Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
October 5, 2003

What We Need is Here

There are many theories about when it was in human consciousness that time ceased to be a circle, and became an arrow. Some say that when the ancient Hebrews escaped from slavery in Egypt, the eternal cycle of the Nile's seasonal flooding was transformed into a new community's enduring consciousness of the Before and After of that liberation event. Others say that the birth and death of Jesus represented a shift in the cosmic system that gave history a direction and a goal, awaiting his eventual return. Still others think that the Enlightenment, with its offer of cumulative learning and scientific discovery, lifted us out of the repetitive rhythms of nature, and set our culture into the momentum of Progress. Whatever may have been the trigger, it is apparent that our modern western society functions in linear time, a straight arrow of cause and effect that carries us further and further away from each passing moment. In the alienation and uncertainties of this forward hastening, the recent philosophers have taught us, we must invent ourselves; we must have courage in facing the unknown; we must question everything, make up the rules as we go along; we must come to terms with the nausea and vertigo of the deep unrootedness which is inherent in this ceaseless movement, and is therefore our sealed fate.

To question seriously the linearity of time is within our culture to be a bit perverse - though perversely, the devices that we use to measure and communicate time are pretty much all circular functions, which arrive where they started, and begin over again. But to give our allegiance to the cyclical, to measure our lives not by how much we have accomplished and how far we have come but instead by the dependability of their returns, is profoundly unfashionable. It is to be primitive, and willfully ignorant; it is to countenance superstition, and to be ungrateful for the gifts and conveniences of technology - or so we are made to believe. But in this rushed and heedless and mechanical context, the poet-philosopher Wendell Berry challenges us to pause, to consider again the healing wisdom of the cyclical universe, and to choose with conscious intention the objects of our loyalty, having an imaginative eye to their long consequences, for ourselves, for our children, for our communities, and for the earth itself.

Even though he questions some of the core assumptions of the Enlightenment project, and even though he explores with delicate reverence the resonance of a Christian religious vocabulary, I find Wendell Berry to be a profoundly humanist thinker. He articulates what is perhaps the most perfectly formulated humanist prayer;

And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart and eye clear.

What we need is here.

"What we need is here." Here, in this time, in this earth, in the abilities that we have, in the gifts that are all around us, in the possibilities that lie within our grasp. The perception of paradise that he offers is not, he insists, "a dream," rather, "its hardship is its possibility," and it is no stingy or vengeful god who withholds it from us, but only our own human failure of vision and will. For although he is a prophet announcing the importance and dignity of the human on its own terms, Berry is no easy optimist. In his view, much that is necessary to the living of good and sustainable lives has been rejected and lost in modern society, the most essential of which is a conscious connection to land, place, and community. In his own life story, the acknowledgement and cultivation of this connection has been a saving discovery. Berry was born at New Castle, Kentucky, in 1934. He grew up in this Henry County locale amidst the cycle of tobacco growing, cultivation, and marketing, so that the romance of this Kentucky heritage became a living part of him. In 1956, Berry graduated from the University of Kentucky and received his M.A. degree there a year later. During the summer of 1956, he studied at Indiana University School of Letters, and on May 29, 1957 he married Tanya Amyx. From 1957 to 1959, he taught at Georgetown College. Later, under a creative writing fellowship, he went to Stanford University and taught for a year, during which he wrote his first novel.

After teaching at New York University until 1963, Berry was offered and accepted a position in the English Department at the University of Kentucky, and he and his wife came home to Henry County. They now live on a 125 acre farm where his family has lived since the early 1800's, and where they raised their two children. According to Bryan Wooley, "Berry is the fifth generation of his father's family and the sixth of his mother's to farm in Henry County, in the neighborhood of Port Royal". Berry did not initially intend to live on this farm, but planned to use it as a vacation place. Instead the Berrys renovated the house and moved into it around July 4, 1965. "It is a real farm, not a writer-professor's country estate. Its chores include milking cows and currying horses, and mucking out stalls and mending fences and mowing hay and all the other time-consuming, sometimes back-breaking, labor that family agriculture requires," he says.

Now a retired professor of English at the University of Kentucky and a past fellow of both the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, Wendell Berry is the author of thirty-two books of essays, poetry and novels. He has received numerous awards for his work, including an award from the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters in 1971, and most recently, the T.S. Eliot Award. But despite the acclaim and honors received for his writing, Berry finds his personal wholeness not in literary achievement, but in the identity of his unique attachment to place. In prose he writes:

"I think the crisis of my life was the discovery that I was a Henry County poet, a kind of creature that, so far as I knew, had no precedent in creation and that I feared was contrary to evolutionary law. I think I went around for years suspicioning that I was the sole member of an otherwise non-existent species. It was like I began with one foot on the ground, very uncertainly balanced, and all my work has been the slow descent of the other foot. Now I think the other foot has come all the way down and planted itself in Henry County along with its mate. And that was the only way I could get my head free of the fear and the combativeness I used to feel. I mean, when a Henry County poet begins at last to see himself as one of the natural possibilities of Henry County and not an evolutionary accident, then he quits worrying so much about getting stomped out and begins going out grinning, saying over and over to himself 'I am possible. I am possible.'"

