This past Friday I attended an event for Artists and Creatives in New York City called Inkwell, hosted by Ekstasis Magazine. I was invited to read an essay about the church engaging culture, alongside a remarkably talented group of painters, poets, essayists, and thinkers. This night was a gift. People packed into the parlor of a brownstone in the Upper West Side, eager with hope that the arts could play a role in renewing our decaying world.

The person I most anticipated hearing from was Makoto Fujimura. Mako is one of the most recognized and celebrated artists of our time. I have long admired him for his vision of the arts and have savored my way through his books and writing. I loved his collaboration on the gospels and was expectant for what he would share. 

Mako’s family comes from Japan, and after the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 that left thousands dead, he wanted to see if there was any way that he could offer support to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami. One of the great challenges was the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Because of the failure of the electrical grid, radioactive contaminants led into the surrounding areas.

One commentator noted, 

The nuclear fallout from the tsunami forced nearly 80,000 people to evacuate their homes, not knowing if or when they may return. The 30 miles surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been left contaminated and relatively barren. Even more disturbing, reports of radioactive rice, beef, vegetables, milk, seafood, and even tea have been found more than 60 miles away from the site, outside the mandatory evacuation zone.

The soil was poisoned, life was threatened, and generations of kids would grow up in the shadow of a nuclear disaster. 

How do you even begin to care for the soil of a nuclear disaster, so that it can produce crops again? What can you do in the face of such loss?
Mako noticed something strange when he toured the area. Thousands of sunflower plants? Why were they there, in a disaster zone? Who planted them, and why?

A few months after the catastrophe, Koyu Abe, the leading monk at the nearby Buddhist temple of Joenji, told Reuters:

We plant sunflowers, field mustard, amaranthus and cockscomb, which are all believed to absorb radiation. So far we have grown at least 200,000 flowers ... and distributed many more seeds. At least 8 million sunflowers blooming in Fukushima originated from here.

Mako pointed out that Phytoremediation is the process where plants are utilized to remove contaminants from the environment. The flowers extract the Radioactive Isotopes from the soil and into itself, and can be cut without the need to dig up the roots of the plants. The seeds of the flowers remove the toxicity in the soil.

This, he pointed out, is a parable of what we can do in the brokenness of our own cultural soil today. There seems so little that we can do in the face of all the devastation around us. Who has the power to reverse our great secular decline? What can be done to stem the tide of sexual exploitation and commodification? How can we address the anxiety and depression so rampant in this generation?

Maybe the answer is small loving acts of sacrifice, taking into ourselves the sinful pollution of our cultural soil and creating space for goodness, truth, and beauty to grow in its place. 

This was in fact the way God acted in Christ. Christ came into the world and absorbed the sin and violence of the world into himself. He turned the other cheek, breaking the cycle of retaliation, absorbed our sin into himself, leaving his righteousness as a gift in its place, and tore down the walls of division creating a new humanity to model this same life in their common practice. 

And Jesus’ vision was that we would live a life like his. His vision was that a new community of his followers heal the toxic soil of our world, planting their presence in the fallout of sin, extracting violence and leaving peace, extracting division and leaving unity, extracting despair and leaving hope.

Mako closed with a call to plant ourselves, our art, and our love into the toxic places of this world, places where the cultural soil is most in need of renewal. The kinds of places Christ seemed strangely drawn to, with his vision of sacrificial love before our eyes.   

As I left the Inkwell Gathering and made my way home, I reflected on the invitation he laid out before us.

Where are the contaminated parts of my life? 

How can I sow patience in my marriage where I have polluted it with anger?
How can I sow presence with my kids where I have ignored them with distraction?
How can I sow joy where I have been busy and burdened?

Things may not change quickly; real damage takes real time to repair. 
But with faithfulness, grace, and resolve, barren things may come back to life.

Though it may seem futile that a few flowers can heal a nuclear fallout, it’s true. There has been remarkable restoration at Chernobyl through this exact process.

As followers of Jesus, we have a choice about how we live today.
We can cordon off areas of our lives and world, afraid of the fallout and toxicity we encounter. Or we can plant things there that absorb the brokenness and allow new things to grow.

I want to be a man like that. 

Join me in heading to the broken places to sow seeds of a kingdom of love.

I’ll see you in the field.

Cheers.

Jon.