In Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (2007), Sarah McFarland Taylor offers a vivid ethnographic analysis of a number of communities of Roman Catholic sisters who are committed to actively embodying ecological theology. McFarland Taylor lifts up the witness and work of a web of communities in North America, including Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey. As these communities of women religious work to creatively inhabit and renew our wounded planet, they simultaneously work to creatively inhabit and renew the Church. McFarland Taylor observes that these “green sisters” represent a movement that “‘reinhabits’ culturally resonant heirlooms of Catholic tradition and vowed religious life, while opening up those traditions to new and imaginative interpretations” (ix). The sisters innovatively engage with the Catholic tradition in order to live in more intimate, sustainable, and just relationships with one another and with the created world. In the process, the sisters explore the potential for developing practices that unlock novel ethical and spiritual potential. We see a concrete example of this creative, imaginative “reinhabiting” in the way in which the sisters apply sacramental language to the process of growing, cooking, and eating food.

A centrally significant practice for the sisters is the act of eating, which many of them take to be a sacramental act. The communities that McFarland Taylor attends to are extremely intentional about the process of growing and consuming food. Food serves as an especially powerful site for sensing and celebrating their rootedness in the land, which is itself rooted in God. The sisters view food as a powerful means for healing our broken relationships with creation. For instance, Sister Miriam MacGillis of Genesis Farm proposes that “it has become clear to me that the concept of food itself is key to the transformation of our ecological crisis” (161). For MacGillis, food is the doorway to ecological transformation, and in order to relate to food properly we must be sensitized to its divine dimension. MacGillis suggests that “unless our human species can open itself to the contemplation of food as a holy mystery through which we eat ourselves into existence, then the meaning of existence will continue to elude us” (161). 

To eat, MacGillis proposes, is to engage in a deeply spiritual act; food is not merely “fuel” for our work in the world, but an encounter with the Divine in and through the world (161). While many of the green sisters celebrate the sacramentality of food, they simultaneously lament the desecration of creation through unjust and unsustainable eating practices. For instance, many of the sisters resist industrial farming practices and promote plant-based, pesticide-free alternatives. 

One way for Catholics to attune to food as a site for divine encounter, rather than fuel for our work in the world, is to gain inspiration from our participation in the Eucharist. Our ritual participation in the Eucharist, and our intimate encounter with God in this particular act of eating, can open us to a broader sacramental worldview, which invites us to encounter God in every element of creation. In fact, Sr. Miriam MacGillis turns to sacramental language in order to convey her sense of the sacred nature of the acts of cooking and eating. Cooking is “eucharistic” for MacGillis (162). “Do we know how to cook?….to be a priest in the midst of this transubstantiation of food into the community?,” she asks (162). Here, MacGillis creatively applies theological language in order to convey the sacred nature of cooking and eating, as practices that can promote communion. 

MacGillis powerfully conveys a particularly revelatory experience she had while contemplatively consuming a bowl of homemade vegetarian chili. It struck her, suddenly, that the bowl “really held rock and soil, minerals and water, and the energy and heat of the stars” (174). This meal marked the convergence of her life with the life of the universe. Every ingredient in MacGillis’s chili began as “seeds that I inserted into the soil” (174). MacGillis sensed that these seeds, after being transformed into food, became “my blood, my bones, my sight, my movement, my thoughts, my prayers” (174). For MacGillis, this bowl of chili served as the concrete site for her own encounter with both creation and Creator. “I was overwhelmed,” she writes, by the “limitless generosity of the universe and its Creator” (174). McGillis’s contemplative approach to food, and her eco-spiritual eating experiences, add a personal dimension and an embodied concreteness to the theological vision of a “sacramental worldview.”

As we celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi, and as we engage with scriptural passages that invite us into the mystery of the Eucharist, may we take Sr. Miriam McGillis’s witness to heart. May our participation in the Eucharist inspire us to develop a deepening sensitivity to the sacramental nature of our daily acts of relating to food: whether through cooking, growing, harvesting, cleaning, eating, or all of the above. 