In more poetic format, Berry puts it this way:

I would not have been a poet

Except that I have been in love

Alive in this mortal world,

Or an essayist except that I

Have been bewildered and afraid,

Or a storyteller had I not heard

Stories passing to me through the air,

Or a writer at all except

I have been wakeful at night

And words have come to me

Out of their deep caves

Needing to be remembered.

But on days when I am lucky

Or blessed, I am silent.

I go into the one body

That two make in making marriage

That for all our trying, all

Our deaf-and-dumb of speech,

Has no tongue. Or I give myself

To gravity, light, and air

And am carried back

To solitary work in fields

And woods, where my hands

Rest upon a world unnamed,

Complete, unanswerable, and final

As our daily bread and meat.

The way of love leads all ways

To life beyond words, silent

And secret. To serve that triumph

I have done all the rest.

For Wendell Berry, there is an intricate connection between the disciplines of farming and the disciplines of poetry, and, in the end, the disciplines of the spirit, and of human wholeness. The first of these disciplines is to chose and to commit, and yet I think he would say we do not choose in utter and existential freedom. We are born in a place, and into a heritage; we are drawn to specific people, finding them beautiful, or wise; certain images or phrases come unbidden to the mind of the poet. We are free to reject these summoning realities of our lives, and the culture of linear time advises us to do so, and to choose rather what is rational, profitable, pleasurable, novel. That culture urges us also to choose for immediate satisfaction, in the assurance that if our choice grows distasteful, we are always free to discard it into the departing past, and choose again differently. But for Berry, there can be nothing lasting or worthwhile built out of such arbitrary and temporary impulses. Rather, if we would be whole, we must chose what we are chosen by, giving our whole loyalty to that which we find to be central in our being, and which we can discover only by learning to know ourselves over time. Whether it is to a partner in marriage, to a community of friendship and mutual support, to a particular plot of land, or even to a structure of verse, we must commit ourselves entirely to the unfolding of our lives in the context of that chosen other, with its unique demands, its possibilities, and its limitations.

In an essay entitled Farm as Form: Wendell Berry's Sabbaths, reviewer Jeffery Alan Triggs observes,

In his critical writings, Berry has been aware of a correlation between natural and literary form. In his essay, Standing by Words, he notes that "one of the great practical uses of literary disciplines...is to resist glibness -- to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extra-linguistic considerations; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing''. For Berry, a "merely impulsive flow of speech'' is the linguistic correlative of philosophical rootlessness, of not knowing one's place in the decorum of nature. Such rootlessness represents a licentious and therefore dangerous freedom in a world whose survival is dependent on maintaining the delicate balance of its constituents. In another essay, Poetry and Place, Berry relates the organic form of community and place to literary form: "one's farm...is indeed a form. It's not a literary form, but it is like a literary form....Like any other form, it requires us to do some things and forbids us to do others. Some acts are fitting and becoming, and some acts are not. If we fail to do what is required and if we do what is forbidden, we exclude ourselves from the mercy of Nature''.

Berry's repeated use of overtly Christian references in his recent book, Sabbaths, has been an issue of some contention. Berry has never been a writer to fit anyone's preconceptions. Critics have chided him on occasion both for "preachiness'' and for lack of religious orthodoxy. I have argued on other occasions that Berry is a deeply religious poet, though his religion has never been that of the strictly orthodox Christian, encompassing as it does the myths of eastern religions, such as the "Wheel of Life'', and of the Winnabago Indians, as easily as the stories of the Bible. Berry is suspicious of the tendency in certain strains of orthodox Christianity to exalt spirit at the expense of the body, which he considers ultimately corruptive of humanity's respect for nature. And he prefers the cyclical notion of time held typically by "primitive'' religions to the linear vision of time enshrined in Christian dogma. On the other hand, in Standing by Words he explicitly accepts a sphere of religious interest standing protectively above and outside the system of systems:

there has to be a religious interest of some kind above the ecogenetic -- "the interest of the whole `household' in which life is lived'' -- ....that system of systems is enclosed within mystery, in which some truth can be known, but never all truth....you cannot speak or act in your own best interest without espousing and serving a higher interest. It is not knowledge that enforces this realization, but the humbling awareness of the insufficiency of knowledge, of mystery.

