This book is a collection of Berry’s agrarian essays written and complied over a number of years. I was first exposed to Berry’s writing in my doctoral program, and to be honest, I found him hard to read. It is not that his writing is necessarily challenging for the reader to complete. Instead, the implication of what Berry writes can be hard to think through fully. It is always not easy to complete one of Berry’s essays desire to read more immediately. His pacing is deliberate and his message, if you linger with it, challenges the reader at many levels—so is the case for me. You have to sit with Berry, perhaps even sit with just one paragraph.
In this book he writes,
“When else in history would you find ‘educated’ people who know more about sports than about the history of their own country, or . . . people who do not know the stories of their family and community.”
The implication of these words being that, in Berry’s mind, we are losing track of our history and our heritage—to say nothing about losing track of our historical faith tradition(s) that we hold dear. Reflecting only on that section can take us down many “rabbit holes” of reflection. He continues, and gathers ’steam’ for his point in the next section:
“The higher aims of [life] are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure cultish faith in “the future.” We do as we do, we say, “for the sake of the future” or “to make a better future for our children.” How can we hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. . . We do not need to plan or devise a “world of the future”; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. . . We have the same pressing need that we have always had—to love, care for, and teach our children.”
Certainly there is a lot happening in Berry’ mind in these quotations that carries with it a diverse application for us—and I do encourage you to sit with that section and think through those words. Linger over them. But the overall presenting concept that I want to think about, which ties to that previous sentence, is: presence.
For Berry it seems that too few of us linger in the present moment. Our lives are lived at a face pace; society, our jobs, or our personal expectations forces this upon us often. Therefore we sacrifice the sacred time with family and friends where story sharing and communal listening can occur. We rush quickly into judgement so that we can move onto the next big thing. The cost this focus us to pay is great.
I wonder if today you could be present, deliberately present on a sunny morning such as this, and by doing so, offer room to love, care for and teach someone you love?
Blessings
Rev. Derek
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