the goblin

"Some Notes for the [enter Democractic nominee's name here] Campaign, If Wanted"

In 2004, Wendell Berry published a commentary entitled Some Notes for the Kerry Campaign, If Wanted in Orion Magazine (later included in the 2005 book "The Way of Ignorance").

Four years later, just months away from another presidential election, Berry's commentary is still vitally, somewhat depressingly relevant.  The stakes are the same; only the names have changed. McCain will try to sound more and more like George W. Bush in order to win back the conservative base - but without mentioning Bush by name, so the media can continue to portray him as a straight-talking maverick. We don't yet know the Democratic nominee, but it now seems likely that, come the general election, Obama or Clinton will face a barrage of attacks similar to those orchestrated by Karl Rove and the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth in 2004.

To my way of thinking, Berry's advice that Kerry should campaign "solidly and clearly on the traditional principles of  politics and religion" is still the best strategy for victory in 2008. Such a message can resonate with voters across the political and socioeconomic spectra. It has the added benefit of being the right thing to do - elevating the political discourse and promoting unity by appealing to our common heritage.  (I have a strong opinion as to which Democratic candidate can best embody and embrace this message, as regular readers of this blog certainly know. But I will leave that for another time.)

Here is Wendell Berry's 2004 essay:

Facing this year's presidential election, our people are bitterly divided. This division is perhaps as great a threat to our future as is the possibility of a second term for Mr. Bush. And so the paramount question for Sen. Kerry's campaign is how to oppose Mr. Bush effectively without so exacerbating the country's political differences as to reduce the possibility of effective government should Sen. Kerry win the election.

One answer, I believe, is to base the campaign solidly and clearly upon our traditional principles of politics and religion. (I am reluctant to say that religion ought to be a political issue in the United States, but it is unstoppably an issue in this campaign.) If the campaign is based soundly enough on principles, then it can be carried out, at least by Democrats, as a reasoned argument, and thus without sensationalizing personal and emotional differences. The further great advantage is that the Bush administration can be shown all too handily to be in violation of many of our country's traditional political and religious principles.

Our government was understood by its founders, and it is understood by many of us still, as a government of laws -- of laws based in part on the laws of God. But the Bush administration, by various arrogations of power, has led us dangerously in the direction of autocracy. A government of laws cannot pardonably ignore either the rights of its citizens or its international treaties. A lot of people now long for national officials who are constantly and strictly mindful of our Bill of Rights.

Our government has a long -- though imperfect and incomplete -- history of international cooperation, the good results of which are now seriously threatened by Mr. Bush's unilateralism and his doctrine of preemptive war.

Both our political and religious traditions instruct us that the truth makes us free. Our kind of government can govern effectively only by telling the truth, just as effective citizenship depends on knowing the truth. Official secrecy and official lies, even in a "good cause," can carry us toward tyranny. Our government is meant to conduct the public's business in public.

Traditionally we have believed, and sometimes have acted on our belief, that political democracy depends upon a significant measure of economic democracy. Since World War II we have changed rapidly from a country owned by many people to a country owned by a few. This has been explicitly the program of some administrations, including that of Mr. Bush. We need an administration that is opposed to such a program. This country should not be entirely owned and run by the great corporations.

Our federal system was conceived as a way to balance national unity with local self-determination and self-sufficiency. Terrorism has made local economic integrity more necessary than ever before. All the regions of our country are dangerously dependent on long-distance transportation. The emphasis in agriculture should now be on genetic diversity, local adaptation, and conservation of energy. We need, for a change, an agriculture policy that focuses above all on the health of the land and the economic prosperity of smaller farmers, rather than the agribusiness corporations.

Along with all the rest of the world's people, we have inherited ancient instructions for the stewardship and good husbandry of the earth, with clear warnings, now significantly verified, of the disasters that will (and already do) attend our failure. We have responded by continuing our elaborately rationalized destructions. But bad precedent is no excuse for bad behavior. The Bush attitude toward the natural (God-given) world is sacrilegious and wildly uneconomic.

The human norm, as established by Christ (and others), is love even for enemies, forgiveness, neighborliness, and peace. It is therefore troubling that members of the present administration, while making much of their commitment to Christ, are insisting on the normality of hatred, greed, revenge, and unremitting war. To make us afraid, they speak much of the willingness of our terrorist enemies to kill themselves in order to kill us, as if this were an innovation. They forget, or they would like us to forget, that our policy of nuclear defense has been suicidal from the beginning. Our increasing destructiveness of the natural world is likewise suicidal. Such desperate security and prosperity cannot be reconciled with reverence for our Creator, who endowed all humans with certain inalienable rights, including life.