This is not, as some critics have charged, an attempt to make a religion of ecology, for Berry insists that the religious sphere, the sphere of ultimate mystery, stands outside the ecological system, but it is vague enough in its contours to disquiet the churchly. Even in Sabbaths, the "mad farmer'' in Berry maintains his wonted "contrariness'':

The bell calls in the town...

I hear, but understand

Contrarily, and walk into the woods.

In calling for people to live out of commitment to what is essential - which for him is a sense of geographic connection across generations - Berry emphatically does not mean to suggest conformity to ordinary social convention. Indeed, he advises the subversion of such structures and pressures wherever possible, in the service of the individual's integrity. "As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind, / lose it... Every day do something / that won't compute," he advises, and "It is only candor that is aloof from them, / Only an inward clarity, unashamed, / That they cannot reach." What redeems that contrariness from mere conceit or defiance is its function as an act of disciplined self-assertion in the context of a larger and more demanding commitment. This, too, is a fundamentally humanist attitude.

Where Berry would seem to part company with the humanist perspective is in his approach to time, for he sees the cyclical perception of life's smaller and larger rhythms as key to what nurtures human wholeness and makes our relationships and societies sustainable. It is only by reconnecting with the past and the future that we can make responsible choices and do the necessary work of the present, and he fears that we are speedily exhausting the capacity of the earth to absorb the consequences of our time-blind consumption. Yet what we are truly hungry for, he suggests, is the very commitment, stability, and endurance that we flee from.

The mind

is broken by the thousand

calling voices it is always too late

to answer, and that is why it yearns

for some hard task, lifelong, longer

than life, to concentrate it

and make it whole.

Such tasks, he would claim, are ready to hand; "What we need is here," and it is not that we all ought to become Kentucky farmers. Rather, each of us must find the commitment that centers us within the cycles of a task that is "lifelong, longer than life," that can concentrate our minds, and make them whole. The last poem of his book Sabbaths promises that

There is a day

when the road neither

comes nor goes, and the way

is not a way but a place.

For example, just in case this has not become patently obvious over the past five years, I should mention that I am not, myself, anyone's idea of a farm girl. I enjoy visiting the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, but my connection to nature consists of keeping a couple of scrawny basil plants alive on the back porch, and maintaining an acceptable litter box in the laundry room for the cats. I suppose that there is a farm in Nebraska somewhere that some of my ancestors worked on, but I've never been there, and I wouldn't know where to look for it. The Grand Canyon was cool, but given a choice, I'd go see Chartres Cathedral again; my attachments are to institutions, not geography. Nevertheless, I think I know what Wendell Berry is talking about, and I even think that he would recognize my 'place' as something akin to his own. For me it is not acres and milking and plowing and harvests, but weddings and dyings and committees and budgets and pot luck dinners and Sunday mornings that are "the way that is not a way but a place." I am committed to this 'place' where I was born, this heritage that chooses and calls me, this Unitarian Universalist religious community, in the same way that he needs both of his feet in the soil of his farm in Henry County. Whatever befalls that farm, for good or ill, Wendell Berry, the farmer-poet, will be there, walking the land, seeing it through, adapting his life to its needs, finding his joy in its fleeting beauties, and his peace in its wideness, wildness and enduring rhythms. For me it is not an earthly geography, but an institutional one, and yet I too find my joy and peace and wholeness in the dependable rhythms of this place, with their infinite, subtle variations. Through the week from Sunday to Sunday; through the month from one board meeting to the next; from new member receptions to Christmas Eve to canvass; from eager couples planning weddings to grieving families planning memorial services; from baby dedications to chalice lighters to high school graduations - it is these cycles that feed me, that make the substance and meanings of my life. And by the same token, it is the demands and disciplines of this work, less back-breaking than heart-breaking sometimes, but no less consuming than those of any farm, that have taught me most of what I know about patience, courage, trust, my own paradoxical power and inadequacy, and the astonishing resilience of the human spirit. It is here that I give myself back, seeing it through whatever befalls; here that I am shaped by a task that is both life long and longer than life, connecting me to you as well as to all who have come before us here, and all who will follow.

Time's straight arrow moves through my life, I know; at every moment leaving behind the past and approaching more closely the inevitable moment of my death - but I do not despair. For, like the poet, I am a participant in a moving dance of cycles that carry me not merely forward, but back again and again to the known moment, to the place I have been before and rejoice to find again, to the repetition that fills and connects and sustains me. Whether the form be the farm, or the church, or the poem, it is in our faithfulness to it that we make that which is given fruitful, and become our greater selves. What we need is here, and when we know this, he says, "Memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament," and there will be a day "when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place," when the dizziness of time steadies, and our roots go deep enough to nourish not only ourselves, but the world and the lives to come.