tomatoes from topsoil

Food List

Breakfast: smoothie made from strawberries, blackberries, apple juice and blueberries

Lunch: green tomato soup (made from tomatoes from our summer garden) with corn, broccoli and potatoes

Dinner: food from The Rocking Horse (a Logan Square restaurant and bar): veggie burger (no bun), side salad, tater tots, diet Pepsi

 Where is one thing from?

     For the last two summers, I’ve planted a small garden in our Logan Square backyard. For summer 2011, I planted corn, tomatoes and watermelon, and attempted to grow potatoes and basil. We supplement the soil with compost from our food scraps and yard scraps. Our eight tomato plants flourished this summer, and at the end of the season I made and froze red and green tomato soup out of the abundance of our garden.

Theological Reflections

     Dr. Theodore Hiebert is an Old Testament scholar who has done a lot of research and writing around the two creation stories in Genesis. He was the lead translator for Genesis in the Common English and there he translates Genesis 2:7 as

 The LORD God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life.

In his The Yahwist Landscape, Ted writes that in this verse, we learn that the most important fact about humanity for the Yahwist (the author of the second creation story beginning at Genesis 2:4b) is the human is made from arable soil. In our very nature, according to the Yahwist, we are connected to the earth… but not just any ground. The New International Version uses the translation “dust of the earth” which seems to suggest that we come from the dirtiness of the earth (don’t we wipe away the dust?) But Ted has argued for the translation “topsoil,” the arable soil of the land… so that we are created from the very soil that gives life to the food we need to survive. The full exegesis of the Hebrew word adama is beyond the scope of this little blog post; Ted does a better job in his book anyway.[1]

     Last summer I worked in our garden after long and exhausting days working as a chaplain at a retirement home in Chicago. The work there was often life-giving, but I came home without much left to give myself. Evenings in the garden—tying up the strong limbs of my tomato plants, marveling at the swelling melons, squatting in the mud—gave me back a different kind of life. In the topsoil of my backyard, I dug into my beginnings. I fell in love with the dirt under my fingernails. I found myself humming the Doxology over and over as I discerned weed from not weed. I was grateful to garden with a loving, life-giving God.

      Months later, eating the fruits of those evenings of labor and that topsoil—that topsoil that gave my tomatoes life—I remember in this creation story, topsoil is used by God to give humanity life. Born from the earth, I cannot help but love my tomatoes as my kin; I cannot help but care for my little garden as my friend. These tomatoes have a taste that is different from the tomatoes I get anywhere else, even the Chicago Farmers Markets. These tomatoes are from my topsoil. In the fall their vines returned to the topsoil to make arable soil for this season, just as one day I will return to the topsoil from which I came.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;

Praise him, all creatures here below;

Praise him above, ye heavenly host;

Creator, Christ, and Holy Ghost. Amen.       

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[1] I have had the privilege of studying with Ted, as he is on the faculty at McCormick.