The Hidden Wound (Opening Paragraph)

As promised, an excerpt from Wendell Berry's "The Hidden Wound." In the opening paragraph, Berry gives his motivation for writing the book and explains the title.

It occurs to me that, for a man whose life from the beginning has been conditioned by the lives of black people, I have had surprisingly little to say about them in my other writings. Perhaps this is justifiable - there is certainly no requirement that a writer deal with any particular subject - and yet is has been an avoidance. When I have written about them before I have felt that I was doing little more than putting down a mark, leaving an opening, that I would later have to go back to and fill. For whatever reasons, good or bad, I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I have known all along to be a wound - a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life. If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself. But I am sure it is not simple as that. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage to his mind as it is in his society.

The Hidden Wound

In those precious few minutes a day when I'm not working or playing with my five month-old daughter, I have been scribbling down thoughts and notes and quotes for an essay I'm writing for an upcoming issue of the Writers Collective.

A couple years ago, I had this idea that American followers of Jesus should establish Good Friday as a National Day of Reconciliation, with each year focusing on a different alienated group. For example, the first year might focus on racial reconciliation. Subsequent years would address anti-Semitism, sexism, the genocide of the Native Americans, and so on.

My thoughts on reconciliation have changed somewhat since I first wrote (and seven people read) my manifesto for a National Day of Reconciliation. While I still believe that reconciliation is the primary "mission" of the Church, I got too far ahead of myself. I was too quick to call for a national movement when I wasn't practicing reconciliation in my own local community. I was naive to think that one million people observing a single day of reconciliation was somehow more powerful than six people committed to meeting regularly and over time to wrestle with these difficult issues together. And so I've exchanged my fifty-state strategy for a humbler and probably more effective strategy I've taken to calling "living room reconciliation" - the topic of my essay-in-progress.

Writing this essay has carried with it the great benefit of spending time with the words of Desmond Tutu, John W. De Gruchy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Miroslav Volf. I've also been reading "The Hidden Wound," Wendell Berry's highly personal account of the legacy of slavery in our language, our families, our land, and even in our churches. Early in the book, Berry writes:

From other stories that have been handed down to me I know that my people, like many others in the slave states, went to church with their slaves, were baptized with them, and presumably expected to associate with them in heaven. Again, I have been years realizing what this means, and what it has cost.

Berry goes on: "[Consider] the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used." To keep himself from asking the troubling questions like "How can I presume to own the body of a man whose soul is as worthy of salvation of my own?", the master had to "perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit."

The preachers at these churches were put in a similarly troubling position.

If a man wanted to remain a preacher he would have to honor that division in the minds of the congregation between earth and heaven, body and soul. His concern obviously had to be with things heavenly; unless he was a saint or a fool he would leave earthly things to the care of those who stood to benefit from them.

Thus the moral obligation was cleanly excerpted from the religion. The question of how best to live on the earth, among one's fellow creatures, was permitted to atrophy, and the churches devoted themselves exclusively and obsessively with the question of salvation.

How do you get to heaven? Well, I have quoted some passages, and there are many others, that say you get there by obeying the moral imperatives of the Scripture, by loving one another "in deed and in truth." But the churches, with their strong ties to the pocketbooks of racists, felt obliged to see it another way: the way to heaven was faith; one got there by believing. And to this day that continues to be the emphasis of such denominations as the Southern Baptist: to be saved, believe!

These are devastating passages, and they knocked me flat. Having grown up in a church that is Southern Baptist not in name but in character, I have seen how the emphasis on belief can overshadow the "moral aspects" of Christianity. That this "false mysticism," as Berry puts it, might have its roots in slavery is news to me - though it doesn't exactly come as a surprise. How could we use religion to justify the enslavement of tens of millions of human beings and expect it to not obscure the gospel?

...Detached from real issues and real evils, the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately?) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion. The religious institutions became comfort stations for scribes and publicans and pharisees. Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man's Christianity has been its soothing bandage - a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit.

