Wild Things

I’ve been on a mad dash of sorts, reading tons of Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau for the past several months at the expense of reading much of anything else. I have, however, a folder of Wendell Berry links that I’ve been intending to look at for a while now and just today at lunch made some time to do so. First off, I came across this really wonderful poem which requires only a deep breath before diving in:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

— Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Good, no? I keep reading it and liking it more each time. “day-blind stars” made me stop in my tracks. So but anyway. I think a lot of the Wendell Berry stuff I’ve been collecting came though the Bill McKibben reading bender I went on last year.

Berry has written a lot about how the church has really dropped the ball on the environment. I found this excerpt gave words to something I’ve been grappling with wordlessly for a while now:

As a measure of how far we have “progressed” in our industrial economy, let me quote a part of a sentence from the prayer “For Every Man in His Work” from the 1928 Book of common Prayer: “Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men.” What is astonishing about that prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations are now divided, almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God’s servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people. This alone, I think, is sufficient to account for the orientation of most churches to religious feeling, increasingly feckless, as opposed to religious thought or religious behavior.

You can read the rest of this piece titled God & Country here.