The Joining of Heaven and Earth: A Look at Wendell Berry and the Church

by KC Flynn

Christian community is not an ideal we have to
realize but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may
participate. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It
goes without saying that community is one of the major subjects taken up in Wendell
Berry’s vast collection of novels, poems, and essays.  Throughout his body of work one will
regularly find references to community: failed, imperfect, hopeful, Christian,
non-Christian, modern, ancient, rural, urban. 
Within the topic of community one can also find a good amount of
sub-topics explored in more detail: sex, economics, ecology, Christianity,
family, and identity would be only a starting point for an index.  For the purposes of this essay I will focus
on one of Berry’s
most important topics in his discussion of community: the Gathered Community.  Although
I take this to be a central theme, one could argue that it is also quite
marginalized.  There is no essay about
the gathered community, there is no novel devoted to the idea, and there are
few poems that reflect this idea directly. 
This is because the Gathered Community serves as a backdrop for all of Berry’s work, quietly driving Berry’s vision and imagination into a
coherent and unified whole. The most
developed vision of the gathered community is found in the novel Jayber Crow:

My vision of the
gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor had been
replaced by a vision of the gathered community.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
then all as some how perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion,
and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.[1]

It is Jayber’s vision, which I take
to be Berry’s
own, that will be the focus of this paper. 
Furthermore, it should be stated that my working assumption is that the
Gathered Community is the telos of Berry’s work.  It is the goal and purpose of all of Berry’s literature to point the reader to the peaceable kingdom of God, realistically embodied on Earth in
a vibrant, healthy, caring community.

Time
and again, the first response to Berry’s
idea of community is, "He is too idealistic." 
But perhaps an idealist is simply a realist living in an unimaginative
world.  Norman Wirzba rightly asks, " Can
a community of care and gratitude become a reality, or must it be relegated to
a fictional world?"[2]  That is the question we must wrestle with, and
it is my hope to begin to think through it in this paper in three ways.  First, I will demonstrate that Berry’s vision of the
Gathered Community is eschatological,
biblical, and prophetic and therefore, is a realistic vision for the
Christian.  Second, I will show that the
church in the modern world needs Wendell Berry’s vision as a corrective to unhealthy
dualism.  Finally, I will argue that
Wendell Berry needs the church in order for his vision to become realized by
looking briefly at the ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas. 

Wendell Berry’s Gathered Community

            What exactly does
Wendell Berry’s community look like?  To
organize the thoughts from his work, Sean Michael Lucas helpfully outlines the
four ways Berry sees community is developed and sustained: memory, sharing,
affection (or fidelity), and harmony.[3]  First, the community works by memory, for only the community that is
rooted in a place for a long time can develop an empowering memory.  Berry argues that "the most complete speech
is that of a conversation in a settled community of some age, where what is
said refers to and evokes things, people, and places that are commonly
known.  In such a community, to speak and
hear is to remember."[4]  Similarly, the Biblical narrative is full of
God’s command to the Israelites to remember what he has done for them.  They have no identity except as the people
whom God delivered from the Egyptians. 
This remembering is meant as a community forming activity for the
Israelites.

Berry’s community also
works by sharing.  This sharing is seen not only as the sharing
of goods, but of life together. 
Christopher Wright, in a discussion of Old Testament ethics, notes that,
"There is a mutual responsibility for the good of the whole human community,
and also for the rest of the non-human creation, which cuts across the idea
that ‘what’s mine is mine and I am entitled to keep and consume whatever I can
get out of it.’"[5]  Berry
echoes this by concluding that, "community life is by definition a life of
cooperation and responsibility.  Private
life and public life, without the disciplines of community interest,
necessarily gravitate toward competition and exploitation."[6]  This is brilliantly described in the short
story, "It Wasn’t Me."  After a beautiful
account of neighborly love and help, Elton (the one in need) turns to Wheeler
(the one who helps him) and says, "I can’t repay you."  Wheeler responds,

It’s not
accountable, because we’re dealing in goods and services that we didn’t make,
that can’t exist at all except as gifts. 
Everything about a place that’s different from its price is a gift.  Everything about a man or woman that’s
different from their price is a gift. 
The life of a neighborhood is a gift. 
I know that if you bought a calf from Nathan Coulter you’d pay him for
it, and that’s right.  But aside from that,
you’re friends and neighbors, you work together, and so there’s lots of giving
and taking without a price – some that you don’t remember, some that you never
knew about.  You don’t send a bill.  You don’t, if you can help it, keep an
account.  Once the account is kept and
the bill presented, the friendship ends, the neighborhood is finished, and
you’re back to where you started.  The
starting place doesn’t have anybody in it but you. [7]

