Staying Home, with New Eyes

--Stay Home--

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home.  Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home.  Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.
(Wendell Berry, Collected Poems 1957-1982, p. 199)

I suppose one could hear him to be anti-social.  "Stay home" isn't, on the surface, an invitational sounding enjoinder.   It rather has the hospitable ring of "keep away from me."  A slower reading, however, allows a richer, more respectful intent to rise from the poem.  


We are surrounded by envy; animated by an appetite for what someone else already has.  Perhaps it is a possession; perhaps a position; perhaps a point in life -- a stage; an age perhaps older or younger.  
"If I had his connections..."  
"If I only had her looks..."
"If I were ten years younger I would..."
"If I could retire now I would..."
"If only our church were located in the suburbs..."
"If only I lived in the country..."


The French have this word -- this concept -- that has captivated me of late.  Terroir speaks of the taste imparted by the specificity of place.  It argues on behalf of the uniqueness of each locale.  A certain hillside may be better suited than another to grow grapes -- indeed, one particular variety of grapes -- but that only makes it better than that other hillside or valley  or plain if one's only desire is to grow that particular variety of grape.  A true "terroirist" doesn't concern himself with what can be grown "over there," but rather with what can be grown right here.  Where he is.  


The Benedictines have elevated the concept to the sacred.  In taking a vow of "Stability," they call attention to the conviction that "God is not elsewhere." 


That, I think, is the wisdom given voice in Berry's poem.  You don't need to come wherever I am -- nor do I need to follow you -- in order to experience wonder and beauty and delight. Invest the patient attentiveness necessary to discover such graces in the place you already are.


Years ago singer Don Henley of The Eagles recorded a song whose chorus was a kind of prayer:
"To want what I have
To take what I'm given with grace
These things I pray..."


To want what I have.  And where I am.  And the taste unique to it.  And to stay home and appreciate the fertility of it.

These things I pray.

Facts in Isolation

I have always felt a little nervous when people start quoting scripture. More often than not, the quotes are fragments that have been surgically removed from whatever gave rise to them and presented as every word in the Bible carried equal weight. Scripture as a string of pearls. As often as not, the result is more abusive of the words than honoring; holy wisdom recklessly eviscerated. I think of the sermon I heard years ago, drawn from the passage in the book of Ruth that describes how "Ruth clung to Naomi, saying 'Entreat me not to leave thee...for whither thou goest I will go...'" to talk about the importance of touch. Please. I'm all for touching, but is that really what this passage is working on? Most arguments on morality I hear condemning this or that behavior are appliqued with these kinds of snippets -- tacky decorations more than structural foundations.

Perhaps that's why one particular sentence in Wendell Berry's essay, "Going to Work" caught my attention. In the essay Berry, a farmer, author and agrarian activist from Kentucky, builds a progressing sequence of 49 propositions on the relationship between working and living. Each of them was worth thinking about, but it was #47 that hooked me.

XLVII. Facts in isolation are false. The more isolated a fact or a set of facts is, the more false it is. A fact is true in the absolute sense only in association with all facts. This is why the departmentalization of knowledge in our colleges and universities is fundamentally wrong.

Reading #47, of course, made me flip back to a couple of earlier propositions -- #'s 30 and 31 -- which suddenly made clearer sense. There, Berry had talked about the "scientific need for predictability or replicability" that "forces perception into abstraction" -- the test plot, for example, that is perceived not as itself but as representative of all plots everywhere; a new machine or chemical or technique that is proved workable in one situation that is assumed to be representative of all places where it might work.

One might say that Berry's examples are scientific "proof texting" -- taking an insight out of context and forcing it to mean more than it really does. But as in science and technology and education, so it is in scripture: context is everything.

Berry, I think, is pretty close to having it right: facts in isolation are false.

I suppose that means I'll need to scrap tomorrow's sermon on the value of touch.

Indulging ourselves until the next famine befalls

We have been winning, to our inestimable loss, a competition against our own land and our own people. At present, what we have to show for this "victory" is a surplus of food. But this is a surplus achieved by the ruin of its sources. (Wendell Berry, Nature as Measure, 1989)

Every seminarian sooner or later learns that the Greek word for "sin" is an archery term, literally meaning "missing the mark." Shooting for the bulls-eye, you hit instead the nearby bull in the eye. The cure, of course, is to refine one's aim -- to shoot with more precision. Spiritually speaking, it means to "repent," which in that same Greek simply means to "go in a different," presumably better aimed, "direction."

As Berry suggests in the opening observation, our cross-hairs could use some recalibration. Agriculturally speaking, we are essentially eating the geese that lay our nutritional golden eggs. We are, in other words, proudly succeeding at our own self-destruction. Or to recall a quote from Thomas Friedman, "We are getting better and better at that which shouldn't be done at all."

Short-term gain and long-term cost. If ever there were evidence of what the ancient theologians described as "Original Sin," it would be this recurring pattern. We witnessed it again in recent years in Wall Street's (read: investor's) insatiable hunger for greater returns, which maximized quarterly reports over sustained vitality and gentler growth, which drove business practices -- and created investment instruments -- that looked good on paper but were ultimately suicidal.

We never seem quite able to comprehend that "how we do things" really does matter as much as -- and perhaps more than -- "what we do."

Agriculturally we measure per acre output, without considering the larger impact of all that goes into achieving it -- the financial, chemical, environmental and even medical price that is paid. Economically we similarly care only about the most superficial "bottom line." Spiritually -- well, we find all manner of ways to be titillated in the moment but not really grounded and nourished throughout the landscape of human experience.

Berry, I think, has put his finger on the essential nature of sin: setting our sights on, and investing our creative energies into, accomplishing more voluminously, more cheaply, and more quickly those things we believe are most important for keeping us alive -- and succeeding; only to die because our very pursuit obliterated that which actually had the capacity to sustain us.

But none of that looks very promising to the shareholders, reading the quarterly reports, so we will just keep doing what we are doing -- and feeling proud and successful -- until the next famine of some sort befalls us.