On the night of August 31st, I was helping my second oldest son with homework when my wife suddenly announced that Wendell Berry had died. I didn’t cry out when she relayed this; I didn’t begin weeping. But a heaviness gripped my heart that one who had so influenced me was now gone.
I am not a disciple of Berry’s in any conventional sense, nor am I his friend save in the way one becomes when they read and profit from someone over years. I was wonderfully dashed to pieces and put back together by Berry’s writing: the novels and the essays, of course, but especially, surprisingly, the poems.
What I have to show for learning from him may not seem like much, but on the scale of my life, in my affections and in my habits, it is substantial enough. I think I have appropriated my inevitable death in such a way that I live a little more simply and more for the sake of others while I am yet alive.
I have taken steps to rely less upon digital tools, and I have enjoyed the clarity and the fruitfulness that has resulted from more analog methods. I think I not only know but also feel a little bit more the satisfaction of working outside on something I helped to grow. I scarcely exaggerate when I call it a miracle that I have helped to plant a pumpkin patch and to keep chickens in the backyard. I, who have been so afraid to get my hands dirty in the past, always trying to quarantine impurities and be at the ready for obsessive-compulsive habits and for screens.
It was Berry who drove home to me how handwriting was a point at which thought and the body converged for the good. This is a window into the entire complex of things Berry cared about and that I have come to see are deeply important. His essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” delivers the epochal summary statement that “the danger most immediately to be feared in technological progress is the degradation and obsolescence of the body.”
You may recognize the truth of that testimony, but do you see how it bears fruit in writing by hand? I didn’t at first, but I was profoundly changed by his assertion that “my handwritten pages have a homemade, handmade look to them that both pleases me in itself and suggests the possibility of ready correction. It looks hospitable to improvement.”
Writing out reflections and drafts by hand has profited me enormously. But his remarks about composition bleed over into life more broadly considered. Berry has never lacked for angry responses when he published something, because people, as a whole, do not like the challenge of a life that is better lived.
You need only read the letters attacking and insulting him following the publication of his brief essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” Some of these were included in the version of the essay published as part of What Are People For? There is a fear in them that spills over into bitterness and rancor. And why? Because Berry sets out a series of principles consistent with a truth that people do not want to hear, and because it means what they are doing is not good.
Part of Berry’s usefulness to me is precisely this, that he constantly held up a mirror to me and showed how far from my professed ideals I fell. No, it doesn’t feel particularly good. But that’s not the point of everything, is it?
I think I have matured enough to recognize that that feeling is due more to my inadequacy than to how impossible those ideals are. Berry’s witness agitated all who read him at every point along the sweep of our accommodation to a pernicious fantasy. We dislike Berry because we have told ourselves that how we are is fine, even though we ourselves know it is not.
The human condition being what it is, it should not surprise us that our complaints about our situation are often accompanied by hostility, rather than hospitality to improvement. We constantly live as contradictions. How many of us spurn other possibilities and simply settle for a different law? There is always a master to whom we turn to derive a sense of accomplishment and equilibrium. Why do we not listen more to the dissatisfactions of our heart and take the hopeful risk of a new affection?
When we encounter an ideal, we are confronted not only over the shape of our lives up to that moment but also the inclination of our hearts as well. An ideal unmistakably asserts there is a better way to be than how we are conducting ourselves now.
Recognizing its demand, we may feel shame for falling short of its vision and decide it is not only impossible but insulting that it should address us. We then settle once again for the pit we have longed to escape. Or we may say in our hearts, “If that’s what I must be, then I will be.” But even then, there are two pathways out of this. Some will try to take on precisely what Berry or Bach or Ignatius did and find they cannot. The question is, will they be shattered by the truth that they can only do what they can in their setting, or will they make idols of such figures and refuse to compromise with the limits reality has imposed upon them here and now?
