Category Archives: Essays

Becoming Native to This Place

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I was introduced to Wes Jackson’s work through reading Wendell Berry. The two men have a longstanding friendship and have similar views of what Berry has called “culture and agriculture.” In Becoming Native to This Place, Jackson explores the ways our assumptions about the earth as an inert repository of resources for us to extract and manage developed, how they are destructive to community, and how they might be changed to develop new paradigms in our relationship to nature.

Like Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson sees agriculture as the heart of our relationship to the earth, a discipline that reveals our attitudes toward the world and each other. He operates The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, which has worked for several decades to “develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops.”

The book asks several important questions. Why does land cultivated by post-World War II methods produce less, and erode more, than it did before cultivation? Why does it support less life? How did the ideas underlying our system of food production, our use of land and animals, and our reliance on nonrenewable energy develop? Perhaps most basically, what if the settlers of this country had approached their lives asking a different question: “How do we become native to this place?”

I read this years ago, but since then I’ve had children and experienced the Little House books. I couldn’t help but think of the Ingalls and Wilder families’ resounding failure at agriculture as they pushed westward. Kind of like the preacher in Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, they brought the assumptions and methods and crops from their places of origin, and it just didn’t take on the prairie. Yet they saw it as a very promising place, and they were right; it was a very fertile landscape. But it had its own ecology, which was foreign to them, and which for whatever reason they never really figured out. Their style of farming was to impose themselves on the land rather than to figure out where they were and how to live there.

That, I think Wes Jackson would say, is pretty much the story of America — or of what Wendell Berry has called The Unsettling of America. There are aspects of this book that I don’t have a good enough backing in science to really know what to do with; Jackson has a B.A. in biology, an M.A. in botany, and a Ph.D. in genetics, and though he writes accessibly enough that I could usually understand, I don’t have the context to evaluate it. I didn’t have a clear sense of the underlying moral or spiritual framework Jackson advocates either, though he sees our various compartmentalizations — of church and state, of science and philosophy, of empirical knowledge and moral knowledge — as negative.

However, when he writes about how different localities have different ecosystems and therefore don’t lend themselves to industrialized agriculture that crams all places into the same mold, it simply makes sense. When he writes about human arrogance in acting confidently before we know all that we think we know, and then having a big mess on our hands afterward, it simply makes sense. It’s easy to feel helpless, but we can at least start where we are, and begin to get to know our own place. I felt glad about the nature study our family has embarked on this year, because learning to love one place is the beginning of an ecological ethic. If we love our place, and learn the names of the native living things that constitute our community, and tune in to the stories going on all around us, we can begin to live with more awareness — and perhaps eventually with more wisdom.

Reflections on Marilynne Robinson’s essays

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By the standards of my generation, all my life I have gone to church with a kind of persistence, as I do to this day. Once recently I found myself traveling all night to be home in time for church, and it occurred to me to consider in what spirit or out of what need I would do such a thing. My tradition does not encourage the idea that God would find any merit in it. I go to church for my own gratification, which is intense, though it had never occurred to me before to try to describe it to myself.

The essence of it, certainly, is the Bible, toward which I do not feel in any degree proprietary, with which after long and sometimes assiduous attention I am not familiar. I believe the entire hyptertrophic bookishness of my life arose directly out of my exposure, among modest Protestant solemnities of music and flowers, to the language of Scripture. Therefore, I know many other books very well and I flatter myself that I understand them — even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses, one or another luminous fragment, a hymn before and a hymn afterward. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed. (Marilynne Robinson)

I don’t have a complete book review this week. I’ve been reading — and rereading, and mulling over — Marilynne Robinson’s Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. The passage above is taken from her essay “Psalm Eight,” and it captures an aspect of my own experience I’ve never put into words — and wouldn’t ever manage to with such delicacy. The Bible is, for me too, “always new.” I have a strong inner resistance to any proposition that purports to be the final, definitive reading of this or that passage.

Just this week, when I was drying my youngest’s hair, she asked, “Do I have to go to Sunday school tomorrow?”

“Why don’t you want to go to Sunday school?” I asked, thinking I’d hear that there was too much writing or something like that.

“I already know all those stories,” she said. “I know all about the Bible. I’ve heard all those stories before.”

Obviously it led into an interesting conversation (not for the first time) about how if the Bible is God’s word, it will speak new things to us every time we read it. I’ve been rereading it myself for years now. And in all fairness, this multidimensional quality is not confined to the Bible, but is a feature of all books. Rereading any text yields new things. But there is a uniqueness to the Bible among all books. Maybe it’s in the nature of its revelation — its truthfulness, its total unexpectedness, its relevance, its ability to speak to personal, inner depths. Add in its literary pervasiveness as a source of so many motifs and themes in western thought, though this is something incidental, something about how people have responded to the Bible rather than something integral to the text.

