Understanding & Faith

…faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.

-- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

-- St. Augustine

I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, “Good-good-good-good-good!” like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith.

-- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

Though there are several, I'm not sure how many other men would rank above Wendell Berry as influencing my adult perspective on many valuable things in life.  I've linked several observations from him that I've collected over the years...here.

Sit down. Be quiet. Stay Away...

Simplify. How does one do it these days?

This week I am reading from two sources, one Paula Huston and another Wendell Berry.  I find a strange dance underway between what I assume to be two strangers to each other.  Each, however, calling us away from the economies that now so dominate our lives.  

i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

-- Wendell Berry

I become increasingly convinced that we must choose to create space in our lives. It too rarely will choose for us. But we are feeding on something unhealthy by staying in the panic-ed pace of our lives. Doing more is not being more. In fact, it is probably 'being' less. Look for the things that compel us towards hyper-activity; even at the so-called spiritual things that do so. What is really driving that?

Take time...and create some space.  Simplify.

Passive Receptacles

From an interview published by The Sun Magazine:

Fearnside: It seems that we’ve been separated from our local communities by radio, television, and now the Internet. Because these forces come from outside the communities, they often don’t reflect the communities’ values. How can we stay plugged in to information and yet preserve our local connections?

Berry: I don’t know. There’s not much you can do, unless you want to disconnect yourself from those electronic gadgets. I pretty much do. Tanya and I haven’t had a television for a long time; people used to give tv sets to our children, because they felt sorry for us. I think we were given three over the years. I listen to the radio some. I don’t have a computer, and I almost never see a movie. To me this isolation is necessary. It keeps my language available to me in a way that I don’t think it would be if I were full of that public information all the time.

Fearnside: My wife and I enjoy watching movies on dvd, but we find that most mass-media offerings aren’t worth our time.

Berry: To make yourself a passive receptacle for information, or whatever anybody wants to pour into you, is a bad idea. To be informed used to be a meaningful experience; it meant “to be formed from within.” But information now is just a bunch of disconnected data or entertainment and, as such, may be worthless, perhaps harmful. As T.S. Eliot wrote a long time ago, information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.

-- Wendell Berry

There are several things to consider here, including our formation.  I think our society says that you need this outside information to be informed, implying even 'to be formed well' (we might even call it something like 'being educated').  But, what if, like in many things, this is simply a lie that perpetuates our problems.  What if we need less of the outside and more of the 'formed from within'  to be who we really need to be?  ...so that we don't become passive receptacles.

The Outrageous

If you’ve lost the capacity to be outraged by what’s outrageous, you’re dead. Somebody ought to come and haul you off.

-- Wendell Berry

Are we outraged by anything any more? We are shocked by so little. We feed on things that should shock as if it were a normal diet. Not unlike the Hunger Games, we make nearly everything entertainment and become callous to what is deeply wrong. Like this day represents in the spiritual calendar, we view it largely as just one more day to get something done or with which to amuse ourselves.

We ought to be hauled off...I'd say, to the dessert until we can see things for the way they really are again...what is good and what isn't.

Earth Day 2021 - "Together, We Can Restore Our Earth"

The Earth is what we all have in common.

-- Wendell Berry

earthday.org

In times like these, our prayer may need to be expressive and embodied, visceral and vocal. How else can we pray with our immense anger and grief? How else can we pray about ecocide, about the death that humanity is unleashing upon Mother Earth and upon ourselves? How else can we break through our inertia and despair, so that we don’t shut down and go numb? . . . . 

I’ve taken to praying outdoors. I go outside, feel the good earth beneath my feet and the wind on my face, and I sing to the trees—to oak and beech, hemlock and pines. Making up the words and music as I go along, I sing my grief to the trees that are going down, and my grief for so much more—for what we have lost and are losing, and for what we are likely to lose. I sing my outrage about these beautiful old trees being cut to the roots, their bodies chipped to bits and hauled away to sell. I sing my fury about the predicament we’re in as a species. I sing my protest of the political and corporate powers-that-be that drive forward relentlessly with business as usual, razing forests, drilling for more oil and fracked gas, digging for more coal, expanding pipeline construction, and opening up public lands and waters to endless exploitation, as if Earth were their private business and they were conducting a liquidation sale. I sing out my shame to the trees, my repentance and apology for the part I have played in Earth’s destruction and for the part my ancestors played when they stole land and chopped down the original forests of the Native peoples who lived here. I sing my praise for the beauty of trees and my resolve not to let a day go by that I don’t celebrate the precious living world of which we are so blessedly a part. I’m not finished until I sing my determination to renew action for trees and for all of God’s Creation.... 

So our prayer may be noisy and expressive, or it may be very quiet. It may be the kind of prayer that depends on listening in stillness and silence with complete attention: listening to the crickets as they pulse at night, listening to the rain as it falls, listening to our breath as we breathe God in and breathe God out, listening to the inner voice of love that is always sounding in our heart. A discipline of contemplative prayer or meditation can set us free from the frantic churn of thoughts and feelings and enable our spirit to rest and roam in a vaster, wilder space. 

