I heard on Sunday that an abortionist had been murdered. “Uh-oh,” thought I. “Here comes the inevitable demonizing of those that condemn the evils of abortion. We’ll all be tarred with the same brush.”
When I had a chance, I read the news story. Until this weekend, I had never heard of Dr. George Tiller. I am not an American, so the unique place he held in popular thought (“Tiller the Killer”, “lightning rod of controversy”, etc.) was unknown to me, though I was well aware that there were those that aborted infants in the third trimester.
Reading his life and death I found myself with several reactions. Too many to process easily. Enough to warrant a post.
Murder
First, let me echo the words of countless others concerned that the evil action of one (murder) may cause a backlash against the many who do not murder.
I do not know with whom the murderer of Tiller affiliates himself. He may call himself a Christian. He may call himself pro-life. I don’t know at this time what he calls himself, or even who he is, although I can safely conclude he is neither Christian nor pro-life.
Christian is as Christian does. By our fruits are we known. Christianity is not a noun or a state of being, but the act of repentance. Murder is incompatible with Christ.
He is also not pro-life. Oh, he may be anti-abortion … that seems safe enough to conclude (I feel no need to invent a conspiracy theory at this time) … but he is not pro-life. Pro-life, by definition, means no killing. None. Not abortion, not capital punishment, not war, and certainly not murder.
Sword
Second, I found myself surprised. Surprised that Dr. Tiller hadn’t been murdered before now. I read of a man who had slaughtered 60,000 or so antenatal infants, and found it amazing that this “lightning rod of controversy” had lived so long.
Why the shock? Simply put, (as Christ said) those who live by the sword die by the sword – an observation, might I add, not an injunction or command. In modern parlance we might say that violence begets violence.
And this is readily observable. Not just with tit-for-tat feuding, as in the Hatfields and the McCoys. In the past 50 years, U.S. imperialism begat Islamic extremism and terrorism which begat American anger (mis)directed at Iraq which has in turn begat an Iraqi insurgency. It is safe to say that the cycle will continue unless some party decides to a bloodless and nonviolent response.
It seems that those who deal in violence most often reap in violence. Blood sown is blood reaped. Sorrow breeds sorrow, and the passions unleashed beget answering passions.
I reiterate: this is not a justification for murder. Following the examples set me by Christ and His Saints, I cannot and will not condone the murder, assassination, killing, or slaughter of anyone, not even a mass murderer like Tiller.
But I can observe patterns, and I can marvel at the miracle of this man’s long life.
Religious hypocrisy
Third, I was troubled, deeply troubled, by a veneer of religiosity that pervaded Dr. Tiller’s life.
He was murdered at church … a church-goer, then. Not just that, but a member in good standing, an usher (a position of responsibility and respectability). He also had a chaplain on staff at his clinic to provide baptisms and funerals for the infants he killed. Balm to solace the heart and numb the conscience of those who had aborted.
I didn’t know Dr. Tiller, and I haven’t the opportunity now, even if I wanted it. I cannot know whether his hypocrisy was deliberate – the work of a minister of evil – or if it was innocent and he was a profoundly deluded and misguided man. Indeed, the point is moot, for he is dead, and his actions and his heart are weighed by Someone infinitely more merciful than I, and more holy, and more just.
Instead, I find myself angered with the spiritual leaders and false shepherds of Reformation Lutheran Church, and their predecessors. They have failed in their duty to condemn the actions of Tiller; they failed to refuse him Communion if he continued to kill; if he was deluded, they failed to save him from his delusion; if he was a minister of evil, they failed to protect their flock. Their responsibility is the souls of their parishioners, of Tiller, his family, and the rest of their spiritual flock, and they have failed all of them.
Christ is risen! Hristos voskrese! Christos anesti!
Well, I'm back.
In an attenuated sort of way.
I have discovered that taking care of two children under the age of two is a daily journey into chaos. When little B. was born, I wondered at all the spare time I had when I had no children at all, and I wondered what on earth I did with my time before he came along. I see now that I had no idea, no conception at all.
I had so much free time when I had only one child. What on earth did I do with my time before my daughter was born?
