an interview with Wendell Berry

I commend to you this week's Bill Moyers webcast: an interview with Wendell Berry.

He speaks to many things that are important to me. Much of what he says has to do with the most important work a human can do: farming. That is not my task, so what am I to do?

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old, for hope must not depend on feeling good and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight. You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future, which surely will surprise us, and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering. The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them? Tell them at least what you say to yourself. Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded, the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it, as you care for no other place… This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work. … Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. … Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet. Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot…. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them. When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens.

"Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it, as you care for no other place…"

For me, a church musician, it means to play our little old Pilcher organ in this parish, and to really listen to what it has to say, and to not care about the fine new instruments that might be in other places. It means to welcome university students when they come here to play their degree recitals. It means to pray Matins in our courtyard, or in the church, or in my office. It means to know the children and adults in our choirs and care about them, and to figure out how to help them grow. It means to listen to the congregation when they sing, and to do what I can to help them do it better.

Perhaps this is not as good as being attached to a piece of land, but it does, I think, mean belonging to my place, and knowing what there is about it that is true of no other place. And that is enough.