-- Margaret Bullitt-Jonas 

Love and grief go hand in hand. Sometimes it is the deep grief we feel during loss that awakens us to the depth and sincerity of our love. 

-- Richard Rohr

Randoms...from Others

Great necessities call out great virtues.

-- Abigail Adams

Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

We fall into the rhythm of our rituals and think they’ll last forever, even if nothing does.   Like most good things, they often end before we know they’re over.

-- Matt Labash

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

-- Wendell Berry

...find the thread? (Prior Randoms...from Others).

Veils

We pity Muslim women for wearing veils, yet almost every face in this country is veiled by suspicion and fear.

-- Wendell Berry

Why is this? How have we ended up this way? Is the answer related to the artificial habits of engagement we have learned to accept as normal?

Utah: Bryce Canyon National Park, Fairyland Loop

Walked 18 miles of amazing views today:




We have the world to live in on the condition that we take care of it.  And to take care of it, we have to know it.  And to know it and be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

-- Wendell Berry

I dream of a quiet man

I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.

-- Wendell Berry, Given Poems, pg 70

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-- Wendell Berry

Our Humanity

We better get our collective humanity back before it’s too late.

Sometimes it takes a crisis to re-find it.  I'd say we're in one, despite the many claims to the contrary.

Here's one example of how it happens...What Neighbors Do, by Barbara Brown Taylor.  There, of course, are many others, like this one on Resistence, Wendell Berry Style.

But, the overall lack of it has been siphoned off for years under the banner of technology and 401Ks.  We've already lost more than we know.  But, we can start getting it back any time we want to — some are already trying...hard.

Now is the time to ask more conscious and serious questions about what it means to look out for each other, our relationship with power, and how to govern accordingly (as U2 reminds us, what we've been seeing isn't the humanity we need).

Before it's too late....

Poetry

We have a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without ever reading or hearing about.

-- Wendell Berry

Soul - Eternal Piece of Private Property?

Modern Christianity, then, has become as specialized in its organizations as other modern organizations, wholly concentrated on the industrial shibboleths of ‘growth',’ counting its success in numbers, and on the very strange enterprise of ‘saving’ the individual, isolated, and disembodied soul. Having witnessed and abetted the dismemberment of the households, both human and natural, by which we have our being as creatures of God, as living souls, and having made light of the great feast and festival of Creation to which we were bidden as living souls, the modern church presumes to be able to save the soul as an eternal piece of private property. It presumes moreover to save the souls of people in other countries and religious traditions, who are often saner and more religious than we are. And always the emphasis is on the individual soul. Some Christian spokespeople give the impression that the highest Christian bliss would be to get to Heaven and find that you are the only one there—that you were right and all the others wrong. Whatever its twentieth-century dress, modern Christianity as I know it is still at bottom the religion of Miss Watson, intent on a dull and superstitious rigmarole by which supposedly we can avoid going to ‘the bad place’ and instead go to ‘the good place.’ One can hardly help sympathizing with Huck Finn when he says, ‘I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it.’.

-- Wendell Berry

Among other things, an interesting adjective is used here, in an effort to make a strong and (I believe) well-intentioned, if not astute, point.  Note the use of the word 'modern' Christianity...as opposed to something else.  Given the voracity of these charges, what is the Christianity that became modern?

There is risk here.  A risk that such things take on a philosophical transcendence from which a return to the utility of daily living never occurs.  What action is needed?  What action is required?  What keeps this from just being another amusement of intellectual controversy?

What We Need Is Here

Poem for the week -- “What we need is here”:

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here. 

-- Wendell Berry

The earth and heavens tell us everything we need to know.

The Peace of Wild Things

'Poem for the week' -- "The Peace of Wild Things":   

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-- Wendell Berry

So Crucial Right Now

I cannot even begin to describe how resonant I am with the spirit of this (it is like describing the soul of my ‘Poem for the Week’ series):

This summer, on a lark, I took a course on poetry geared toward Christian leaders. Twelve of us met over Zoom to read poems and discuss the intersection of our faith, vocations and poetry.

We compared George Herbert’s “Prayer” to Christian Wiman’s “Prayer.” We discussed Langston Hughes’s “Island,” Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” and Scott Cairns’s “Musée” to examine suffering and the problem of evil. We read about Philip Larkin’s fear of death and what he sees as the failures of religious belief in his poem “Aubade.” It was my favorite part of the summer.

In our first class, we took turns sharing what drew us to spend time with poetry. I clumsily tried to explain my longing for verse: I hunger for a transcendent reality — the good, the true, the beautiful, those things which somehow lie beyond mere argument. Yet often, as a writer, a pastor and simply a person online, I find that my life is dominated by debate, controversy and near strangers in shouting matches about politics or church doctrine. This past year in particular was marked by vitriol and divisiveness. I am exhausted by the rancor.

In this weary and vulnerable place, poetry whispers of truths that cannot be confined to mere rationality or experience. In a seemingly wrecked world, I’m drawn to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Autumn” and recall that “there is One who holds this falling/Infinitely softly in His hands.” When the scriptures feel stale, James Weldon Johnson preaches through “The Prodigal Son” and I hear the old parable anew. On tired Sundays, I collapse into Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems and find rest.