Neil Postman is a critic of contemporary culture. His is not an Orthodox voice, but one that I think well worth heeding (in the vein of Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry). Medium: video, from Youtube.
Six questions to ask about technological change:
What problem does the technology solve?
Whose problem is it?
What new problems might be caused by decisively solving an old one?
Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?
What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies and what is being gained and lost by such changes?
What sort of people and institutions acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?
Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.
Media tends to become mythic.
And here is the full lecture:
"I call my talk Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. I base these ideas on my thirty years of studying the history of technological change but I do not think these are academic or esoteric ideas. They are to the sort of things everyone who is concerned with cultural stability and balance should know and I offer them to you in the hope that you will find them useful in thinking about the effects of technology on religious faith.
I
"The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off... Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost. Now, this may seem to be a rather obvious idea, but you would be surprised at how many people believe that new technologies are unmixed blessings. You need only think of the enthusiasms with which most people approach their understanding of computers. Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences.
"Think of the automobile, which for all of its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities, and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape. Or you might reflect on the paradox of medical technology which brings wondrous cures but is, at the same time, a demonstrable cause of certain diseases and disabilities, and has played a significant role in reducing the diagnostic skills of physicians. It is also well to recall that for all of the intellectual and social benefits provided by the printing press, its costs were equally monumental. The printing press gave the Western world prose, but it made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of communication. It gave us inductive science, but it reduced religious sensibility to a form of fanciful superstition. Printing gave us the modern conception of nationhood, but in so doing turned patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion. We might even say that the printing of the Bible in vernacular languages introduced the impression that God was an Englishman or a German or a Frenchman - that is to say, printing reduced God to the dimensions of a local potentate.
"Perhaps the best way I can express this idea is to say that the question, What will a new technology do? is no more important than the question, What will a new technology undo? Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently. One might say, then, that a sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one's being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends. In fact, if it were up to me, I would forbid anyone from talking about the new information technologies unless the person can demonstrate that he or she knows something about the social and psychic effects of the alphabet, the mechanical clock, the printing press, and telegraphy. In other words, knows something about the costs of great technologies.
"Idea Number One, then, is that culture always pays a price for technology.
II
"This leads to the second idea, which is that the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. There are even some who are not affected at all. Consider again the case of the printing press in the 16th century, of which Martin Luther said it was God's highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward. By placing the word of God on every Christian's kitchen table, the mass-produced book undermined the authority of the Church hierarchy, and hastened the breakup of the Holy Roman See. The Protestants of that time cheered this development. The Catholics were enraged and distraught. Since I am a Jew, had I lived at that time, I probably wouldn't have given a damn one way or another... some gain, some lose, a few remain as they were.
"Let us take as another example, television, although here I should add at once that in the case of television there are very few indeed who are not affected in one way or another. In America, where television has taken hold more deeply than anywhere else, there are many people who find it a blessing, not least those who have achieved high-paying, gratifying careers in television as executives, technicians, directors, newscasters and entertainers. On the other hand, and in the long run, television may bring an end to the careers of school teachers since school was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word will have in the future. There is no chance, of course, that television will go away but school teachers who are enthusiastic about its presence always call to my mind an image of some turn-of-the-century blacksmith who not only is singing the praises of the automobile but who also believes that his business will be enhanced by it. We know now that his business was not enhanced by it; it was rendered obsolete by it, as perhaps an intelligent blacksmith would have known.
"The questions, then, that are never far from the mind of a person who is knowledgeable about technological change are these: Who specifically benefits from the development of a new technology? Which groups, what type of person, what kind of industry will be favored? And, of course, which groups of people will thereby be harmed?
"These questions should certainly be on our minds when we think about computer technology. There is no doubt that the computer has been and will continue to be advantageous to large-scale organizations like the military or airline companies or banks or tax collecting institutions. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, bricklayers, dentists, yes, theologians, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more than ever reduced to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political institutions.
