A Reflection on the Death of Wendell Berry

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them
(Rom 12.4-6).

Wendell Berry died this week. My personal connection with Berry’s writing reaches back to my junior year of high school, though I was completely ignorant of it at the time. I wrote my capstone English research paper at Lamphere on the topic of farm subsidies (initially because no one else was interested). Besides Gospel parables about farming in Sunday School and drives through the east Tennessee countryside on family vacations, this research paper was my wicket gate into the rural and agrarian world, almost completely alien to my suburban upbringing.

I first remember hearing Wendell Berry’s name when I moved to Louisville, KY. for Bible College. My nostalgia DeLorean took me back there this week when I read an e-mail newsletter from Theopolis Institute penned by my classmate – Brian Moats – and an article from Christianity Today by Dr. Russell Moore – both in honor of Berry’s passing. In seminary I was assigned a collection of Berry’s essays to read entitled, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, for Dr. Moore’s Ethics class, which may be the first time I read Berry. Regardless, I was in a community of friends and brothers in the (personally) sacred dorms of Carver Hall, influenced by voices like Dr. Moore and songwriter/author Andrew Peterson, who shared a reverence for Wendell Berry.

But it wasn’t until Bethany and I moved to rural Kentucky that I understood Berry more than I ever had before. Wendell Berry was a bluegrass native himself – born and raised in Henry County, KY., he lived and taught for a few years in New York before feeling called back to his old Kentucky home. From the age of 30 until his death on Monday at the age of 92, Berry lived and farmed (while also writing novels, poetry, and essays, and teaching at his alma mater The University of Kentucky) in Port Royal, KY. Much of Berry’s writing and activism challenged modern agrarian morality and championed local communities and small family farming. One might assume (from Berry’s agrarian apologetic and prophetic polemics against modernity) that Port Royal was an idyllic southern town – a slice of heaven on earth – but the truth is Port Royal is like every other meth-plagued, dollar general speckled small town that blankets the rural south, the same kind of towns that Bethany and I lived in in Hancock and Ohio Counties near Owensboro.

But Wendell Berry didn’t merely extoll America’s agrarian past (contra his New York Times obituary heading); he tapped into something much deeper – themes of embodiment, membership, and what it means to steward God’s creation. Like a fish in water, so many of us have unwittingly been catechized by the individualism and commercialism of modernity. Akin to a modern prophet, Berry recognized this decades ago and procured his pen (literally, he never owned a computer, but wrote his copious collection of novels, poems, and essays by pencil, pen, or typewriter) to wage war against the harms of modernity.

Berry wrote much about the importance and necessity of community (most vividly embodied in his Port Williams novels like Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter). His writings major on what Berry referred to as “membership,” lauding the value of localism and community over against individualism. In his work, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, Berry wrote:

"I believe that the community — in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures — is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms."

In his novel, Jayber Crow, Berry laments modern Western individualism thus:

"The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use."

 Berry understood that true community requires a "placed people"—individuals tied to a specific location through shared responsibilities, trust, forbearance, and mutual care rather than rootless commercialism. This made me think about our little community that we call Christ Community Church. The Lord has called and formed a people for Himself in our local church – a community of love, care, and trust. God created us in such a way that our health – spiritual, mental, emotional, even physical – is reliant upon each other.

It is in the local church – around the Word and sacraments – that the gospel forms us. In his poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Berry calls upon us to, “practice resurrection.” We do so by believing the gospel together sitting under the voice of the preacher. We practice resurrection when we feast on Christ’s body and blood together in faith. We practice resurrection as we confess our sins to each other and together receive the pardon. And we do so in our place together.

We are quick to (rightly) remind ourselves that the church is not the building, but the people. While this is true, there this a theology of place that’s often missing. We are embodied creatures who serve an embodied Lord. The incarnation of the Son of God means much to us a doctrine, but we often neglect its implication and application in our understanding of people and places; especially our place at 8291 E. 14 Mile Road.

Christ Community Church is primarily the people – individuals and families who share trust, responsibilities, and mutual care for each other in the gospel. Despite our differences, we are members of the same body – the body of Christ: One Lord, one faith, one baptism (Eph 4.5). But we are also a “placed people.” Ever since I was 10 years old, our church building has been a meaningful place to me – it is where I gather with the saints, my brothers and sisters, around the Word and sacrament every Sunday; it is where Bethany and I made our vows to God, each other, and our church; it is where my mother and grandfather were mourned at their funerals; it is where my children were baptized.

This theology of a placed people rests firmly on our eschatology – its telos resides in the new heavens and the new earth. The world is not destined for destruction. Eternity will not be a disembodied existence in the clouds. Jesus will return to raise, the dead, judge the world, and make all things new. We will be resurrected to live forever in the new creation with our risen Lord Jesus Christ. And every Sunday we get a glimpse of that in the church - the people and the place. Wendell Berry gets at something like that in his novel, Hannah Coulture:

“There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”