Yesterday, Wendell Berry died. He was 92 years old, at home in Port Royal, Kentucky—the place to which he had given so much of his life, attention, labor, and love.
There seems something fitting about that. Wendell Berry spent a lifetime resisting the mythology that a meaningful life requires us to become increasingly mobile, powerful, productive, famous, or unencumbered by place. He chose instead to belong somewhere. And from that somewhere, he changed the way many of us see the world.
I never met Wendell in person. But I feel his death personally.
His books have accompanied me for decades. The Unsettling of America. Think Little. What Are People For? Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community. The World-Ending Fire. The extraordinary Port William stories and novels, especially Jayber Crow. And then the poems—the Sabbath poems collected in A Timbered Choir and This Day—words born, quite literally, from walking the same Kentucky hills Sunday after Sunday, year after year.
Berry taught me that attention can be a spiritual discipline. That affection can be a form of knowing. That place can become teacher. That limits can be gifts. That neighborliness is not sentimental. That the health of soil, water, bodies, economies, communities, and souls cannot finally be separated from one another. And perhaps most importantly for my own work as a practical theologian, Berry helped me understand that faithfulness is always embodied somewhere.
What Are People For?
That question may be one of Berry’s greatest theological contributions. What are people for?
It sounds almost absurd when first asked. People aren’t for anything. Human beings aren’t tools. We aren’t economic units. We aren’t consumers, markets, labor forces, voting blocs, data points, audiences, or human resources. We are creatures. And creatureliness mattered enormously to Berry.
His was a remarkably robust theological anthropology, even when he wasn’t writing what would conventionally be called theology. To be human, in Berry’s imagination, is to be a creature among creatures—dependent upon soil we did not make, air we did not create, communities we did not invent, bodies we did not design, and a world that precedes us and will continue after us. We belong before we achieve.
That is profoundly counter-cultural.
Much of modern life trains us to imagine freedom as escape from dependence: freedom from place, tradition, obligation, limits, neighbors, bodies, seasons, even one another. Berry kept insisting on nearly the opposite. Our humanity is discovered through relationship. We become human through membership. Through affection. Through work. Through fidelity to particular people and particular places. Through accepting the limits that make love possible.
I have increasingly come to describe the vocation of my own life as the quest for faithful presence—learning to become lovingly present to G-d, neighbor, self, enemy, place, story, beauty, and justice. I cannot say how much of that imagination bears Wendell Berry’s fingerprints. Berry understood that presence requires staying long enough to know something. And loving something enough to be changed by it.
Port William
Maybe that is why Jayber Crow has stayed with me so deeply. Port William is fictional, but anyone who has spent enough time there knows it is also strangely real. Its people belong to what Berry called a “membership.” Not a membership in the institutional sense. No cards. No dues. No strategic plan. A membership made through lives entangled with other lives.
Births and burials. Farms and kitchens. Marriages and estrangements. Mistakes and forgiveness. Work that needs doing. Meals that need cooking. Neighbors who need help. People we might not have chosen but who, through the strange providence of place, have somehow become our people.
That vision has haunted much of my thinking about church.
What if church were less an organization people attend and more a membership we discover ourselves within? What if salvation includes the healing of our relationships with land, neighbor, food, work, body, watershed, and community? What if the question isn’t simply whether I believe the right things, but whether I am becoming capable of belonging faithfully to the world G-d loves? Berry made questions like these difficult for me to avoid.
Keith
But my relationship with Wendell Berry wasn’t only through books. Keith Anderson, former president of The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, was one of the people who helped make Berry part of the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of our school.
I honestly can’t remember hearing Keith speak without Wendell Berry eventually appearing. Berry was everywhere. A line from an essay. A poem. A story from Port William. A question about community, place, membership, or what human beings are actually for. Keith helped many of us see that Berry wasn’t merely an agrarian writer from Kentucky. He was offering us a way of understanding human formation.
So when Keith was preparing to retire, I had an idea. It was probably a ridiculous idea.
