My Birthday tribute to Wendell Berry

Discovering Wendell Berry through

Imagination in Place

Written by Dan McDonald

This quote is not from the book I am reading – but goes with the writing I’m doing.

 

            When, last week, I began reading Wendell Berry’s Imagination in Place I did not realize Sunday August 5, 1934 was his birthdate, and this Sunday his 84^th birthday. I have read only a few of his works, but each book I have read has made me think for a longer time than it took me to read. Today I write of what I’ve been learning about Wendell Berry and his message as I approaching the midway part of this 2010 published book.

            The first essays in this book are mostly about people who have been mentors and friends in Berry’s life. They come from different places than Berry does, but share an appreciation of their lives being connected to place and community.

            I’ve often classified Wendell Berry as a Southern Agrarian writer. However appropriate that classification might be, I am discovering how his writing as a Southerner and as an Agrarian is for Berry something of a starting point in his relationship to place and a broader more universal culture. I am learning that he recognizes an importance in discovering specific local connections if one is to learn how to interact with others in broader abstract universal matters.

            In Imagination in Place, Wendell Berry spends a good part of the book expressing gratitude for the mentors and friends who helped shape his perspective. Neither of the two I have so far most encountered are Southerners. But they can be described as writers connected to their local places. One mentor for whom Berry expresses his gratitude is Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), a man of the West. Berry tells of studying under Stegner, while only later growing to find Stegner’s impact on his life grew in the years following his studies, while not being a dramatic recognized influence when he studied under Stegner’s supervision. In a chapter entitled The Momentum of Clarity , Berry notices the sort of writer Stegner had become, that would eventually have an impact on him. He reflects on Stegner in the following paragraph:

            “[Eventually I thought there must have been a moment when he decided that he would not be the kind of writer who would look on his native country as “raw material” for his art, and leave it otherwise to take care of itself or to be cared for by other people, but that he would be a kind of writer who would be devoted to his country for its own sake, and do what he could to protect it. And then I thought that perhaps he had not decided – that perhaps there had come a moment, simply, when he realized that he had become that kind of writer. Whenever and however that moment occurred, it was a significant moment; so far as I know, no American writer had been that kind of writer before.]”[i]

            Berry’s use of country in this paragraph intrigues me. “Country” here doesn’t seem to me to equate nation, and yet there is a relationship it seems between the loving of his country and nation. It seems as though country is representative of a more specific, localized place that then is also connected to one’s commitments to life in a broader, more universal manner. I have to think on how I learned love of country in my own childhood way of understanding. I grew up in a north central Illinois farm region. My first thoughts of living in a great America, was to look over the neighboring Prairie farmland horizon and seeing a grain elevator with its peak visible over the plots of land filled with corn and soybeans. That is how I first understood I lived in a great nation. I had this specific localized vision of greatness that served as my understanding of the abstraction of a great nation named The United States of America. Seeing Berry’s debt to Stegner helps me realize that while Berry can be described as a Southern Agrarian, is certainly not one inclined to say to us “You must become a Southern man to discover truth.” He certainly did not see Stegner that way. Stegner was for Wendell Berry a fellow companion connected to place and a localized cultural way of life.

            A second writer, mentor, and friend Berry recognizes, is poet Hayden Carruth (1921-2008). Carruth’s roots were planted in a small Vermont community. In Berry’s essay on Carruth, he quotes a piece of writing Carruth did in honoring a neighbor who operated a small dairy farm. When Berry had visited Carruth in Vermont, Carruth had taken time to introduce Wendell Berry to his dairy farm operating neighbor. Berry selects Carruth’s eulogy for this dairy farmer as a sample of Carruth’s connection to his Vermont place and community:

Notice how many times

I have said “manure”?

It is serious business.

It breaks the farmers’ backs.

It makes their land.

It is the link eternal,

binding man and beast and earth.[ii]

 

            Berry made his own profound remark regarding the poem, saying “[“Cowshit,” then has an eternal value. A “cowshit farmer” is an artist whose art makes of cowshit “the link eternal.”]”[iii]

            Imagination in Place has given me a new appreciation for Wendell Berry. He is a man who understands that perhaps the best way to be a man capable of understanding universal truths is to be a man who has learned to receive from and return to his own specific local place and community. That is why he can be a Southern man who would not expect you to be southern man unless you are a man and a Southerner. He would understand paradoxically but also logically that to understand the universals of life we perhaps need to learn to be preoccupied with the local that we can see with our own eyes. I remember an associate pastor named Robert Haling, where I was once a member of the church. He would often tell us his favorite saying “Bloom where you are planted.” The universal characteristics of life are expressed in thousands of thousands of specific offerings of localized reality.

