In the winter of 2023, one of my dear friends approached me to see if I would help to give the talk for the annual diocesan Rural Life Day event to be hosted at our parish in April of 2024. This topic had been on my heart for some time, so I jumped at the opportunity. Narrowing down what I would say was difficult. I had enough material to write a book. Below is my portion of the talk we gave. Since speaking, we’ve had to get the internet back in our house for a variety of reasons, I gave birth to baby no. 8., and I have been able to expand upon and clarify these thoughts so much more.

Liturgical Homesteading

My husband likes to say that we are 5-finger radicals: 1) We homeschool, 2) we homestead, 3) we don’t have internet in the house, 4) we’re Catholic, and 5) we’re always pregnant.  We live just down the road in an old farmhouse we bought 8 years ago, and we love it there.  This past year, we declared a year of rest for our homestead as a time to discern what God is calling us to next, and during that time, we came up with a family mission statement for our homestead.  It reads as follows: “We strive to build family and community, observe Catholic Liturgy, and practice historic customs in order to orient ourselves towards God’s will.”  I’ve been using the term “liturgical farming” to summarize this mission statement.          

Our sabbatical year in 2023 was based on the biblical concept introduced in the book of Deuteronomy, where the Israelites were instructed to let their land rest one in seven years.  We wanted to let the land rest and dedicate our time to other things such as maintenance around the house and land, catching up on homeschool things, investing time in the parish community, and discerning the next steps for the future of our homestead: a 6-year plan to get us through to the next sabbatical year.

Though I’m probably not the first person to use the term “liturgical farming,” it’s not a common phrase.  I have yet to find any solid resources on the topic, probably because the people who live it don’t have time to write about it! 

              What I mean by liturgical farming (or homesteading) is that the things we do on our homestead are (or will be) based on or built around the liturgical year of the Catholic Church.  In the document Familiars Consortio, it says “The Christian family will strive to celebrate at home and in a way suited to the members, the times and feasts of the liturgical year.”  Growing up, this was not something my husband or I experienced.  We were nominal Catholics to say the least.  As we’ve grown into our Catholic faith over the years, we’ve come to recognize the importance of incorporating our faith into all aspects of our lives.  We want our children to have a deep grasp of our faith and heritage, and tying the liturgy to our homestead is an excellent way to do that.

            One of the reasons we began homesteading is reflected well in the Pastoral Reflection from the USCCB entitled “For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me Food.”  It states: “Too many in Our Church and nation do not know the world of agriculture.  For some, agriculture is a distant reality, little seen and less understood.  When we go to the supermarket, we rarely think about where our food comes from, who produces it, who harvests it, or what it takes to process, package, and distribute it.  When many of us think of agriculture at all, we worry about the economic cost of groceries and not the environmental cost to our land or the human cost to the farmers, farmworkers, and rural communities in the United States and around the world.”  This accurately represents our own experience and what we have observed in others.  We don’t want our children to experience this disconnect.

            Our journey to liturgical farming or homesteading has been a gradual one.  We didn’t know much about homesteading when we began and we probably knew even less about our Catholic faith.  Our children were a major factor in pursuing this lifestyle, because in it we saw something healthy for the body and soul, and like all parents, desired to give our children good things.

            The learning curve for each has been steep.  We jumped in head-first when we bought our house.  It came with a flock of egg-layers, an orchard ready to harvest, and a garden ripe for picking.  We’d gardened and done a bit of canning prior to moving, but we had to learn a lot and fast.  Over the years, we continued to dive deep into this lifestyle, trying our hands at everything from butchering to bread-making.  My husband works a full-time job away from home and I homeschool our 7 (soon-to-be 8) children.  As you can imagine, we’ve had our hands full.

            Through it all, our faith has kept us afloat.  When people ask us how we do it all, we first tell them we couldn’t do it all if it were not by the grace of God, and then remind them that we rarely do things without mistakes.  We’ve always known we were called to this lifestyle, but that’s not to say it has been easy.  Two years after moving, we made our first step into liturgical farming when we made an agreement, signed on a restaurant napkin, that listed our priorities.  Even though God had been on the list, prior to ranking the items by importance, functionally, God had not been number one.  Striving to put God first dramatically changed things.

            In the early years, we found it difficult to rest and relax as a family.  There is always work to be done!  Around the time of our napkin agreement, we took the next step towards a liturgical lifestyle:  observing Sunday as a day of rest.  After all, God tells us through scripture to take a day of rest AND KEEP IT HOLY!  This brought about a significant change to our household.  By putting work aside for a day and dedicating the day to God and family, we found that our moods improved and so did our productivity the rest of the week.

            Several years ago, I stumbled across the topic of liturgical living for the first time when reading the book “Around the Year with the Trapp Family.” My eyes were opened to a whole new way of living.  The thing that struck me was how well it would blend with our homesteading lifestyle.  We began studying the saints, the different Memorials, Feasts, Solemnities, and fasts of the Church.  Nearly all of it was foreign to us.

            I was introduced to many new concepts in that book, but the one that stood out the most was what the author wrote about Americans celebrating seasons at the wrong time, particularly Christmas.  Americans celebrate Christmas from Thanksgiving until December 26th, and then it’s “over.” They overlook the season of Advent and then the season of Christmas.  It got me thinking about how disordered we have become as a society.  In this global society, things can reach our homes almost instantaneously, resulting in the loss of the seasonal value of things.  Homesteading created a deeper appreciation of the seasons for me, and with the concept of liturgical living, I could see how detrimental it is when we ignore the God-given seasons in our lives, be they natural or Liturgical.  I began seeing how deeply the liturgical year is reflected in the natural cycles of the seasons. 