"In a word, these people are losers in the great computer revolution. The winners, which include among others computer companies, multi-national corporations and the nation state, will, of course, encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology. That is the way of winners, and so in the beginning they told the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. Then they told them that computers will make it possible to vote at home, shop at home, get all the entertainment they wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary. And now, of course, the winners speak constantly of the Age of Information, always implying that the more information we have, the better we will be in solving significant problems - not only personal ones but large-scale social problems, as well. But how true is this? If there are children starving in the world - and there are - it is not because of insufficient information. We have known for a long time how to produce enough food to feed every child on the planet. How is it that we let so many of them starve? If there is violence on our streets, it is not because we have insufficient information. If women are abused, if divorce and pornography and mental illness are increasing, none of it has anything to do with insufficient information. I dare say it is because something else is missing, and I don't think I have to tell this audience what it is. Who knows? This age of information may turn out to be a curse if we are blinded by it so that we cannot see truly where our problems lie. That is why it is always necessary for us to ask of those who speak enthusiastically of computer technology, why do you do this? What interests do you represent? To whom are you hoping to give power? From whom will you be withholding power?...
"Since technology favors some people and harms others, these are questions that must always be asked. And so, that there are always winners and losers in technological change is the second idea.
III
"Here is the third. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.
"Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data. I do not think we need to take these aphorisms literally. But what they call to our attention is that every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments. In a culture without writing, human memory is of the greatest importance, as are the proverbs, sayings and songs which contain the accumulated oral wisdom of centuries. That is why Solomon was thought to be the wisest of men. In Kings I we are told he knew 3000 proverbs. But in a culture with writing, such feats of memory are considered a waste of time, and proverbs are merely irrelevant fancies. The writing person favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The television person values immediacy, not history. And computer people, what shall we say of them? Perhaps we can say that the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom. Indeed, in the computer age, the concept of wisdom may vanish altogether.
"The third idea, then, is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet, Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence, The medium is the message.
IV
"Here is the fourth idea: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.
"That is why we must be cautious about technological innovation. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible. That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers. The most creative and daring of them hope to exploit new technologies to the fullest, and do not much care what traditions are overthrown in the process or whether or not a culture is prepared to function without such traditions. Capitalists are, in a word, radicals....
"I trust you understand that in saying all this, I am making no argument for socialism. I say only that capitalists need to be carefully watched and disciplined. To be sure, they talk of family, marriage, piety, and honor but if allowed to exploit new technology to its fullest economic potential, they may undo the institutions that make such ideas possible....
V
"I come now to the fifth and final idea, which is that media tend to become mythic. I use this word in the sense in which it was used by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes. He used the word myth to refer to a common tendency to think of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things. I have on occasion asked my students if they know when the alphabet was invented. The question astonishes them. It is as if I asked them when clouds and trees were invented. The alphabet, they believe, was not something that was invented. It just is. It is this way with many products of human culture but with none more consistently than technology. Cars, planes, TV, movies, newspapers - they have achieved mythic status because they are perceived as gifts of nature, not as artifacts produced in a specific political and historical context.
"When a technology become mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control. If you should propose to the average American that television broadcasting should not begin until 5 PM and should cease at 11 PM, or propose that there should be no television commercials, he will think the idea ridiculous. But not because he disagrees with your cultural agenda. He will think it ridiculous because he assumes you are proposing that something in nature be changed; as if you are suggesting that the sun should rise at 10 AM instead of at 6....
"Our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God's plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us."
...
HT to Daniel Mitsui of The Lion and the Cardinal, and to the blogger [I can't remember whom!] that pointed me to Neil Postman's lecture.
I do not have Orthodox "must reads." I don't know enough about the condition of anyone's soul (truth be told, not even mine own) to know the medicine best suited for its healing.
However, if I had to provide a list for someone who insistently demanded it of me, I might start here:
The Orthodox Church by Bishop Kallistos Ware (formerly known as Timothy, now a Metropolitan)
The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware (formerly known as Timothy, now a Metropolitan)
The Way of a Pilgrim by Anonymous (I still like the translation by R.M. French the best)
Way of the Ascetics by Tito Colliander
Father Arseny, 1893–1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father by Anonymous, tr.Vera Bouteneff
Saint Silouan the Athonite by Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov - especially the first part of this book which was also published separately as The Monk of Mount Athos: Staretz Silouan, 1866-1938.
Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works by Hieromonk Damascene Christiansen
Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. Daniel Clendenin
Great Lent by Fr. Alexander Schmemann
The Orthodox Faith, vols. 1 - 4, by Fr. Thomas Hopko
I thought these books would offer at least some insight into various aspects of Orthodoxy that are important to be aware of. The two books by Ware give a strong overview of the Church, touch on spiritual traditions, patristics, liturgical and historical issues - as well as relations with the West and other Christians. Way of the Ascetics goes further in presenting, simply, the spiritual traditions of the Church and personal ascetic exertion. The Way of a Pilgrim is really sort of a saint's life, as is Father Arseny (which also introduces religious persecution under the Bolsheviks) and Saint Silouan (which introduces Mount Athos). Father Seraphim Rose and Clendenin's Reader are probably the most 'controversial' on this list. First, Clendenin has edited a very good selection of Orthodox writings from a number of sources and 'schools' within Orthodoxy inlcuding Ware, Schmemann, Florovsky, Meyendorff, V. Lossky, Stavropoulos, Nassif, Bulgakov, Ouspensky and T. Weber. Second, Father Seraphim Rose offers a look at the life of an American facing many of the Orthodox religious issues of his day thus raising both his own 'camp's' position, as well as those to the Left and Right of him. Most important is a presentation of a modern American who became Orthodox and a monk, which is simply a statement that conversion is possible and Orthodoxy is not simply Greek or Russian, etc. It also presents a picture of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. Hopko's Rainbow Series is a very useful presentation of all aspects of Orthodoxy, especially the basic facts of the Liturgy, Orthodox history, her thoughts on various doctrines, etc. A very good primer. Schmemann's Great Lent is him at his best, which to me is as a pastor. He presents the meaning and mind of the most dramatic elements of the Orthodox calendar very well, step by step. I think these books give one a taste for the various wings of the mansion of Orthodoxy; after reading these, one can explore further by reading other books mentioned in these texts or that are similar to them.
Isolation from God is first and most obvious - it is the ultimate isolation to which all other isolations point. It is not for nothing that hell has been described as a God-absent sensory deprivation chamber.
There is also the isolation of persons. With individualism and individualistic non-Trinitarian thought, we have lost the sense of salvation as corporate and communal.
The twentieth century has seen the (empty) triumph of many other isolations, the acquisition by our Enemy of many isolating tools:
In feminism (and reactionary machoism), the isolating and putting at enmity of the sexes.
In public school, television, and modern nontraditional music, the isolating of each generation from those that have gone before.
In modernism, the isolating from history (and her lessons) and tradition.
In funeral homes' crematoria and embalming rituals, the isolating from death and the repentance death engenders.
In an officially urban world, the isolating of man from the Created order.
It is this last isolation that I wish to consider.
It is an old tactic that has taken on new dimensions. Hitherto cities were best for the proliferation of leisure and its concomitant vice, but the Created order was still close. Not so today.
Concrete covers the ground, skyscrapers and "light pollution" shut out the sky, globalized agriculture and food distribution centres divorce us from the origins of our food, sewers and garbage trucks hide from us the consequences of our waste. Never before has man been so isolated from the natural, so separated from the Created order. In fact, as Wendell Berry points out, we have created a new word to articulate this separation: the environment, that which is around us. We have lost the sense that we are in it, that we are part of it, and that ultimately we will return to it.
It has been suggested in this blog (not by the authors) that the Created order is not a self-evident good because St. Paul - among others - fails to mention it. Completely aside from the fact that the Bible does not address everything nor was it meant to ...
[The New Testament was collated by the Church, its several parts determined by comparison with the oral tradition of the Church. The Church in turn has become epistle ... she has become the good news of Christ, articulated as she incarnates Him. The Church is the New Testament. Rather than a model where an issue does not exist for God (like cannibalism, say) if it hasn't been addressed in a text two thousand years old, we proclaim the living Body of Christ, which by virtue of its life can and will address all issues that the centuries reveal.]