---

[i] Imagination in Place; Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley p. 41

[ii] Ibid., p. 65

[iii] Ibid., p. 65

Reading and Thinking

Reading and Thinking this week

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I am officially on my two week vacation. It could hardly be more needed. I had planned to attend the Image Journal sponsored Glen Workshops in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There were some things going on in life closer to me that seem to need special attention at this time, and I have some things to do at the house, and some need for simple rest – so it is a staycation. I did notice Wendell Berry’s book Imagination in Place resting in a place with some other unread books. Since I bought my copy of that last year at the Glen – I thought this would be a good time to start reading it. If any Glen people happen to see my blog – fat chance (it is the one time when people aren’t checking their browsers for something to read), I will definitely be thinking of you. The Glen is a wonderful place to meet talented writers, artists, and creative people. It is humbling because you might live in a place where you don’t meet many and you begin to think you are pretty good and then you meet people that are really good and you aware of mediocrity in your writing, and thus become slow to say things like “I blog.” You also happily discover that creative people tend to love encouraging people who are simply trying to be creative.

 

            In addition to just starting Berry’s book I have been plodding so very slowly through Living Justice by Thomas Massaro SJ. Massaro’s book is a textbook on Catholic social justice teaching. Although I am a Protestant, I find myself increasingly respectful of the insights of the Catholic Social Justice tradition. One advantage Catholics have on speaking to these issues is that Catholicism represents people from industrialized and developing nations; with constituencies that fill the scope from deeply conservative to progressive, and fill the spectrum of human existence among people of many languages, cultures, and national settings. Much of Catholic social teaching is the result of perspectives percolating to the top from the localized levels of church life until they are finally represented by Bishops, councils, and Popes. Being a Protestant I do not have to take everything as authoritative, but for the most part I find everything discussed as something useful to be appropriated into life at some level. Since Massaro’s book is a textbook I find myself reading it like I did an important textbook in college. I found when I read a book for the first time I simply saw what interested me. It took me a second reading to see what really interested the author so that I began to get an idea of what his message was and not just as a vehicle to appreciate what I appreciate. I won’t say much about Living Justice in this blog, but hopefully in future blogs as I read the book a second time I will feel more confident of my understanding the author’s concerns and not just mine.

 

            Both of these books are books which seem to fit into the sort of works that address aspects of a general theme I am seeking to better understand. Years ago I passed through a sort of crisis in my Christian life. Since becoming a Christian, I have never had any trouble seeing that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was taught in the Holy Scriptures. I did go through a period when I began seeing that we Christians seemed to say the Trinity was an essential doctrine according to the faith, but in every day Christian life we seemed not to present it as a very useful teaching with useful applications to life. Eventually I discovered that this was not so for the ancient church fathers, and one could include the ancient church mother Saint Macrina who helped her brothers Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa towards their Trinitarian doctrinal understandings. For the church fathers, the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation stood in the center of what they called the Christian Gospel.

            For me one of the eventual practical ramifications for me in understanding the Trinity was in understanding the nature of our humanity, as created in the image of God. We understand in the Trinity that God is one in three and three in one. He exists as God in union; one God. He exists as God revealed in three persons; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons but one God. This is holy mystery but God is seen as distinct existing persons and one God in unity. I will never try to explain God, for to do so I am convinced will only lead to confusion. But looked the other way what I understand only vaguely in mystery helps inform me as to our human complexity. We exist individually and communally. We cannot truly separate the individual and communal existence. Why do I believe and behave as I do? How much is because of my unique individuality, and how much is due to my unique setting in place, in culture, in family, in tribe, tongue, nation, and varied experiences? How much of me is me because of choices I made consciously and how much is me because of environment that shaped me unconsciously?

            These two books help point me to aspects of this mystery of the human experience that exists in part because of genetics, in part by cultural shaping from varied aspects of culture including family, community, education systems, church influences, and national issues. Berry’s emphasis in writing has as one of his most important themes how to maintain an emphasis on local community when we are being shaped by a nearly omnipresent pressure to be people who are global, online, taking their place in the big issues, while hard pressed to know an actual neighbor. He yearns to maintain a localized community where issues instead of floating from the top to the bottom of the layers of life percolate from the experiences of the local. That seems to me a worthy venture.

