I've begun to discover for myself someone who has been around much longer than me. No, not Jesus, although that applies. I'm talking about Wendell Berry, author from Kentucky. He's one of those people I'd heard quoted at various times over the years and so I recently decided to read a collection of his essays in a book called "The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry."
Berry is a man of faith who understands that the salvation God has brought the world in Jesus Christ is far more than the promise of a trip to heaven when we die. This kind of "soul disconnected from a body promise of eternal bliss" is pretty much the kind of salvation that I grew up expecting out of my faith in Jesus. That, plus doing good the best you can in this life because God loves you, is what I'd say being a Christian is all about.
Berry is one of those people whose writing is re-framing the way I understand God's saving work in Jesus Christ. His work is helping me to see how God's salvation involves reconnecting people to one another and the creation God made good. He sheds new light on Paul's declaration in 2Corinthians 5:17 "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!"
In his essay, "The Unsettling of America" Berry writes about the difference between "exploitation and nurture." Reading about those two things makes me imagine the "old" which is passing away and the "new" which Christ has and continues to bring about. I think this goes way beyond "Life might suck now but it will all be well after we die and escape this God-forsaken earth." It is a hope that makes my heart beat faster. In many ways, it is why I continue to be a follower of Jesus and have reason to say everyday ought to be "Earth Day."
Here is an excerpt from that essay by Wendell Berry:
"Let me outline as briefly as i can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind [exploitation and nurture]. I conceive a strip miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health - his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinate time?) the exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living wage from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order - a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, 'hard facts'; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind."
I recognize the exploiter in the mirror and ask God to save me from this old self.
