A Resurrection of the Wild

“There will be

 a resurrection of the wild.”

 Wendell Berry

            If you don’t know Wendell Berry’s work, check him out. A powerful poet and novelist, who seems to have been born directly from the earth itself.  Berry is known for his love for the earth and all its creatures, but he is also a gentle and demanding voice for sanity in our political and spiritual discourse.

            The lines above are from his series of poems called “Window Poems”. He is talking about the resurrection of the wilderness, or as he puts it “the second coming of the trees” that will happen “when the fools of the capitals/have devoured each other/in righteousness.”  You can see that rising power of the creation in every sidewalk crack and back yard, where weeds great and small burst up at the slightest mention of rain.  His poem was in a collection published in 1968, but even with all our paving over and bombing and fracking of the world, I don’t see the earth giving up anytime soon.  Come and look at the alley behind our church, if you wish to see the earth in humble, forceful action.

            But I think he might see this resurrection of the wild as a call to our deepest natures, one that is so needed right now.  Despite all the X-Treme sports and the never-ending parade of spectacle that has infected our popular music and movies and TV and social media, don’t you think we live in a particularly timid age?  There is plenty of wildness in style, but not a whole lot in substance.

            We have 12 days left until the election (we should be going out to do Posadas of peace and sanity for each of those nights), and while I’ve heard some really crazy ideas (like cutting taxes drastically for the wealthiest among us will balance the budget), I haven’t hear any wild ideas, in the best sense of the word.  A good wild idea would be: let’s eliminate poverty. Another would be reducing our military budget by 50%, which would still leave us ahead of the next five nations (China, UK, France, Russia and Japan) combined.  Let’s start teaching Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin and Farsi in every school, from pre-kindergarten on, so we can more fully communicate with those we call “enemies”.  (By that I mean, immigrants, Muslims, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and whomever else we need to project upon).  I know people and groups are saying these things, but will we be wild enough to commit ourselves to them.

            This is not coming out as gentle as I wish. I would like to be less angry about the world right now, but I can only do that when I’m willing to be in more pain about the world (and as we all know from television, pain is something to conquer or avoid at all costs).  It hurts to see children in Syria bombed.  It hurts to listen to listen to “Christian leaders” demonize gay people.  It hurts that I feel powerless about this a lot of the time.

            So I go back to Wendell Berry. In the same collection, he writes in “Letter to a Siberian Woodsman” these lines: 

            In the thought of you I imagine myself free of the weapons and

            the official hates that I have borne on my back as a hump,

            and in the thought of myself I imagine you free of weapons and official hates,

            so that if we should meet we would not go by each other

            looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their burdens,

            but would stand clear in the gaze of each other.

I’m not sure of the line breaks, Wendell, but I am sure that I want to let go of my weapons and official hates today.

Be justice.  Be beauty. 

Patrick