Servant Life
We are a public charity of
the State of Hawaii.
No one here receives any kind of salary
—
neither the nuns, their chaplain, nor the members of the board
of this non-profit corporation.
The purpose of the Farm is ministry plain and simple.
We provide food for families in need in our community.
And
we partner with the Natural Resource Conservation Service of the USDA,
our local Soil and Water Conservation District,
and
the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (University of Hawaii).
We did not choose this Island.
We believed we would complete our lives of ministry in Haiti,
where the sisters had begun decades earlier.
The naked children wandering through squalor,
the men squatting beside make-shift fires,
the dead and dying seen everywhere.
We knew the hopelessness of their lives,
and
we were there to offer whatever friends can offer.
People have asked if this life were hard to bear.
We reply that the greater burden
is the fog and indifference of "affluenza,"
which is the pervasive spiritual disease in the United States.
Lately,
life in the bubble of affluence has been blighted with an additional plague:
the prideful pronouncements and ruthless depredations carried forward
by exponents of a "woke world."
Meantime,
the world suffers.
800 million people go to sleep each night hungry.
Half the world's people live on slightly more than $2 a day.
80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 per day.
The facts of life crowded in:
three-quarters of the earth is covered with water;
a tiny fraction of the land is arable;
a very small minority of the world's inhabitants control nearly all of its wealth;
and
most humans live in poverty, want, disease, or suffering.
The world suffers,
and
once you are joined to the suffering of the simple and the sincere,
you cannot imagine returning to a daily routine of outsized egos, narcissism,
pervasive delusion, and the effrontery to impose these delusions upon an entire society.
But we did leave Haiti.
The apostolate we served,
developed by one of our nuns,
caring for a quarter-million people per year
with medical care, food, clothing, and education,
was taken over by woke partisans.
A new CEO was appointed who immediately suppressed our chapel.
She appointed a founder and former director of Planned Parenthood,
who stripped our walls of anything suggesting religious life.
And
she forbade us to represent ourselves as serving God.
We were forced to seek another place where our little community might remain together
and
survive.
This place ended up being Oceania, in a northern corner of Polynesia.
Here we would face
no heat bill,
no AC bill,
no property tax,
and
no limits on growing food year round.
Here we also would have
quality medical care, free-of-charge courtesy of Medicare.
None of us had received any kind of salary check for decades.
Our longtime leader had entered religious life at age seventeen.
Nonetheless,
the God of all found a way.
We did not seek the Farm.
What developed into Hermitage Farm sought us.
Yes,
the aching need of Haiti was no longer around us.
Yet,
everywhere you go,
you meet people in need.
At Hermitage Farm,
we protect the sacred Creation.
We grow healing foods.
We provide God's bounty to neighbors in need.
Net profits go to charitable purposes.
Operating costs include rent on the farmhouse;
our groceries beyond what we grow for our table;
our tools, equipment, and supplies;
and
rent on the land we don't own.
That is,
what we grow is what keeps us alive.
Many people do not understand that the Church
—
neither the Roman Catholic Church
nor
the Eastern Orthodox Church
—
does not subsidize monasteries, parishes, or general ministries.
These little religious houses may support the Church
in the form of assessments paid to a diocese or to a general fund.
But the flow of money does not go the other way.
This was true in Haiti,
and
it is true today in Polynesia.
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