In the loving hospitality of my grandmother

Just over a week ago, I lost my maternal grandmother, Dorothy Mullins. She had just celebrated her 94th birthday back in October, but had been slowly declining in health in recent weeks and months. As I did a number of years ago for my paternal grandfather, I was privileged to give a eulogy at her funeral this past weekend, which I'll share here...

The earth and debt: Marriage in Wendell Berry

Tanya & Wendell Berry
Photo by Ann Thompson via Flickr

Jake Meador has a wonderful essay up on Fare Forward, entitled "Wendell Berry's 'Room for Love'." He cycles through three marriages in Berry's fictional works, and offers reflections on how successful marriages in Berry often resemble the author's agrarian understanding and expansive writings on how to live in harmony with the created world (of which we are a part).

Becoming a good steward of the earth involves learning to live, love, and tend with the land, not over or against it. It's about identifying the rhythms of life, health, and beauty already at work in nature, and partnering with it in our human culture-making, through which we create the stuff and meaning from the world we inhabit and use (channeling Andy Crouch's thinking on culture here).

And it's not a question of whether we do this culture-making and use of the world (or our relationships, such as marriage), but how, which reflects our moral character. Meador isolates what he thinks might be the heart of Berry's vision and purpose for writing as he does, with a quote from The Gift of Good Land:

“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.”

So it goes in creation, so it goes in marriage.

Down in the muck: Wendell Berry on the "inescapable cruelty" of life

"Down in the Muck"
(photo by Andrew Stawarz/Flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Until yesterday while watching the fantastic Bill Moyers interview with Wendell Berry, I had never read or heard his poem, "For the Hog Killing." I'm grateful that my first exposure to this poem was hearing Berry read it aloud, with his soft northern Kentucky drawl.

Around minute 30 of the interview, Berry talks about the gross mistreatment of and cruelty to animals that our industrial food system requires. He then pauses and acknowledges an "inescapable cruelty" to all human life, even for vegetarians. "We have to live at the expense of other creatures." The rule then, he says, is to use fellow creatures (plants and animals) - and the land upon which we all dwell - with the minimum of violence.

Moyers then asks Berry to read the poem, "For the Hog Killing":

Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the eye,
let them die while the sound of the shot is in the air, let them die as they fall,
let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let freshet be full,
let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around,
for today we celebrate again our lives' wedding with the world,
for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond.