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    A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt
    Unavailable
    A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt
    Unavailable
    A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt
    Ebook193 pages2 hours

    A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt

    By Kyle T. Kramer and Bill McKibben

    5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Writer, teacher, and farmer Kyle T. Kramer presents the honest, humorous, and uplifting story of coming to know God and himself and beginning to understand life as prayer in A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt. For Kramer, this came about through rejecting consumerism, creating an organic farm, and raising a family in rural southern Indiana.
    In his moving debut book, America columnist Kyle Kramer recounts the sometimes-gritty story of how he came to experience the joys of real community through a journey of honest reckoning with his own ambitions. For Kramer, this story involves lots of dirt.

    In the summer of 1999, Kramer, an earnest and high-achieving private school teacher in Atlanta, decided to forgo a promising academic career. Instead, he heeded the voices of the unlikely prophets in his life and purchased a block of hardscrabble land in southern Indiana in order to start a small farm. Tending it back to health—one difficult lesson at a time—Kramer founded Genesis Organic Farm, built a self-sustaining and environmentally friendly home, and began to fully embrace the Benedictine traditions of physical labor, prayer, and hospitality. A Time to Plant is a deeply human story of one man’s attempt to make simple living a reality as a spiritual discipline for himself, as a model for his children, and for the good of creation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAve Maria Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781933495347
    Unavailable
    A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt
    Author

    Kyle T. Kramer

    Kyle T. Kramer is the executive director of the nonprofit Passionist Earth & Spirit Center, which offers interfaith educational programming in meditation, ecology, and compassion. Educated at Indiana University, the Universitat Hamburg (Germany), and Emory University, he is the former director of graduate theology programs and spiritual formation for Saint Meinrad, a Benedictine monastery and school of theology. Kramer and his family spent fifteen years as organic farmers and homesteaders in Spencer County, Indiana. He serves as a Catholic climate ambassador for the USCCB-sponsored Catholic Climate Covenant and is a columnist for St. Anthony Messenger. He previously served as a columnist and essayist for America magazine. Kramer speaks across the country on issues of ecology and spirituality.

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    • 5/5
      In A Time to Plant, Kyle Kramer tells of his journey as a rural homesteader in southern Indiana. The pages are filled with honesty and wisdom as Kramer examines his spirituality and his role in the world.

      While working on his Master of Divinity at Emory University, Kramer begins to question whether his plan to become an Episcopal priest is truly his vocation. His love for gardening and his desire to live simply as a steward of the earth lead him to begin a search for land near his childhood home in southern Indiana.

      As Kramer began his venture, he often fell into bouts of anger, resentment, and despair. Though he was aware it would not be easy, the hard work required for a simple, sustainable lifestyle left him little time for his family and was far from the idyllic rural life he longed for. He eventually accepts that the time is not right for him to be a full time farmer, and while he remains devoted to his land and home, he also finds fulfillment in his job at St. Meinrad, a nearby Benedictine monastery and seminary.

      His tone is neither self-righteous nor judgmental, as Kramer realizes he is far from perfect and his lifestyle choices far from sustainable. The world is one of great ambiguity and our choices are not always simple. He recognizes the gray areas where hope meets despair, idealism clashes with reality, and success collides with failure.

      While Kramer expresses little hope that the world will ever be healed through any individual or communal action, he does leave the reader feeling that how we choose to live does matter. Though it often doesn't make sense,he continues to hope because life is "infinitely precious and valuable in some mysterious way [he] cannot fully fathom."