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(OSV News) — Life on a small organic farm in northeastern Pennsylvania in the cool early days of spring, adapting to the rhythms of planting, livestock care and chores, can sound blissful to anyone buffeted by adult pressures and responsibilities.
Carmina Chapp hopes you think that. Because she does, too, and she believes a quiet pastoral setting helps deepen your faith.
Her big moment of discernment came while reading the 1952 autobiography of Dorothy Day, “The Long Loneliness,” which asserts that respite from life’s losses can be found in service to others.
After trying to live her Catholic faith through the examples of saints, priests and women religious, but not finding inspiration in long-ago figures, Chapp read Day (1897-1980), the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and still very much a contemporary figure. She realized, “This is it.”
Chapp, a Catholic theologian with degrees from Providence College and Duquesne University, is the founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm near the borough of Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania, near Scranton. Her husband, Larry Chapp, a retired theology professor who taught for 20 years at DeSales University, creates podcasts and blog posts under the title “Gaudium et Spes” (“Joy and Hope”).
The Chapps, Oblates of St. Benedict, established the farm in 2013 with the goal of providing food for people in need served by soup kitchens and food pantries as well as a place of contemplation for visitors encouraged to follow a Benedictine spirituality.
She touted the farm at a March 20 webinar sponsored by the Minnesota-based Catholic Rural Life.
“It’s amazing. It’s a wonderful, peaceful life,” Chapp said.
It came about after she and her husband prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the divine office, and found an identical discernment: “We need to simplify our lives” and “we need to feed people.”
The farm exemplifies the dignity of work — to “live by the labor of their hands” — as referenced in Chapter 48 of the Rule of Benedict, produced in the year 530.
“We’re in the mindset of we want to glorify God in our work now,” Chapp said. “Voluntary poverty, it’s called. We’re intentionally living as simple a life as we can, so we just don’t need very much.”
The Chapps, assisted by volunteers, raise produce — tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, cabbages, cucumbers — and tend to chickens for the eggs, goats for the milk, and sheep for the wool, on eight of the property’s 11 acres.
Continued below.
www.osvnews.com
Carmina Chapp hopes you think that. Because she does, too, and she believes a quiet pastoral setting helps deepen your faith.
Her big moment of discernment came while reading the 1952 autobiography of Dorothy Day, “The Long Loneliness,” which asserts that respite from life’s losses can be found in service to others.
After trying to live her Catholic faith through the examples of saints, priests and women religious, but not finding inspiration in long-ago figures, Chapp read Day (1897-1980), the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and still very much a contemporary figure. She realized, “This is it.”
Chapp, a Catholic theologian with degrees from Providence College and Duquesne University, is the founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm near the borough of Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania, near Scranton. Her husband, Larry Chapp, a retired theology professor who taught for 20 years at DeSales University, creates podcasts and blog posts under the title “Gaudium et Spes” (“Joy and Hope”).
The Chapps, Oblates of St. Benedict, established the farm in 2013 with the goal of providing food for people in need served by soup kitchens and food pantries as well as a place of contemplation for visitors encouraged to follow a Benedictine spirituality.
She touted the farm at a March 20 webinar sponsored by the Minnesota-based Catholic Rural Life.
“It’s amazing. It’s a wonderful, peaceful life,” Chapp said.
It came about after she and her husband prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the divine office, and found an identical discernment: “We need to simplify our lives” and “we need to feed people.”
The farm exemplifies the dignity of work — to “live by the labor of their hands” — as referenced in Chapter 48 of the Rule of Benedict, produced in the year 530.
“We’re in the mindset of we want to glorify God in our work now,” Chapp said. “Voluntary poverty, it’s called. We’re intentionally living as simple a life as we can, so we just don’t need very much.”
The Chapps, assisted by volunteers, raise produce — tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, cabbages, cucumbers — and tend to chickens for the eggs, goats for the milk, and sheep for the wool, on eight of the property’s 11 acres.
Continued below.
Life on farm named for Dorothy Day helps Catholic couple deepen faith, ‘glorify God’ - OSV News
(OSV News) -- Life on a small organic farm in northeastern Pennsylvania in the cool early days of spring, adapting to the rhythms of planting, livestock care and chores, can sound blissful to anyone buffeted by adult pressures and responsibilities. Carmina Chapp hopes you think that. Because she...
www.osvnews.com
