Sixteen years ago, the farmer/poet/novelist Wendell Berry spoke from our pulpit to a jam-packed sanctuary on a Thursday night. I watched young people who had never set foot in a church arrive and enthusiastically lean in to catch his every soft-spoken word. We invited Wendell Berry because we were reading one of his novels as a church-wide book read. But folks across Kansas City flocked in to hear him because they resonated with his reverence for creation and his urgent call to care for this gift. This week Mr Berry died at age 92.
I have returned repeatedly in my morning devotions to his collection “Sabbath Poems” and to his essay “What are People For?” which is worth thinking about as a title even if you never read the essay. While I was driving Wendell and his wife Tanya in from Kansas City’s airport, I mentioned to him how much I love the novelist Wallace Stegner, who was Wendell Berry’s professor and mentor in graduate school. And Mr. Berry recommended a collection of Stegner essays. I have worn out the pages of “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.”
I have never forgotten Tanya Berry offhandedly saying, “We will know that society is advancing when we start planting vegetables in our front yards.” She made me chuckle, and she made me think. The two of them were the most down-to-earth celebrities I have ever met. I remember while Wendell was speaking and signing books that she was over in the corner looking bored. They were regular people…though he received a National Humanities Medal from President Obama.
Something about the Berry’s simplicity was moving. Staying on the farm in Kentucky. Avoiding the trappings of technology. Going to worship in the little rural Disciples of Christ church. Writing on a legal pad with a pencil in the daylight hours. It was not really about lingering in the past. More about loving what really matters.
My favorite novel of Mr Berry’s was Jayber Crow. One of the novel’s characters says this about love:
It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child, whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. It is in the world but not altogether of it. It is of eternity.
Through his witness, we glimpsed that eternal love.
Grace and Peace,
Carla