All of us must answer this because none of us is ever absolved from having to live. Why do we feel as though our fatigue is stronger than the grace of God? Or that we should never be challenged out of spiritual lethargy?
The gospel is only ever for the thick-skulled and hard-hearted, for the apathetic and inadequate. So it is for you and for me. And it frees us to tell the truth. The primary reason I am afraid of admonitions to do differently is that I am a coward. I lack, both in ability and in merit. Some part of me knows the truth of this.
But too often, I think, we stop there. The justification of the ungodly is so astonishing because the ability and the merit of another are reckoned as my own. But it’s not a fiction that leaves me the same as when I encountered it. One is declared righteous, and then Jesus’ own agency is shared with them by the Spirit, unlocking doors over time as they are tried in the Spirit with the daring of Jesus.
We complain of having too little or no agency, and there is truth to this. But what is not true is the idea that we only ever have the same amount of agency we began with, precisely because a new horizon of thought, feeling, and action becomes possible through partaking of Christ. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” Paul adoringly proclaims (Gal 2:20). Paul lives and acts, and yet it is not only Paul to whom these things are attributed but also the Christ who loved Paul and gave himself over to death for him. The righteousness of God is the power that reaches out to us and in us to aspire to something better, something fulfilling.
***
I remember telling some friends seven years ago that one of my fantasies was to lay down on a forest trail in a light rain and not worry about my clothes getting wet or dirty. That was an almost eschatological vision for someone like me who had allowed OCD to ravage his life. And now, this year, I derived tremendous satisfaction from tilling the soil in preparation for planting our pumpkins.
You and I are not good gauges of what we are capable of, either for good or for evil. You and I tend to equate the feeling of a thing’s difficulty with its impossibility. We bemoan not so much that the next good we are called to do is beyond us but that it isn’t as easy as the grime to which we are accustomed.
Justification, really, is the gift that allows the pitifully little I am capable of right now to count as more than it appears to be in and of itself, to bear fruit the normal metrics say should not be possible, to unlock greater capability and greater agency in me.
If justification frees us to love, this really amounts to a freedom to live with the truth that I am not the center of the universe, and that what I think I can handle and what I will find myself handling do not coincide. Love means that others deserve as much consideration as my preferences and my needs, and that many of my “needs” may not be as necessary as I tell myself they are.
None of us does this constantly with full fervor at all times. Nevertheless, if one does not want to be better, if one does not wish to do or be more than their givens, then one does not have love.
Berry would have balked at comparisons between him and Jesus, but I will draw one anyway. People have strong reactions to Wendell and to Jesus because both announce cataclysmic things that are true. People resent the clarity of their stances because they are comfortable with the way things are, regardless of how crummy and horrifying and dehumanizing they are. We feel impure as we consider their positions — as we should — but treat this feeling as evidence we should not budge. Both of them present us with the way things are and with an alternative.
But it is Jesus who asks us: What must you do next if you are already forgiven for not having done it?
Jesus allows you to feel that tension. He confronts you with a different way and comforts those who wish to walk this way rather than the other. He embodies faithfulness and shows the humanity and loveliness of this alternative. And he is overjoyed when you give your five loaves instead of holding onto them because you don’t have more to offer right now.
In this light, let us remodulate Saint Paul’s critical question for us in an era of machine-enabled lassitude. Should we vegetate and scroll and consume slop that grace may abound? God forbid! Christ has not rescued us from the hope of something better but from the awful hole we have dug for ourselves. So long as the answer to that question surprises you, I fear you are finding solace not in the gospel but in settling. God wants better for you. And so did Wendell Berry.
Perhaps you will not grow pumpkins or chase chickens around your yard to gather them into the run. All well and good. But I thank God that I can now get my hands dirty for even five minutes because Wendell assured me I would not only be okay but happy. And doggone it, I am much happier than I was when the circle of my life fit comfortably around what I felt capable of. We must never content ourselves with how things are, for God is a God of the impossible.
