Everyday Liturgy: How did you first learn of Wendell Berry and what are some of his poetry and other writing that have impacted you?

Troy: I first heard of Berry from my preaching professor, Anna Carter Florence.  And then that same year had great conversations about him with friends in Emergent: Brian McLaren and Laci Scott to name a few.  Since then I'll run into a book of poetry or essays or a quote on line and end up digging back into him.  When you asked me about this interview I grabbed the books I had and realized that more than half of my Wendell Berry collection I had given away to someone along life's journey.  Fidelity, I gave to a friend who lost her mother.  Sabbath Poems, to a young woman on the "Invisible Children of Sudan" tour.  And Given Poems I have lent to my friend, Mark Scandrett, from across the US in SanFrancisco and twice he has brought it with him cross-country to return and yet he ends up keeping it.  I love the way Berry can reach to most any person's spiritual core without being evasive or forceful. 

The first poem I ever read by Berry, perhaps his most popular was, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front."  Its worth the whole interview if the reader would just read this aloud (the whole poem is here). Poetry is meant to be read aloud.

As soon as the generals and the politico
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" from The Country of Marriage, copyright ® 1973 by Wendell Berry

That phrase, "practice resurrection," has haunted me ever since.  Placed within the context of evoking prophetic self-effacing beauty, resurrection is no-less a historical claim and yet much more, Berry helps me see the resurrection as the greatest movement of all time.  And it is from this that Berry's poetry and theology and philosophy and fiction pours, a man elucidating what it is to practice the resurrection amidst the particular acres of his farm and his family.

EL: In our brief conversation before this interview, you stated, "I can't think of a more significant contemporary poet/theologian to discuss than Wendell Berry."  How do you as an artist and pastor living in downtown Atlanta begin to interact with Wendell Berry's philosophy, theology, and poetry---which is so much about rural America, farming, and agricultural community?

Troy: In late modernity, things urban and rural face a similar disparity and economic violence, wrongs being waged over relationships.  In this way I think Jane Jacobs (the godmother of new urbanism) and Wendell Berry are not antitheses of one another, but are about much of the same project. They each stare closely.  They see into things the way poets and philosophers must do. In contemplating the particular and reflecting on humanity through reading Berry I learn a great deal about infrastructure, commerce, and traffic--these are not exclusively urban nouns. I need Berry because I need to pay attention.  Just when I think I "have it fixed," Berry teaches me that, "It is unfixed by rule" (Sabbaths 1998 VI). 

Not only that, but Wendell Berry roots me deeply in the contemplation of love. Another of my favorite poems is from his Sabbath poems collection.  He finds a way to root the aims of Jesus in the Way of Jesus by circling around what Paul would call the greatest gift and what Jesus would declare as the kingdom of heaven...

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens. (Sabbaths 1998, I)

EL: So what is it about awareness and love that Wendell Berry brings uniquely to theologians and pastors today?

Troy: I guess it comes down to community.  I remember growing up learning about community through the usual Christian streams including Willow Creek Community Church lectures, para-church small groups, and eventually through contemplative writers like Jean Vanier (founder of L'Arche Communities) and Henri Nouwen.  But Berry hits on the issue of community uniquely as it effects the whole population and natural world with whom we are entangled and dependent.  Berry gets at the heart of this matter in his essay written responding to the media coverage of the sexual harassment hearing of Justice Clarence Thomas enitled, "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community". He suggests that community is that social contract that happens in-between what is private and public.  And that people these days are increasingly estranged from their community by (among many things) their private withdrawal or external exploitation from the public sector, be it political, economic, or religious.  Berry writes, "The destruction of community begins when its economy is made--not dependent (for no community has ever been entirely independent)--but subject to a larger economy" (126).  Berry gets at this through the lens of local rural community, but this same larger economy permeates my local urban community as well. This has been the plight of rural communities suffering due to the commercialization of food and farming, and the outsourcing of work and domestic items (exemplified by tractors from oversees and the availability of bananas in-or-out of season from thousands of miles away).  Basically, the consequences of the production of goods are separated from the consumption, and the reverse also being true. 