Inspired by the embodied witness of Sr. Miriam MacGillis, as well as the theological insights of Laudato si’, we might practice a sacramental approach to eating on this feast of Corpus Christi. As we prepare our meals, and as we eat them, may we bring to mind Patriarch Bartholomew’s words, quoted by Pope Francis in Laudato si’, that “as Christians, we are…called ‘to accept the world as a sacrament of communion, as a way of sharing with God and our neighbours on a global scale” and that “it is our humble conviction that the divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of our planet.’” May our enhanced sensitivity to the sacramental nature of our food inform an enhanced sensitivity to the desecration caused by unjust and unsustainable approaches to agriculture and eating, as well as a willingness to resist the systems that stabilize this desecration. For instance, our sensitivity to the sacramental nature of the tomato in our salad might inform our sensitivity to the unjust agricultural practices which the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are fighting to end. As we engage in a contemplative approach to eating, we might draw inspiration from the following short article by Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Lilian Cheung, “How to Eat an Apple.” 

You can find the article here: https://www.lionsroar.com/savor/ 

Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis, O.P. is a member of the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell, New Jersey. She co-founded Genesis Farm, an ecological learning center in Blairstown, New Jersey, in 1980, with the sponsorship of her congregation. 

Genesis Farm, which is located on 226 acres of preserved farmland, was an early contributor to the Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement. Inspired by the legacy and writings of geologian and cultural historian Father Thomas Berry, Genesis Farm is committed to the new cosmology, which understands the earth as an evolving community of life within an evolving cosmos. In 2005, Sr. Miriam received the Thomas Berry Award from the Center for Respect for Life and the Environment. Genesis Farm is animated by the insight that “the scientifically-based story of the Universe offers profound insights into our public, personal and spiritual lives.” 

For more information on Genesis Farm, see: http://www.genesisfarm.org/about.taf

For a fuller biography of Sr. Miriam, see: 

https://www.chc.edu/uploadedFiles/School_of_Graduate_Studies/Sacred_Earth/McGillis%20Bio.pdf 

Freedom Farm is a Christian community located in Middletown, New York. It was co-founded in 2004 by Edgar Hayes and Ann Rader, who also serve on the Mission Council of Agape Community in Hardwick, Massachusetts. Freedom Farm’s motto is “growing in faith,” which they understand and apply in two intertwining senses: they are committed to actively cultivating the faith of community members and visitors, and they are committed to growing healthy and sustainable food from a faith-based perspective. 

When considering the roots of Freedom Farm, Edgar Hayes, who grew up in Harlem and Brooklyn, highlights the transformational experience of being at Agape Community on a retreat as a college student, and being amazed when someone harvested food directly from the garden, brought it into the kitchen, and prepared it as a meal. He also highlights inspiration that he and his wife Ann gained from a training program at Alex Haley Farm. 

Freedom Farm’s name was derived from the Freedom School movement of the 1960’s, which emerged during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964. Freedom Farm is committed to building a just and sustainable community, and food plays a pivotal role in this process. For instance, members of Freedom Farm work closely with students coming from urban spaces, to teach them through retreats and immersion programs about justice, food, and faith. In addition to this, through Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Gleaning/ Food Access program, Freedom Farm supplies fresh produce to those in need. 

To view “Embodying Eco-Justice at Freedom Farm: A Conversation with Edgar Hayes” please click here: https://agapecommunity.org/recording-of-embodying-eco-justice-at-freedom-farm-a-conversation-with-edgar-hayes/

In this icon, Fr. John Guiliani depicts Christ as intimately linked to the bounty of the earth and cosmos. Clouds and stars, rocks and streams and leaves, bread and grapes converge in constituting the mystical body of Christ. The icon suggests that in Christ we can find deep intimacy with creation, and that in creation we can find deep intimacy with Christ.