Wendell Berry:
The difference between rights granted by a government and rights given by “our Creator” is critical, for it is the difference between rights that are absolute and rights that are contingent upon the whim of those in power.
Archive for the 'Wendell Berry' Category
For the second year in a row, my plan is to be out of the country this 4th of July. So, no getting together with family. Still, I thought of this Wendell Berry poem in advance. If you are getting together with family this weekend for a juicy hamburger and a slice of watermelon, maybe think about this poem by Wendell Berry.
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“I tremble with gratitude
for my children and their children
who take pleasure in one another.
At our dinners together,
the dead enter and pass among us
in living love and in memory.
And so the young are taught.”
Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow:
But of course the story of my life is not finished yet. I will not live to tell the end of it.
My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it.
Jayber Crow is the barber in Wendell Berry’s recommended fictional community of Port William. As such he witnesses how life and circumstances sometimes transform people . . .And, in that sense, there is a parallel between Jayber Crow’s job of being a barber and mine as a pastor.
But you could not be where I was with experiencing many such transformations. One of your customers, one of your neighbors (let us say), is a man know to be more or less a fool, a big talker, and one day he comes into your shop and you have heard and you see that he is dying even as he is standing there looking at you, and you can see his his eyes that (whether he admits it or not) he knows it, and all of a sudden everything is changed. You seem no longer to be standing together in the center of time. Now you are on time’s edge, looking offing into eternity. And this man, your foolish neighbor, your friend and brother, has shed somehow the laughter that followed him through the world, and has assumed the dignity and the strangeness of a traveler departing forever. Jayber Crow, page 129.
See also, “We’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.”’ “Living long won’t kill you, not for a long time.” And, “Take a rest in Port William fiction.”
If you’re looking for good fiction, I commend to you Wendell Berry. Jayber Crow is a wonderful place to begin.
Burley Coulter is the man in Berry fiction. My favorite quote may be the one found in this post . . .Or, in this one. But, here is another quality Burley Coulter response.
They found a certain wondrous glee in the joke of getting old, and they varied it endlessly.
“Age,” said River Bill Thacker toward the end of a conversation to the general effect that time, contrary to expectation, made old men out of young ones. “Age has more more for my morals that Methodism ever did.”
“Well,” Burley said, “thinking maybe of his mother’s years of dying away by bits,” some people live a long time.”
Catching his tone, Bill said, “What’s the matter with living a long time? It ain’t going to kill you.”
“No,” Burley said. “Not for a long time.”
I’m an “avoracious” reader as Barney Fife once said. In addition to theology and blogs, I read a lot of fiction. Rarely do I recommend fiction in posts. I make an exception for Wendell Berry. If you are looking for reading that will help you think carefully about life in the 21st century, then read Berry’s books about Port William, a fictional community in Kentucky.
For an explanation of why you should read Wendell Berry, read this article in Christianity Today (click here). I am not as high on Berry as these authors – - I don’t think he is the prophet we most need to hear – - still, his perspective is well worth considering.
There are a number of Port William books. I would recommend beginning with Hannah Coulter. It’s short – - you could read it in a few hours, and yet profound. An excerpt:
This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed. So close to the end now, what do I look forward to? ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ Some morning, I pray, I’ll have the good happiness of ‘the man who woke up dead,’ who Burley Coulter used to tell about. Wendell Berry. Hannah Coulter, page 5.
You can see other Wendell Berry titles in my bookstore (click here).
From Pilgrim’s Progress where the “river” is death:
Now I further saw, that betwixt them and the gate was a river; but there was no bridge to go over, and the river was very deep. At the sight, therefore, of this river the pilgrims were much stunned; but the men that went with them said, You must go through, or you cannot come at the gate.
The pilgrims then began to inquire if there was no other way to the gate. To which they answered, Yes; but there hath not any, save two, to wit, Enoch and Elijah, been permitted to tread that path since the foundation of the world, nor shall until the last trumpet shall sound.
Or, in the words of Wendell Berry’s, Burley Coulter:
We’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.
Ready?
Psalm 90:12, So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
It isn’t that a bunch of intellects actually show up for coffee. I listen to them speak off the printed page. Books are stacked all around me at church and home and I turn from one to the other as though it was someone else’s turn to talk. During the sermons, I don’t tell you about all the influences during the week. It would be a distraction. But, I thought for this week (especially given the nature of the topic) you might benefit from knowing some of the people that I invited into my study.
Christopher J.H. Wright recently wrote a book called The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith. Wright is one of the most brilliant-living Old Testament scholars. Per the web, he is “an Irishman who lives in London, with his heart firmly planted in the Majority World! Chris, with his wonderful wife Liz alongside, has pastored a local parish church, taught at a top seminary in India, served as President of a key Christian college, and authored a dozen books. Chris also serves as Chair of the Lausanne Committee’s Theological Education Commission and as honorary president of the Tearfund in the UK.”
Tremper Longman III is an Old Testament professor at Westminster (Per Servicemaster, he is now at Westmont) . Longman wrote, God is a Warrior and in the book, Show Them No Mercy: 4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide. If you get really interested in the topic of this sermon, then you will want to read this book.
The British scholar Richard Hess wrote a commentary on Joshua I consulted. I know little about Hess. I benefited from what he wrote. I wrote down this quote and we’ll get to it in the sermon, “Christ takes upon himself the sin of the world and becomes the victim of the holy war that God wages against sin (2 Cor 5:21) (Hess, 46).” I also have a commentary by a former Calvin professor named Woudstra.
Wendell Berry writes both fiction and essays. He farms in Kentucky. His books consider how modernity is reshaping life. Berry is part of a Baptist church though his writings are not theologically explicit or sophisticated in the manner of Flannery O’Connor. Berry takes issue with individualism and modernity and by virtue of that interest was sitting at the table in my study part of the week. (I actually had to go home and get him at lunch). I listened to Berry through both his essays and his fiction. Berry refuses to have a computer. His wife types his for him on a Royal typewriter.
I have been thinking this week too about Flannery O’Connor, who wrote fiction. Catholic, she was more theological than Wendell Berry (and harder to read too). She died when she was only 39. In addition to attending the University of Iowa (despite being a Southerner through and through) she was a literary genius. Miss O’Connor suffered terribly physically, but her writing has a depth because of it. A Wheaton professor, Jill Palaez Baumgaertner has helped me understand O’Connor. See Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring. She and I swapped e-mails this week.
Justin Taylor is a blogger who works at Crossway. He is the managing editor for the ESV study Bible. He wrote a post, “How Could God Command Genocide?” which I reread for this sermon. I know Justin just a little personally through my relationship with Crossway.
Dan Block is a professor at Wheaton. I have spent two different study retreats with him. I consulted an unpublished handout he wrote that has the title, The Ethics of Israel’s Conquest of Canaan.
The book, Hard Sayings of the Bible, by Walt Kaiser (he handed me my doctoral diploma), Davids, Bruce, and Brauch is a good one to think about owning. It is published by IVP.
Have you ever worn yourself out traveling between the hills?
Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth. Wendell Berry in Nathan Coulter.