... I would argue that it would have been utterly redundant for the Bible to have addressed it. If a man in those times chose not to care for his garden or his farm, weeds would have overtaken it, the plants would have withered, and he and his family would have starved. The apostles, evangelists, and epistolists were in the Created order; they had no concept of a people so divorced from their food source that they need a note from God to tell them to stop soiling their food supply or their water supply.
This last is the part that gets me. Christians, no matter their creed or lack thereof, have a responsibility to work for the betterment of Creation. This is not a matter of Left vs. Right, not a matter of hippie granola-crunchers vs. sober suit-wearers, not a matter of The Will of God vs. the sideshows. Even if a person who professes the name of Christ has the nerve to assert that care for God's Creation is a spiritual non-essential, he cannot get past the fact that pollution contaminates our water, our food, & our bodies, and pollution ultimately sickens and kills us.
It is impossible to get past the logic of this. Soil your bedsheets and you will sleep in excrement. Soil your food supply and you will eat the consequences.
I've had Wendell Berry on the mind of late, and a post has been hovering at the back of my mind, waiting for articulation.
One of the things I wanted to mention was our desire to have a bit of land to nurture, to use, to reap. E. and I were discussing Ochlophobist's recent series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) - a thesis in pictures, really, lauding a way of life that he (and we) finds laudable - and it struck us forcefully that there is a fascinating subculture within Orthodoxy (agrarian postmodern?) that hungers for land. This is a hunger not for the gain that land might bring, but a hunger for the toil and the sweat and the tears that is a Christian engagement with God's Creation. A step back and away from the petroleum-fertilized factory farming of the latter part of the 20th century, a return to sustainable (ie. non-polluting) living, even if on a limited scale, and a re-engagement with God's Creation after the soul-straitening concrete canyons of the Big City.
A recent moment of envious yearning (and joy! - both with him and for him) was reading about Lotar's purchase of a homestead for he, his wife, and his 1.5 children. These things are possible, evidently - I just don't know how to get where I can realize these dreams also.
Andrea Elizabeth articulates some of that bewilderment. She is not in quite the same place that I am in - I still hope for something a little more country, and I get the feeling that she has reached a point of contentment with her place/situation in life. In her words:
While I agree with and admire [Wendell Berry's] ethics, I haven’t been able to become an ardent disciple because I don’t think his particular way of life is completely practical for everyone. I love self-sufficiency, but not everyone is as smart as he is. Did he make most of his livelihood on his farm or by his gifted writing? I’ve talked about how much more fertile and better watered Kentucky is compared to where I live too. Still, I could probably get by with the produce available at our Farmer’s Market. Wait, last time I was there I noticed that most things weren’t local. But if I spent a lot of time studying, I could probably find enough local sources to keep us well-fed. But my attentions are usually diverted elsewhere. I resent the hour and a half I spend at Walmart every week as it is. And my home garden, which I prefer to access rather than going across town to the farmer’s market, I’m self-sufficient that way, got mostly eaten by bugs, or didn’t produce much (for the needs of a family of 8) for other unknown reasons. I intend on getting better at gardening though. It is a healthy sport.
Again, I don't agree with her conclusions, but I sympathize with her frustration. Here is Ochlophobist's response:
This weekend past we spent time with our best friends, on their third attempt at a sustainable farm [the subject of which was the photo-essay mentioned above -- V.]. They have all the skills and the desire to farm, but did not inherit any land, or any significant means, and they have not followed the most common path of niche farming today - to spend a few decades in a lucrative field and then, after accumulating means, running off to the boutique farm. It is likely that this third attempt will be their last, that most of their lives will be spent as serious gardeners, and not as farmers. There is a place for the mourning over lost dreams, but then one must go on and do the hard work in the real here and the real now that God presents to us.
I have written before, and I think honesty requires us of agrarian bents to say it again and again - Wendell Berry inherited the family farm, one that was semi-functional. He had financial means outside of farming, whether or not he needed such. What of those of us who did not inherit such things, and would never have access to such means? These facts are one reason why I must read Berry and Edwards (who wrote Ebenezer) as, first and foremost, eulogists.
