Writer, farmer and modern-day prophet Wendell Berry will visit the college where I teach and live this fall, and I'm trying to remain cool and level-headed. For me, that's a challenge because I marvel at his poetic prose that challenges us to hold our spiritual values at the center of our sense of place.
During his short stay, I fear becoming part of an agrarian paparazzi, planning my jogging routes around his campus tour or visit to an Appalachian Studies class. While I plant my fall garden, I visualize him strolling past my on-campus duplex when I'm harvesting kale with my two daughters.
Yes, this hero worship is amusing on some level, if you consider that I'm a 45-year-old mother, writer and academic. But I believe that we need to feel reverence for those voices calling us to put our religious values to work in local communities to sustain God's earth. And I believe that because I am a mother, teacher and a person of faith.
I want my daughters and my students to connect with people who are discussing, writing about and ultimately creating a healthful, sustainable world. I remember when the first fast-food restaurant -- Hardee's -- came to my hometown of Fairhope, Ala., in 1979. Yet my children have never seen a major highway exit in this country without signs signaling the location of every Taco Bell and Burger King within a half-mile radius.
We need alternative road signs and luminaries if we are going to reconnect human communities with places. Berry's writings -- all 30 books of poetry, novels and prose -- provide some direction: "What I stand for is what I stand on," he writes. He implores us to "practice resurrection."
To that end, his life with his wife Tanya on Lanes Landing Farm in Port Royal, Ky., reflects actions that back up his words. Famously, the 77-year-old Berry does not use a computer (my feminist students are surprised to learn that his wife apparently types his manuscripts).
He tackles contentious political issues, such as joining the Feb. 12 sit-in with 14 other activists at the Kentucky governor's office to ask for an end to mountaintop removal. In one YouTube video, Berry wears a blue button-down shirt and tie, while a younger protester in a T-shirt and jeans tweets about the event. Just this month, he joined the voices of Bill McKibben and James Hansen, calling for civil disobedience in protest of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from the tar sands of Canada to Texas.
We can lose our connection to places in one generation, he maintains. I think about this prediction as I watch my students explore ways to regain the local economies described in his writing. On most days, I have more faith than fear, more optimism than skepticism, primarily because of the work of both faith communities and my own students who are letting their spiritual connection to places guide their life's work, whether they consider themselves religious or not.
Here in my current home of Asheville, N.C., First Congregational United Church Of Christ installed 42 solar panels as a public witness to renewable energy. Oakley United Methodist Church started a community garden. Yet, Berry writes that even if we had an unlimited supply of sustainable energy, we would continue to degrade the earth -- until we adapt to local economies that recognize the impossibility of infinite growth as an economic principle.
As a mother whose days are marked by breakfast, work, dinnertime, bath time and bedtime, I have thought about what this means to me on a practical level. I can't come close to replicating Berry's life with a family farm and countless books to my name. But I am making an effort to live in community with others in one place, recognizing that this is my privilege and hence my responsibility.
When my former students grow food, teach children or start businesses like "The Organic Mechanic," I want them to realize that our heroes are real people in place and time. In class, I pass around a hand-written letter, a kind and diplomatic note from Berry declining my invitation to write a preface to my last book. This rejection note thrilled me because it represented an encounter with a real person on a similar journey, rather than some imaginary friend I talk to while gardening.
Watching for modern-day prophets and signposts will help us create the faithful communities we want to inhabit. This is the real work of our daily lives, not only in our imaginations. "There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places," Berry writes.
Now, I think it's time to plant that kale.
Wendell Berry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wendell Berry Takes Back His Papers - NYTimes.com
Wendell Berry on Agriculture and Work - YouTube
Cheers,
-MacConchie
While there are many passages in the Bible that praise the wonders of nature Christians do not dwell on these passages that encourage the reverence of the earth. How often does a Christian pastor preach on respecting the earth's environment? Not the evangelicals for sure. The Church has not given much importance to environment. Fundamentalists and evangelicals associate environmentalism with paganism. Some rabid evangelicals consider environmentalism a deadly 'Green Dragon' and a devil's tool to deceive and mislead believers. The Republicans are deeply influenced by such obscurantist thoughts reflecting their cynical approach towards the environment and their opposition to EPA. Can Christians learn to revere the planet and all that is in it?
I prefer my nature-worshipping unadulterated by a monotheists who can make no sense of a sacred earth when all they really seek is to quit the place and go somewhere better. Or dabble in heresy.
The "empty space," we learned with modern telescopes refers to a void of stars in that area - essentially a tunnel of stars (or no stars)
and one thing which doesn tusually get discussed at church : flushless odorless composting toilets..towns and citie s are only sustainable when without sewers and septic systems
of the flaming autumn
with red and orange
dancing below
in the grassy wind
of the ice blue day
stabbed
by the shafts of
sun hills amid
cold sloshing ponds
darting birds, circling birds
in swirling columns of
invisible air
crying
salty marsh tears
not wanting to leave
but being called by
far off cranes.
Lord let me come back
here if only a mote of
dust, a mole of wind,
a particle of light,
let me crawl in the grass
and be a feast for a red tail
or speared by an egret
even the howl of a coyote
would be enough for me
in this mystery,
this sacred ground,
this all.
One might almost start wondering if this deity even exists or if he is just an invention of humans who want to justify their sayings and doings by evoking some made up higher power.
Also there are humans who "justify their sayings and doings" by saying there is no higher power, thus no real standards of right and wrong, and in the end no one is answerable to anybody.
As for establishing a standard for right and wrong - not that this has anything to do with evidence - no one seems to have any standard. That includes the religious. Religious people are the biggest relativists there are - claiming biblical authority yet following different rules from those spelled out in the bible (which are man made to begin with). Show me a religion that has not justified horrific acts in the name of their "higher power". Show me a religion that has not followed strict dogmatic rules in the past, and that has not changed, modified, renounced, apologized, and forsaken many of these rules, only to claim to somehow still be following divine instructions and to be infallible all over again.
Bless everything that is natural, from kale to corn, from Canada to Katmandu, from the skyscrapers of NYC to the cloudscapes of Fiji, from Chernobyl to the decaying factories in Dansk, from Teflon to solar panels, from the shuttle to Skylab, from vat grown meat to artificial intelligence, from diesel to oil derrick, bless everything that is natural.
For everything is natural. A-men! A-woman! :3