Professor says goodbye to Bonaventure
Trev Thompson
Issue date: 2/5/10 Section: Opinion
Eight years ago, my wife and I exited the highway and drove into the Allegheny River Valley in an old maroon VW van. Our first stop was at a farm called Canticle Farm where a farmer and a St. Bonaventure University student were transplanting baby broccoli sprouts into the soil. After a life spent mostly "on the road" and frequently in foreign lands, that initial stop on the South Nine Mile colored our extended stay on this good journey.
From that farm and subsequent good work of hands and heart, we found the primary guiding images, practices and values that now shape our lives: Seeds planted, watered and nurtured; sprouts transplanted and cultivated; plants trellised and maturing; harvests given away, feeding the hungry and bringing people together; compost returning, enriching and fermenting; organic, sustainable, cyclical, earthy, cosmic, embodied, integrated, fraternal and rooted.
These images, practices and values were given even more life when my wife and I both enrolled in graduate courses here at St. Bonaventure University. Here, through the stories of those people who spoke prophetically and poetically to this wild and mysterious human condition, these voices became our masters, the voices of Francis and Clare, Bonaventure and Scotus, Wordsworth and Blake, and Shakespeare and Joyce. The professors who embodied these voices also became our friends and mentors.
And for the past five years, as a member of the ministries team, director of the Warming House and adjunct professor in Clare College, I have had the opportunity to share life and work - in all kinds of formative places, from kitchens to classrooms - with an abundance of students, faculty, staff and community members who have continued to tweak, challenge and grow my grasp of the mystery of this good journey.
It is here that we have given birth and life to our children, Sophia and Corwin, learned to hunt deer and milk a cow, brewed beer and fermented pickles, made life-long friends with people and plants, shared meals with full-moon idealists and those who hunger and thirst for love and justice, bought a home and raised chickens, discovered Robert Lax and filled our journals with our own musings and traipsed through the messiness of life with so many students (who continue to graciously call us and write on our Facebook walls).
As this last week here in the valley of Corn Planter and Pamfilo da Magliano rolls forward, I feel the immense gratitude and blessedness of each last meal, conversation and shift of sun and cloud. During my transient life, I have spent a lot of my life saying "good bye." However, this time around, I'm not sure exactly how to part ways. Like those young, stalky broccoli transplants from my first visit, which after a season of mingling and maturing in this soil, grew green, ripe and luscious, never before do I feel so thoroughly shaped by the spirit of a land and a people.
And, as I sit with all of this and look down at my hands and remember the myriad of faces and places, I realize that I shed (and probably composted) a lot of my young skin in this land, too. I pray then that after my time here this land might be a bit more fertile for those who come after, those who decide to put their hands in the soil and live fully and joyfully in this river valley.
From that farm and subsequent good work of hands and heart, we found the primary guiding images, practices and values that now shape our lives: Seeds planted, watered and nurtured; sprouts transplanted and cultivated; plants trellised and maturing; harvests given away, feeding the hungry and bringing people together; compost returning, enriching and fermenting; organic, sustainable, cyclical, earthy, cosmic, embodied, integrated, fraternal and rooted.
These images, practices and values were given even more life when my wife and I both enrolled in graduate courses here at St. Bonaventure University. Here, through the stories of those people who spoke prophetically and poetically to this wild and mysterious human condition, these voices became our masters, the voices of Francis and Clare, Bonaventure and Scotus, Wordsworth and Blake, and Shakespeare and Joyce. The professors who embodied these voices also became our friends and mentors.
And for the past five years, as a member of the ministries team, director of the Warming House and adjunct professor in Clare College, I have had the opportunity to share life and work - in all kinds of formative places, from kitchens to classrooms - with an abundance of students, faculty, staff and community members who have continued to tweak, challenge and grow my grasp of the mystery of this good journey.
It is here that we have given birth and life to our children, Sophia and Corwin, learned to hunt deer and milk a cow, brewed beer and fermented pickles, made life-long friends with people and plants, shared meals with full-moon idealists and those who hunger and thirst for love and justice, bought a home and raised chickens, discovered Robert Lax and filled our journals with our own musings and traipsed through the messiness of life with so many students (who continue to graciously call us and write on our Facebook walls).
As this last week here in the valley of Corn Planter and Pamfilo da Magliano rolls forward, I feel the immense gratitude and blessedness of each last meal, conversation and shift of sun and cloud. During my transient life, I have spent a lot of my life saying "good bye." However, this time around, I'm not sure exactly how to part ways. Like those young, stalky broccoli transplants from my first visit, which after a season of mingling and maturing in this soil, grew green, ripe and luscious, never before do I feel so thoroughly shaped by the spirit of a land and a people.
And, as I sit with all of this and look down at my hands and remember the myriad of faces and places, I realize that I shed (and probably composted) a lot of my young skin in this land, too. I pray then that after my time here this land might be a bit more fertile for those who come after, those who decide to put their hands in the soil and live fully and joyfully in this river valley.
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