from : Wendell Berry's "The Burden of the Gospels"
Iraq and now Lebanon have proven themselves such mesmerizing distractions I have been crippled by despair. It's time to become functional again. Toward that end, I had a dream last night in which I was attending a lecture on what I can only call Sufi Astronomy. The speaker, an enthralling stranger, talked about "star charts inspired by God" and closed his lecture by saying that if our maps of the solar system were to reflect the real role of the physical world in God's plan, "the earth would be drawn as a moon of a planet called Heaven." I awoke immediately after he spoke those words and saw them as an affirmation of the following passage from a Wendell Berry speech given last summer called "The Burden of the Gospels." Reading it for the first time yesterday, itt shattered my obdurate funk of the last few weeks. My encounter with Wendell made me return to a locus of thought and action where I can again be effective and, thinking of my wife and friends, tolerable.
NOW that I have come out against materialism, I fear that I will be expected to say something in favor of spirituality. But if I am going to go on in the direction of what Jesus meant by "life" and "more abundtantly," then I have got to avoid that duality of matter and spirit at all costs.
As every reader knows, the Gospels are overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of human life, of life in the human commonwealth. In the Sermon on the Mount and in other places Jesus is asking his followers to see that the way to more abundant life is the way of love. We are to love one another, and this love is to be more comprehensive than our love for family and friends and tribe and nation. We are to love our neighbors though they may be strangers to us. We are to love our enemies. And this is to be a practical love; it is to be practised, here and now. Love evidently is not just a feeling but is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another. The way of love is indistinguishable, moreover, from the way of freedom. We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of emnity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another--that surely would be to have life more abundantly.
And where more than in the Gospels' teaching about love do we see that famously estranged pair, matter and spirit, melt and flow together? There was a s Samiritan who came upon one of his enemies, a Jew, laying wounded beside the road. And the Samiritan had compassion on the Jew and bound up his wounds and took care of him. Was this help spritiual or material? Was the Samaritan's compassion earthly or heavenly? If those questions confuse us, that is only because we have for so long allowed ourselves to believe, as if to divide reality impartially between science and religion, that material life and spiritual life, earthly life and hevaenly life, are two diferent things.
To get unconfused, let us go to a further and even more interesting question about the parable of the Smaritan: Why? Why did the Samaritan reach out to love his enemy, a Jew, who happened to be his neighbor? Why was the unbounding of this love so important to Jesus?
We might reasonably answer, remembering Genesis 1:27, that all humans, friends and enemies alike, have the same dignity, deserve the same respect, and are worthy of the same compassion because they are, all alike, made in God's image. That is enough of a mystery, and it implies enough obligation, to waylay us a while. It is certainly something we need to bear anxiously in mind. But it is also too human-centered, too potentially egotistical, to leave alone.
I think Jesus recommened the Samiritan's loving-kindness, what certain older writers call "holy living," simply as a matter of propriety, for the Samiritan was living in what Jesus understood to be a holy world. The foreground of the Gospels is occupied by human beings and the issues of their connection to one another and to God. But there is a background, and the background is more often than not the world in the best sense of the word, the world as made, approved, loved, sustained, and finally to be redeemed by God. Much of the action and talk of the Gospels takes place outdoors: on mountainsides, lake shores, river banks. in fields and pastures, places populated not only by humans but by animals and plants, both domestic and wild. And these non-human creatures, sheep and lilies and birds, are always represented as worthy of, or as flourishing within, the love and care of God.
To know what to make of this world, we need to look back to the Old Testament. to Genesis, the Psalms, to the preoccupation with the relation of the Israelites to their land that runs through the whole lineage of the prophets. Through all this, much is implied or taken for granted. In only two places that I remember is the always implicit reason--the practical or working relation--of God to the creation plainly stated. Psalm 104:30, addressing God and speaking of the creatures, says, "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created . . ." And, as if in response, Elihu says to Job (34:14-14) that if God "gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together . . ." I have cut Elihu's sentence a little short so as to leave the emphasis on the phrase "all flesh."
Those also are verses that don't require interpretation, but I wamt to stretch them out in paraphrase just to make as plain as possible my reason for quoting them. They are saying that not just huymans but all creatures live by participating in the life of God, by partaking of His spirit and breathing His breath. And so the Smaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God. {REPEAT: And so the Smaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God.}
When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life he means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finit world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all. {REPEAT: His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.}
To be convinced of the sanctity of the world, and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty of desecrating the world and of destroying creation. Amd we ought to be a little terrified to realize that, for the most part and at least for the time being, we are helplessly guilty. It seems as though industrial humanity has brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and to our work. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don't know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon. How could we live without degrading our soils, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could we live without the ozone hole and the hypoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of the fossil fuels? To the offer of more abundant life, we have chosen to respond with the economics of extinction.
If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God's presence in His work and in all His creatures? The answer, we may say, is given in Jesus's teaching about love. But that answers raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern: How are we to make of that love an economic practice?