            Massaro’s textbook would not argue against the importance of the local, but would seek to bring together collected wisdom to encourage people to responsibly seek out ways of dealing with various social and cultural issues of our day. I have happily found Massaro to be more interested as a text book author to present general perspectives on cultural issues than trying to express his agenda. He gives us information about the formation of the social justice issues as presented in Catholic teaching but reminds us that while there are general teachings, there are still varied ways those who take the teachings seriously would seek to apply the lessons of Catholic teaching in a large world, with varied cultures and ways of living.

            I suppose because I believe in the Holy Trinity and man created in the image of God, these sorts of books that help give me additional perspectives into the connected life of humanity in collective and humanity in individuality will interest me for the foreseeable future.

Musings of a Weary Man

Musings of a Weary Man

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Perhaps I have too many irons in the fire. Or is it too little discipline and too easily distracted? Whatever the reason I am looking forward to a two week vacation where I get to push the reset button.

            Sometimes I view myself as a writer. To be sure I enjoy writing. But a true writer is someone who considers the craft of writing from every aspect of writing. The other irons in the fire generally keep me from writing as well as I could if I gave myself to such considerations. I am a warehouseman. That is how I pay my bills. Most writers do more than to write to pay their bills. I am also a churchman. I am an officer in the church I attend and presently I am also involved as we look for a new minister in the search committee. Early in the year where I work we worked a couple of months of 72 hour work weeks. I am not sure I have ever fully recovered. I am sure that each of my responsibilities could have been better attended and performed. Lately there have been times when I just wanted away from everything. As I look towards my two week vacation I can begin to imagine myself getting to a better state of mind. I can imagine myself finding a better plan to meet my responsibilities and to seek to pursue this passion. I don’t think we are necessarily guaranteed the ability to do our passion in life as our vocation. Most people in this world are simply not privileged enough to get to choose to do whatever is on their heart. I do think however if God has placed something upon our heart we ought to give it some expression. When Vincent Van Gogh picked up brush and put it to easel, without a lesson he probably didn’t know if that was to be a passion alongside his ordinary vocation or would become his new vocation. If it is a passion it will be something to be done for that most special five minutes of the day or as a vocation for many hours in a week. I will make room for writing, which is for me a passion. I have the suspicion it will never pay my bills. But hopefully when the next two weeks are done I will feel more capable in mind, heart, soul, and strength to pursue my vocation, my responsibilities, and my passion. If you are weary I hope you are beginning to establish a strategy to get the rest you need to pursue what you need and want to pursue.

            I didn’t expect to stay around the house for my vacation. Originally I planned to attend the Glen Workshops in Santa Fe, New Mexico this year. But as this deep seated weariness and sense of being overwhelmed hung over me – I realized I needed rest and healing, and a restructuring of my life to move forward. A few weeks ago I let the sponsors of the workshop know I would not be attending. I had already paid for room and board, so I asked that instead of asking for a refund or a partial refund that they might find someone who could not otherwise attend the workshops. In a short time I received a wonderful letter regarding how there was a person that quickly came to mind. The person who will be taking my place has been through some difficult times. It will be for the person not only an opportunity to pursue desires in the arts, but also to get some healing following an ordeal. It made me happy. God works these things out. As much as I would have loved to soak in the times at the Glen, I really need rest and restructuring in the simplest of ways. But there was someone for whom in addition to the Glen being a place to grow in the pursuit of the arts; it will also be a place to get away and get a new perspective. Our souls needed healing, but we needed distinct remedies.

            I want especially in this letter to give a shout out to Tina Osterhouse, who I follow on Twitter. I am reluctant to describe someone I have never met as a friend, but Tina is certainly an appreciated acquaintance. Lately I have been fretting about my writing style and so many other things in life. She gave writers some wonderful advice last week or the week before. It proved to be so simple it became an encouragement to me that I was going to be able to get through this patch where I only felt tired and weary. I hope some of you who are reading this blog will find these words as simple, wise, helpful, and perhaps even healing as I did.

            “There is nothing new under the sun. Don’t try to be original. Write as honestly as you can, with as much integrity as you’ve got. Come at your work from your own slant, your neighborhood. It’ll be original because it’s your work, not because you tried to be original.”  – Tina Osterhouse.

