When they removed him from his bed at his death, they found a book under his pillow. Up the very last, Teddy Roosevelt was still striving to learn and improve himself.
Want to be quickly overwhelmed? Go to a bookstore to buy a book. When you walk through the doors you find yourself in a tsunami of rows and rows of books begging for your attention.
How do I choose a book to read? Sometimes I check out what friends are reading. A lot of times I’m a sucker for an attractive cover. But there’s one source I usually trust. I discover good reads by noting the books referenced by my favorite authors. If an author I enjoy cites an influential reference, then I’m inclined to look up the book.
That’s how I discovered Wendell Berry.
The next time you visit a farmer’s market ask the organic farmer or gardener if they’ve heard of Wendell Berry. Berry was a forerunner in creating the farm to the table movement and has shaped environmental discussions for decades. He does this in provocative and practical ways filtered through a Christian worldview.
Berry was an established professor of creative writing and a poet when he decided to leave academia and move to his family’s northern Kentucky farm. This farming life was not a return to a romantic pre-industrial lifestyle, but a way of living guided by an agrarian philosophy — a lifestyle that embraces the stewardship of God’s creation, in a specific place, where all that we have comes from a God who asks us to steward His gifts. Wendell repeatedly calls this a “given life.”
This transition from academia to a farmer didn’t stop his writing. During his life as a Kentucky farmer, Berry has authored a series of novels, books of poetry, and numerous collections of essays, articles, and commentaries.
What can this farmer, poet, novelist, and agrarian philosopher teach the church? A lot!
Here are two simple but profound themes to ponder; themes peppered with quotes from Berry’s writings.
Practice being a genius.
Famers understand what Berry calls the “genius of the place.” By “genius” he means the particular characteristics of a local farm. Wise farmers know how “to consult the genius of of the place . . . [they] must ask what nature would permit them to do there, and what they could do there with the least harm . . . to the place and to the neighbors.”1
When a farmer understands the genius of a place, he or she can “tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love in the company of neighbors that they know and love.”2
This understanding of land enables one to adapt their work to their place. “We farm the farm that’s given to us,”3 writes Berry. You don’t grow pineapples in Nova Scotia or rice in Arizona.
Is your mind racing like mine to make the connections between farming, place and ministry? In your church or ministry, are you “farming the farm given to you?” What’s your genius rating?
Here’s another theme to consider.
Go slow to watch.
Economic landscapes, like farming, require careful watching. Any parcel of land we use, writes Berry, “must have an eyes-to-acre ratio.” By eyes, he means “a competent watchfulness, aware of the nature and the history of the place, constantly present, always alert for signs of harm and signs of health.”4 Attentive watching teaches us how to care.
Farmers take time to observe the low places, the shady areas, the acres that receive the most sunlight. A productive harvest depends on thoughtful knowledge; knowledge gained by watching in slow ways.
As speed increases, notes Berry, “care declines . . . We know that there is a limit to capacity of attention and the faster we go the less we see.”5 “The making of a farm begins in the recognition and acceptance of limits . . . The true [farmer] shapes the farm with an assured sense of what it cannot be and could not be . . . the [question] of form returns us to that of local adaptation.”6
These limits of what could be or could not be arise from knowing the genius of the place. Our motivation for knowing our place is because we care for the place. What’s the most practical method to discover the genius of a place, to demonstrate that we care?
“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention . . . and most permissive of stopping to look or think,”7 concludes Berry. A farm’s good health is when there “is a limit of scale, because it implies a limit of attention.”8
Limits tell us what grows well in our place and within these limits, we focus our attention on a few things — farming the farm that’s given to us. Slowness is a virtue to the good farmer — and to ministry leaders.
It’s easy to “run” in ministry. We increase our programs, fill our schedules, and expand our kingdom empires. In the process, we stop walking, we stop paying attention, we stop caring. We forget, Berry writes, about “the importance of scale.” We fail to determine the scale appropriate for our places and needs, our people and our buildings.
Then Berry digs the knife into our practice of speed: “only machines, companies, and politicians run.”
Let’s pause to capture some take-aways from Berry’s writings.
Like a farmer, we make it a practice in our ministries to slow down, study, pay attention, and choose wise ways to grow people. We are careful about assuming that “one size fits all” — importing successful ministry franchises that may not fit the “genius” of our place. Wise leaders understand the nature of limits — about themselves, their people, and their ministry contexts. We weed out in-grown competition and comparison as we learn to relax and “farm the farm given to us.”
Whew! What a tour through Berry’s writings.
I’ve just hinted at how his insights on the agrarian life can impact the church. The books I’ve quoted are from his collections of essays. I haven’t touched his novels like Jayber Crowe or Hannah Coulter. If you enjoy good character development with thoughtful plot lines (without gratuitous sex and violence!) then you will enjoy his novels. I will be referencing his poetry in another posting.
One last thought from Berry to massage your thinking — “We must grow like a tree, not like a fire.”
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