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Column Transformed corner a sermon in mulch, compost, broccoli
By RICH HEFFERN
Kathy Marchant is a dreamer. Her
inner-city neighborhood had seen better days.
She lives on the West Side, a mostly Hispanic area in Kansas City,
Mo. Kathys day job was home restoration in the gentrified areas of the
city. About 10 years ago, she found herself obsessed with a nearby hilltop
intersection where the broken windows of neglected, dilapidated storefronts
gazed out on a vacant lot littered with weeds and trash. Kathys dream
featured a store and a cafe on that corner, and the eventual renaissance of a
neighborhood that had once been vital, splashed with color, fun and verve.
So she took her savings and, with her partner, bought and began to
restore two of the spacious corner buildings, repointing the brick,
replastering the interior, installing new window glass. The corner of 17th and
Summit came to life again.
She opened one building as a grocery store, naming it City Garden.
Carrying the usual line of grocery items, City Garden also features organic
beans, rice and grains bought in bulk and packaged with the stores
labels. Antique wooden shelves groan under display cases filled with coffees,
herbs and teas. A bulletin board is up to date with flyers for neighborhood
events; local craftspeople advertise their skills and wares on 3-by-5 inch
cards. Alternative and Spanish-language newspapers fill the racks below.
Wonderful aromas waft up from the bulk spice bins. A small deli offers
delectable salads made from fresh ingredients and cookies and sopapillas
freshly baked. Its a place where you want to spend time, even if you
dont need the groceries.
In the other room Kathy installed skylights, refinished the oak
floors and sandblasted the brick interior walls. This area became the Bluebird
Cafe. Small tile-top tables with tiny pots of dry flowers fill the attractive
space. In the restaurant, chef Zoe LaGrece uses local produce to concoct
delicious and nourishing vegetarian entrees for the customers who come for
lunch from nearby downtown office buildings.
Soon after the store opened its doors, Kathy and staff transformed
the vacant lot across the street into a garden. A picket fence, draped with
ivy, encloses it. In the summer, raised beds sprout kale, eggplant, broccoli,
tomatoes, peppers, okra, carrots, turnips and beets. Smaller beds harbor spicy
arugula, parsley and cilantro. Green beans and snow peas hang from trellises.
Grapevines climb the walls of a small gazebo. Kathy hires homeless people to
tend the garden and harvest the vegetables throughout the summer. You cannot
get a fresher, tastier salad than the ones served in the Bluebird. Whats
more, the waste and trimmings from Zoes kitchen go right back into the
garden as compost, nourishment for next summers crops.
Kathy told me once that all of the store and restaurant staff live
within eight blocks. The commute to work is done mostly on foot or by bicycle.
The counter staff people call the local neighborhood kids by name when they
come in after school for healthy and tasty treats.
The store and restaurant are a marketplace for nearby local
farmers and growers. Such markets are necessary in the Midwest where a farm
crisis deepens daily. Eighty percent of the farmers in Missouri are unable to
sustain themselves by farming alone. Nearby Kansas came in last place in water
quality for the past three years because of pesticide and chemical fertilizer
runoff from farm fields. Rural families and communities continue to be
devastated by current agribusiness practices and low prices paid to the
producers. On the other end of the farm crisis, urban dwellers have to eat food
laden with pesticide residue, tasteless and lacking in nutrition.
An Episcopal priest called not long ago, asking me to recommend a
book for his newly formed spirituality group to read and study. Should he offer
them Teresa of Avilas Interior Castle or perhaps something by John
of the Cross? I had just come from lunch with a friend at the Bluebird Cafe.
Instead of these tried and true classics from the past, on impulse I
recommended a just-released book titled Shelter for the Spirit, by a
local author, Victoria Moran.
Several chapters in her book describe City Garden and the Bluebird
Cafe. I told the priest that I was convinced deep down that the activities and
disciplines that enabled these small businesses to sprout and flourish
constitute a true spirituality for our times. Knee-deep in the worlds
current dilemmas, Kathys way is as valid, graced and useful as any doings
in a monastic enclosure, any devotion or retreat practice. Just as monasteries
were a creative solution to problems in the early Christian centuries, so
perhaps Kathys efforts represent a new kind of creativity and
spirituality, tailored to our times.
Vern Barnett, a Unitarian minister and expert on interfaith
dialogue, has said: There are three great crises in our time: To preserve
the environment, to heal the person and to redeem the community. A
spirituality that is not in some way involved in dealing with these three
crises, healing these great wounds, is nothing more than a parlor game.
Kathys transformed corner, for me, is a parable in brick and
glass, a sermon in mulch, compost and sprouting broccoli. As theologian Monika
Hellwig rightly claims, the primary issue in spirituality is not the redemption
of the individual soul but the redemption of the whole world. Perhaps each of
us is given a little speck of the world to redeem. It is not ours to finish the
great task, but neither are we free not to participate.
Kathys efforts bring jobs to the homeless, vitality to a
neglected city neighborhood, nutritious, tasty food to city dwellers and badly
needed income to nearby farm families. The corner of 17th and Summit is a
shelter for the spirit, a grace, a blessing, a way to move forward into the
next century.
Rich Heffern is author of Daybreak Within: Living in a
Sacred World (Forest of Peace Publishing).
National Catholic Reporter, October 15,
1999
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