Now, Berry takes over 50 pages to get at this, so I won't butcher his craft by attempting to summarize it here.  But I have found the same principle to be operating in urban environments.  Take, for example, ownership of property.  An overwhelming majority of property in the inner-city is owned by those outside of the community, those in the public.  Banks that own mortgages like mine, and landlords who own houses with market-rate tenants or Section 8 tenants--all with legal "rights" to the land we share and the buildings we inhabit--live outside of this neighborhood and often outside of our state.  And lately it's gotten even crazier: because of mortgage fraud and the recent national mortgage implosion, our zip code, 30310, is 66% in foreclosure and the major deed-holders of foreclosed homes are now international investors who buy "parts" or pieces of mortgaged properties. Ownership and community responsibility have been spread into the amorphous, global, "public". There is no recourse when an abandoned property is inhabited by drug dealers and pimps.  And there is no restitution for displaced families who are evicted because of scams or unfortunate turns of luck.  And these public real estate economics affect at least two things (among others).  First it causes the gentry, like myself, to act in private, protective ways about such things as "property value" when the property originally belongs to the community. Like it or not, as a property owner I'm part of the hustle. I'm a player, like playing Monopoly as a kid.  My private "bottom line" becomes self-serving factor in neighborhood, community discussions. Second, public real estate cloaks further abandonment of the poor and the widow, who also belong to the community, by absconding responsibility for them to some mythic "public" whether it be church or government assistance. 

Take, for example, a house in our neighborhood.  The actual property on Desoto Avenue that was a home to Alfonzo and his wife, an elderly working-class couple, was recently mistakenly sold by them to swindlers. Now, Alfonzo and his wife have no house. The swindlers are on the run.  And the bank holds the note to an empty, boarded up house.  ‘A family with no house and a house with no family.  And it will only be a matter of time before the illicit entrepreneurs of drugs and sex find a way into the boarded up house. Its over and there's nothing we can do.  Alfonzo's neighbors have been cut out of the entire process.  We don't even know where he and his wife are anymore, much less know how to contact the new property owners to negotiate an alternative.

This private subversion of community and absconding of communal responsibility toward a mythic public happens over a host of layers in the innercity: healthcare, childcare, education, transportation, accessibility, you name it.  The most vulnerable residents here are dependent on disability checks or child support and other federal assistance to subsist.  And they cannot re-enter the cycle of community engagement because they are warrants of the state.  Getting out of the system is an uphill battle that few choose and even fewer accomplish successfully.  And while legislation can address this, the failure begins at the loss of community.  So, then, community is where the church's practice of resurection must re-start.

Berry addresses the loss of community in terms of the health care system particularly in a beautifully elaborate piece of short fiction entitled "Fidelity."  In this story the rural town lawyer, Henry Catlett, explains to a big city detective why the disappearance of a dying elderly man under the care of his son is a matter of community and not public:

"Let us not forget that one of the subjects of our conversation is money--the money to be spent and made in the art of medical mercy.  Once the machinery gets into it, then the money gets into it.  Once the money is there, then comes the damned managers and damned insurers and (I am embarrassed to say) the damned lawyers, not to mention the damned doctors who were there for money before anybody.  Before long the patient is hostage to his own cure.  The beneficiary is the chattel of his benefactors" (174). 

Christians--suburban, rural, and urban--all face the temptation to see ourselves as benefactors and insofar as we abscond from their own entanglement in the loss of community  we risk making our vulnerable neighbors into so called "beneficiary" or chattle.  We Christians prefer a view of "community" that makes us feel better and makes life easier. ‘A view that easily sorts out the "other."  But Berry's stories elucidate a community that includes all sorts of others- the public drunk, the illegitimate child, the enemy, even the rocks and rivers and the trees by name.  So you can see why his work is perfect orientation for this father and artist and neighbor living in the inner-city.

 

 

 

EL: As a pastor in a major American city, how then do you translate some of Berry's ideas about community from his rural setting to your urban one?

Troy: Let me say first how "pastoring in the city" is informed by Berry, and then return how pastoring amidst the American religious landscape is challenged by his prophetic work.

