Wendell Berry Sabbath Poems 1 Fear, Trust and Hope.

For six decades Wendell Berry has been writing about citizenship. But citizenship with it widest most inclusive meanings: global citizenship, human citizenship, socially responsible citizenship, community building citizenship, agricultural and environmentally friendly citizenship; not those narrower forms of nationalism and consumerism, built on models of competitive economics which encourages upward spirals of production, consumption, waste production and the ultimate exhaustion of our planet. 

 

Wendell Berry is the original friend of the earth, because the friend of the creatures that live on earth, and especially the friend of humanity, people like ourselves who have the capacity to nurture or ruin the planet on which we all depend. If you haven't read Wendell Berry then you are missing one of the most distinctive, patient, informed and passionate voices of the past half century, speaking on behalf of your future, your welfare, and your responsibility to care about how the way you live your life impinges on everyone else's future and welfare.

 

This post is the first of several in which I reflect on Berry's work, and how in ways I don't always realise, his words have been like the best compost, taking time to break down into ideas that nourish the intellectual topsoil and make it more hospitable to imagination, vision and hope. Essays and novels, poems and short stories, have become for his readers like blades of the plough Berry so admires and advocates, turning over the soil, preparing the ground for newness, growth and organic developments of human minds, technology as servant not master, the natural world as gift to be enjoyed and stewarded rather than exploited and laid waste by runaway greed.

 

The collection of Sabbath poems that Berry has written over the years is one of those books that you can read repeatedly, or browse in occasionally. What makes the contents of This Day. Collected and New Sabbath Poems so special is that the poems were written on the Sabbath day, in the disposition of rest, when the poet purposely and purposefully takes pencil and paper and writes what he sees, feel, and prays. They range across the subjects and causes to which he has devoted his time and energy, in a vocation of priestly care for creation. Few writers, practitioners and advocates have spoke with more eloquence and humane learning on behalf of a natural world besieged by forces unheeding of its ruin. His Sabbath poems are forms of contemplative prayer, or brief soliloquy, or thought experiments in environmental renewal, each of them a hopefully imagined turning point in the health of both the earth with its creatures and the human community entrusted with a world.

 

The poems are gathered in chronological order. In 1998 three poems enable us to overhear Berry, or to look over the shoulder of the poet, and learn what it is he fears, (IX) what gives him hope (V), and how he looks on the ordinary and find there extraordinary grace (I). There is a poignant yearning for it not to be so, when he speaks of his fear of despair; there is an indomitable trust in love as eternal in consequence when he writes of what matters whatever happens; and there is visionary hopefulness in his conviction that when the river overflows it mirrors the overflowing love and sorrow of God.

 

                                            IX

         What I fear most is despair

         for the world and us; forever less

of beauty, silence, open air,

gratitude, unbidden happiness,

affection, unegotistical desire.

                                          V

Whatever happens
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
into the lasting world
and will not leave
whatever happens.

                                        I

In a single motion the river comes and goes.

At times, living beside it, we hardly notice it

as it noses calmly along within its bounds

like the family pig. But a day comes

when it swiftens, darkens, rises, flows over

its banks spreading its mirrors out upon

the fields of the valley floor, and then

it is like God's love or sorrow, including

at last all that had been left out.