(RNS) — I was graced just once in my life by the presence of Wendell Berry, the farmer-poet who died earlier this week at age 92.
Over 20 years ago, I heard Berry speak at the annual conference of the largest professional association for my academic discipline. I was intrigued that someone known for his Christian faith would be invited to speak in a solo session by an organization not known for being terribly friendly to Christians.
If you’ve ever been to an academic conference, you know that attendance at individual sessions varies wildly. I know of panels with one attendee in the room who was not on the panel. A handful in a room is also fairly common. One never knows what to expect, especially at a convention as large as this, with hundreds of sessions over several days. Berry was assigned a good-sized room for his presentation, but as it turns out, the planners should have given him a bigger one. It was a standing-room-only crowd, and when he finished speaking, those who were sitting joined the rest for a standing ovation.
It had been ingrained in me since my early adulthood that Christians were despised and rejected by the world—especially within academia. I had internalized and expected such treatment. And indeed, I had many experiences that confirmed the bias.
But here was a Christian who was being feted and applauded by the very world I had been taught hated us. And let’s be clear: Wendell Berry was not feted and applauded because he tickled ears. His was not a milquetoast faith. Berry fiercely held and advocated convictions aplenty, enough to offend or affirm just about everyone. As I recall, in the reading that gained him such applause that day, he included a line that proclaimed the sanctity of unborn human life — and this in a crowd that statistically would be overwhelmingly and militantly pro-choice. And still they listened.
In his 2011 book, “Another Turn of the Crank,” Berry wrote:
If abortion is wrong, as I believe, it is wrong because it excludes some of our fellow humans from our care. But to think that abortion is wrong is to risk dangerous oversimplification if we cannot follow our thought to its logical conclusion. If we cannot justify violence to unborn human beings, then how can we justify violence to those who are born, or to the world that they are born into?
This single quote encapsulates why Berry did not fit into current categories of “liberal” or “conservative.” Agree or disagree with him, he aimed to be consistent. It is that consistency that leads both progressives and conservatives, as The Nation notes, to admire his writing.
Berry’s consistency was spread not only through his many words, but more importantly, through the way he lived his life.
Berry was a “culture warrior” by any definition of the phrase. He spoke and wrote against the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, mountain-top removal, the rise of agri-business and factory farming, industrialization and nuclear power (being arrested in 1979 for protesting at a nuclear power plant in Indiana). Berry was most critical of the excesses of capitalism and technology over the years as well. All of these are positions that naturally appeal to more progressive folks.
But to look more closely at Berry’s words and his work is to see that his views are rooted in a fundamental conservatism, in the traditional sense of that term, despite the fact that he rejected that label. (That term, like so many others, has become almost meaningless in present-day politics.) Nevertheless, Berry’s essential conservatism can be seen in an interview published in 2012 in which he said, “To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits.”
To conserve requires limits. Even good things — perhaps, especially good things — must have limits. And limits are rooted in purpose.
Indeed, at the heart of Berry’s various causes, all of his writing, and the lifestyle he chose — that of a farmer rooted in the land and in one place for over 60 years — is the essential question of purpose. In his essays, stories and poetry, Berry was always asking some version of the question, “What is this thing (this work, this practice, this action, this institution) for?” In the title of one of his most-known books, he even asks, “What Are People For?”
In this book, Berry talks about the false distinction between work and art. He says he once thought of art as “a refuge” from the troubles of work. But he came to see that the subject of art — for him, poetry, fiction and other writing — but for others of us, perhaps, other forms of making — is our lives. “My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place.”
It may seem obvious that we all live in our places, but Berry’s gift is in helping us to see what has been too obvious, to lift the veil of the familiar, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley famously describes the work of the poet.
One crippling symptom of the disease of modernity is to be absent from the present by always looking toward some future hope, aspiration, goal, to always be working for the weekend or “quitting time,” as Berry observes in “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food.” This tendency to overlook the present leads also to less of a sense of place. Berry models a unified sense of the present, place, work and art. “I no longer ‘go to work,’” Berry continues in “What Are People For?” “If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am ‘at’ my work even when I am not working.”
It might seem that it’s easier to see life, work and art this way when you are a farmer who lives on the farm. Yet, Berry’s invitation to all of us isn’t that literal. We all live in a place. And being fully present in that place — while working, resting, enjoying family, cultivating community and worshipping God — is the purpose of our lives and its subject.
Berry was present at that academic conference decades ago because, before becoming a farmer, he studied and taught English. When he became a farmer, he integrated that learning and way of being into his vocation. His work became the subject of his art, and that art filled volumes.
It is that sort of integrity — that wholeness — that made the man and his work so beloved. As Paul Kingsnorth put it in his recent memorial essay, Berry “actually practiced what he preached.” What he preached and what he practiced was hard. But it was good. We don’t need to be farmers or poets to strive to do the same.
Indeed, the opening lines from Berry’s poem, “How to Be a Poet,” apply to whatever kind of work we might do, wherever we might do it:
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have …
In the making, in the sitting down, in the quietness and in the dependence comes the humility that marked Berry’s life and character most.
Berry’s legacy from both his life and his many works lives on as many, many words on his passing show. But you don’t have to agree with Berry’s views or like his fiction, poetry or essays to recognize that his life was a model for all Christians: We are called to bear witness to what we believe is true with all of our life, for all of our life.