My wife is a scrapbooker.  Together, with our daughter, we enjoy crafting original works of art that tell our story.  On one occasion we made a page to tell the story of ourselves as a couple, how we met, where we live, and the things we value.  I was reading poetry by Berry at the time and these lines from his poem, "History," stuck with us both...

Through my history's despite
and ruin, I have come
to it's remainder, and here
have made the beginning
of a farm intended to become
my art of being here.
By it I would instruct
my wants:  they should belong
to one another and to this place.
Until my song comes here
to learn its words, my art
is but the hope of song.

I feel that one of my greatest temptations, as a gen-Xer in my 30's, and pastor in the Emerging movement, is that of wanderlust.  I test high on "ideation," making stuff up... I am quick to adapt.  After all, that is our bane and joy in life as X-ers, adapting amidst disorientation.  And so when things do finally calm down I'm liable to reinvent myself or to rush after another cause. Yet, for all my revelry in disorientation, I am also in need of orientation.  For all the fingers I might point back at my fore-parents--and those "whites" who were part of this neighborhood's "white flight," as well as those generations earlier who took this land from an indigenous people-- for all of my righteous indignation toward them, the "remainder" of that story is still my starting point. The story of America, of the south, of white flight, and now of gentrification is my story.  And so I must make a life out of this place and not pine for a fault-free starting point.

So this little life Kelley and I are making, the very place we have chosen or has chosen us, it instructs our wants.  The material world is what God's Spirit animates into a teacher the same way that mustard bushes and fig trees and seed sewers were teachers for the followers of Jesus. My wants should belong to one another and not compete for my attention.  They are destined to do so.  My desires, all that is beautiful and real that captivated my senses, all of these are an appetite for the divine, for what C.S. Lewis calls "joy."  ‘An appetite that Tom Wright describes as "hope." But I think that Berry outdoes both of these theologians when he describes it as "song." I resonate with the song and my life is an art, an art rooted in the hope of "song."  As a singer-songwriter I get that.  Songwriters have to linger and become a student of the material for the story to emerge. For a song to find its lyrics, it must simmer, and steep.  Songs, like disciples, have to stick around for a long time, lower their shoulders, and listen.  That's when the words show up.  And so our little "farm" is smack dab in the middle of Atlanta's gentrifying inner city. And pastoring in the midst of this frail urban environment is our art of being here.

Second, I'd say that my being a pastor against the backdrop of American organized religion is challenged by Wendell Berry's prophetic voice. I am challenged to gather for the purpose of love first and foremost. Berry's fiction and prose articulate a religion that is "folk," that is American, and he artfully reminds its practitioners (we Christians) of our Scriptures that are suspicious of progress.  His characters reminds us of those biblical colleagues of ours who risk seeking forgiveness to their own peril as well as those who seek private or public gain to the peril of the very Shalom or Sabbath (community) that they were seeking to build in God's name. Alluding to the biblical themes of conquest, imperialism, and exile Berry points to the self-interest that prevails when communities organize around anything other than love.

The following is an excerpt of Berry's from the essay "God and Country" where he is skeptical of the project of "organized religion,"

It is clearly possible that, in the condition of the world as the world now is, organization can force upon an institution a character that is alien or even antithetical to it. The organized church comes immediately under a compulsion to think of itself, and identify itself to the world, not as an institution synonymous with its truth and its membership, but as a hodgepodge of funds, properties, projects, and offices, all urgently requiring economic support. The organized church makes peace with a destructive economy and divorces itself from economic issues because it is economically compelled to do so. Like any other public institution so organized, the organized church is dependent on "the economy"; it cannot survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its vocation is to correct. If it comes to a choice between the extermination of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field and the extermination of the building fund, the organized church will elect-indeed, has already elected-to save the building fund. The irony is compounded and made harder to bear by the fact that the building fund can be preserved by crude applications of money, but the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field can be preserved only by true religion, by the practice of a proper love and respect for them as the creatures of God. No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.(Wendell Berry, "God and Country" in What are People For?)

