It takes a remarkable balance of capacities to be a farmer and a poet, to plough furrows and write essays, to plant seeds and select words that will grow in the mind and bear humane fruit. For as long as he can remember, Wendell Berry has been writing and cultivating, thinking and harvesting, practising a productive stewardship of the land and an equally productive stewardship of the language. This is a man at home on the farm and in the lecture room, who chooses to plough with horses and to write with a pencil, his deepest thoughts are passionately articulate and passionately agricultural. He is as careful of verbs and nouns and adjectives, as he is of soil, seeds and their fruit.
Coming towards Advent, and a liturgy formed around the ancient dualism of darkness and light, the tensions between light and darkness move towards resolution in the story of how "the true light that enlightens all humanity has come amongst us". What is both earth moving and mind shifting is the cosmic scale and world creating power of the language used in John chapter 1. Shining through the rhythmic prose of John's Prologue (ch1.1-18) are ideas of metaphysical brilliance written as conceptual theology in the form of poetry. The whole chapter moves towards the climactic paradox as the Eternal Creative Word becomes time-bound created flesh in the man Jesus who made his home amongst us.
"The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,… full of grace and truth." The connection between Wendell Berry and the Advent Adventure lies in that paradox. God comes not in words but in a Word. That Word comes in the form of a person, stepping into created relatedness with human beings. This person, Jesus, drinks wine at weddings, cries at missing his best friend's funeral, asks a woman for a drink of water, eats bread, shares bread and even says he is bread. The Eternal Creative Word walks in dust, but walks on water; enables the visually impaired to see, but radiates such luminous truth that those who think they see God's truth so clearly are blinded by a truth they refuse to recognise.
Few contemporary writers have thought so long and hard about the meaning of earth, as Wendell Berry. His poetry is soaked in images of soil and trees, land and woods, skies and mountains, seasons and the weather, horses ploughing and reaping. And all of these images have their daily reality in the life outdoors while also serving as lessons in husbandry of the earth, stewardship of the land, love of life, resistance to brutality, and respect for persons and creatures whose precious lives are both gift and responsibility not to be refused. In other words Berry's poetry is informed by environmental ethics, ecological wisdom, a lifetime's agricultural experience, and rests on a sub stratum of spiritual and moral conviction that this earth is gift to be cared for. Our planet is not our property and it is not a commodity; Earth is organic, living, and provides the soil on which we stand and the air we breathe. It is the God given environment within which created beings can grow, co-exist, discover the ways of justice, peace, mercy and generosity, and do so as wisely grateful stewards of a creationion we did not make and do not own.
And so from Berry to Advent. Because he sees the connection between the Word who became flesh, and the Word of whom it was written, "All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made." Advent and Creation belong together. There is an overwhelmng case for including praise for creation, and lament for human destructiveness in an Advent liturgy. Berry's poetry represents a lifetime's praise and lament, thanksgiving and confession, as he considers the plight of the earth, human responsibility, and the prophetic and urgent task of telling the truth that sets free, and noting and explicating the sins that are destroying our human home.
So here is one of Berry's poems. The light that gives life to everything on this planet is absorbed into the plants that we eat. The theme of light recurs in this poem, as metaphor for feeling bright and thinking gratefully as the mood and the prayer are "bright with praise of what I eat". And the last line contains the cultural converse of the greedy entitlement of the consumer who thinks nothing of what they eat other than as satiation of appetite. The moral imperative extends to how we eat what we eat, and how we view the world that is the farm of creation.
Prayer After Eating
I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.
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