There is probably someone reading this post - someone with a much better understanding of American church history than I - who disagrees with Berry's thesis and/or my summary of it. No doubt there are many others who take profound issue with the notion that fundamentalist theology is indivisible from the legacy of slavery. I hope you're out there. We should talk. This is one part of a much larger conversation we need to have as believers and as a country - a conversation I think will be the disturbing but important result of a sustained commitment to the long process of reconciliation.

Update: I am completely engrossed in "The Hidden Wound." Each page is more beautiful and challenging than the one before. I've decided to post short excerpts from now through Easter Sunday.

The Rhythm of Gratitude

Yesterday, I wrote an introduction to Resurgence Magazine. Today, I'd like to provide a sample. The following is an excerpt from an essay in the latest issue. The essay is called "The Rhythm of Gratitude" and it is written by David Orr, author of the book "The Last Refuge."

In the beginning was the Great Heart of God that set the rhythms of the universe in motion - first the Big Bang... The beat heard through the still-expanding Creation and in the pulsations of energy and light that animate the cosmos. In the beginning was the Great Heart of God and that rhythm drives the journeys of our little planet around its small star. Day follows night; one season follows another. The Great Heart of God beats in the Dance of Life, the ebb and flow of the tides, the migration of birds, the rhythms in our bodies, and the seasons of our lives. Break the rhythm and our little part of the cosmic dance stumbles to a halt. But in the beginning and forever: the rhythm of the Great Heart of God.

But it was not long before others, more sophisticated and clever, realised that they could change the rhythm of Creation. The heroes of disharmony, men like Bacon, Descartes and Galileo, taught us that we could and should conduct the symphony and in Bacon's words "put Nature on the rack and torture her secrets out of her to the effecting of all things possible." And so in time we learned how to make things never made by Nature; we learned to split the atom and to manipulate the code of life. In the conquest of Nature (and of humans) the rhythm changed to those of the business cycle, the product cycle, the electoral cycle, the seasons of fashion and style... The rhythms of commerce, greed, power and violence. But we did not know what we were doing, as Wendell Berry once said, because we did not know what we were undoing.

Now we live in a time of consequences. Climate scientists have given us an authoritative glimpse of a literal Hell not far in the future. Scientists fear that we are fast approaching the threshold of runaway climate change - not just global warming but destabilisation of the entire planet. A hotter time will change the seasons, the cycles of Nature, the rhythms of life, and the great procession of evolution.

The rhythm of the Great Heart of God has been drowned out by the cadence of hubris, greed, and violence... And we should ask why.

After reflection I have come to believe that the great Rabbi Abraham Heschel had it right - that the source of dissonance is ingratitude. "As civilisation advances," he wrote, "the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines... humankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder."

Heschel, here, connects appreciation with the sense of wonder and awe. The problem as he defines it is simply that as a "mercenary of our will to power, the mind is trained to assail in order to plunder rather than to commune in order to love."

We were given the gift of paradise, and thought that we could improve it - on our terms. We thought we could reduce the great mystery of life to a series of solvable problems each contained in an academic box. We thought that we could rid the world of reverence and so exorcise mystery, irony and paradox. We thought that we might change the cadence of Creation and seize control of the great symphony of life with no adverse consequence.

I wish it was practical to type out the rest of the article (it is not available in electronic form on the Resurgence website). Orr goes on to identify a few of the reasons gratitude comes hard. For one, nearly half a trillion dollars is spent each year on advertising "to cultivate ingratitude otherwise known as the seven deadly sings." The result, Orr says, is a "cult of entitlement." For another, "the pace of modern life leaves little time to be grateful or awed by much of anything." But Orr also identifies deeper reasons, including, most profoundly, that to acknowledge something as a gift requires us to acknowledge a giver. "And herein is the irony of gratitude. The illusion of independence is a kind of servitude while gratitude - the acknowledgment of interdependence - sets us free." Orr concludes:

Gratitude changes the rhythm. It restores the cycle of giver and receiver, extending our awareness back in time to ancient obligations and forward to the far horizon of the future and to lives that we are obliged to honor and protect. Gratitude requires mindfulness, not just smartness. It requires a perspective beyond self. Gratitude is at once an art and a science, and both require practice.

Seriously. Last time I'll say it. You should check out Resurgence.

 

Superstition and Religion

Earlier this week, I finished reading "Another Turn of the Crank" (1995), a collection of essays by the Mad Farmer, Wendell Berry. My favorite essay was "The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity," about the increasing pressure we are under to choose caring over not caring.

