Campfire Stories is a documentary film series that features people who are trying to belong to the earth and each other in new and transformative ways. One of their films features a man named Adam Wilson. He runs a community farm that is also an experiment in non-commercial food systems, sustainable living, alternative economies and what Adam calls “radical neighboring.” As they film, Adam tells this story: 

Back in my early 20s, I heard a story. It sounded a bit like a fairy tale back then.

It was about a farm that began with three farmers, longing to grow food for their neighbors in a place where that had largely become impossible due to rising land prices. And so, they approached a group of interested neighbors with a plan, or at least a proposal or a plea, for the possibility of local food again in that place. This plan included a budget for what it would cost them to undertake a year growing a year’s worth of vegetables for 30 households. Vegetables as well as milk and meat.

The farmers gathered the interested folks in a circle. They asked if they could go around the circle and have people pledge different amounts of money until the budget was covered, and it took a couple of rounds, but they did it.

A few years into the project, a woman came to one of the farmers, and she said, “You know, my husband and I love being a part of this farm and community, but we’re gonna have to drop out of the farm because we’ve both lost our jobs.”

The farmer then said to her, “You know, I think you could do us, as the farmers and the membership as a whole, a real service, if you came to the meeting, and you pledged zero.”

And by golly, she had the courage to do just that.

Then the farmer told me that what happened next was that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

So, there you got a bunch of middle class folks weeping in a way that usually would have been downright embarrassing in public.

So what happened there? Why were they weeping?

Well, we could tell a story that says they were weeping out of pity, that they pitied the poor woman and her family. But that might be a little bit too easy of a story to tell.

Maybe instead, in that moment, they had a felt sense of themselves as people who had the capacity to carry their neighbors. Which also means that they realized they lived among people who had the capacity to carry them on the day that they might need to pledge zero. 

So friends, maybe the invitation this month is to pay attention to when you feel like weeping. A theme like flourishing carries the connotation of blooming, as if this month is solely about helping each other blossom brightly into the fullness of all we can be. But maybe it’s also about softening. About waking up to the reality that our culturally-encouraged pursuits of independence haven’t made us safe; they’ve only made us brittle. Maybe what this month wants most for us is a retrieval of tenderness. A reconnection to that part of us that longs to be vulnerable, that hungers to stop pretending we’re stronger than we are, that understands that flourishing also involves unfolding our ability to say, “I hurt,” “I’m scared,” and “I need help.” Who wouldn’t weep if they discovered that there really was a world like that out there?

UUFM is a part of the Soul Matters Sharing Circle, which provides resources for our Sunday Services, children’s Religious Education, and Chalice Circles. Check out our year of themes here and read above for the thoughtful introduction to this month’s theme, Flourishing Together.