Why are families drawn to agrarian life? Is it just a trend, or is the homestead life our natural calling? Read this excerpt from The Liturgy of the Land!
Why Families Are Drawn to Agrarian Life
It seems that most families have an “agrarian moment” at some point. It happens when they dream of their family living on a farm, growing food, working together, slowing down, unplugging, and enjoying such a life with others. They see children in the yard feeding chickens, mothers in the garden checking on what is ripe for the table, and the father coming back from the field, perhaps discussing the day’s work with an older son in celebratory satisfaction, sharing work, responsibility, and care for the same place with one another. They see themselves working hard but closer to home and closer to each other.
Often, people that find themselves longing for life on the land are serious in their faith because they find something in their modern way of life that, at best, makes it difficult to live their faith and, at worst, is inherently opposed to it. In fact, many budding agrarians point to their faith as the very thing “driving” them to the land.
The Romance Is Real
In The Liturgy of the Land, our proposal is that while it is possible to romanticize the life of homesteading to the point of sentimentalized caricatures of reality, it is also true that homesteading is romanticized because it is romantic. The family homestead is not simply a different option among others, as if life is nothing but a series of lifestyle choices, but it is the natural place and work that lends itself uniquely to growth in virtue and holiness. In short, life on a homestead is good because it brings us closer to our family, to nature, and to our local community. Yet, the greatest motivation to take up this lifestyle is that homesteading can help orient us more fully and simply toward our true and lasting happiness, which is God Himself.
What Is a Homestead?
To better understand what we mean by a Catholic homestead, we might consider why we use that word in the subtitle and not “farm.”
The word “homestead” originates from the Old English word hamsted, which could refer to a specific home or even a village. “Home” obviously refers to the dwelling of a family, and the old word stead referred to a place that was firm and established; think of stead with another related word, “steady.” A homestead is a place where a family is rooted in the use or ownership of a piece of land.
American usage, however, has given the word staying power, as it referred to the various homesteading acts of the federal government that launched people out—especially in the westward expansion of the United States—to establish themselves on newly claimed or conquered lands. Wrapped up in this history, homesteading has some mixed realities for us today, but its roots are deeper than one nation’s history because the homesteaders then were mostly looking for the same thing they are today—even if the realities look very different.
In both Old and American English, therefore, we see that a homestead is not merely a property used to grow crops but a piece of land defined by the presence of a rooted family. Also, contrary to charges of isolationism, the connection to words defined as “village” reminds us that Catholic families rooted in the land always grow outward into communal life, hopefully and most ideally with other Catholics, so that the community can meet both physical and spiritual needs. The land is also utilized primarily for the purpose of providing for that family in a manner usually called subsistence, which means the agricultural effort is oriented toward the life of the family itself and, therefore, the family is oriented toward the life of the farm. The union of the family and the land is sacred, naturally mimicking the fruitful love of man that, when true and lasting, is fruitful and life-giving.
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This article is taken from a chapter in The Liturgy of the Land by Jason M. Craig and Thomas D. Van Horn which is available from TAN Books.
