Tribute to Wendell Berry a Week After His Death. Wendell Berry died last week. He was 92. There is a small handful of authors who have fundamentally changed the way I think about important things. Wendell Berry is one of them.

Berry was a small Kentucky farmer who wrote books about farming, place, family, ecology, and sometimes the politics of agriculture.

I’m not a farmer, but he always made me want to be one.

I don’t live in a small town, but he always made me want to.

The first of his books I read was The Unsettling of America, 1974.  

Then there was the fiction, which he wrote to dramatize what he wrote about in his nonfiction. There is also poetry, but I’m not as in to poetry as I should be if I were a real man of letters.

Lessons

He farmed when he could have just been a famous, rich writer.

He protested (mountain top coal mining) and got himself arrested for what he thought was right.

He understood and championed having a sense of home, a sense of place you belong to with people you belong to.

His concept of “membership” spoke to me and changed the way I thought about doing church. I had been a driven church planter, employing church growth and business methods to get numbers. It had worked, but felt empty. When I read Wendell Berry, I understood why it had felt empty. Because the way I’d done it reduced people to numbers. He might have said I was running church like big agribusiness ran land and soil management. Practical, and aiming toward a certain outcome that did not take into account the particular person (place) or their particular situation.

More on “membership.” Two quotes will suffice:

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”

― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.”

― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

In one book, one of the favorite sons of the county has died in WWII, and the worst person to try to console the family was the local pastor. Ouch.

Why? Because he was a Jonny-come-lately to Port William and, unlike everyone else in town, hadn’t known the father of the boy, or his father, or his father, or their neighbors since before the Civil War. How could he understand what they were going through? How could his canned Scripture references, plug-and-play words from one funeral to the next, possibly meet them in the heart of their ache for their boy? They tolerated the poor bastard until he had the good sense to leave.

I knew I did not want to be that kind of pastor. God help me.

I did not grow up on a farm, but my father did, and I loved his father’s Texas farm. I loved his tractors, his pigs, his cows, his horses. I loved the smell of the cab of his 70s F-150. I loved sitting between those two men on the bench seat on the way to some field or out to the old family lake house an hour away for recreation. (That is, recreation for everyone but my Granddad, who spent the entirety of the visit on the roof, or some otherwise needed repair to the old house.)

Berry evokes these kinds of daydreams and memories from me. My soul feels settled and I think for an afternoon, I could go be a farmer.

But I know it’s not really farming that I long for. I’m sure I wouldn’t actually like the work or the instability (my own family could afford to farm because they still had a good share of a trucking company they once started and operated).

What it really is is connection to places and people. I’ve lived in Illinois now long enough to feel fairly comfortable here. But I might cry driving into Texas, especially the Dallas area where I think I first came to human consciousness. The grayness of dead grass, and the relative smallness of the trees (compared to the East Texas pines where I eventually grew up), just feels like home, like that old Ford.

Berry awakened me to these things, and I am sad no more books are coming, but I still have plenty to get through, having only read half his output to date.

What can I say to writers (or anyone)?

How to be like Wendell Berry:

Know your homeland and write about it. Don’t be afraid to be thought of as regional. It worked wonders for him.

Authenticity — there is nothing more important in life and art. He was who he was, and a bunch of us liked it.

Value the truth and write it, speak it, live it.

Don’t take yourself too seriously, even geniuses are just people.

Love your “membership;” it’s all you have in the end.

Love God honestly, and see yourself as a steward of His creation.

Take everything into account. Berry plowed his fields with solar power, that is, mules. He didn’t merely adopt the newest technology just because it was more productive. He thought about what it might mean for the totality of his life and the world. He saw in the 70s what big farming was going to do to family farms, and so to the families that lived on them, and so to the communities that had formed between them. He was absolutely right. There is nothing sadder than a small farm town that has replaced its main industry (family farms) with meth, obesity, and alcoholism.

I’ll be binging his books. If you’ve never read him, here are four of my favorites:

The Unsettling of America

Jayber Crow (novel)

Hannah Coulter (novel)

The Need to Be Whole

God bless Wendell Berry and those who will miss him.

Jeff B. Miller

‍