This
leads us to the third point, the community works through affection or fidelity.  "When one works beyond the reach of one’s
love for the place one is working and for the things and creatures one is
working with and among, then destruction inevitably results."[8]  Berry
is clear to show that this affection cannot be manufactured but only comes from
an intimate knowledge of, in this case, a particular community. We should be
careful not to confuse affection with romantic bliss or ease.  This affection "grows over time and is the
effect of sustained commitment and involvement. 
As we work with others, and as we endeavor to get to know them, we learn
to appreciate them in their depth and integrity."[9]  In the Scriptures, the book of Ruth can be
seen as the story of God’s lovingkindness and covenant faithfulness (in Hebrew,
hesed).  It is only because of Ruth’s hesed that God’s fidelity to the
Israelites is made possible.  It is
Ruth’s ordinary, everyday faithfulness that gives the community the gift of
Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David.

Finally,
Berry’s
community works to achieve harmony.  This harmony, the goal of any community,
naturally requires humility of its members. 
This humility results in "a quiet secession by which people find the
practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy
that is exploiting them…."[10]
This secession, as Berry calls it, might be seen as a ‘calling away’ by the
Biblical narrative in Matthew 11:28-30, where Jesus proclaims: "Come to me, all
you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for
I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."  Although Berry sees this harmony as a human artifact,
the Christian knows this work is not done through this powers of this world but
only through the empowering of the Holy Spirit.[11]

Why the Church Needs Wendell Berry

The
result of this four-fold description is a concrete vision of a healthy
community. In contrast to the ambiguities in much modern teaching on heaven, Berry’s vision gives us
an imaginative look at what this ‘heavenly’ community might look like.  The modern church would be wise to
appropriate Berry’s
vision for four reasons.  First, it is biblical and Berry’s vision borrows much of its
imaginative framework from the Christian tradition.[12]  Each of the four "works" of the community
mentioned above have a corresponding theme running throughout the Christian
scriptures.  Memory, sharing, fidelity,
and harmony are so bursting with biblical imagery that the Christian can’t help
but analogize his words.  And while Berry is critical of
modern organized religion, he is equally honest about his own formation in the
Christian religion:

There are an
enormous number of people – and I am one of them – whose native religion, for
better or worse, is Christianity.  We
were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is,
whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our
consciousness, or language, and our dreams.[13]

Second,
Berry’s
vision is earthy, that is, it is
concerned with the physicality of God’s good creation.  In response to the contemporary movement
towards escapism (with historical roots in Gnosticism), Berry’s vision is rooted in the goodness of
the created world.  Memory, sharing,
affection, and harmony point to this
world – not some far off place we will go to when we die.  Memory looks backwards to the generations
that have preceded our own, sharing and affection point to the present reality
of life lived together, and harmony anticipates the goodness and fullness of
the world to come.  As one who lives off
the land, Berry
knows – in the true sense of knowing – that his livelihood depends on the
continuous fidelity of God to produce vegetation on the land.  The error of ‘over-spiritualization,’ that
is, a spirituality that tends to become escapist or other-worldly, is the
result of a "a dualism that manifests itself in several ways: as a cleavage, a
radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter,
religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, and so on.  This dualism, I think, is the most
destructive disease that afflicts us."[14]

The
dualism of body and soul is the most troubling to Berry. 
In a insightful exposition of Genesis 2, he argues for a non-dualistic
anthropology: "The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is not man = body + soul; the
formula there is soul = dust + breath…God did not make a body and put a soul
into it, like a letter into an envelope…He made the dust live.  The dust, formed as a man and made to live,
did not embody a soul; it became a
soul."[15]  This understanding of human nature and the
goodness of Creation is fundamental to the community Berry envisions.

