Remembering Wendell Berry - September 3

Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 37:1-18; PM Psalm 37:19-42; Job 16:16-22,17:1,13-16; Acts 13:1-12; John 9:1-17

A dear friend of mine gave Anne and me one of the most interesting wedding gifts we received: two books.

The first was Follow Me Down, a rather gruesome story of crime, faith, passion, and redemption by the beloved Memphis writer Shelby Foote. Foote, of course, is far better known for his monumental history of the American Civil War.

The other was Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry’s novel about a young man who leaves seminary and eventually becomes the barber in a small Kentucky town. Since I was preparing to leave for seminary myself only a few months later, I wondered whether Jonathan was offering me a little career advice.

That novel was my introduction to Berry, who would become arguably the most influential writer on my faith. His novels, poetry, and essays have profoundly shaped the way I see God at work in the world. More particularly, they have shaped my understanding of what God calls us to be: people rooted in creation, attentive to the places we inhabit, and responsible for the ways we care for the earth and for one another.

Berry was born in rural Kentucky in 1934. After landing one of the most prestigious jobs in the country at NYU, he resigned much to the dismay of the literary world and returned to his home state in the 1960s. Berry settled on a farm near Port Royal, where he spent the rest of his life. He was at once a poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, conservationist, and social critic. Across all those vocations, he returned to a common conviction: that the health of the land, the health of our communities, and the health of our souls cannot finally be separated.

Wendell Berry died this week at the age of ninety-two, and I grieve a world without his voice. His words have often challenged and reoriented my life. He once wrote that we have made the mistake of assuming that whatever is good for us must also be good for the world. Instead, he argued, we must learn to trust that what is good for the world will ultimately be good for us as well.

Berry’s poem “Original Sin” is especially beautiful. It approaches sin from a different angle than today’s reading from the Gospel of John, yet it also helps illuminate that reading.

In John 9, the disciples encounter a man who has been blind from birth. They ask Jesus whose sin caused his blindness: his own or that of his parents. Jesus rejects the premise of their question. The man’s suffering is not a punishment that can be neatly traced to someone’s wrongdoing. It will instead become an occasion for the works of God to be revealed.

 That does not mean, however, that sin is unreal. As Christians, we recognize something within humanity that resists God—something ancient and deeply rooted that damages our relationships with God, with one another, and with creation. Berry gives voice to that mystery:

Original Sin

Well, anyhow, it preserves us from the pride

of thinking we invented sin ourselves

by our originality, that famous modern power.

In fact, we have it from the beginning

of the world by the errors of being born,

being young, being old, causing pain

to ourselves, to others, to the world, to God

by ignorance, by knowledge, by intention,

by accident. Something is bad the matter

here, informing us of itself, handing down

its old instruction. We know it

when we see it, don’t we? Innocence

would never recognize it. We need it

too, for without it we would not know

forgiveness, goodness, gratitude,

that fund of grace by which alone we live.

—Wendell Berry, Given: Poems (2005)

Sin is not a simple explanation for suffering, and suffering is not proof of someone’s guilt. But our blindness, our inability to see God, one another, and creation as clearly as we should, is real. The good news of John’s Gospel is that our blindness need not have the final word. Like the man beside the road, we can be encountered by Christ. Our eyes can be opened, our lives can be changed, and the works of God can be revealed in us.

And even our recognition of sin can become, as Berry suggests, a doorway into forgiveness, goodness, gratitude, and “that fund of grace by which alone we live.”

Thanks be to God. 

John+

Question for Self-Reflection: Where does sin invite you into a deeper relationship with God?