“…to agrarianism, farming is the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift. The shortest way to understand this, I suppose, is the religious way. Among the commonplaces of the Bible, for example, are the admonitions that the world was made and approved by God, that it belongs to Him, and that its good things come to us from Him as gifts. Beyond those ideas is that idea that the whole Creation exists only by participating in the life of God, sharing in His being, breathing His breath. ‘The world,’ Gerard Manley Hopkins said, ‘is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Such thoughts seem strange to us now, and what has estranged us from them is our economy. The industrial economy could not have been derived from such thoughts any more than it could have been derived from the golden rule.”
Wendell Berry, “The Agrarian Standard”
I love the message of this essay by Berry (republished in his book, The World-Ending Fire), but I fear we’ve truly lost this, and I’m not certain that it will ever be attainable again. Perhaps. I was encouraged by the documentary film, The Biggest little Farm. Although I think it had its problems with over-idealizing the endeavor, the root message went beautifully with what I’ve been reading in Wendell Berry’s work for a long time.
It’s interesting, too, as I’m reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, I see the message that we are destroying the very things we wish to preserve (in Abbey’s case, the natural world of our national parks and monuments) by a certain lack of care and thoughtfulness.
At heart, we’re insatiable. In our home and work lives, we lean toward the take. We grab what we can. We invest with an eye toward our stable financial futures; and this means dumping billions into the very industries that are destroying the planet and standing in the way of simpler lives. Because, of course, as wonderful as it sounds, most don’t want simpler lives. We don’t want to make do with what we have. We’ve got to have our Starbucks, all dolled up, and Starbucks is an industrial mega-giant. All we see is what comes out of the spigot in their stores, but everything behind the spigot grinds away incessantly at Creation. We can’t go back. Who wants Folgers anymore after having their venti low-fat vanilla Frappuccino?
The irony is that we’re using the very engine of this progress – that engine which, at its heart, pillages the planet – to communicate our disgust. I type this on an computer composed of fossil-fuel-based plastics and metals mined in ways of utter destruction to the environment, transported from points of origin in vehicles that burn and pollute over highways that encase nature in concrete and asphalt.
So, going back to what Berry said: the more I think about our current state of affairs, the more I am convinced of God’s intentions. He created us to live in a garden – to hold dominion over it, but to do that as stewards, not destroyers. To care for it and nurture it. But when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they did the one thing that God did not want them to do – they declared to him on that day that they didn’t need his care and provision. That they could handle it on their own. That they could be as gods themselves.
One can imagine how this would throw things out of balance, and we have Paul saying as much (and long before the age of industry and technology that we inhabit today, where the imbalance has proceeded beyond light-speed): “And we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
I see films like The Biggest little Farm and I see someone trying to recapture that which is, at heart, natural to all of us. It’s just that most of us have buried it somewhere to the point that it looks like we don’t really care. We want our comfort! To settle for a vision of stewardship and nurturing our world is to give up on our gentrified lives (those which try to recreate and capture the good-old days – but without all of the inconveniences like pit toilets). We want our imported trinkets and baubles (which have graduated from cheap toys to TVs and cell phones). We want our exotic fruits and vegetables – year-round at that – rather than settling for what we can grow (and put the effort into canning) right in our own backyards.
But we’ll never really get there, though we’re starved for it at heart. Paul goes on: “And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” Sure, he’s talking about Christian believers, but something can be said for all of humanity. Some seek just to survive (we can’t ignore the fact that we Americans are the wealthiest in the world – the majority of us living at standards far above the global average). Others seek to rise ever-higher through the accumulation of stuff. But in the end, the bottom line is that it just doesn’t matter. Every one of us will leave it all behind, and it is often when saddled with that realization that we struggle through the missed opportunities – the doing of things with our lives that actually meant something.
The more I ponder this, the more solid my conclusion becomes that without Christ, we are truly lost. But rather than just say “trust Jesus” and get you thinking that I want to lump you in with the typical judgmental “Christian,” I want you thinking that we should trust in the one who has always wanted us to conserve, protect, and nurture. Both nature and those who live within it. To subdue and have dominion over something doesn’t mean to abuse it. We can glorify God by living within the bounds of the gift He has given us without destroying it to get more.