Berry: Men and Women in Search of Common Ground

Wendell Berry writes in Men and Women in Search of Common Ground of how community can bring trials and suffering, but it is in those very trials that our good hope lies. His says that binding ourselves with the closest relational ties in life offers us the only kind of freedom that has the possibility to bring flourishing.

"These ways of marriage, kinship, friendship, and neighborhood surround us with forbiddings; they are forms of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape. We may be obliged to look on this wish as necessary, for, as I have just implied, these unions are partly shaped by internal pressure. But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness. Our choice may be between a small, human-sized meaning and a vast meaninglessness, or between the freedom of our virtues and the freedom of our vices..."

The highest state of the human person is not freedom from bondage, but rather being tied to places and people with bonds of love the way a root is tied in bondage to the soil. There is a myth in our culture that to rise we must cut our ties with everything that might hold us grounded. It has given us a culture with a tendency towards transience and shallowness, but the problem is that there are good things in life which cannot come except by endurance with a place and with people. The pursuit of the freedom from those ties is the pursuit of an isolation which can suffocate the soul. As Berry says, the only way to escape the pressures of community is to escape into "loneliness and meaninglessness." There is a choice between a freedom that is vast as our every whim, and a freedom that is limited in countless ways by love for things outside the self. In the first freedom there is a hidden bondage because every happy wish dream sours eventually in the bracing air of this broken world. The grass will always look greener on the other side and in the pursuit of it you will never settle and actually begin to live there. In the latter bondage, however, there is a hidden freedom. Though this broken world has a way of breaking down every tie, commitment and faithfulness has a way of bringing in redemption. The work of redemption is a long and painful work, but it is also the only real way to save anything, and it is in the very ties of bondage to real people and real circumstances that we find the freedom of joy, healing, and happiness of human flourishing.

Berry: Think Little

Wendell Berry writes in his essay, Think Little, of the tendency for Americans, who have, according to him, lost their "private life" to think of change in increments of organizations, rather than actually changing the way they live their own lives.

He writes:

"... The citizen who is willing to think little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving a problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work. A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world's future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word. A good farmer who is dealing with the problem of soil erosion on an acre of ground has a sounder grasp of that problem and cares more about it and is probably doing more to solve it than any bureaucrat who is talking about it in general."

There is a lot wrong with this broken world. We can't change it all, but we can make some impact on that small piece of it to which we are called. Our jobs. Our families. Our homes. The ground we build our homes on. Each of our lives extend into many smaller spheres. Berry says, and I believe the Bible would agree, that living faithfully in small, consistent ways has incredible changing power. We have to think little, however. Everyone wants a big place in the story, but in pursuing that large place we may miss out on the small, mundane chances to be faithful unfolding every day around us. The irony here is that if there ever will be a larger work it will only be the collection of many tiny faithfulnesses that grow in a life or in a church or in a community. It may be foolish to imagine having the one without the other, or in longing for a larger work without ever having learned the lesson of small, simple faith.

Berry: Feminism, the Body, and the Machine

Wendell Berry writes in his essay, Feminism, the Body, and the Machine, about another essay he wrote in Harpers in which Berry details his reasons for not choosing to buy a computer. Harpers received several critical responses from readers of Berry's piece and Feminism, the Body, and the machine is a response to his critics. The essay was written in 1989 but is timely today. Berry's themes are exactly what the title would indicate; he responds to feminism, how to body and work interact, and what the machine is doing to human life, which were also the main themes of his criticism. I think the essay is worth reading. Please overlook the irony that I am blogging about someone who refused to buy a computer.

Berry writes:

"... But a computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can't get from other humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more. For a while it seemed to me that every university professor I met told me this. Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily, and too much. I would like to be a better writer, and for that I need help from other humans, not a machine."

This quote struck me as something wonderful because it deals in questioning the underlying assumptions of our culture. It brings up this itching feeling that we have been using the word "need" all wrong. We may not "need" what we think we need. In fact, we may simply want it, and our wanting may be undoing things that should not have been undone.

A culture's technological advances serve its idols. Computers make sense for a lot of reasons, one of which being that our culture idolizes speed, ease, and quantity. Living Christianly in such a culture means living in such a way that questions the underlying assumptions, and finding a way to live under the rule of the real God, not the rule of smaller ones. The Church ought to be different, and anyone who really experiences the Church should experience that difference as something incredibly beautiful - because the difference sifts down like snow from a God who is incredibly beautiful. That challenge lays a question at our feet: how different will we be and why?

Art Wednesday: Interview with Scott Cairns

Scott Cairns is a poet and professor of English at the University of Missouri. I had the chance to talk with him and ask him a few questions about the writing life and the creative process:

A: How do you create a work? How do you live the writing life?
S: Just keep reading. The writing life is primarily a reading life, so you just keep reading. The writing life is healthy so long as you keep reading. As soon as you stop reading and imagine that you are on your own, you are pretty much done. Even if you keep turning out books. The funny thing about those books is that they will sound a lot like the books that came before, and that’s because you are running out of gas.
...I think that is the only way to survive is to have a really vital engagement with the books that precede you. Literature is really a conversation and when you are a writer you have to understand that you are now taking up your part of the conversation. You don’t walk up on a group of your friends and just start yammering, you listen for a while and find out what we are talking about and then you weigh in. That is how literary study is. You engage the conversation and find out what we are talking about, how we are talking about it, what are the ways that we might talk about it. You won’t be eclipsed by the tradition, and you won’t be stuck in a solipsistic, isolated sense of your own self-worth, which you will be if you don’t engage that tradition.

A: How do you live the writing life in the real world?
S: We have to learn not to say things like that. I don’t believe I have ever left the real world. I’ve been an academic for a while, but it feels pretty real to me. I have children and dogs, a mortgage. What’s not real about that?

A: I guess the question is how do you make time for writing?
S: How do you make time for writing now?
A: It’s gets drown out too often.
S: Do you have a prayer life?
A: Yes
S: How do you make time for that?
A: You just make time for it.
S: So you have a discipline? Well maybe that could be the answer. You could develop a discipline for writing that is like your discipline for prayer… The reason I resist the phrase “real world” is that it is so commonplace. I think in many ways a scattered, distracted business world is a lot less real than one in which you are paying attention to your heart and your soul and your mind, and nurturing those things.

A: Your advice to the writer who wants to write but doesn’t know how to begin to go about doing it is to be disciplined and write?
S: To be disciplined and read with your yellow legal pad handy to write down whatever provokes you. It is sort of like writing poems. When it is time to work on writing a poem I always begin with my legal pad and my pencils and I read until something provokes a response. Then I chase that on the page until I run out of gas there and then turn back to reading. It really is a dialogue and conversation which you establish with the text. But it is not the prior authors intentions that you are so intent upon as developing a sense of how whatever it is you are reading provokes you into further creating. It is not like you are going to get through his text some ossified mean it is rather that you honor the text in front of you as vital and as having agency and power.

A: It sounds like you are saying that in order to be original you have to be firmly grounded in others original work.
S: Well sure. My sense of original writing is writing that bears the marks of its origins. And authenticity. The Greek word from which we get authenticity is authentes is an old word that has to do with ceramic work and the mark of the hand. And authentic work has the mark of the hand that shaped it. So authentic and original, yeah, that’s what we want. You have to think of it as a collaborative endeavor.

A: There is an understanding of what the word original means that arises out of prohibitions against plagiarism that puts a separation between what anyone else has done and now what I am putting forth.
S: Yeah, well. I don’t care about that. A good example is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who read a lot and didn’t worry at all about how what he read found its way into what he wrote. Smaller minds did accuse him of plagiarism, mostly out of jealousy I presume, but if you look at what he did he didn’t copy anything. He reworked everything. He was influenced and then kept the river flowing. Every art has a tradition. To understand a discrete work of art in the midst of a tradition requires, unless you don’t care about honoring it the way should, an awareness of the art that led to it. There are sort of naïve practitioners of given arts who don’t know anything and they are mostly a product of good marketing than anything really worthy. The really interesting artists to me are the ones who know what came before them and have engaged it and take what they want from that tradition and employ it. Their own visions are influenced by the tradition.

A: What is the relationship between talent and training?
S: I don’t know if I believe in talent. I guess there have been times when I have had students who have really really wanted it but couldn’t get it, so maybe there is some fire or gift that is required. I kind of think not though. I prefer to think that we are all called to something and if we must pursue that with all of our energy. In the case of writing, keep your butt in the chair until you’ve made something. Discipline is required and perseverance and not really caring about what anyone else thinks about what you do. That’s a part of it too. You can’t be writing in order to gain approval. That’s backwards. That dooms you to a certain kind of writing. I think that if there is such a thing as talent it is worthless unless it is accompanied by discipline. I think those are some of the least happy people in the world, the ones who have a certain kind of gift and then squander it through laziness or whatever else gets in the way.
I kind of resist the idea that some people have it and some people don’t. I think everybody has something. All the students I’ve seen have gotten better through discipline.

A: how long does it take you to write a poem?
S: There’s no one answer to that.

A: What is it like for you to be in the process of writing a poem.
S: Prayer and poetry haven’t much in common, but the one thing I think they share is a quality of stillness. You cultivate a habit of being able to descend. You descend into your heart and the word on the page and it gets more quiet and then you just mess with the words like they are clay. That’s what it is like to be doing it. Some people don’t like that. They don’t want to labor at that level. They seem to want to have an idea and then express it, so there is a lot of stuff that looks like poetry.

