Chilli Fiesta

by Ruth Valerio on September 2, 2010
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This is me, helping my lovely friend Rosemary Moon with a food demo at the Chilli Fiesta at West Dean Gardens. She was there all weekend, working wonders with chilli and creating various culinary delights, but she asked me to join her for this particular one in which she was making salami. So we stuffed salami skins together ('ooh er' jokes aside please) and chatted pigs and pork and politics and generally had great fun together.


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West Dean Gardens are really good at promoting seasonal, local ingredients with their various festivals (look out for their Totally Tomato show coming soon, and their Apple Day in the autumn): nearly 20,000 people went to the Chilli Fiesta and got a chance to look round the stalls, sample and buy, see the beautiful walled garden and view the award-winning collection of chilli plants (West Dean has the largest collection in the world). Rosemary also runs workshops for them and shares an allotment in the grounds with the Head Gardeners. We need people and organisations who dedicate themselves to promoting the good things that are around us, and it was a pleasure to be involved in something that was doing just that.

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In praise of yurts

by Ruth Valerio on August 13, 2010
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We've just come back from the Cotswolds, staying in a yurt. It was quite funny beforehand seeing people's reactions when I told them that was what we were doing for our summer holiday, and just reinforced to me all I've written about elsewhere in 'Oh to be a hippy': some just laughed; on FB I had comments about nude dancing and was I mad?! It honestly really took me by surprise! Actually, it was definitely more along the lines of 'glamping' (glamorous camping, for the uninitiated) than any sort of hippy activity: proper double bed for Greg and me, sheepskin rugs on the floor, comfortable seating, inside woodburning stove and all linen and kitchen things provided. There was even a compost toilet!

Our yurt was beautiful: set in a little woodland glen, surrounded by wildflower meadows, with loads of butterflies, and a robin and squirrel who would come onto our decking area and eat the scraps we left out for them. One afternoon as Greg was sitting out on the decking, the squirrel shinned up the pole next to him, along to the frying pan that Greg had used earlier to fry some eggs in, and began licking out all the butter at the bottom! There was a tree house and swings in the woods which the kids enjoyed, and we all tucked up in our beds together in the evenings with the log burner and candles burning and I'd read to them.

What was interesting was being away for five days with no electricity, which of course meant no computer and no television. It would be fair to say that there were a couple of points when the kids missed being able to flop in front of the TV and it was intrigued to watch them cope with it and have to find other quiet things to do. For me, it was bliss, and I found it really intrusive once we were home and the TV was on again. Thinking about it, the only thing I missed was running hot water for the washing up. It made me realise how little we really need to be complete.

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Picnic on the Plot

by Ruth Valerio on July 11, 2010
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With church bells ringing, the sun quietly sliding behind the trees, runner beans flowering and pea pods plumping, the hard work of having an allotment and/or growing your own vegetables was forgotten, as members of the Transition Chichester Grow Your Own group enjoyed a picnic on Ann's allotment plot.

Watched over by Ann's scarecrow Alice, the problems of getting lettuce to grow (put the seeds in the fridge overnight was Cathy's suggestion), the realisation that we were all suffering with black fly on our runner beans this year (not to mention the broad beans), and the challenges of keeping going when sometimes it just seems so much easier to buy from the supermarket, were all discussed.

We also heard about Anita's trip and attendance at two transition events and were fascinated about the ancestors' activity; some attendees sat in an 'inner circle' representing the people of today whilst others sat in an outer circle, representing people of 2050; it was interesting to think of the questions we would ask.

An after picnic tour of the plots brought us back to the now and we packed up, enthused and energised ,to water and weed our respective vegetable patches, before re the moon finally took over the lighting of sky.
(Thanks to Ann Emery for this account)
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Ecological Hermeneutics

by Ruth Valerio on June 21, 2010
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I sparked quite a funny debate on FaceBook last week. I came across some writing by Anthony Thiselton (lead thinker things to do with how we understand the Bible) and he talked about 'premature horizon assimilation'. I understood what he was talking about, but really, I thought, only an academic could write that kind of phrase in all seriousness. So I posted it up on FB and asked if premature horizon assimilation was something that only men suffered from? To see the responses you'll have to look on my page...!

But what was that all about really? I came across that amazing phrase because I was working last week on some teaching I'm doing on hermeneutics. I'm doing the teaching at the Pioneer Theology Summer School up in the Hayes next week. The three days away are on hermeneutics - ie how do we read the Bible and understand it for today? Various approaches are being taken, but I've been asked to look at the contemporary issue of the environment (how I hate that word for its anthropocentrism!) and use it as a lense to do some teaching on hermeneutics.

So I've been doing a load of thinking and reading about how 'green Christians' interpret the Bible and related issues around the authority and inspiration of the Bible (I'd recommend Tom Wright's Scripture and the Authority of God). Really interesting stuff, I've loved it!

There are basically three approaches to the Biblical material:
1. The first is an approach of 'recovery'. This seeks to say that historically Biblical interpretation/tradition has got it wrong and that if we really go back and understand the text correctly then we'll see that an ecological ethic lies at the heart of the Biblical story.
2. The second approach is what I call 'ecological resistance'. This says that the text reflects the biases and faults of their human authors and so where those texts are negative and anthropocentric they must be 'called out' and resisted.
3. The third approach is 'anti-ecological resistance'. This approach agrees with (2) but therefore concludes that it is unbiblical to care for God's world at all.

And what do we learn from all of this? We learn that the hermeneutical spiral is alive and well. Yes, I would want to affirm that it is important to try to get back to the original intention of the author/text as much as we can and we must work hard at that. But, at the same time, we must all recognise that we wear 'interpretive lenses' when we read the texts - there is no view from nowhere! Because of this we are constantly learning as our horizon interacts with the horizon of the Biblical text and both inform the other And then, of course, there are other people's horizons too, which is why we learn so much from other people. If that is the case then we should welcome disagreement and debate rather than trying to ignore or stifle it, because we'll learn from it and our own understanding will be improved. So, if we are to read the Bible for all its worth then we need the basic stuff of character: humility, wisdom, courage, kindness...

Above all, our understanding of the Bible and our being changed through it happen ultimately through the Holy Spirit working in us. Reading the Bible shows us God's plans for his creation - all his creation - and it is inspiring to know that we all have a part to play in those plans.
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