Third,
Berry’s
vision is prophetic. A study of
Walter Brueggeman’s Prophetic Imagination
shows how Berry
is a textbook example of someone who practices "prophetic criticism" and
"prophetic energizing."[16]  This is demonstrated, first, in the way that Berry is involved in
"futuring fantasy."  Brueggemann notes
"the prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of
implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined."[17]  Although Berry does hint at some practical things
communities can do, he is not concerned so much with prescribing specific tasks
but with convincing the reader of the idea that something can be done.[18]  Second, Brueggemann states that, "the poetic
imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the
dominant reality…It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the
promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises."[19]  Through his poetic imagination, Berry allows readers to
enter into his imagination through storytelling and experience the Gathered
Community for themselves.  The third way Berry plays the role of
prophet is through "prophetic energizing," that is, "presenting an alternative
consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness
and vitality."[20]  Through his critique of modern society, Berry is able to "bring
to public expression the hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and
suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there."[21]  His recognition of the fragmentation of
society, the disintegration of communities, the destruction of creation, and
the loneliness of the individual – to name a few -  allow for a new expression of hope to be
birthed in his writings.  Berry as prophet both
challenges and encourages his readers to think freshly about the world and
their place in it.

The
fourth reason the church should think seriously on Berry’s vision of the Gathered Community is
that it is eschatological, and
therefore realistic.  The term eschatological denotes the presence of God’s kingdom now but also
the future coming of God’s Kingdom. 
This is more commonly known as the "now-but-not-yet" aspect of the Kingdom of God. 
Berry’s
community is now, but he is not
advocating a utopian idealism.  In fact, the
very text in which the Gathered Community is based includes disappointment,
failing, and forgiveness.  But Berry’s community is
also to come: "My vision gathered the
community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of
time."[22] 

The tension
between the now and the not-yet is a result of a person who sees. 
In the novel, it is Jayber Crow alone who sees the community gathered in
perfection but also marred by its own sin – he is a Jesus figure.  He is one who has eyes to see the Kingdom of God in the midst of the community.  He is only able to do this because of his
vision is rooted in memory, sharing, affection, and the desired harmony of the
community. Berry’s
vision, while fictionally expressed, is nonetheless realistic for the Christian
mind.  We can hold on to hope that a
community like this is realistic because we know that in the eschaton, "the
dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them…the old order of things
has passed away" (Rev. 21:3-4).  True
Christian realism stands between the now and the not-yet, living in the tension
of a broken world waiting patiently to be restored.[23]  An error in either direction – by looking too
hard at the now, or by grasping too much for the not-yet – leads to
disappointment and disillusionment. 

Why Wendell Berry Needs the Church

To
return to Norman Wirzba’s penetrating question, "Can a community of care and
gratitude become a reality, or must it be relegated to a fictional world?"  Furthermore, "Do we have any reasons or resources
to move us in the direction of gratitude?"[24]  This is the one area where I think Berry misses the
mark.  Jayber Crow’s vision of the
Gathered Community replaces the Gathered Church! 
By marginalizing the church he marginalizes his one hope of making his
vision into a reality.  Theologian
Stanley Hauerwas makes the case that without the worshiping church, Berry’s seed has no
ground in which to germinate:

Berry’s appeal to a religious sense of
mystery for maintaining some sense of the "whole" is important, but a sense of
mystery cannot be sustained absent a community in which the mystery is
materially enacted.  A [community] able
to resist the mystifications legitimated by the abstractions of our social order
will depend on a people shaped by fundamental practices necessary for truthful
speech.  In short, without the church, a
church capable of demythologizing the false idealism that possesses our
imaginations, there is no possibility that a [community] can exist capable of
[embodying the virtues that Berry's
vision entails]. [25]

Only
with something of a Hauerwasian ecclesiology can a community like Berry’s be realistically
embodied.  This is because Hauerwas sees
the community as that which embodies and performs the story: the story is the Christian narrative and the performance is the practice of the church.  A
community of character requires a story and practices that are able to account
for why life should be lived and centered on memory, sharing, fidelity, and
harmony. By doing so, the community offers the only form of truth that can be
found. Furthermore, "the problem is not whether we lack the imagination to
begin to think what a [community] shaped by Christian practice might look like,
but rather whether the church exists that can provide the material conditions
that can make such an alternative [community] possible."[26]  We can certainly imagine it, but are we a
people capable of embodying it?

According
to Hauerwas, the worshiping church centered on Eucharistic practice embodies
many of the same habits, community, practices, memory, and eschatology found in
Berry’s work.[27]
The Eucharistic liturgy moves from gathering, to greeting, to confession of
sin, to proclamation of Scripture, the response of baptism, the offering, the sharing
of the Eucharistic sacrifice and, finally, the sending forth.[28]   Gathering is in itself eschatological because
it foreshadows the communion of the saints. 
Hauerwas notes, "It points to the scandal of those who are not present,
particularly those who have been excluded."[29]  Greeting focuses on the name of God, the
focus of the gathering.  It reminds
members that theology is about the character of God rather than the fallen
members of the community.  The confession
of sins is the place where the members recognize their mutual need for one
another for forgiveness.  Baptism is the
response to the proclamation.  It is here
where members are reminded of the Christological character of ethics and
grafted into the life of the community. 
Finally, the community participates
and shares in the Eucharist, "which
sums up all that has gone before: the sharing of Christ’s body."[30] 