In “Psalm Eight,” Marilynne Robinson combines a reflection on some aspects of her own spiritual experience with her knowledge of the art of narrative to propose a way of reading the Bible that makes sense to me. She suggests that it is like a seed, in which stories fall like “possibility in a sleeve of limitation” on the rich or stony ground of our temporal experience.

Over the course of the essay she looks at the resurrection narratives, suggesting that they are probably not written to provide documentary proof, but to preserve likeness. There is too much evidence that resurrection would not have been seen as all that incredible to the original audience, she explains. The stories are written as “portraiture” — as a depiction of how Jesus’ resurrection was unique among other such events. Thus the differences in the gospel accounts fade, and what is striking is their agreement on certain things. But she also points out how even those narratives show Jesus recalling the old stories of Scripture — echoing past stories and motifs. “What is eternal must always be complete,” she concludes, “So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative — event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.” Even Jesus himself reveals who he is using Scripture, in which God laid the groundwork for his entry into the temporal world, and gave us the terms to recognize him.

One of my favorite parts of the essay is where Robinson remembers the way her relatives gave her “Presbyterianism taught in parables.”

God spoke to Moses from a burning bush, Pharoah dreamed a dream of famine, Jesus said, Take up your bed and walk. We drew or colored pictures of these events, which were, I think, never explained to us. No intrusion on the strangeness of these tales was ever made. It was as if some old relative had walked me down to the lake knowing an imperious whim of heaven had made it a sea of gold and glass, and had said, This is a fine evening, and walked me home again. I am convinced that it was all this reticence, in effect this esotericism, that enthralled me.

What a wonderful caution against over-instructing our children in what this or that Bible story “really means.” Give them the stories. Plant the seeds. Then let them flourish forever in the different seasons of our children’s lives.

I find this idea of Scripture, and our own experience, as eternal truth broken down and mapped out in the temporal language of stories, very satisfying. It appeals to me both as someone resistant to final conclusions about passages of Scripture, and as someone story-loving by nature. But Robinson’s working-out of her thought is far more complete and poetic than my attempt to portray here. My purpose in writing about it is to give a small glimpse of the experience of reading this book, one that requires me to linger in its pages for awhile longer.

Week in Words: Glory

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I’m pausing in my swim through the archives, lifting my head out of old blog posts for a breath of air in the present. And what I’m reading is 1000 Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp.

Her writing reminds me a lot of Annie Dillard, and also of Dillard’s predecessor, Thoreau. Especially this passage I read this morning:

How I want to see the weight of glory break my thick scales, the weight of glory smash the chains of desperate materialism, split the numbing shell of deadening entertainment, bust up the ice of catatonic hearts. I want to see God, who pulls on the coat of my skin and doesn’t leave me alone in this withering body of mortality; I want to see God, who gives gifts in hospitals and gravesides and homeless shelters and refugee camps and in rain falling on sunflowers and stars falling over hayfields and silver scales glinting upriver and sewage floating downriver.

It’s a very similar sentiment to what Thoreau expresses here, in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Both writers feel something so similar when they’re out in nature, yet they come to such different conclusions about God. I also notice the contrast between a feminine perspective that absorbs the wonders of nature, and a masculine one that seeks to dominate (“drive life into a corner”).

Both passages stir me up and encourage me to go into this day alert to the possibilities. As Ann Voskamp goes on to say, “I pay tribute to God by paying attention.” I hope this will be a digging-deep, thick-scale-breaking, skin-coat-tugging kind of day.

Reflections on the Psalms

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I have to be honest: the book of Psalms has never been a favorite of mine. It’s been praised so often by others that I’m quite willing to accept that the fault is in me. There are a few individual chapters that I love. In general, though, where others find the Psalms give voice to deeply-felt feelings and prayers, I am much more affected by some of the rousing stories of the Old Testament, the prayers in the Epistles, and the parables of Jesus.

I’m not sure why this is. But reading C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms laid a gentle hand on some things in the these poems that have bothered me, even though I’ve never really addressed them myself: the cursings, the self-righteousness, the rapturous love for the law, the way the writers think of death as simply the end. In this book Lewis works out his own thoughts about these and other matters over which he stumbled initially. I can’t say that Lewis has illuminated my hitherto unknown reasons for having only a polite interest in the Psalms, but he does soften the guilt I feel over it. If someone so erudite has struggled too, then it must be neither unpardonable nor insoluble.

My reading of these essays was uneven; I wasn’t equally interested in all of them. (I’m sure this will be a useful reference that I’ll return to in future seasons, though.) My favorite essay by far is #11, “On Scripture.” It bothers me sometimes to hear what sounds like Bible-olatry in Christians. The implication is that it’s the only revelation we have, all questions are answered there, and that’s that.