A: What do you think the fundamental difference is between having an idea and trying to express it and descending into that creative space.
S: One is expository writing and the other is poetry. There is a lot of expository writing that passes for poetry just because they don’t use the whole paper. You can make it look like a poem on the page but you are still expressing, you are making and argument. It is essay writing. There is something that you want to express that precedes the making of the thing, but it will never be a poem then. It will only be a poem if you started messing with words and the words lead you into saying something that you haven’t known to say, then you are in the presence of poetry and you can work with that, continue to shape it, find out what you want to say. That’s how you make a poem.

A: So it is not a poem until you discover something?
S: Right. It is not a poem until someone discovers something. It may not be you. I think it really is a discipline. That’s what a discipline is. You have a sense of calling. I think a lot of us have a screwy sense of calling and think we are called to serve. A calling is really a gift. It is a delicious opportunity to something. It is another way God reveals more things to you. So poetry, if that happens to be your vocation, the thing to which you are called, can’t be thought of as something by which you give something to the world. It is actually a way that you get something. Prayer is kind of like that too. You have this idea that you need to pray to give God something, but that’s not really what prayer is. Prayer is an opportunity to hear something, not to say something. To apprehend a truth.
So I think vocation in general, the vocation of prayer, the vocation of any art it finally not a way to do something, it is a means by which we are given something we would not otherwise get.

A: How do you know if you are called to be an artist?
S: I think the first thing is that it gives you pleasure to do it, and if it makes you feel joyful to do it even if it is hard. It can be hard in a joyful way. There is a word to characterize the disposition of Lent which means “bright sadness." Lent is a way in which we are called to confront ourselves and our failures which makes us sad, but there is also this bass note of joy because the sadness is not an end in itself. It is a means to another end which is our resurrection. It is a bright sadness. It is a suffering which has a use.

A: You are saying that your calling can be like that?
S: Yes, it can sometimes feel like that. Because sometimes the joy is not immediately apprehendable. It is just glimpsed. What is more apprehendable is that this is hard. I am not getting this. This is tough. I want to give up.

A: What do you do in that moment?
S: sometimes you give up, but that is a mistake. But even knowing that it is a mistake to give up doesn’t mean that you will never give up. Sometimes you will give up. You will make that mistake. You will have not gotten what you would have gotten on that outing. God willing, there will be another opportunity and maybe that time you won’t give up and you will find something else. You won’t ever get the thing that you lost, but you may get something.

A: Do you think that having something to say makes a work shabbier?
S: Shabby is a good word for it. Smaller. If all your work does is say what you already know… that’s a pretty low bar. It’s not very ambitious to only want to say what you already know. It is more ambitious and more true to your calling to desire to find something meaningful to say.

A: Is there room for wanting to give people something through your writing?
S: I think maybe you are suggesting that there is a tension or a contradiction between laboring to find something or laboring to give somebody something. I would insist that they are not antithetical they are necessarily the same thing. I think it is kind of illusory to imagine that you have something to give anybody without that discovery. This is really hard for Christian writers because they tend to have an idea that the story is pretty simple and it has already been done. All you have to do as a writer is repeat it clearly enough and the world will get better. I blame C. S. Lewis a little bit for this because he was so good at allegory and when Christians writers want to point so some illustrious predecessor they often point to Lewis. Allegory is not all that it is cracked up to be. When you crack the code of an allegory you pretty much know the story. As allegorists go he was a really good one. But as artists go allegory really isn’t high art. It is pretty much saying what you know and dressing it up to make it interesting. Christians have this notion that all art is allegorical and representational. The fact is very little art is merely allegorical and representational. If it doesn’t require the discovery of something new and deeper and more it is really probably not art. And literary art is funny because people think words are for expressing what you think to say. But that is really not literary art. That’s how we use words most of the time, but that is not how we use words as a medium for art. Words as a medium for art are necessarily words employed to discover something. Christians think that art is only good if it repeats the story they already know.

How/Why To Cultivate the Imagination

Jeff Adams gave a lecture on the Christian imagination at the 2009 L'abri Conference in Rochester in which he gave some helpful thoughts about how and why to cultivate the imagination. Imagination, Adams says, has been under-nourished in contemporary Christianity, and if we are to have a robust faith - and robust lives - it will mean, in part, regaining our imaginations. Imagination lets us see the beauty in what is there, and a deadened imagination can mean a deadened experience of living. There is wonder all around us, but that doesn't mean we will see it, that we will participate in it. The sight of that beauty can be food for living. Adams gives 5 ways to cultivate the imagination and, through it, bring the Christian story to bear on all of life.