We know that caring will involve us in great effort and discomfort, and we dread to choose it, but we know too that the toils and miseries of nor caring are becoming greater by the day. Someday, presumably, it will become easier and less miserable to care than not to care - if by then we still remember how to care, and if the choice is still possible.

I am going to write more in the next couple days about this essay and a novel by Wallace Stegner, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain." For now, I'd like to share this passage from "The Conservation of Nature":

We are by nature creatures of faith, as perhaps all creatures are; we all live by counting on things that cannot be proved. As creatures of faith, we must choose either to be religious or to be superstitious, to believe in things that cannot be proved or to believe in things that can be disproved. The present age is an age of superstition, and some of our shallowest superstitions have the authorization of our hardest-headed rationalists and realists. The modern ambition to control nature, for instance, is an ambition based foursquare on a superstition: the idea that what we take nature to be is what nature is, or that nature is that to which it can be reduced. If nature is to be controlled, then it has to be reduced to that which is theoretically controllable.  It must be understood as a machine or as the sum of its known, separable, and decipherable parts.

Care, on the contrary, rests upon genuine religion. Care allows creatures to escape our explanations into their actual presence and their essential mystery. In taking care of fellow creatures, we acknowledge that they are not ours; we acknowledge that they belong to an order and a harmony of which we ourselves are parts. To answer to the perpetual crisis of our presence in this abounding and dangerous world, we have only the perpetual obligation of care.

Berry says that Modernism takes nature as that to which it can be reduced. This reminds me of something I read several years ago in a book by Max Oelschlaeger called "The Idea of Wilderness." Oelschlaeger explains that, for Moderns, "wilderness" represents a former, repugnant condition "in which human beings lived mean and savage lives"; it has no essential value in a society that prizes culture and civilization. However, Moderns believe that the "naturally given" wilderness might be valuable as throughput - the streams and forests, the plants and animals, the land itself are "transformed into material resource" through Adam Smith's production-consumption cycle. Oelschlaeger calls this "economic alchemy."

The "Wealth of Nations" represents the realization of Merlin's dream: the base and valueless could now, with the facility of natural science and industrial technology, be transformed into a Heaven on earth. Consumption, and its never-ending growth, is the summum bonum of the "Wealth of Nations," an ideal yet living today in the relentless pursuit of economic development. Through legerdemain, Smith transformed the first world from which humankind came into a standing reserve - a nature of significance only within a human matrix of judgment, devoid of intrinsic value.

We now understand how this was done, for we see nature only through the eyes of Homo oeconomicus...Primary attributes of nature alone remained - those capable of quantification through monetary value. Even to entertain such a question as "How much is wild nature worth?" implies a radical reorientation of perspective. For Smith, and all indutrialized democracies since, this question has been answered through the market mechanism, sometimes supplemented by cost-benefit analysis (an enormously questionable and politically oriented practice itself rooted in Modernism). With the publication of Smith's "Wealth of Nations," the line between civilization and the wilderness was clearly drawn.

"I go among trees and sit still"

I am currently reading "A Timbered Choir," a collection of poetry by Wendell Berry. These are the "Sabbath Poems," written over two decades on Berry's weekly Sunday walks through nature. He writes in his preface: "These poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors...I hope that some readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort." In this area, as in so many others, I'm trying to do as the poet-novelist-essayist-activist- farmer from Port Royal, Kentucky advises. I've copied out a couple of the poems into a notebook that I carry in my back pocket. Here's a Sabbath Poem I intend to memorize, along with the epigraph from Isaiah inscribed at the beginning of this excellent book:

"The whole earth is at rest, and is
quiet: they break forth into singing."
                                    ISAIAH 14:7

1979 (I)

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

Here is an excellent interview with Wendell Berry in the Fall 2007 issue of Shenandoah (via Poetry Daily).

[William] Blake said that the arts are our way of conversing with paradise, and that's probably as good a generalization as could be made. There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity. And, of course, that's one of the possibilities contemplated in the biblical idea of the Sabbath...If you take up that theme of the Sabbath you're going to take up also the theme of failure, of all the things in our life that obstruct such apprehension, and make it difficult or impossible. But maybe it's possible to have moments when you're just freely in place, apart from the clutter of what Shakespeare called the workaday world.

A second interview, in prose, from Sojourners (July 2004).