I like Lewis’s way of seeing the Bible. He acknowledges that it includes many literary forms, writers with different levels of awareness of inspiration, interference in its canonization and editing, an evolving (and flawed) human consciousness filtering it all. He acknowledges that the human personality through which the Bible comes to us is “an untidy and leaky vehicle,” rather than one that can give us “ultimate truth in systematic form — something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table.” Instead of what we might have thought would be best, we have what God apparently thinks is best:

The total result is not ‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.

He goes on to make the point that it’s the very departures from our desired “perfect” vehicle that give the Bible a unique power. Because it’s not easy prey for our “systematising intellect,” it demands a response from the whole person.

I’d like to quote more, but that gives a taste. The rest of the essays are well worth reading. For those who criticize Lewis for approaching universalism, there’s ample ammunition here to accuse him again. At various points he expresses the hope that some of the ancients who anticipated Christ (Akhenaten, Plato) may be saved despite being outside Jewish or Christian tradition. I don’t read this as universalism, or in any way undermining the primacy of Christ claimed in the gospels. God is gracious, and I expect we will find surprises in Heaven like the vineyard workers in Jesus’s parable found. Overall in these essays there is a generosity, a sanity, and a willingness to face the uncertainties with both faith and reason that I found very nourishing.

Great Possessions

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I’ve had Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer’s Journal on my shelf for years. I kept passing it over for more “compelling” fare. Fortunately I didn’t pass it over this time.

The book has a foreword by Wendell Berry. I expected it to be a record of farming practices. Instead, it’s a book of natural history essays based on Amish farmer David Kline’s wildlife observation around his Ohio farm. (He has a more recent book called Scratching the Woodchuck that develops this theme further.) As someone who’s been enjoying our garden, our yard’s rich population of birds and bird’s nests, and the various wild visitors who pass through, I found lots of interesting material here.

Kline writes about all aspects of nature — seasons, plants and animals, timber, birds and bird-feeding, the “ribbon of life” of a fencerow, and anything else that captures his attention as he goes about his work. Everything about his farming practice bespeaks both an attitude of cooperation with the wilderness in which his farm exists, and a rich ecological understanding. All of it occurs within a context of his community’s gratitude and reverence for the world humanity is charged to steward in the creation account of Genesis.

The Amish are regarded as a curiosity by some, an anachronism. But as our acquaintance with this author grows, he’s more and more obviously merely a sane voice. “The Amish are not necessarily against modern technology,” he writes. “We have simply chosen not to be controlled by it.”

Besides writing in loving detail about his place, his observations are contextualized with many references to his wide reading in poetry and ecology. There is a quiet persuasiveness and delight in his literate reading of his native landscape. I have great respect for this tradition of farming, with its values on diversity (not monocropping), scale (not super-sized agribusiness), health (not just production), humility (not conquering), and stewardship (not depletion).

These pages also contemplate loss: loss of species, loss of pure water, loss of habitat for some wildlife irreplacable in the ecological network of relationships. One of the most compelling chapters describes the destruction of a patch of old-growth forest on a neighboring farm. It reminded me of the scene in Berry’s Jayber Crow in which an old forest is similarly flattened for profit. Before the wood vanishes, Kline gives us a glimpse of it as a world of life. It’s impossible not to grieve when it is destroyed — and even the original settlers’ grave markers are broken and scattered.

Last but not least, this book touches the nerve of my own deep loneliness as a modern person. Kline lives in an intact community, one in which people are still connected to the land they tend, to the God they worship, and to the neighbors they labor with in the most practical of ways. There is nothing comparable in my experience. I don’t have the cultural inheritance, the knowledge, the skill, or frankly the practical need for my neighbor that are enforced by the Amish lifestyle.

But what I do share with Kline is his love for the world around us. This book affirms that as only the work of a first-class naturalist can.

Girl Meets God

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Girl Meets God is Lauren Winner’s spiritual memoir, subtitled On the Path to a Spiritual Life. I found myself contrasting it often to Blue Like Jazz, in which Donald Miller traces a similarly young and modern spiritual journey. But I found Girl Meets God far more satisfying.

I really liked the first half, or maybe the first 2/3, of this book. It’s readable, scholarly in a for-a-popular-audience way, and clever. I’m interested in the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and exploring the continuities and discontinuities between the two constitutes a central theme as Winner describes her conversion from Judaism to Orthodox Judaism to Christianity.

Here are some of the things I liked:

1.) Winner’s treatment is more thoughtful and informed than Miller’s. As an example, take her discussion of the mysteriousness of God. Here’s Donald Miller’s view: “I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me.”

Now here’s a snippet of Winner’s discussion:

Here is the thing about God. He is so big and perfect that we can’t really understand Him. We can’t possess Him, or apprehend Him… But God so wants to be in relationship with us that He makes Himself small, smaller than He really is, smaller and more humble than His infinite, perfect self, so that we might be able to get to Him, a little bit.

