The best laid plans of biking often go astray.  Today, a few miles into my ride, a bridge was out.  Most of rural Kansas is on a one mile by one mile grid, so this blockage added two miles to my journey.

Most of the way I was kicking up gravel.  With the weeks of hot dry weather, both Whiskey and I were getting pretty dusty.

However, we were making good time.  Sister McCracken had invited me to take part in lunch at the home of the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica.  I am going to visit them to learn about their plans to create a micro-prairie, and to learn how they are interweaving a care for land with ethical, social and spiritual values.

Lunch is at noon, and at first I am pleased to find that I have arrived 20 minutes early.  However, I soon realize I went to the wrong place.  I had headed for the highest mount in Atchison, assuming I would find the nuns there, but in fact this is where the monks reside.  They arrived first from Bavaria, Germany to minister to German immigrants in Kansas Territory.  They founded an abbey on the top of this hill overlooking the Missouri River where Benedictine College now is also located.

The nuns came a few years later to start a school for women on a hill a mile and a half south.  Five months ago, these Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica came to national attention when they spoke up against comments made by Kansas City Chief’s kicker Harrison Butker’s in his Benedictine College commencement speech.  Just two months ago, the nuns were once again in the news for their corporate activism.  Led by Sister McCracken—they attend corporations’ shareholder meetings ($2000 or more earns you a right to have your voice heard), and put forward resolutions calling for more ethical practices.  One such resolution called for diversity and non-discrimination on corporate boards.  Another opposed patent practices that raised drug prices.

Arriving in time to still enjoy the tail end of lunch, over a buffet meal I hear about the notoriety this most recent AP story brought.   Mostly the dominant media reports on the rise of far right Christian groups.  The popularity of this AP story (first sent to me by a colleague in California) shows that there is an eagerness to hear that this is not the full story of Christian or political activism in the U.S..

After lunch, Sister McCracken gives me a tour of the monastery.  This includes the expected beauty of stained glass windows.

It also includes a visit to Sister McCracken’s desk, which is filled with papers from her various organizing efforts. There is everything from get out the vote notecards …

… to an action plan for Pope Francis’s call in Laudato Si’.  In this encyclical letter, Pope Francis made his plea to Catholics to care for the planet and all its creatures, including by fighting environmental degradation and global warming.

Long leaders in the realm of social justice, recently the Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica have distinguished themselves through leading work on environmental and climate justice.  What I particularly appreciate is their insistence on the entanglement of all these forms of justice.  To my surprise and delight, Sister Carrillo cites my colleague Donna Haraway’s work as an inspiration for her notion of deep interconnectedness.  Indeed, it was a surprise to many of us when Haraway was cited in Laudate Deum—Pope Francis’s follow-up to Laudato Si’.

One manifestation of this commitment to deep interconnectedness is the recently created Merrywood Gardens, a community garden for the people of Atchison.  Not only is it good for the planet to grow more food locally, it is good for the people of Atchison.  Atchison’s poverty rate, Sister Carrillo explains, is very high (17.3 percent, 1.5 times higher than the average rate in KS).  At the local schools, there are a lot of children on reduced or free lunches.  All the food from Merrywood will be donated to the community to help meet this need.

Another manifestation is the ecological work being done on the monastery lands.  For decades, the nuns have been evolving their cultivation practices, and have learned many lessons.  For example, when native Ash trees succumbed to the emerald ash borer beetles, they learned that it is best to plant a diversity of native trees so all are not lost when the next beetle comes along.  They also learned that ornamental Bradford pears–planted partly for the beauty of their white flowers–revert back to their wild form and create trees with thorns that are a menace.

So now they are attempting to prioritize cultivating plants that historically have lived on these lands.  This includes an effort to experiment with prairie restoration.  They will start with this little plot of land.

Their first step will be solarization–putting clear plastic over land to bake off plants–because right now the land just wants to be Johnson grass. They then will decide which prairie seeds to plant. There are no prairie lands left in this part of Kansas that did not meet their demise at the sharp edge of a plow.  However, there is a restoration prairie near Mayetta, about 60 miles away, that they hope can provide insights on what to plant.

Sister Carrillo dreams that one day theirs will be the reference prairie for this part of Kansas.   But cultivating it will take time.  The young plants will be mowed in their first years to allow their roots to develop.  It will take five years before a climax prairie begins to emerge.  So to the community she says, when you think of prairie, think patience.

Sister Carrillo faces not only the challenge of cultivating patience, but of changing perceptions.  For some, prairie still evokes images of untamed and dangerous lands.  Some fear bringing back prairie will also bring back ‘vermin.’  And so the work of cultivating land is entangled with the work of cultivating new concepts.  What if animals considered vermin could become, in Haraway’s language, companion species—life forms we learn to live well with as we create the diverse ecosystems needed for survival?  And what if beauty did not mean the white flowers of the pear tree, but the presence of ‘otherkinds’?

This last question Sister Carrillo poses as we look out together out on monastery land spotted with mature non-native trees.

Is this beauty, she asks, if these trees are sterile for other forms of life?   Yes, the more hardy forms of trees may grow slowly, but they support more diversity of life.  She describes coming out one day and looking at this little bur oak.

It had many kinds of species on it, while the non-native trees had none. Among the life forms finding sustenance was a red-spotted purple butterfly that she long had been hoping to see. What if beauty is this, standing in awe in the presence of otherkinds?