To find yourself in a parallel universe can be oddly comforting.  Although you don't exactly know where you are, all the same you feel yourself pleasantly at home.

Such was my experience some months ago in Finca Villa Loyola, a Jesuit agricultural operacion in the mountains of Nariño, Colombia.  The parallel to this organic coffee plantation sits on the backdoor step of Guelph, Ontario, and goes by the name of Ignatius Farm.  This latter bucolic bubble bumped up against by Walmart and other urban bothers is where I passed my spiritual infancy.   Toying with the idea of a religious vocation, I spent a year of Jesuit kindergarten, living in the famous "Red House" and picking the red, genetic legacies of the infamous edenic apple.

Whereas in Guelph I was up the trees, in Nariño I was down in the dirt, hunched over ground-level beds of soil-filled baggies, into each of which I commended a single, selected coffee bean with bushy aspirations.  Despite the geographical and biological differences, the results, however, were similar: increased esteem for the gifts of what Catherine Doherty calls "apostolic farming", and gratitude that the Society of Jesus, both in Canada and in Colombia, take seriously the careful cultivation of creation.

The parallism between Villa Loyola and Ignatius Farm also reaches the personal.  For much of the inspiration and perspiration that went in to make Ignatius the place of peaceful agricultural practices that it is today exuded from the person of the late Jim Profit SJ.  It turns out that the proud islander Jim has a latino dopelganger, one José (Joe) Aguilar SJ.  Both soft-spoken, big-hearted, friends-of-the-earth masters in organic growing; only Jim was a sage of the spud, while Joe is a java-maestro. 

Thanks to Jim, the farm in Guelph became a destination for aspiring farmers, who put in a season of practical education learning the ups and downs (lots of bending involved in small-scale agriculture) of organic farming.  Thanks to Joe, the southern finca now attracts groups of campesinos, who, against the pressures of globalized, industrial agro-business, strive to stay true to the land that has given them life. They come to supplement, complement and even challenge some of the traditional techniques inherited from their ancestors.  The miracle of soil micro-organisms, the conviviality of companion planting, the sacred complexities of composting all enter into the living pedagogy of Villa Loyola.  Not to mention the innumerable intricacies, from breeding, to planting, to picking, to drying, to grinding, through which filter every cup of a "buen café". 

    Here too Ignatius and Loyola, Guelph and Nariño meet.  By far the most vivid memory I retain of Jim is the product of frequent repetion.  Every day around about dawn Jim, decked in a bathrobe and gumboots, would make the hundred yard pilgrimage from his hermitage to the house in order to resurrect himself with a stiff brew.  It was the opening steps of his prayer, a kind of caffienated composition of place, to use the Ignation lingo.  This was how, on the most basic and blessed level, he praised the mystery of the incarnation.

Joe, it should come as no surprise, is also a coffee-mystic.  For him, the stuff is much more than a mere stimulant; it is sacramental.  He goes far beyond a blind faith in the profound properties of the black gold, as he has attained an intimate, interior knowledge of the plant, its preperation and its appreciation.  Joe and Jim would have gotten on famously.

And, I would like to think, they do so now.  For another universe parallel to all others is that of the Kingdom, where the not yet is the already.  There, in my contemplative moments, I see Jim  walking Joe through fields of potatoes, the two of them calmly conspiring as to how to liberate the crop from voracious Colorado beetles.  There too I see Joe in the shade amidst coffee shrubs confiding to Jim all his careful observations of the flora and fauna of Villa Loyola.  At the best of times, when my contemplation is rich enough, I join my two organic brothers to enjoy a cup of the highest quality coffee found in this beautiful Kingdom, that at once has come and is on its way.  

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Photos by Greg Kennedy, SJ, unless otherwise noted.