Being born a human was not the first time God made Himself small so that we could have access to Him. First He shrunk Himself when He revealed the Torah at Mt. Sinai. He shrunk Himself into tiny Hebrew words, man’s finite language, so that we might get to Him that way. Then He shrunk Himself again, down to the size of a baby, down into manger finiteness.

<sigh of satisfaction from me…>

2.) It’s honest. (Too many examples to cite.)

3.) It’s witty.

4.) It’s smart and bookish.

So why did I only enthusiastically like the first half or two-thirds?

1.) It’s smart and bookish. (I know, I just said that.) There are a few too many lengthy and detailed lists of challenging books read, and references to intense conversations about super-specialized erudite topics. I think the aim is self-deprecating — “See what a pointy-headed academic [her term] I am?” — but it got old.

2.) In the chapter about confession, the main point is how difficult it is to be fully honest with someone about your sins. But she had no problem coming clean for anyone who reads this book about her struggles with maintaining chastity. (She covers that territory in this book as well.) Autobiography is a confessional form; as I was reading, I remembered that Augustine’s Confessions detail his sexual sins too. It’s just that he doesn’t do it in the context of agonizing over how hard it is to talk about them. It seemed a little disingenuous.

Obviously it’s an engaging book, and I recommend it. You can get a fuller sense of the book by looking through the discussion questions suggested here. It can be a little frustrating in its inconclusiveness, but as an account of a complicated and ever deepening spiritual voyage it’s not so much about an arrival as about a journey, a weaving together of several strands. As such it’s well worth reading.

The Gutenberg Elegies

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How shall we characterize [reading]? What is it that separate reading acts share that lies beyond the local construction of setting, characters, and narrative circumstances? Is there a fundamental and identifiably constant condition that we return to over and over, one different from all other conditions, from being asleep, from being high, from daydreaming?

I think there is — certainly for me. But years of working in bookstores have convinced me that this fundamental condition is there for others as well — not just a specific inner state, but a need for getting back to it. Readers know it and they seek it out. I study people in the aisles of bookstores all the time. I see them standing in one place with their necks tilted at a forty-five degree angle, looking often not for a specific book, but for a book they can trust to do the job. They want plot and character, sure, but what they really want is a vehicle that will bear them off to the reading state. (Sven Birkerts)

The pages of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age are filled with passages like these. They manage to put a finger precisely on something I feel to be true but have never heard said so well. Birkerts takes reading as his subject, and writes about it compellingly enough to leave me reflective and troubled about our collective step “out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. We have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable.”

I’ve never read such a brilliant meditation on what makes reading distinctive. I’m not talking about the lists of virtues we’re familiar with. I’m talking about perceptive, thorough description of what occurs in us when we read, written in prose that’s vivid and engaging and unfailingly equipped with the categories to take any half-developed hunches we may have had on the subject, and carry them all the way to the end.

As the title promises, this book is an elegiac consideration of what happens to books in an electronic age. Under this heading it covers a lot of ground. There’s no way I can summarize without oversimplifying, but I can offer an incomplete sampling of the subjects addressed:

  • privacy, memory, reflection
  • the linearity and sequential logic of the book vs. interactivity and hypertext
  • how the medium affects the message in literary art
  • how the means affects the end
  • otherness
  • the explosion of data vs. the defining boundaries of the disciplines
  • wisdom vs. expert accessing of information
  • how modern literacy stacks up with the past
  • deconstruction and multiculturalism and the decline (or death) of the author and all forms of author-ity
  • the subversiveness of reading

Birkerts writes, especially in the early chapters, with a digressiveness that might have bothered me except that even his digressions are fascinating. He speaks of the physical book with a reverence I couldn’t completely relate to. Early on, he offers a chapter of reading autobiography that helps to define the significance books and reading have had for him, and I can only partly relate. I’ve always loved reading, and I prefer the book to cyberspace. But Birkerts’ comments make me feel I’ve been downright half-hearted about it at best, doctorate in English notwthstanding. And there are a few points in the argument at which I felt skeptical — more sanguine, and not quite ready to accept the grim worst-case-scenario.

But the chapters that examine the reading act, and that contrast the kinds of mental and even soul-making (borrowing a term from Keats) activity that belong to reading with those encouraged in an information age, have been deeply affecting for me. (One reader said the book had affected him at “a subatomic level.”) I’ve never read anything that opened my eyes more to all that happens when we read, and all the implications of the kinds of media we read. If indeed the book is in decline, this one puts up quite a fight.  I’ve recognized the possibility before that we live in a crucial age when our technology gives us the power to have an impact incalculable to earlier generations. After reading The Gutenberg Elegies I’m convinced beyond a doubt. I recommend it highly for anyone who wants to be more awake and aware in a historic moment when much is at stake.