I wrote Wendell Berry. Not an email.Wendell didn’t do email. A letter. And sometime later, another handwritten letter made its way back across the country.
I had asked whether he might be willing to host Keith and Wendy for a Sunday afternoon visit—maybe some lemonade and conversation. Wendell said yes. He graciously agreed to welcome these people he had never met into his home. We arranged for a copy of Jayber Crow, and Wendell inscribed it personally for Keith, extending the invitation for Keith and Wendy to come visit.
I still smile thinking about it.
Because somehow the gesture embodied the very world Berry had spent his life writing about. Here was one of America’s great writers, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the author of dozens of books, inviting a retiring seminary president and his wife over for lemonade. No conference. No keynote. No VIP reception. A Sunday afternoon. A conversation. Hospitality. Presence.
It was so wonderfully Wendell Berry… at least as I imagine him.
The Sabbath Poet
I return perhaps most often to his Sabbath poems. For decades Berry walked outdoors on Sundays and wrote poems born from those walks. I love the practice almost as much as the poems. Stop working. Go outside. Walk. Pay attention. Listen. Receive the world again.
In an economy organized around ceaseless production, Berry practiced Sabbath as resistance. The world does not depend upon our productivity. The forest grows without our management. Birds sing without monetizing their songs. Creeks continue toward rivers. The soil receives what has died and, mysteriously, turns death toward life.
Berry’s Sabbath poems invite us back into a world that is gift before it is resource. Perhaps this is one reason his writing has always felt theological to me. He kept directing our attention toward creation—not as scenery surrounding the supposedly important human drama, but as the community of creation within which our human lives become intelligible. The world is not raw material. A forest is not merely timber. A river is not merely water supply. Soil is not merely agricultural input. And a human being is not merely a consumer.
Everything belongs. Everything is gift. Everything lives in and through relationship.
A Shalomic Imagination
I have come to speak of this interconnected flourishing as shalom—G-d’s dream of flourishing for all and everything. Berry helped me imagine what that might actually look like on the ground. Shalom cannot remain an abstraction. It has to become soil. Food. Work. Economics. Friendship. Watersheds. Neighborhoods. Bodies. Farms. Tables. Communities. Enemies becoming neighbors.
People learning again that their flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of everything around them. That is what Berry gave us: not merely environmentalism, and certainly not nostalgia for an imagined agrarian past, but a fierce critique of every economy and ideology that requires us to forget our belonging.
Against the fantasy of limitless growth, he honored limits. Against mobility, place. Against individualism, membership. Against extraction, affection. Against efficiency, care. Against abstraction, particularity. Against despair, fidelity. And against the assumption that changing the world requires becoming powerful, Wendell Berry quietly kept tending his little piece of Kentucky earth.
That may be one of the most radical forms of faithful presence I know.
This Day
And now Wendell Berry has died. There is something strange about grieving someone you never actually met. Yet perhaps books create their own forms of membership.
Someone places words on a page. You encounter them years later, thousands of miles away. Those words enter your imagination. They alter the way you walk through your neighborhood. They change what you notice. They give language to something you have sensed but couldn’t yet name. And eventually you realize that this person has become one of your teachers.
Wendell Berry was one of mine. Yesterday, at his home in Port Royal, the long life of this farmer, poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, neighbor, husband, father, and stubborn lover of this world came to an end. But the membership continues. The soil remembers. The stories remain. Port William remains. The poems remain. And somewhere today, I imagine, someone will put down their work, step outside, and walk slowly enough to notice the world.
Perhaps that is one way to honor Wendell. Go outside. Walk somewhere you love. Pay attention. Learn the names of your neighbors. Love a particular place. Accept your limits. Do some good work. Welcome someone to your table. And practice belonging to the world rather than merely passing through it.
Thank you, Wendell.
For teaching so many of us that another way of being human is possible. And for showing us what faithful presence can look like when practiced, stubbornly and lovingly, in one place over the course of a life.
Rest in Peace, dwight
