Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry died yesterday.

I did not know him, though saying that does not feel entirely true. Some writers give us information. Some give us pleasure. A rare few give us language for real life. Their words work their way into our timbers until we can no longer remember who we were before we read them.

Mr. Berry was that kind of writer for me.

I loved his poems. I returned to them when I needed to remember that the world was still beautiful, that despair was not wisdom, and that sometimes the holiest thing a person could do was walk into the woods and become quiet.

And then there was Jayber Crow, which may be my favorite novel ever written.

I have rarely encountered a character whose life was so small by the measures of the world and so immense by every measure that finally matters. Jayber does not conquer anything. He does not build an empire, lead a movement, or become an important man. He cuts hair. He digs graves. He keeps a church. He listens to people talk. He watches them marry, quarrel, grow old, leave, and die. He carries a love he cannot possess and belongs to a place that cannot be reduced to property.

But it was Mr. Berry’s essay “The Two Economies” that changed the architecture of my mind—and, eventually, the arrangement of my life.

The essay begins with Mr. Berry and his friend Wes Jackson trying to imagine an economy comprehensive enough to account for everything upon which human life depends. Money was not sufficient. Neither was energy. Finally, Jackson offered an answer that was both startling and obvious:

The Kingdom of God.

Mr. Berry came to call it the Great Economy—the vast, intricate, partly visible and mostly mysterious order that contains every creature and every consequence, every field and sparrow, every birth and burial, every gift and debt.

Inside that Great Economy, human beings create their little economies: farms, businesses, nations, churches, households, careers, and individual lives.

These smaller economies are necessary, of course. We must grow food, build houses, organize work, raise children, earn money, and decide how to spend our days. The danger begins when one of our little economies forgets that it is small.

When that happens, it begins to act as if it were the whole. It values only what it can measure. It consumes what it did not create. It ignores any cost that falls outside its own accounting and calls itself successful because the numbers still add up.

Mr. Berry’s primary example was industrial agriculture. A farm can appear profitable while losing topsoil, poisoning water, exhausting farmers, and leaving the land less fertile for those who come after them. The books balance only because the real costs have been charged to someone else or postponed until another day.

The modern economy has become very skilled at preserving the golden egg while killing the goose that laid it.

But Mr. Berry was writing about more than farming. He was writing about human life.

My life was also a little economy. Every day I was deciding what deserved my time, what counted as success, whose needs received my attention, what could be postponed, what could be sacrificed, and what I believed would finally make me secure.

And my economy could be badly arranged.

For more than two decades, I stood in pulpits and spoke about the Kingdom of God. I prayed for it to come. I preached its grace, announced its promises, and invited people to enter its life.

But it is possible to preach the Kingdom while arranging one’s life according to another economy.

A life can be devoted to good work and still run on anxiety. It can speak about grace while measuring its worth through productivity, recognition, and the approval of others. It can treat love as an inexhaustible resource and assume that the people closest to us will absorb whatever costs our ambitions impose upon them.

There was love in my work. There was also fear and pride and the old human ache to prove that my life mattered.

Berry helped me understand that even good work can be badly arranged. If the economy of my life turned against the Great Economy—even in the name of ministry, usefulness, or success—it would eventually damage me and the people I loved.

Whatever our way of life consumes will be consumed somewhere. Whatever we neglect will be neglected by someone. Our bodies carry what our schedules refuse to acknowledge. Our families live with the anxiety created by our need to succeed. We promise ourselves that life will become more peaceful after the next deadline, the next crisis, the next season of growth.

And Mr. Berry gave me a standard large enough to evaluate that economy.

The Kingdom of God was not merely a beautiful future awaiting me after death. It was not only a message I had been commissioned to preach. It was the reality within which my life was already taking place. My work, relationships, ambitions, habits, body, money, and time all existed within it.

The question was not simply whether I believed in the Kingdom.

The question was whether the economy of my life moved in cooperation with it.

