Book Report #4 - Quality time with Mr. Wendell

Wendell Berry, a writer and farmer from Kentucky, was referenced frequently during my American Studies classes in college. While I always liked his work when we read it, it lived for too long as just "something I read in college." After seeing Berry cited in a few good books over the past year, I decided to pick up a book of his essays, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Though I have not finished reading all of the essays, those I have read have helped me to take a more thoughtful look at the world around me, and have forced me to consider my role as a part of God's creation.

Berry's essays seem to touch on some of the most vital - yet too often unexamined - aspects of our lives here on earth: work, community, health, marriage, sex, even eating! He does so from an agrarian perspective, believing that we all need to be living more closely connected to the earth, working and caring for creation and each other as much as possible. Berry shies away from modern technology (he does not use a computer) and conveniences like fast food. He is a Christian (though not a Calvinist, and not an exclusivist), and challenges Christians especially to think about how we are called to care for creation.

One of the things I really value about Berry's writing is that he writes about the environment without being a radical "tree-hugger," because he addresses it holistically. He is deeply thoughtful, reflective, and draws from diverse sources - including his own experience of farming and wandering through the woods. Berry's writing has stood the test of time: the earliest essays in this compilation were written in the mid-60s, and it is striking - at times almost alarming - how much things he wrote in the 60s and 70s resonate today. For instance, in an essay entitled "The Body and the Earth," Berry writes, "... we have cut the cultural ties between sexuality and fertility, just as we have cut those between eating and farming. By 'freeing' food and sex from worry, we have also set them apart from thought, responsibility, and the issue of quality." That was written in 1977; how much more is this true thirty years later!

A few other brief excerpts, just to give you a taste (and hopefully to make you want more):

We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsibly within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone. "The Body and the Earth"

What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? "Health is Membership"

Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine -- which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes. "Christianity and the Survival of Creation."

Berry's writes with great thought and great care - both for the reader and the world. I appreciate his depth, his voice, and his wit that makes me stop and think about things I take for granted. Case in point:
We are invited to "see seven states from atop Lookout Mountain" as if our political boundaries had been drawn in red on the third morning of Creation ("The Body and the Earth"). Thank you for that revelation, Mr. Berry.

In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, several forms of the Prayers of the People (which we read as a congregation each Sunday morning) contain a prayer about creation:

For the good earth which God has given us, and for the wisdom and will to conserve it, let us pray to the Lord. (Form I)

Give us all a reverence for the earth as your own creation, that we may use its resources rightly in the service of others and to your honor and glory. (Form IV)

For the just and proper use of your creation... Lord, hear our prayer. (Form VI)

Reading Berry's essays has compelled me to take these prayers more seriously, and to consider what it really means for us to reverence creation, to use its resources rightly and justly. Indeed Lord, grant us the wisdom and the will to care for it well.

(The moral of the story: I encourage you to get your hands on some of Berry's writing and read and consider it well. You'd be wise to have pen and dictionary in hand while you do. The particular compilation of essays I'm reading, edited by Norman Wirzba, is excellent, and includes all of his best pieces.)