Reading a fair amount of Wendell Berry. Worthwhile.
“Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. There is always work here that I need to be doing and I have many worries, for life on the edge seems always threatening to go over the edge. But I am always surprised, when I look back on times here that I know to have been laborious or worrisome or sad, to discover that they were never out of the presence of peace and beauty, for here I have been always in the world itself.”
Someone asked me if there was snow up here. After I took the photo which is at the top of the page now, we had a nor’easter blowing all night, which dropped about another six inches on top of the four that were in place. But it steadily warmed all night, turning the snow to hail, and by morning it sounded like it was raining diamonds outside. The wind was incredible. It snapped one of the beeches near my house, which unfortunately snagged about forty feet up in the air and now is just waiting its chance to crush someone who walks beneath it. It also brought down a large maple, closing off the driveway until I get over there with a chainsaw one of these days. But the snow has closed off the driveway until spring anyway, barring a “global warming” thaw.
But most impressive was the fact that I couldn’t get out my front door. The wind scoured the whole mountainside, pushing a huge drift against the house, which was frosted by a hard layer of ice on top, pinning my door in place. That’s fine. That’s what the back door is for. I got a shovel, walked around, and dug the front door out.
I spent some time burying the house in the snow; air can get under the house, because there’s no basement. This cools the place (especially the floor, of course) considerably. Burying the bottom of the house in snow, as I learned last year, creates an “igloo effect” which does keep the place a bit warmer.
You’re off toward the edge of the bell curve when you tell strangers about your life and they say you remind them of anti-money crusaders living in caves. So it happened to me on Saturday night, when I was told to investigate a Moab man who calls himself Suelo (article in the link). I am impressed. The article managed to leave out his website, which is very interesting. I haven’t met him personally, but these are certainly the trappings of a prophet. Look especially at the quotation from St. Augustine:
For, on account of the things which each one of us possesses singly, there exist wars, hatreds, discords, conflicts between people, tumults, dissensions, scandals, sins, injustices, and murders. On what account? On account of those things which each of us possesses singly. Do we fight over the things we possess in common? We inhale this air in common with others, we all see the sun in common. Blessed therefore are those who make room for the Lord, so as not to take pleasure in private property. Let us therefore abstain from the possessions of private property—or from the love of it, if we cannot abstain from possession—and let us make room for the Lord.
Not what you hear every Sunday, I’ll wager.
This has certainly been a recurrent interest in my life. I am currently very solidly middle-class, a property owner, a car driver, and the like. But my life is simpler than others’ and I think this is a good path for more people to follow. I was very affected by meeting on my cross-country bike trip a man in Eugene, Oregon who had explored this path quite fully. He and I spent an afternoon together, sitting on the riverbank he mentioned as he lay dying. He made it clear to me that there is a great margin of waste in our society, broad enough for many people to live comfortably at little ecological cost. Why not have more people – desert fathers and mothers – in that margin?
On my way back up to the cabin, I stopped at the supermarket in Monticello. I got out of my truck but realized I forgot my plastic bags – I typically reuse them – and went back. I was fumbling around inside the truck, as I don’t have things very organized, and was surprised by a voice right behind me. “Excuse me, mister?” It was a woman holding a set of jumper cables in a little package. “I’m trying to get back home,” she said, “and I need money for gas. Would you be willing to buy some jumper cables for five dollars? I need it for gas money. They’re brand new and everything, I don’t think they’ve ever been used. Five bucks, can’t beat that, right?”
She was probably 30, but careworn, as rural women around here. You could tell that she had known sadness and suffering. I had exactly five singles on me, and I bought the cables, thinking that was the best of the options available. I then heard her as she ran back to her boyfriend, who was rummaging around in the cushions of an old sedan: “Honey? I just got us gas money!” She sounded like a little child. And I thought of the love these women have for us deadbeat men – and all the little things they do, braving any humiliation, for this love.
After ten days in the city, I’m heading back to the snows. Far and away the most striking thing about this visit was the sheer number of unemployed people I met. Last night was the peak of this, at a Christian artists’ party. Of course the artsy folk are going to be underemployed, but this was very impressive. Then I got on the F train at 4 a.m. and found it filled – as I have not seen in decades – with homeless people. There were two or three on every car on the whole train. There were police around, but they left the homeless alone. It was very cold outside.
I talked to one train-sleeper named Steve from West 4th to 42nd. He liked my outfit. “Nice cape, man… damn you get on that thing makes an impression.” He claimed that he “worked Monday to Friday.” You can believe this claim of his or not, but I was there, and I’ve gotten much better at reading people, and he was so sensible and normal-looking (and clean) that I believed him. He said he lost his apartment a week ago. We talked about a topic native New Yorkers often talk about with each other, that we natives have no problems talking to strangers, while the transplants are much more fearful. But his being “out of doors” reminded me of the Great Depression stories I’ve been reading in Wendell Berry’s book Jayber Crow. I told him that and he said the whole situation was like “the Grapes of Wrath.”
It’s good to move away from the idea that the priesthood has to be made up of pure, near-perfect men: no matter who you put up on a pedestal, he will be found unworthy at some point or other. But the priesthood has been so wrapped in this idea – this is God looking for the unblemished lamb for his sacrifice – that the role seems to warp the men. Sin becomes unbearable only when the expectation is sinlessness.
But still there does have to be some attention paid to who gets put where. Perhaps if we were allowed to be open to our weaknesses, organizations like the Church hierarchy would be able to say, “So-and-so shouldn’t work with these people or those people or whomever.” It is a bit disturbing to me to hear of the headmaster of my high school, the man who heard my confessions when I was 14, pleading guilty to child pornography charges. I never found him threatening, but perhaps he was not in the right place?
Andrew Sullivan takes on, in few words, the “Prosperity Gospel” – the Bad News – and gives some real spiritual teaching.
It’s staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus said his kingdom was emphatically not of this world, defends religious war where Jesus sought always peace, and backs torture, which is what the Romans did to Jesus.
At some point these charlatans need to be chased out of the temple. Which these days means the Republican party.
Same old story. You don’t meet many Biblical literalists who literally interpret Matthew 19:23.
Obama’s Responsibility.
02-Dec-09Being in New York is interesting, to hear people assail Obama from both right and left – he’s emasculating this country and bowing down to the Emperor, or is a shill for the military-industrial complex and is “Bush III.” His decision to send more troops into Afghanistan is pleasing no one – it’s not a plan authored by a Republican, so it won’t please the right, and it’s not what Gandhi would do, so it’s not pleasing the left.
I don’t know if what he is doing is prudent, and I don’t know if it will succeed. But I am impressed by the decision, and in fact it is decisions like this which I wanted to see when I voted for him. The immature impulse, given any inherited difficult situation, is to wash your hands of it as quickly as possible. Obama could have played partisan politics here, brought all troops home on January 21st, blamed whatever ensued on Bush, and been done with the whole thing. But by his current actions he is taking responsibility for the war he inherited. He is putting his own popularity on the line to give his generals the chance to win it.
And yet he is also ending it. It is clear that his stated intention is to end the wars this country is in – to close the gates of Janus – before his term expires. If it is his last term, so be it – he will not leave his successor the mess he himself inherited. If he goes down as the worst president in American history, who did nothing but inconclusively end two unwinnable wars, pass a much-adulterated health care bill, and sit back while the country slowly healed itself, then Obama is willing to do that – because he will be leaving the country better off than he found it.
Admittedly, this is not the kind of heroic Cola di Rienzo-esque assault on a corrupt system, but that never really was in Obama’s nature, for anyone who was watching the whole spectacle unfold.