Mr. Berry gave me an end large enough to order the work of my hands. He helped me understand that the purpose of my life must govern the actual practices of my life: how I work, how I rest, how I love, how I use my time, how much I believe is enough, and what I am willing to sacrifice in order to be thought successful.

A good end cannot be pursued by practices that destroy the people and places the end claims to serve.

The Kingdom cannot be built by consuming our neighbors.

Love cannot be practiced indefinitely at the expense of those we love.

Grace cannot be proclaimed truthfully by a life organized around proving its worth.

That does not mean my years of pastoral ministry were false or wasted. They were neither. I loved the people I served. I still believe in preaching. I still believe that words spoken from a pulpit can become windows through which people glimpse the Kingdom.

But Mr. Berry helped me understand that the preacher does not stand outside the Great Economy explaining it to everyone else. He stands inside it, dependent upon gifts he did not create and subject to consequences he cannot escape.

He is not the source of the light.

He is standing in it with everybody else.

Mr. Berry’s vision was humbling, but it was also liberating. If meaning originates in a reality larger than us, then we do not have to manufacture it.

We receive it.

A carpenter does not create the tree. A farmer does not create the soil. A parent does not create the mystery of a child. A pastor does not create the Kingdom.

And a storyteller does not create the significance of a human life.

The meaning was there before the storyteller arrived. His task is to attend to it, shape it honestly, and give it away without diminishing it.

This brings me back to Jayber.

By almost every modern measure, Jayber’s life is unremarkable. Yet he becomes significant precisely by relinquishing the need to be significant. He attends. He remembers. He remains. He allows the lives of other people to matter to him.

He does not stand above Port William, his hometown, and explain it. He belongs to it.

Perhaps that is what I am learning in this season of my own life. After decades as the preacher in the square, I find myself settling onto the porch. A porch Mr. Berry has invited me on which will, by grace, continue to give me eyes to see.

The square was not wrong. There are times when somebody needs to stand there and speak clearly. I remain grateful that I was called to do that.

But Mr. Berry’s porch asks something different of me.

It asks me to sit near enough to hear one person’s story. To notice who is walking down the road. To remember who used to live in the house across the way. To allow silence to remain in the conversation. To resist turning every sorrow into a lesson or every beauty into an argument.

It asks me to bear witness to the small portion of the world I have actually been given.

That is what I am trying to do now through stories or windows as I call them.

I am looking back over ordinary moments and asking what was present that I could not see at the time. I am learning that meaning does not always arrive with trumpets. Sometimes it hides in an old window, a dog, a mailbox, a tree, a shared meal, an embarrassing mistake, or a kindness almost forgotten.

These are the minute particulars of a life.

But Mr. Berry helped me see that they matter not because a writer makes them important, but because they already belong to something larger. The whole is present in the part. The Kingdom presses upon us through soil and bread, marriage and work, grief and laughter, memory and place.

Everything signifies because everything belongs.

I think that is the greatest gift Mr. Berry gave me. He loosened my grip on the need to be the source, to explain the whole, or to make my life important by standing above it.

I am already inside something larger.

My task is to arrange my work, love, attention, and words so that they cooperate with what holds together and lasts.

Wendell Berry died yesterday.

Others will assess his place in American literature, his environmental influence, his agrarian vision, and his resistance to the machinery of modern life. Those assessments should be written.

This is the smaller testimony I can give.

He taught me that the Kingdom of God was not merely something I hoped would come. It was the deepest reality of the world I already inhabited. He taught me that my own life was a little economy within it and that the way I arranged that life mattered—not only to me, but to everyone joined to me.

He gave me an end large enough to order the work of my hands.

He reminded me that we are members before we are masters, recipients before we are producers, and beloved before we have accomplished a thing.

Perhaps the best way to honor him is not merely to admire his words.

Perhaps it is to step outside.

To feel the ground beneath our feet.

To attend to the people and places that have been entrusted to us.

To do the next small thing faithfully.

And then, when the work is finished, to become quiet enough to notice that we have been living inside the Great Economy all along.

Rest in peace, Mr. Berry. And thank you for bringing so much of that peace to the lives we live.