Jesus for Farmers and Fishers by Gary Paul Nabhan: a review

book review by Scout Miller

“I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.” – George Washington Carver

The earth calls to us all. At least, tilling up a garden by hand in a light rain, watching the calves play in the field, I cannot help but feel as such. I believe that the most universal of truths and the most complex of life-lessons can be learned by spending just a few hours working with your hands in the dirt.

When I say the earth calls to us all, I do mean all of us: people of all stripes and from all walks of life are now finding themselves called closer to dirt, to fresh air, and to growing things. It’s not just 3rd generation farmers like myself, or elderly hippies reliving their Woodstock era in retirement. I know teenagers not yet out of high school that have never lived outside of suburbia and have Pinterest mood boards of cottage industries and container gardens. I know disenchanted and depressed millennials who made huge life changes during the pandemic, shifting from a 9-5 job to making pottery in a cabin in the woods. I have read about families of five and their dogs selling their 2.5-kid-white-picketfence American Dream for a 5th wheel trailer tiny home and a chance to see all the National Parks in person. I know people well into old age who have taken up gardening again, for the first time in decades, in their retirement. The earth is calling, and people are listening.

Much in the same way that the earth calls to everyone, I believe anyone can find something of interest in this book. As someone who has struggled to find the time and presence for both spirituality and farming in the past few tumultuous years, reading Gary Paul Nabhan’s book was a grounding force to me in a number of ways. His work is endlessly readable and relatable but also a deeply and carefully complex love letter to the poor and marginalized agricultural worker. In it, I felt my own call back to my roots in farming, but also the call that the ancient farmers and fishers must have felt. I held in my heart the suffering and the grief of centuries of marginalized agricultural workers striving to keep food on their own tables while also feeding the masses. No wonder Jesus, so dedicated to helping all humanity at the sacrifice of his own life, spoke in parables of sowing seeds and planting wheat.

I grieved reading this book, as someone who has a deep relationship with agriculture and its people, as Gary brought to life the plight of the farmers and fishers of centuries ago, their struggles mimicking those that face my own family and our community. Working in agriculture, whether you be fisher, farmer, shepherd, or rancher, is one of the most dangerous, underpaid, undervalued jobs one can have, and it can take a huge toll of your mental and physical health. I listened as he wove between stories of centuries past and current events, recognizing the parallels of food waste, food shortage, and the lack of food justice. To live this life has never been an easy thing.

But I also laughed out loud reading this book, as someone who has a deep relationship with the spiritual: witnessing an interpretation of Jesus as a disenfranchised youth using the promise of food and proverbs of agricultural sabotage and the trade secrets of the ancient fishers of Galilee as a way to lure all people to make changes to their own lives. Jesus used the fields and lakes as a stage to encourage acts of kindness and restorative justice, inspire resilience and hope in the face of hardship, and preach the sustainability of discerning, adaptive, diversified thinking to the people who most desperately needed it. This interpretation of Jesus is so intrinsically relatable, so understandable, so necessary.

Not only is Gary Paul Nabhan a Franciscan brother and a renowned agroecologist with the knowledge and the scholarship to write such a book, he is an excellent storyteller. Drawing from the parables of Jesus to tell parables of his own, he invites the reader to join him in his agricultural and ecological activism, calling out for contemplative action through the stories of Jesus’ kindness and the ancient agricultural know-how of farmers, fishers, gleaners, and shepherds. As Jesus shepherded humanity toward the basic truths of love, peace, and gentleness, Gary shepherds the reader through the history of ancient marginalized agricultural workers and the parallels we can see in our own world today.

As I close the book for the first (but most certainly not the last) time, I find myself better equipped to understand both a more “earth-flavored gospel,” and also, to paraphrase a passage in the book, I have faith in the margins of agriculture as “a community of kindred spirits who behave like wild little mustard seeds in the ways that they grow to face the challenges before them.” Reading this book gave me hope, gave me context, gave me new ideas not just for my own kitchen garden but for the ways in which I can better serve my community.

The earth calls to us all. It is in the ways that we respond that change the face of this world.

– Scout Miller, a prodigal farmgirl

---

“Being humbled and awestruck by the “tangled web” of wild nature may be the first step that many of us take toward giving more care to creation, whether we call our actions conservation (safeguarding the sanctity and integrity of nature) or restoration (healing the wounds in the damaged fabric of our earthen household).

If we read the actions and the words of Jesus carefully, he is calling us to do both. We can keep vigilant about protecting nature’s most sacred places and about bringing restorative justice to all cultures and creatures that have fallen in harm’s way. Whether we are farmers, fishers, or simply consumers, we are called to care for even the most cryptic or miniscule elements of creation in our midst. Even weeds belong to the kin-dom of our Creator.”

Page 126 The Wonders of Weeds

---

Jesus for Farmers and Fishers
Gary Paul Nabhan
ISBN 978-1-5064-6506-7