            Living liturgically involves finding ways to tie our normal homesteading activities to the life of the Church.  The first connection I made between the two, is between St. Patrick and our first batch of maple syrup for the season which is usually finished around his memorial.  As artificial as the connection may be, we made pancakes dyed green and shaped like a clover to remember this great Saint of the Church and served them with fresh syrup.  When he was 7, our second son declared it was “St. Pancake’s Day.”  It served as an opportunity to talk about who Saint Patrick was and why we remember him.  (As a side note, the easiest dates to incorporate into our lives were those of the secularized memorials of the Church, such as St. Valentine, St. Patrick, and St. Nicholas, because finding the true meaning behind these days was easy and they were names we were already familiar with.) 

            Over time, we’ve added other celebrations.  St. Isidore the farmer was an obvious Saint to begin with because of his connection to the work we do, and our priest at the time, Fr. Tony, came to bless our land on this memorial. 

Several years ago, we began observing Martinmas, in honor of St. Martin of Tours.  We even raised and butchered a goose for the traditional Martinmas meal.  This memorial is often referred to as “Catholic Thanksgiving,” a time of thanks for the bounty of the main farming season and marking the beginning of winter work: harvesting firewood and hunting in the woods.  Each year, we’ve invited friends to join us in fellowship for this celebratory meal, and since we didn’t do any butchering last year, Fr. Bill was kind enough to provide the goose for our meal. 

Memorials special to a family and feasts and solemnities are often a time when we eat special food, celebrate with others, and remember our forebearers of the faith.  Sharing meals and food with others is a reflection of what Jesus does throughout the Gospels.  Since we grow so much of our own food, it is only fitting that we think carefully about how we use what we have raised. 

            The idea of feasting got me thinking about the ways we eat today.  In a society of convenience, WE DON’T THINK TWICE about how many pigs might need to be butchered to keep up with our love of bacon.  Thankfully, the food industry is incredibly efficient, and little goes to waste.  The parts we don’t use are turned into food for our pets, get composted to feed the land, or get converted to other valuable resources.  Homesteading and raising our own food caused us to reduce waste significantly by evaluating how to utilize everything to the max. 

            If you butcher chickens yourself, you probably think twice about serving a meal of chicken breast for the whole family.  At least, we do.  If we each ate 1 breast, that would take 5 chickens to feed my family for just 1 meal. There are times when I will break a chicken down, separating breasts, thighs, and drumsticks, but usually, we package them whole.  Since I don’t typically package our chicken in parts, these cuts are saved for special occasions.  Pork belly, chops, or ribs are another example of special cuts, as is a venison neck roast.  Rather than eat these meals on some random day of the year, why not eat them on a day that deserves to be celebrated?  Even if we aren’t celebrating memorials and feasts, if we at least save these things for Sundays, which are each a memorial of the Resurrection, it’s a way to highlight the importance of this sacred day.

            Our Catholic heritage can be tied to our homestead in so many ways.  The kids and I sing hymns regularly as part of our homeschool days, and we sometimes take those hymns with us as we work in the field.  Our bees didn’t make it through the winter a few years ago, so we decided to harvest the wax, and dipped candles.  The candles were blessed and used on our home altar.  Last year, we put up Stations of the Cross on our walking trails.  We walk the trails often, and it made sense to add this devotion to our land.  The Stations end in a spot on our land that has been turned into a prayer garden.  So much of homesteading lends itself naturally to time for prayer and reflection, because working with our hands is often not as mentally intensive as is -say- a desk job.

            I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how communal homesteading can be, which is reflected in our life as Catholics.  Our homestead is most enjoyable when we include others in what we do.  Friends helped build a new shed– we have a community garden for those without space of their own– we share our resources with others such as the chicken plucker and cider press– and we share the bounty of our land- all gifts from God. 

            Our homestead and the gardens and farms of others do so much to care for the needs of our parish families and others.  Who hasn’t met the generous gardener, willing to share their blessings with others?  I love seeing people use their gifts for the benefit of our parish communities.  For example, this past fall, someone from the parish donated apples to the church to make applesauce for the annual Perch Fry.  Some women got together and made the applesauce needed in the church kitchen.  This simple act of sharing apples ended up touching the community in multiple ways.

            It’s been such a blessing to be part of this rural parish community, where we share much of our life with others.  We’ve learned our skills from books, YouTube videos, and trial and error, but our parish community has been incredibly helpful to us over the years, sharing wisdom and advice from their own experience.  We purchased our first meat chickens from fellow parishioners, another taught us the basics of beekeeping, and a friend from St. Gregory’s got us set up to grow culinary mushrooms.  In turn, we’ve been able to pass on our knowledge to others within and outside our parish.

            We knew when God brought us to our homestead that He must have plans for us there, and He certainly has.  Our homestead has provided a surprising number of opportunities to share our faith and values with others, those who are not a part of our local or parish communities, but that we have ties to in other ways.  I never would have expected our rural life to be such a social one, but it is!

            The culmination of our experiences over the years and our recent year of rest was the writing of the mission statement for our homestead I mentioned earlier.  Going forward, we hope to take a much more intentional approach to homesteading, but we have a lot to learn.  Our homestead will change as we change and learn, but we now have a guiding compass, a way of knowing where to go.