I believe I read this first when cited in an essay by Brian McLaren cautioning others from setting up Emergent as a "movement."  Since then I have seen such "dependence upon the economy" play itself out in congregations wrestling about the community's public use of their playground in terms of their insurance liability.  I have seen this play out in my own forced resignation from a church.  I have had friends loose their job within young emerging churches and traditional churches over these kinds of choices.  "Spiritual" things are easy marketable alternatives to messy, unquantifiable lives of discipleship.

EL: Berry is often considered the honorary founder of many of the movements that are just beginning to make an impact today: agrarianism, locavores, farmer's markets, urban farming, sustainability, organic farming, conservation of land, energy, and resources.  Do you participate in any of these movements, whether directly or indirectly?

Troy: My neighbor and colleague in things emergent in Atlanta, Melvin Bray, has taught me a lot about local organic living.  He has argued with me about alternatives to the produce that I would mindlessly purchase from the major chain grocery store.  And over time we've changed our attitude towards produce and dairy products.  We teach our daughter, through prayers over meals and visits to orchards, farms, and farmers markets to recognize where food originates from and our entangled relationship to its growers, harvesters, transporters and merchants.  Our family has paid to belong to CSAs in two different years in our lives, but do not currently belong to one.  However, at the encouragement of a neighbor, we planted some vegetables this year in a neighborhood garden just walking distance from our home.  We are not clear of criticism in this area, in fact I can name dozens of friends who are more assertive about their food consumption whether they be vegan, locavores, or entirely organic.  But we also do not raise our hands in despair, assuming there is nothing to be done. 

The language of the slow-food movement might best pigeonhole our family's food habits (but we still have go-gurts in the fridge).  My mother liked to cook from scratch, and still does sometimes.  I learned to cook and bake from her.  And then, for 3 years while Eve was a toddler, we shared a home with two other Christian couples and their kids.  We lived in a hybrid sort of intentional community.  We split our living expenses evenly and shared responsibilities for cooking, shopping, and cleaning up after meals and we made intentional efforts to share 5 meals together each week.  During that time I learned a great deal from my housemates, John and Holly Grantham about stretching left overs, about cooking 3 meals from a whole chicken fryer, and about Indian and Mexican spices.  And then from the many Emergent gatherings I have learned from so many foodies their local cuisine and inexpensive ways to eat fresh whole-foods.

In terms of energy conservation, when I learned from the Story of Stuff about the amount of energy that could be saved by changing to fluorescent bulbs, we changed out our entire house.  And now I read that we don't have an answer to the mercury in these light bulbs. Oh well, we're trying.  I enjoy biking and riding MARTA, Atlanta's subway, when I can- but I still end up commuting all over town in my little ‘95 Integra.

One thing that might contradict everything I said earlier about public economics and property ownership is my new experience of the last 15 months as a home owner.  Now, Melvin Bray and I will argue as to whether homeownership need be portrayed as an idea American practice.  But for my part, I have found deeper resonance with Wendell Berry by cultivating an old home and the lot it sits on.  Owning my home (or having a mortgage for it) is more than just investing money being "thrown away" on rent, it also about belonging to a parcel of earth and a structure that was erected 39 years before my dad was born.  Our 1910 Bungalow is the oldest thing I have to contend with.  ‘Older than my 92 year old grand-father in-law. And contending with old things is a good practice for my short attention span.  It also lays a claim in our neighborhood.  I can see why the Lord told Jeremiah to buy some land in his home county making him a stakeholder in the civic game (Jeremiah 32:6).  As a resident on Dill Ave., a street known for prostitution, drug dealing, and two homicides so far this year, I have a unique voice in the political and judicial discourse of our neighborhood. Owning an old home has been a discipline of patience and community responsibility, but it has also been that "farm" that becomes my "hope of song." Planting sunflower seeds in little cups while the frost is still out, transplanting those seedlings to the yard beside Fairbanks Ave, picking the grass and weeds around those flowers, and watering them with rain water from the barrel that collects rain from the roof... these things tie me back to the earth.  They root me.

