Rory Groves is a former technology consultant and founder of multiple software businesses. He and his wife Becca reside in southern Minnesota where they farm, host workshops, and homeschool their six children. He is author of Durable Trades: Family-Centered Economies That Have Stood the Test of Time. You can learn more about the Groves’ family ministry here.
1. You were eight years old when you wrote your first computer program. Many people (including myself) have always seen creativity and making as something connected to the arts. What did you learn about creativity through your first experience with creating a computer program?
I have always been drawn to the world of ideas, and I believe I was drawn to computer programming as an outlet for that sort of creativity. Coding allowed me to bring an idea to life, metaphorically speaking (nothing is as dead as silicon and circuits). As a young child living in a suburban neighborhood, raised on standardized education, I wasn’t exposed to many other avenues that would break out of conventional patterns and allow me to express something completely new. Later in life I would discover farming with its constant witness of rebirth and renewal.
2. You’ve written, “As we were making our farm, our farm was making a family.” Can you say more about what this means and the importance of making something as a family? How do you create a culture of making and creativity in your family?
We have a very egocentric approach to life—at least in modern, industrialized nations. We approach work, and even family, under the premise that they serve us. Thus we conform our modes of work according to our individual tastes, rather than conforming ourselves to the demands of work (and family). Farming is a great example of this. You can, if you wish, purchase everything you need for dinner from a store and never take part in its production. You simply pick up a frozen, pre-cut chicken and boxed lettuce off the shelf and take it home. Or perhaps more commonly, you pick dinner up at a drive-through window. This simple act of eating requires virtually no forethought on your part, nor thought of the dozens or hundreds of people involved in producing the product you are consuming. Now try growing your own food. Not only will you spend an incredible amount of time thinking about your future dinner (how many potatoes do I need to grow to feed my family for a year?), you will also be busy procuring seeds, planting, cultivating, harvesting, preserving, etc. But you are almost never alone: you are joined by your co-producers who will dine with you. In my case, that is my family.
What I noticed over the years was that farming was actually uniting our family in a way that fast food never could. The satisfaction of eating a homegrown pickle does not end with the flavorful crunch. When we pop open a jar in the winter months, we remember the beds we prepared, the vines we trellised, the deer that snuck in overnight and chowed them down, and eventually, the bushels and bushels of delicious cucumbers that we harvested and sliced and crammed into wide-mouth jars and water-bathed. And we remember doing all of it together.
3. One of your concerns is how the Industrial Revolution disrupted our relationship to the things we use. What you call “the spirit of making” has been lost through commoditization of goods, or when we make (and buy) cheap things in abundance. Can you explain this “spirit of making” and its value on our lives as creators and as consumers?
If we were created in the image of God, then we are co-creators with Him. If we were created in the image of Industry, then we are cogs in a machine. This is why so many, I believe, feel unfulfilled even in our modern age of unprecedented prosperity. We weren’t designed to be machines, to mass-produce according to exacting factory standards. Or according to mass-market appeal. The spirit of making means that we co-create with God. Just as He did not create uniform cogs when he made us, we should not approach our work with the same blandness. Everything we make ought to be unique in some way, just as there are no two elements in all of creation that are the same. Only machines produce sameness.
A related thought: in Paradise Lost, Milton entreats the same Spirit that “Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss and mad’st it pregnant.” I have this verse printed out and taped to the wall in my cabin where I write. It’s an amazing thought: believers have access to, and receive inspiration from, the same Spirit that presided over creation. Creativity is not an industrial process, in other words. It is calling forth life from the abyss.
4. You discuss how our culture has a work-life imbalance: Our meaningful, lifegiving work is found in our leisure time, and our work becomes a means to an end. A coherent or integrated life, however, is built on the idea that our work itself contributes to our human flourishing. How do we find this coherence in work that isn’t always fulfilling but is necessary to pay the bills and support a family?
Matthew Crawford goes into this dilemma in Shop Class as Soulcraft (and it’s a good read). The superficial answer to this question is to keep doing what you’re doing and add in a few meaningful hobbies around the edges or apply some self-help business psychology to incorporate more meaning into your job, like a mission statement. But those will only deliver superficial results.
If you want substantial changes in your life, you need to dig a lot deeper and ask tougher questions: Are the “necessary” things in your life truly necessary? Does your work strengthen your relationships or erode them? Does it bring you closer to your family? Closer to God?
I often tell people that we didn’t get into this situation overnight, and we’re probably not going to get out of it overnight, either. It may take a generation—or a few generations—to reverse the effects of industrialism on our families and marriages and communities. So the question really is, are you willing to be that pivotal generation who will sacrifice in the present so your children can have meaningful, family-centered economies of their own? Any job becomes bearable if you are thinking generationally.
That said, don’t wait to begin building the future reality now. Start a home-based business with your family. No matter how humble, just start, and do it together. Then watch and see if the Lord blesses it.
When we started our family newsletter seven years ago, we really had no idea what would come of it. It was just a way to share our farming trials and errors (mostly errors) with friends. But it was something we could do together as a family. Our first newsletter went out to 30 families. The newsletter led to a book, and the book led to hosting events and many other opportunities that we could have never imagined when we were just starting out. The most recent newsletter went out to 2,800 families! But it all began when we decided to start something together, and the Lord blessed it.
5. What advice do you have for people who haven’t learned crafts, farming, or the trades? How do we embrace and live the philosophy of building a home economy in small ways?
I believe everyone should attempt to learn everything they can about traditional modes of living. It’s how our ancestors lived for thousands of years, how they remained free and independent and self-sufficient. But work is only one element of the family economy. There is also worship, education, childcare, elder care, recreation, and so on — everything that makes a culture is connected to economy. The pilgrims believed that every house was a “little church” and for many generations families have practiced daily worship in their homes, led by fathers—the “priests” of the home.
Also, there is education. Many families, like ours, have opted to homeschool their children. Homeschool opens up incredible opportunities for discipleship and mentorship, but it also permits more flexibility for pursuing home-based business. The two complement each other as parts of the home economy because they each have their own education.
These are just a few elements, but they are important. Look for other functions that have been “parceled out” to corporations and bureaus and professionals, as Wendell Berry writes. And then bring them back home.
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