That question calls for many answers, and we don't know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer will be living and working with a long time--if they are allowed a long time. Meanwhile, may Heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.
--Wendell Berry, from: "The Burden opf the Gospels," a speech given at the first joint convocation of the Lexington Theological Seminary and Bsptist Seminary of Kentucky, Lexinton, KY, on August 30, 2005. Taken from The Way of Ignorance, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006, pages 134-37.
NOW that I have come out against materialism, I fear that I will be expected to say something in favor of spirituality. But if I am going to go on in the direction of what Jesus meant by "life" and "more abundtantly," then I have got to avoid that duality of matter and spirit at all costs.
As every reader knows, the Gospels are overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of human life, of life in the human commonwealth. In the Sermon on the Mount and in other places Jesus is asking his followers to see that the way to more abundant life is the way of love. We are to love one another, and this love is to be more comprehensive than our love for family and friends and tribe and nation. We are to love our neighbors though they may be strangers to us. We are to love our enemies. And this is to be a practical love; it is to be practised, here and now. Love evidently is not just a feeling but is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another. The way of love is indistinguishable, moreover, from the way of freedom. We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of emnity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another--that surely would be to have life more abundantly.
And where more than in the Gospels' teaching about love do we see that famously estranged pair, matter and spirit, melt and flow together? There was a s Samiritan who came upon one of his enemies, a Jew, laying wounded beside the road. And the Samiritan had compassion on the Jew and bound up his wounds and took care of him. Was this help spritiual or material? Was the Samaritan's compassion earthly or heavenly? If those questions confuse us, that is only because we have for so long allowed ourselves to believe, as if to divide reality impartially between science and religion, that material life and spiritual life, earthly life and hevaenly life, are two diferent things.
To get unconfused, let us go to a further and even more interesting question about the parable of the Smaritan: Why? Why did the Samaritan reach out to love his enemy, a Jew, who happened to be his neighbor? Why was the unbounding of this love so important to Jesus?
We might reasonably answer, remembering Genesis 1:27, that all humans, friends and enemies alike, have the same dignity, deserve the same respect, and are worthy of the same compassion because they are, all alike, made in God's image. That is enough of a mystery, and it implies enough obligation, to waylay us a while. It is certainly something we need to bear anxiously in mind. But it is also too human-centered, too potentially egotistical, to leave alone.
I think Jesus recommened the Samiritan's loving-kindness, what certain older writers call "holy living," simply as a matter of propriety, for the Samiritan was living in what Jesus understood to be a holy world. The foreground of the Gospels is occupied by human beings and the issues of their connection to one another and to God. But there is a background, and the background is more often than not the world in the best sense of the word, the world as made, approved, loved, sustained, and finally to be redeemed by God. Much of the action and talk of the Gospels takes place outdoors: on mountainsides, lake shores, river banks. in fields and pastures, places populated not only by humans but by animals and plants, both domestic and wild. And these non-human creatures, sheep and lilies and birds, are always represented as worthy of, or as flourishing within, the love and care of God.
To know what to make of this world, we need to look back to the Old Testament. to Genesis, the Psalms, to the preoccupation with the relation of the Israelites to their land that runs through the whole lineage of the prophets. Through all this, much is implied or taken for granted. In only two places that I remember is the always implicit reason--the practical or working relation--of God to the creation plainly stated. Psalm 104:30, addressing God and speaking of the creatures, says, "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created . . ." And, as if in response, Elihu says to Job (34:14-14) that if God "gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together . . ." I have cut Elihu's sentence a little short so as to leave the emphasis on the phrase "all flesh."
Those also are verses that don't require interpretation, but I wamt to stretch them out in paraphrase just to make as plain as possible my reason for quoting them. They are saying that not just huymans but all creatures live by participating in the life of God, by partaking of His spirit and breathing His breath. And so the Smaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God. {REPEAT: And so the Smaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God.}
When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life he means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finit world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all. {REPEAT: His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.}
To be convinced of the sanctity of the world, and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty of desecrating the world and of destroying creation. Amd we ought to be a little terrified to realize that, for the most part and at least for the time being, we are helplessly guilty. It seems as though industrial humanity has brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and to our work. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don't know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon. How could we live without degrading our soils, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could we live without the ozone hole and the hypoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of the fossil fuels? To the offer of more abundant life, we have chosen to respond with the economics of extinction.
If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God's presence in His work and in all His creatures? The answer, we may say, is given in Jesus's teaching about love. But that answers raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern: How are we to make of that love an economic practice?
That question calls for many answers, and we don't know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer will be living and working with a long time--if they are allowed a long time. Meanwhile, may Heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.
--Wendell Berry, from: "The Burden opf the Gospels," a speech given at the first joint convocation of the Lexington Theological Seminary and Bsptist Seminary of Kentucky, Lexinton, KY, on August 30, 2005. Taken from The Way of Ignorance, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006, pages 134-37.
posted by David Federman @ 5:28 PM
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