’t stop.

Mother Theresa, who did “something beautiful for God.” That’s what I was trying to do, but it’s interesting to see how difficult it is.

What lessons have you learned through the farm?

I was spiritually glib when I first moved out here. The first three months were a honeymoon; I was so relieved to have my dream come true. Then work ran out, because I had turned down editing jobs while working on the Farm Trust. Though I have always been quite frugal, I’d never faced day-to-day total anxiety over finances, and the possibility of losing the farm because I didn’t have the money to carry it. That was the first time I had such huge financial anxiety.

I’ve learned about concreteness. The first winter the water bowls in the barn froze. I was renting land to a farmer for his cattle, and was responsible for getting them water, which meant bringing water from the house. I remember jumping over the fence and getting into the herd with a huge garden hose. There was my poetic brain – the one that had drawn me closer to God -- but in that field it became irrelevant and was even an obstacle to dealing with the reality of the emergency: thirty very thirsty cows, and I had to get in there without being trampled, then fix the water bowls when I didn’t have much money to spare.

Physical hardship. In the beginning, while out in fields, or trying to fix things in a rundown house, I sometimes thought I’d collapse from the pressure.

Loneliness. I’d always assumed I would eventually have the husband God had in mind for me by my side. I didn’t have as much chance to return to the city to visit friends, and though some came out to visit me, it was lonely.

Later, I read this passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which was an apt description of what I felt: “Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love … It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain.” (Quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer New York: HarperCollins, p. 216).

Ultimately, I was humbled by realizing that what I felt was nothing compared to what farmers have experienced over the centuries. I was going through a small thing compared to what the pioneers went through, the United Empire Loyalists, and the later wave that brought settlers like Susanna Moodie. The first generation of UELs also had no time for poetic reflection. They barely wrote anything down at all; the stories we have from that settlement came from the next generation, or the one after.

I discovered a lot of my warm fuzzy “spiritual” feelings back in Toronto were based on the buzz of the city and the proximity of friends I loved. Some of my spiritual life in the city was really a romantic view. Though I understood suffering to a degree in the city, I came to understand it better on the farm.

I’ve discovered that many local churches, in spite of being in farm country, are relatively disconnected from their farming past. At my local Anglican church, most parishioners are from the village, most in my age group married, and many retired. They were not facing the same issues I was. Although I wasn’t yet a farmer, I worked on farm causes and wanted to see a ministry that would help combat their loneliness, and spiritual and physical isolation.

Eventually, I came to understand that perhaps some of the hardship on the farm was God’s disciplining me to understand what my father and uncle had gone through, and why they eventually sold the family farm. I had been angry with them for selling it, but being on this farm helped me forgive. There’s grace in the understanding, and there’s grace in remorse.

My spiritual arrogance took a tumble as well – I figured God helped me set up farm, so he would just bring a helpmate along too. But obviously God had other things in mind, and one of the lessons is you can’t set the agenda and expect God to sign it.

If those first years were like a death to self, have you turned a corner now?

Yes, this is the first year I can look at that barn, the expense of repairing it, and not have this horrible devastating emotion of being unsure I would make it.

This is a beautiful farm. Being out in fields with birds singing is like being in the Garden of Eden. When I work in the fields, my love for creation is reinforced, but the reality of the fallen world is present too -- calves are sometimes stillborn and my bird-feeding table has attracted wounded birds among the healthy. But other days, I go into the garden and see a humming bird at rest, preening itself, or a downy woodpecker snoozing on the trunk of the willow tree.

Farmers say you can’t eat the view, but I’m developing a business based partly on the credo that maybe, in a sense, you can. I’ve held a couple of lavender-harvesting days that were popular and I’m going to be renting garden space. This will be part of the business, but I hope it will also minister to people who haven’t had garden space before, or who’ve had to move to a retirement home or an apartment. They might find this a healing experience. There are places to draw, and go for nature walks. I’m planning to give “talk-walks” about the history of the area, about agriculture, and about literature – including Christian views of these things. I am also working on a prayer garden.

I have other activities in mind like teaching people to use their hands, showing them how to make linen out of flax or preserves out of tomatoes. I may also install a cistern and pump, so people can draw water the old way. And if the electricity fails, there will still be water on the farm.

I don’t want to present the farm as a paradise or my relationship with God out here as being a cakewalk. It's been rough ... but there have also been, and will be, I think, many moments of joy and contentment both for me, and the people who come here. That's my prayer.

Kathryn Dean can be reached at kaydean@rocnet.ca