The
irony in Berry’s
Gathered Community is that by distancing his vision from the church, he
distances himself from the very hope that his vision can become a reality.  To be sure: memory, sharing, fidelity, and
harmony are not to be isolated and found only
in the church.  However, it is only by
the church being the church that God
called it to be that the world has
any hope of being the world God has called it to be.  As Hauerwas quite famously remarks,

The first social
task of the church – the people capable of remembering and telling the story of
God we find in Jesus – is to be the church and to help the world understand
itself as the world.  The world, to be
sure, is God’s world, God’s good creation…For the church to be the church,
therefore, is not anti-world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is
meant to be as God’s good creation.[31]

In
conclusion, Berry’s
vision would benefit greatly from a church formed by the story and practices of
the gospel.  Likewise, the church would
benefit greatly from incorporating Berry’s
vision into its own imagination. They need one another.  The church needs the prophetic voice of Berry to fuel its own thinking, and Berry needs the church in order to have a
community capable of embodying his prophetic vision.  As Hannah Coulter, another of Berry’s characters
insightfully remarks, "There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world.  And it is by the place we’ve got, and our
love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven."[32]  To understand the church in this light would
be helpful to both Berry
and the church trying to live into the eschatological vision of the New Heavens
and New Earth.  We are obliged to say in
humility and hope: There is no "better church" than this, not in this world.  And it is by the church we’ve got, and our
love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

[1] Wendell
Berry, Jayber Crow: A Novel (Washington, DC:
Counterpoint, 2000), 205.

[2] Norman
Wirzba, "An Economy of Gratitude," in Wendell Berry: Life and Work, ed. Jason Peters (Lexington:
The University Press of Kentucky,
2007), 153.

[3] Sean
Michael Lucas, "God and Country: Wendell Berry’s Theological Vision," Christian Scholars Review XXXII, no. 1
(Fall 2002): 81-2.

[4] Lucas,
"God and Country," 82.

[5]
Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament
Ethics For the People of God (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity, 2004), 149.

[6] Wendell
Berry, "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community," in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993),
121.

[7] Wendell
Berry, "It Wasn’t Me," in That Distant
Land: The Collected Stories (Washington,
DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004),
266-288.

[8] Wendell
Berry, "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse," Sex,
Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 24.

[9] Wirzba, Economy of Gratitude, 152.

[10] Wendell
Berry, "Conservation and Local Community," in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993),
17-18.

[11] A
Christian might find a better word than "harmony" in the Hebrew word shalom, or peace.

[12] I use
the word "biblical" here not to make reference to some set of proof texts that
would prove or disprove a position, but rather to point to an imagination
formed by a close, careful, and faithful reading of Scripture. 

[13] Wendell
Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation," in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993),
95-96.

[14] Berry, "Christianity and
the Survival of Creation," 105.

[15] Ibid.,
106.

[16] Walter
Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
(Philadelphia:
Fortress, 2001), 39-79.

[17]
Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination,
40.

[18] An
example of this is found in Berry,
"Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse," in Sex,
Economy, Freedom, and Community, 19-26, in which berry outlines
"twenty-seven propositions about global thinking and the sustainability of
cities."

[19]
Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination,
40.

[20] Ibid.,
59.

[21] Ibid.,
65.

[22] Berry, Jayber Crow, 205.

[23] I am,
of course, implicitly critiquing the "Christian realism" put forth by such
thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr, which I find to be inherently un-Christian
precisely because of their inability to live in the tension between the now and
the not-yet. 

[24] Wirzba,
"An Economy of Gratitude," 153.

[25] Stanley Hauerwas, The
State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007), 104.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Samuel
Wells, Transforming Fate Into Destiny:
The Theological Ethics of Stanley
Hauerwas (Eugene: Cascade, 1998),122.

[28] Wells, Transforming, 122.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian
Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 100.

[32] Wendell
Berry, Hannah Coulter: A Novel (Washington, DC:
Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004), 83.

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_____.
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_____. "It Wasn’t Me." In That Distant Land: The Collected Stories. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004.

_____. Jayber Crow: A Novel. Washington, D.C.:
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_____. "Out
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_____. "Sex,
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