Jackson Newton

Project: Professional Internship with the Community of St. Mary's Southern Province

This summer I lived with the Sisters of St. Mary, an Anglican, Benedictine, monastic community in Sewanee, TN. My days were centered around three primary responsibilities: assisting the Sisters with their prayer services, gardening, and reading.

The garden was huge, full of every plant imaginable: squash, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, kale, lettuce, chard, you name it. It might as well have been a full-fledged farm. (Or, it seemed that way to me, having only managed to kill a small herb garden previously.) Needless to say, I had a lot to learn. In the garden, questions quickly arose: What is bone meal? How often do we fertilize? Does the compost go in Bin 1 or Bin 2? Paul, the Sisters’ part-time groundskeeper (and a full-time hippie), kindly answered these questions. Slowly, fewer arose. By the end of the summer–in between conversations with Paul about the Grateful Dead–I had learned the basics of gardening. I’d seen life and death in the garden: the plants I had planted mere weeks before became fully developed and were harvested. Weeding was a daily task. Once pulled, the weeds were hastily thrown into the compost bin. It was redemption, pesky weeds becoming fertile compost. I liked that.

Byung Chul-Han, the philosopher whose works I read through this summer, describes his experience of gardening in his book In Praise of the Earth: Gardening “is pacifying. Thus ‘garden work’ is not a fitting expression. Work originally means toil and hardship. Gardening, by contrast, brings happiness. In the garden, I recover from the hardship of life” (57). I find it difficult to answer what the “work I did this summer” is. Is gardening even “work”? I’m not so sure. If anything, I found my other responsibilities, cooking, cleaning, tour-guiding, acolyting, etcetera much more burdensome. The garden was a place of joy, and a place that I will miss.

I think the greatest perk of this experience was meeting all sorts of interesting characters. Convents, it turns out, attract many visitors: a retired cover model turned Episcopal priest, a Russian Orthodox monk, Buddhist newlyweds, a bishop, a visiting TikTok nun microcelebrity, DSA organizers, among others. Some people I liked; some people thoroughly irritated me. All of the visitors, however, were interested in learning about the garden. The garden was a great unifier. This is important to how we think about sustainability. Caring for the environment doesn’t just need to be made up of “don’ts”: don’t drive too much, don’t eat too much, don’t waste too much, etcetera. Sustainability can be a source of great joy too. It can unify people. It can give them hope.

I enjoyed working across disciplines this summer, getting to talk and study with several theology professors (who taught Benedict's Rule), a master gardener (the aforementioned Paul), an English Professor (Professor John Gotta kindly taught us from his book Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology), and a philosopher of religion. I also enjoyed working and living alongside my fellow internship partners in the Sewanee community and getting a sense for the greater Cumberland Plateau region. It was also rewarding to know that much of the food I was growing was going to local community food banks, and that the garden, a source of great joy to me, was also bringing joy to people all across the region, a demonstration of the interconnected nature of climate and economic justice.

I don’t think I will ever be a professional gardener. I do, however, imagine that gardening will always remain something I do. There’s something about keeping life alive that's magical, and I am extraordinarily grateful both to the Sisters of St. Mary and to JTS for letting me tap into that magic.