I’m not alone in my interest in this ancient art form. Poetry seems to be making a comeback. According to a 2018 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the number of adults who read poetry nearly doubled in five years, marking the highest number on record for the last 15 years. The poet Amanda Gorman stole the show at this year’s presidential inauguration, and her collection “The Hill We Climb” topped Amazon’s best-seller list.

There is not a simple or singular reason for this resurgence. But I think a particular gift of poetry for our moment is that good poems reclaim the power and grace of words.

Words seem ubiquitous now. We carry a world of words with us every moment in our smartphones. We interact with our family and friends through the written word in emails, texts and Facebook posts. But with our newfound ability to broadcast any words we want, at any moment, we can cheapen them.

“Like any other life-sustaining resource,” Marilyn Chandler McEntyre writes in her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, “language can be depleted, polluted, contaminated, eroded and filled with artificial stimulants.” She argues that language needs to be rescued and restored, and points us to the practice of reading and writing poetry as one way of doing so. Poems, she says, “train and exercise the imagination” to “wage peace” because “the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.”

Indeed, in our age of social media, words are often used as weapons. Poetry instead treats words with care. They are slowly fashioned into lanterns — things that can illuminate and guide. Debate certainly matters. Arguments matter. But when the urgent controversies of the day seem like all there is to say about life and death or love or God, poetry reminds me of those mysterious truths that can’t be reduced solely to linear thought.

Poetry itself can engage in smart debate, of course. Yet even didactic poetry — poetry that makes an argument — does so in a more creative, meticulous and compelling way than we usually see in our heated public discourse.

Another reason that I think we are drawn to poetry: Poems slow us down. My summer poetry class teacher, Abram Van Engen, an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, reminded me that poetry is the “art of paying attention.” In an age when our attention is commodified, when corporations make money from capturing our gaze and holding it for as long as possible, many of us feel overwhelmed by the notifications, busyness and loudness of our lives. Poetry calls us back to notice and attend to the embodied world around us and to our internal lives.

In this way, poetry is like prayer, a comparison many have made. Both poetry and prayer remind us that there is more to say about reality than can be said in words though, in both, we use words to try to glimpse what is beyond words. And they both make space to name our deepest longings, lamentations, and loves. Perhaps this is why the poetry of the Psalms became the first prayer book of the church.

I am trying to take up more poetry reading in my daily life. Reading new poems can be intimidating, but I figure that the only way to get poetry really wrong is to avoid it altogether. It helps that poetry is often short and quick to read so I fit it into the corners of my day — a few minutes in bed at night or in the lull of a Saturday afternoon.

During the past school year, with my kids home because of Covid precautions, we would pile books of poetry on our table once a week (Shel Silverstein, Shakespeare, Nikki Grimes, Emily Dickinson), eat cookies, and read poetry aloud. I now try to always keep some books of verse around.

In one of my very favorite poems, “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes of a beauty that is “past change.” In this world where our political, technological and societal landscape shifts at breakneck speed, many of us still quietly yearn for a beauty beyond change. Poetry stands then as a kind of collective cry beckoning us beyond that which even our best words can say.

-- Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times Newsletters

4 Observations (from Others)

We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power.

-- Bell Hooks

I believe that in times such as these, we are all being called to listen. 

-- Barbara Otero-López

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, 
we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, 
we have begun our real journey. 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. 
The impeded stream is the one that sings. 

-- Wendell Berry

How shall we negotiate postmodernity without inner strength?

-- Barbara Holmes

Prior 4 Observations (from Others).

"Loyal To Soil"

 Emma Donahoe sent me a link to this reading, 'The Ground of Hospitality'.  She is now working in Washington on a farm where the motto is "Loyal to Soil".  This is a must read, as it considers so many beautiful dimensions of our relationship with life and death through the soil of the earth.  Sobering.  Liberating.

Reminds me of the hidden regenerative power of the cycle that is built into things and points to the life that lives on after death occurs physically, including some of the more recent examples posted here -- Jean Vanier, Rachel Held Evans, among a few.


From the reading referenced above -- "Enriching The Earth":

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past season
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

-- Wendell Berry

Like A Moron

...begins where we dare to enter into foreign, scary places. ...happens when we're willing to dare looking stupid; or, in the words of Wendell Berry in Citizenship Papers, to "take the risks of amateurism." Witness goes hand-in-hand with entering into foreign discussions that don't happen in the church. Otherwise, the church will die talking to itself.

When we are interested solely in winning the dialogue, we will stop entering into them because we don't feel we can win them. As my friend Dr. Dan Brunner has said: Christians don't know what to talk about when we aren't talking about conversion or theology. This is indicative of a church culture that deals with its ignorance by silence when it should deal with its ignorance through dialogue.

There is something profoundly scary about throwing yourself into a foreign field where you know nothing because you risk looking like a moron. We prefer safe conversations about faith because they make us look smart. But it is only in the process of looking like a moron that one can receive new wisdom and insight.  ...continue this helpful reading here.

-- A.J. Swoboda