EL: What do you make of this kind of "rootedness" when Emergent theology and so many churches seem to lean toward improving things and changing the world?  How do you see this play out in your role as a pastor?

Troy: This gets to the bottom of it for me.  When I am only future oriented, looking only towards the horizon, I become anxious about today.  My dreams become the very things that put me in writer's block, so to speak.  And I think churches fall into the same rut.  They have become disembodied, un-rooted.  And so folks drive into the city from the ‘burbs or to the ‘burbs from the city to get fed "spiritually" only to be less and less rooted as disciples in their very neighborhoods. 

I saw this temptation in its clearest way one weekend when I was driving south to a presbytery meeting, 50 minutes away.  As I left, I drove by a clean up project of the neighborhood association and for the entire ride south I couldn't shake the fact that I belonged with my neighbors.  In fact, the arguments and pageantry that my cells would be caught up in the meeting to which I was heading would actually mal-form me as a neighbor.  So, I decided to turn around and join my neighbors in cleaning our streets of tires and cans and pollutants.  Now, I'm sure that neither choice: church meeting or cleanup project was bad or better in and of itself.  Yet, for me, I needed the resurrection practice of joining my neighbors, and grounding or rooting myself in the discipline of earth care.  A few days later I found this poem and I think it best sums up my resonance with Berry on these maters. He reminds my emergent, eschatologically romantic self that work is done in the doing and not in the dreaming and talking....

EL: As an author, Berry separated himself from the "normal" antics of other authors in the 1960s and 1970s by staying in Kentucky, farming, and writing in a treehouse.  How do you as an artist find a creative place in which to make something new?

Troy: My back porches have mattered a great deal to me.  My songs, "Hoping for Forgiveness" and "Waiting for Genesis" were written while looking at the blue bird making a home in the cedar box on a public golf course plopped in the middle what used to be called Atlanta's "Little Vietnam".  And "Hold on to These Things" and other new stuff I'm writing, come from the back porch at our current home on Dill Ave.  It's a bit awkward actually.  Because of the way the house is situated I sit high (almost gentry-like) above the rest of the side street and I'm struck at the way power and privilege play out. 

Timing matters as much as place for me.  I am a regular student of Julia Cameron's Artist Way and find that morning pages is my best bet at consistently producing new material with depth.  Such a practice becomes a spiritual discipline, replacing what I used to call "devotions."  Now scripture and prayers from the Daily Office are met up with poetry and centering meditation and guitar playing.  They all seem to inform my understanding of myself as a child beloved of God, and as part of a World beloved of God.

I was laughing today as I reread one of Berry's poems reflecting on the writing process:

This is the time you'd like to stay.
Not a leaf stirs.  There is no sound.
The fireflies lift light form the ground.
You've shed the vanities of when
And how and why, for now.  And then
the phone rings.  You are called away. (Sabbaths 1998, II)

 

 

Tim Keel, pastor of Jacob's Well, is an artists with an MFA who says his new canvas and medium as pastor are the community of folks who make up their church. I'm hopeful that as my role as pastor develops I'll continue to have time for writing and performing the music that articulates the experience of our place in the world.  I have seen the canvas of our life affect our views of church, though.  I have watched our family and its church-like practices influenced by the space we are in.  We bring neighbors in.  We go to neighbor's homes.  When people want to meet in Atlanta to learn about emergent I try to drag them down to my neighborhood.  The local cohort held two events this summer and both were within a stone's throw of my neighborhood.  Exposing wider Atlanta to the story we have historically avoided is part of writing and living creatively.  And so this place is the place that informs my song.  This city and our little urban neighborhood is home to our family's "art of being here."

§ 

Troy Bronsink lives with his wife, Kelley, and daughter Eve, in the Capitol View neighborhood of South West Atlanta.  He likes to write and perform music, he is a pastor and a community organizer, he helps pastors and churches approach emerging practices, and he is facilitating a local expression of church provisionally called Neighbor's Abbey. He wrote a chapter in the Emergent Manifesto of Hope, works as a worship consultant, and blogs at churchasart.com.

All phtography is credited to Daley Hake @ daleyhake.com