Rector’s Note: What we continue to learn from those who have died-10.1.26

We’ve lost several national heroes of late – artists, writers, activists whose advanced age is a reminder of how long their wisdom, passion and commitment to the good has been shaping us. That’s important to remember when so many cruel and hateful voices are grabbing the microphone.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the passing of Dolly Parton. But I’m also mourning the passing of feminist icon Gloria Steinem, jazz musician Cassandra Wilson and author and activist Wendell Berry.

Berry has been a particular inspiration for me. For the last few weeks, I have been rereading a small book of his short stories called “Fidelity,” one of his many accounts of a fictional Kentucky town he calls the Port William membership. They are such gentle stories of deep love, forgiveness and heroic choices, highlighting several characters that the reader meets over and over again in the many books he wrote about this community.

A great-grandson in his adulthood learns the full story of how a distant cousin murdered his great-grandfather in an act of drunken anguish, and how his grandmother carried the narrative with compassion for both families all her life. A young man makes the long walk home after the war, joining his father and brother in the healing and restorative work of farming. A family secrets away a beloved elder as he lies dying in a hospital bed, creating their own form of a hospice in the woods where he was most at home.

The summaries don’t do his work justice. Berry was a poet and author, a climate activist and a defender of the family farm. He envisioned communities that cared deeply for their members over time, who held one another’s stories with compassion and who defended such love over institutional callousness.

I particularly recommend his book Jayber Crow, which is next on my list of re-readable books. I have several that sit on my nightstand to help me get to sleep at night. Jayber Crow  is the story of the Port William membership through the eyes of its barber, who is also at heart a well-read philosopher, theologian and student of humanity. It’s also a story of love, both requited and unrequited.

Berry was a Baptist who had his issues with organized religion. Yet his spiritual sensibility and deep belief in the mercy, love, forgiveness and presence of God rings through all of his work. There is a universality to it as well.  Perhaps that’s because love is recognizable everywhere it makes a home. Berry had an eye for seeing it and an eye for describing it so others could see it. Mostly he saw it in the simple relationships that people have with one another and with creation. He described eloquently how God’s love and mercy are best practiced, how they ring through the quotidian.

Sunday mornings Berry would walk the land, which inspired his series of Sabbath poems, works that I have yet to plumb. One example on his Wikipedia page beckons to me. And I am reminded as ever that even in death, our great artists leave so much life behind to instruct and shape us.  It’s what we all aspire to, I think. And it’s why the Communion of Saints has always contained both those who are still living among us and those who have died and yet remain near, as close to us as God.

The bell calls in the town

Where forebears cleared the shaded land

And brought high daylight down

To shine on field and trodden road.

I hear, but understand

Contrarily, and walk into the woods.

I leave labor and load,

Take up a different story.

I keep an inventory

Of wonders and of uncommercial goods

— Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems^.

 Berkeley: Counterpoint. p. 11. ISBN 978-1-61902-198-3.