I’m reading a book by Wendell Berry called The Art of the Commonplace and it is totally rocking my world… and I’m only through the Introduction.
What disappoints me is that so few USAmerican christians know of this guy’s work, much less that he is one of our great voices. Check out this quote where he totally bares his soul and frustrations all in one fell swoop:
[Questions about how to know and care for the environment] are also, both in origin and effect, religious. I am uneasy with the term, for such religion as has been openly practiced in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth. It has encouraged people to believe that the world is of no importance, and that their only obligation in it is to submit to certain churchly formulas in order to get to Heaven. And so the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere — to a pursuit of “salvation” that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their lives beyond the life of the world. The Heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately.
The paragraph goes on and its indictment is both scathing and pin pointedly accurate. Amazingly, though, I don’t feel like a wagging finger and furrowed brow are pointed at me as Wendell writes. I feel like this man is talking with me and, while he is deeply passionate in his convictions, they are tempered with the understanding and patience of Jesus.
Another thought from the introduction that has stuck with me is simply this: in the time since Columbus landed in the “New World”, not once have white men in power said “What is this land?” “What is its nature?” “How do we live in this environment?” “What must I do?”. The total lack of these important questions, coupled with half a millenia of subjugating the land to our wishes, whims, and desires, means that we have turned large swaths of this great place into a shadow of their former selves. Worse yet, if we never stop to ask how we live in this place, we may rob ourselves of the joy of harmonious living within Creation.
