Pax on both houses: Wendell Berry Interview: "Field Observations" /// Wendell Berry and Religion

Monday, July 16, 2012

Wendell Berry Interview: "Field Observations" /// Wendell Berry and Religion

Excerpt, "Field Observations" http://arts.envirolink.org/interviews_and_conversations/WendellBerry.html

Fisher-Smith: So your vision is not, as a shallow reading of your work might make somebody think, regressive, a kind of nostalgic longing for a rural nineteenth century ideal with horsedrawn equipment? But in fact, the kind of community you envision hasn't existed yet. Is that right?

Berry: That's right--at least it hasn't existed in America yet--but there's no way to defend yourself against a shallow reader. If your work includes a criticism of history, which mine certainly does, you can't be accused of wanting to go back to something, because you're saying that what we were wasn't good enough. There is no time in history, since white occupation began in America, that any sane and thoughtful person would want to go back to, because that history so far has been unsatisfactory. It has been unsatisfactory for the simple reason that we haven't produced stable communities well adapted to their places.

What I'm talking about in my work is the hope that it might be possible to produce stable, locally adapted communities in America, even though we haven't done it. The idea of a healthy community is an indispensable measure, just as the idea of a healthy child, if you're a parent, is an indispensable measure. You can't operate without it.

I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temple into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow.

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.”

Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

(Alan here... The word "atonement" means, literally, "at one ment.")

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