But we can learn many important things from these eulogies. We can remember many important things. We are offered in them something of an image of repentance, if we look with our eyes open enough. And we can make our little, sputtering, seemingly inconsequential efforts at the human things. I live in a cheap ranch house on half an acre, but I can double dig a small garden, and I can make things with my hands as time permits, I can cook my own food from as honest of ingredients as I am able to secure. I can read lasting words, sing hymns, sit still. I can attempt to pace my life in a manner that bows as little as possible to the rush of the constant movement of consumption. I can remember that I have failed, and I will fail, and that I am small, that my efforts will matter little but somewhere in that littleness is my salvation, and as God wills the salvation of my children. One can still strive, even in this place, to cultivate the quiet, the slow, to choreograph the movement of one's hands and breath in the dance of activity and stillness in a manner that befits a human life - as best as one is able, in the midst of all those troublesome cares and demands. To borrow my oft put example - even the single mother living in one of those awful bauhuas projects can bake her own bread, and while that may be the only careful human act she has time for, aside from prayer, it is the sort of rebuke of consumenivorism that reveals a clinging to life, and grants a reward, the richness one experiences when coming upon the flower in the desert.
There is also the temptation, the very American temptation, of taking from Berry & Co. a moralist perfectionism. An all or nothing disposition which rots the soul, as it judges any effort which does not achieve a fast and secure perfection to be hell-fodder. There is a lack of pause with this sort of perfectionism, scarce disposition to cover the sins of others, few allowances, a poverty with regard to tenderness of heart. We have to live the life that we are given, and when we read Berry as moralist only, or moralist primarily, most of us end up under a load of impossible moral burdens. I will never get to the farm in KY. I have no way of getting there. I must concern myself with my own home, as Berry exhorts. In much of Berry's literature there is that call to be who you are where you are, in as human a manner possible, but the overt moralism in much of his work provides something of a contradiction in tone at times, and one is best to follow Andrea Elizabeth's reading and take this with a grain of salt. There is not going to be a Wendell Berry movement that changes America. You are not going to take part in some great motion of social change by getting your produce from a local farmer or growing one quarter of your caloric intake. This is not to say that such social movements do not exist and will not push and pull society in this and that way. It is to say that such an agenda betrays Berry and the whole notion of living an honest human life. Movement agendas are destructive abstractions. It is better to simply and quietly go about doing the best things one is able. There will always be the temptation to fight the Dark Lord of Mordor with his own Black Speech. Our focus must be upon the goodness of a row of okra where and when we find it, the goodness of the chicken in the backyard, the goodness of a pig allowed to run about, the goodness of grain and water getting under fingernails. These things are miracles always and only in their instances. As soon as we make of them a rule or a paradigm they are lost to us. God only ever loves this bruised reed, the one here, that you see trampled in front of you. The Society for the Protection of Bruised Reeds (S.P.B.R.) is not the work of angels, but a diversion. The poor in spirit hold up those reeds within their very short reach. And yet that greatest of miracles - the seemingly smallest reach that is the summit of all human affairs, of all human history, that short length from pierced torso to nailed hand, holds the entire universe in its mercied place. Today, right now, this world is kept on its rotational axis for the prayer of a little old nun, chanting O Heavenly King as she presses a cucumber seed into earth with her nub of a finger. There is no other way. [highlighting mine -- V.]]
This is life in the meantime, living without despair, living in prayer and finding God in the here, in the now. This is re-remembering that what is holy in yearning for land is not the ideal of healthy land, sound ecology, the economy of thinking small and local ... what is holy is that baptism of the broken (land, ecology, and the rest of the cosmos) by Orthodox, through prayer, through vigil, through labour offered to God, ascesis in all its forms.
I will continue to yearn, and hope. I don't think this is wrong. But the now cannot, must not be forgotten.
- V.
On the meaning of the title: When King Harald Hardrada of Norway put in his bid for the Kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England, the holder of the crown - Harold Godwinson of Wessex - retorted that the only English land that he would give Harald was the 6 feet to bury him. Or, as Harald was reputed to be a tall man, 7 feet.
... I would like land, yes, but I would rather that there be more planted in it than just me.
Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. - G.K. Chesterton
