On the Passing of Wendell Berry

The Grace of Tending

written by Gayle Doornbos

I didn’t like poetry growing up. I would love to blame my high school teachers for making me hate the genre. Despite my attempts to hold them accountable for my aversion to poetry, the reasons for my strong dislike ran deeper than being forced to march in step or clap out the meters of different poems. Poetry eludes mastery. It requires careful tending to language through slow, attentive reading. It is often elusive, pointing to realities that are not easily captured or contained. As a high school student, I preferred the texts that I could read quickly, with facts I could memorize for the test. Poetry was the exact opposite; it refuses to be treated transactionally. 

There will be many tributes to Wendell Berry over the coming days and weeks. Many written by those who had the pleasure of knowing or meeting him. I have only encountered him through his words. Words that he has tended to like he tended the land on which he lived. Words that pointed to a deeper and richer world, that is not primarily defined by consumption and transaction but by loving transformation. Berry, in his life and his words, was about attentiveness to life, slow, careful acts of love in community. He was not blind to life's challenges or the despair that comes with living sometimes, but he refused to see the world as meaningless. Rather, he invited us all to see a different world—often through the lens of creation—in which we are small, beloved creatures whose lives are gifts. He had the uncanny ability to remind us that, as humans, we belong to the world of the ‘wild (created) things,’ and in doing so, he showed us the glorious reality of what it means to be alive and not in control of the world. We are small, but that is good news. 

I no longer hate poetry. In fact, I have come to love it for the very reasons I found it so frustrating. It is slow. It must be tended to; it is not transactional. It is like life, where loving attention and slow, steady presence make it meaningful. Berry was very aware that we are often pressed to see life in the exact opposite way, continuing to invite us all into a different way of seeing and being. It was a profound gift, one that will last long beyond his life. For him and his words, I am extraordinarily grateful. And I am planning, as Berry instructed, to keep trying to live a life in which I often “do things that don’t compute”—things that have no market value or measurable outcomes but are the very things that make life beautiful and filled with meaning. 

Our Actions Have Meaning

written by Jeff Ploegstra

What can I say about the passing of Wendell Berry? Having never met the man in person, I am still deeply grieved. His writings have been at various times for me a source of challenge, inspiration, peace, and comfort. 

Some people know him from his novels, but I will always appreciate his essays and poetry most.  A few years ago, I heard a recording of him reading “The Peace of Wild Things” and now whenever I read anything by him, even things I encountered years before, I still hear it in my mind in his voice. The poem is embedded in a larger episode of “On Being” with Krista Tippett that is worth a listen as a whole, but his reading of his own poetry is a gift, and the poem is timely. At least it has been for me in recent years. 

I regularly share quotes from Wendell Berry in my biology and environmental studies courses. In fact, I had shared three separate quotes from him in my Botany class on the day that he died. Probably the quote that lives most deeply in me is a question: “How will you practice virtue without skill?”

Berry elaborates: The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well—to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how—and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone.

This question lives right next to another phrase commonly heard on the campus where I teach, Coram Deo—“Before the face of God.” We are not here just avoiding sin, thinking the right thoughts, feeling the right feelings. We are not living in a kind of naïve hopefulness that our best intentions will somehow manifest themselves as a better world. We work, we share, we give, we receive, we act… and our actions have meaning—for our neighbors and before our God. 

I commend him to you. 

“…That is not to suggest that we can live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."[1]

An Invitation to an Intentional Life

written by Danielle Wyenberg

In all his writings—novels, poetry, and essays—Wendell Berry had a gentle, consistent way of reaffirming the goodness of living in community and love for the land. He often called to attention the importance of relationships, those between people and nature, communities, or tools, saying that when these relationships are healthy and recognized, we can then move into a place of imagining what flourishing might look like in each aspect of life.

Each year, I challenge engineering students to read Berry’s Mad Farmer poems and to think and write about what it might mean to be a “mad engineer,” one who is unafraid to be foolish in the eyes of the world and will  “ask the questions with no answers” and “practice resurrection.” Berry himself would almost certainly encourage us, as mad engineers, to prioritize appropriate technology, to recognize our human limits and the limits of the natural world, and to pursue the practice of amateurism in lifelong learning, all themes that are present across his writings. As Christian engineers called to both tend and keep, cultivate and steward, these principles can serve as touchstones, guiding and challenging us as we seek to do our work well.

That is another common thread running through all of Berry’s writings—the joy of good work, and of work done in community. “Good work is our salvation and joy,” said Berry.

I know, I know. That’s not what Martin Luther said. But I think Berry’s words are an important reminder to us that meaningful, wholehearted work brings deep contentment to us as humans and is a tangible response to our salvation in Christ. That is, our work cannot be separated from our joy and salvation.

Working with care and intention also connects us to our communities and the natural world, strengthening the relationships that we have with our places. Working alongside our community helps us to form what Berry often called a “membership,” a community of people who move forward together and are committed to one another. This is a beautiful echoing of the language in Lord’s Day 21, in which the communion of saints is defined as “believers one and all, as members of this community, share in Christ and in all his treasures and gifts.”

Berry’s literary contributions are vast and multifaceted, but the central messages carry an invitation into a more intentional life, one that prioritizes people, land, communities, and the joy of good work. These steady reminders offer encouragement and challenge, sparking both discussion and reflection as we endeavor to faithfully carry out our work.

Wendell Berry and the Path Forward, the Path Back

written by Howard Schaap

There’s a social media clip making the rounds of Nick Offerman, a cult figure in his own right, talking about the importance of Wendell Berry’s 1977 book, The Unsettling of America. Offerman calls that book Berry’s White Album and hypothesizes that it should be required reading for every freshman in high school. 

After Berry’s passing and watching that clip, I paged through my copy of The Unsettling of America. On almost every page, I found eager underlining and marginalia. I met my younger self there, a young father trying to understand the different pieces of his life, who in Berry’s pages found a map to exactly how those pieces might be stitched together into a whole fabric.

So I take Offerman’s point. The Unsettling of America might be the single-most influential book in my life outside the bible. But freshmen in college would find it heavy lifting, to say nothing of freshmen in high school. Better to start with Berry’s fleshed-out vision in his poetry (I saw many people share “The Peace of Wild Things” after his death) or the short and sweet Hannah Coulter. My guess is that many people would find that book beautiful if quaint, the way it recreates the lives their great grandparents might have led that is now fled from the earth. 

It is then that I would point them to The Unsettling of America, which is Berry’s theory of everything. Nearly every page has a diagnosis for what’s wrong with humanity, and it stretches into agriculture and eating and religion and marriage and work. The Unsettling of America will show you the divorces that have happened in the world and in your own life. 

And yet, true of any prophetic work, it doesn’t just make you yearn for the past but reimagine the future, reimagine how we might live. Berry hates the idea of “the future” as we have understood it, living in self-contained pods, finally having outsmarted all the limits of our lives—our dumb bodies and our dumb marriages and our dumb communities and our dumb jobs. Rather, Berry would return us to those things, so that we’re at home in them as if for the first time. It’s a very home-coming sort of vision. 

And so, because it gets us to see differently, Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America is prophetic work. But is it really possible to live this way? This is the question people always ask about prophets. Before any change can happen, you first have to imagine it. Berry’s gift to the world, to me, was that vision—the ability to re-see creational goodness under my nose, beneath my feet. The Unsettling of America will not have you building castles in the air, it will have you building mudpies in the dirt; it will return you to being a human of the humus, walking in the Garden with the Lord.