1. We must saturate our imaginations with the truth. Developing our imaginations is like developing a muscle or anything else. It takes effort and time. Saturating your imagination with the truth does not mean not exposing yourself to anything that isn't true, but bringing the truth to bear on every situation.It means reading good stories, and not just reading them, but soaking yourself in them. A movie is not just entertainment, but a text to be read, a work containing depth to be understood and digested. The natural world becomes more than just dirt and flower and sunny days - it becomes an open book which is "pouring forth speech."

2. Let the truth take root in your mind. This exercising of your imagination begins to make the truth permanent in your mind. They say when you really immerse yourself in a foreign language you begin to dream in that language. When you immerse yourself in truth, you begin to "dream in truth." It takes root. Habits develop. You might say that the power to see is growing. Imagination, after all, is a certain kind of seeing. Everyone views the world through a lens that shapes everything they see, a lens not always of their own choosing. Cultivating the imagination is strengthening the ability to see through a true lens, to make changes to the lens itself to see with new eyes.

3. Recognize the Story in the stories. The world we are living in is not a series of random, unconnected occurrences, but rather, it is a story. There is a grand, over-arching story beneath which all the smaller stories of our lives play out. The Story is that the universe was made and it was good, but it fell and now we find ourselves in a muddle. The universe is not left in the mess, but is in the process of being set right by the personal God who made it good originally. That is what Christianity says is the most basic Story common to all people and things in this world. It is the original good, the fall, and the slow but certain movement to restoration. The point of cultivating the imagination is to learn to see this Story in all the little stories. To be able to take any new thing and see something of its history (it's goodness), it present state (a glorious ruin), and a bit of its destiny (being made new). This is a big part of the new lens, the Christian worldview.

4. Imagine a redemptive future. In the play, Les Miserables, Jean Valjean is a criminal who is transformed by an encounter with a redemptive imagination in the form of an old priest. He steals the silver from the priests house and when he is caught he is brought back to the priest so that he can identify Valjean. Instead of condemning him the priest welcomes him like a brother and tells the soldiers that he gave the silver to him, and, piling more silver in his hands, he pulls him close and says, "Jean Valjean my brother you no longer belong to evil. With this silver, I have bought your soul. I've ransomed you from fear and hatred, and now I give you back to God." Valjean is never the same. The priest's redemptive imagination created the reality that it envisioned. The Christian imagination is a work of hope. To love a person, a place, a church, or anything at all, often means seeing it, not as it is, but as God intends it to be. That is the power of imagination.

5. The imagination is a powerful teacher. It is a great grace to see the world through new eyes. It is a blessing to come to a fresh view of the world that has sadly grown routine around us. As Hopkins said, "the world is charged with the grandeur of God." That grandeur is so often inaccessible, and we need the strength of our imaginations to stare into the world and be moved by it. In a sense, the imagination turns over the soil of our experience and discloses new treasures to us. It is a teacher in that it can show us the beauty (or the ugliness) in the world around us that was always there but we were blind to.

Thanks to Jeff Adams for his lecture, Walking With Giants: Participating in Redemption Through the Christian Imagination.

Wonder and Miracle

I found myself thinking this morning about something Denis Haack said at the L’abri Conference: “If you are too busy for wonder, you are too busy.”

I find it so easy to be practical in my daily life. I drive my car and feel the air and am awoken by the sun in my window and greet my friends and it all produces no wonder because I have made the mistake of believing all these things are merely normal. In his essay, The Ethics of Elfland. G. K. Chesterton writes about bringing the lessons of “elfland” home to the real world. One such lesson is that in elfland anything at all can happen, which means that everything is a miracle. The point of Chesterton’s essay is to say that it is, in fact, the real world where everything is a miracle. Chesterton writes:

"...perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

Humans are perched precariously in the midst of mystery. Blaise Pascal wrote that at our left is an immensity of smallness and at our right is an immensity of greatness. If you examine the world God has made and try to break it down into it all its pieces you will eventually be looking into things so small our science can only see them with equations and beyond those things there is mystery that can only be guessed at. On the larger scale, we are surrounded by a universe so large that entire galaxies are born and die before the light from their existence has enough time to reach us. We sit on a tiny globe hung in the vastness and peer out like children listening at the floor for the sounds of their parents laughter.

Wonder is the appropriate response to living. The Bible teaches that we live in a universe created by an infinite God and we will spend eternity staring into his beauties and the beauties of what he has made. For now we hold our breath and wait for the next unfurling of a sunset, or ring of laughter, or grace of creation. We wait on the stage for the next billowing of the curtain to glimpse, in a moment, the face of the author.