            That seemed to me to the perfect piece of advice. Our originality flows from how God has made us unique as human beings. We have our own distinct DNA, our unique history, the mix of things we have done and seen, and the philosophies and ways of life which have appealed to us. Our uniqueness is not based so much on how we generate something utterly different from anyone else, but rather our uniqueness rests upon who we are and all that we have seen, done, and experienced. Or as Oscar Wilde once advised, “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

            That is all I have for tonight. Next week hopefully I will be getting that rest and restructuring I need. If you need that, in whatever way you need to take care of yourself – please do so!

            May the Lord bless each and every reader.

First Reformed Impressons Part 1

 

“First Reformed” - Impressions

Part 1: Seeing the film through my eyes

Dan McDonald

 

            This essay is a story of my interaction with the movie “First Reformed.” How I consider the movie doesn’t necessarily indicate how you will see it. “No two people see the same movie”. Each of us brings our own perspectives into the theater and into the film. For me seeing “First Reformed” awakened thoughts of my favorite theater’s history, and of a neighborhood through which I pass on my way to the theater.

            On my way to the theater I pass through a neighborhood of what was likely working class homes built after the First World War. The houses are quite small by today’s standards. The neighborhood seems as I pass through it to be something of a scene from the movie “The Outsiders.” That shouldn’t necessarily since S.E. Hinton wrote the novel when she was attending high school only a couple of miles from this neighborhood and others like it. Paul Schrader’s film tells the story of a man being pushed close to the mental breaking point. In the Outsiders, rival gangs from different sides of the poor and the affluent divide, are resisting their own differing perceptions of pressure. Pony Boy understands this after Cherry describes how there is a lot of pressure for kids being told that they must succeed. Sometimes the pressure placed upon them to succeed seems to have little correlation with their life dreams. They simply must succeed whatever that means. Pony Boy, who lives in one of these antiquated houses, in neighborhoods of people who have seldom been successful in other’s or their own eyes felt the pressure of living in a place where everyone thought that no one in these parts ever amounts to anything. Place and the overall community expectations doesn’t mean everything about how we will respond to life, but it does mean more than we would admit when we say you can be anything you want to be. Perhaps it needs to be said, but how easily can it be heard? There are times when a message is needed that will provide a way for someone to stand against the pressures crushing his soul. In the Outsiders one could imagine Pony Boy’s life would have “stay gold” written over all that he would do in the future. The Outsiders and First Reformed are not even similar movies, but they both deal with the struggle of facing down pressure in our lives. I think driving through a neighborhood that reminds me of the Outsiders helped me to see the images of a person struggling with what life had given to him.

            The place I think of as my theater originally opened 90 years ago in July 1928. It’s ninetieth birthday will soon have a number of events to celebrate its history. The history of the theater and the neighborhood where it exists is a history that has included flourishing, floundering, and simply looking for equilibrium instead of boom and bust. In 1928 the theater opened its doors in an area which was then the city’s busiest business area outside of the city’s downtown district. The theater and surrounding business district was in easy walking distance from the recently built Route 66 highway. The mother road as it has been dubbed by a historian of the road became a sort of main street for every town through which it passed from Chicago to Los Angeles. The theater in this new business district was a place where all the newest Hollywood movies could be seen.  Route 66 gave birth to many business districts, but she was a fickle mother, who often changed paths and left the children she mothered abandoned. That is what happened when the route moved ten blocks south. New business areas started growing along the new pathway. In a few more years the interstate system was built bypassing the old road altogether, and it wasn’t thought important to provide an exit ramp leading to the dying business area. In a few years the theater stood amidst empty buildings where busy stores had once thrived. Few people came to the theater in the dying place. The cinema that once showed the latest Hollywood fare now advertised adult entertainment and triple-x movies. Then even that business model closed its doors and the theater joined the empty storefront buildings in being boarded up with “no trespassing signs.” Eventually someone who loved old theaters and fine movies decided that maybe this was the spot where one could remodel the old theater and establish it with to serve a different niche market. It would be a locally owned non-profit independent arts house theater. The area is in something of a renaissance with a mix of businesses discovering the old buildings in search for entrepreneurs, and the Spanish community with its barrios kind of existence within our culture. It is a curious mix of English speaking arts community side by side with the Mexican-American community. The upcoming celebration of 90 years of cinema history finds the cinema in the same place but different world than where it has stood for so many years.

            In “First Reformed” the focus is upon a church about to celebrate its 250^th anniversary celebration. The church has a small number of people in its actual congregation. Without some help from a mega church existing elsewhere in Albany County, it would be hard to imagine the congregation being able to financially carry the load of both paying for an old building’s maintenance and a pastor’s salary. There is a deep connection to the past and the church seems in its worship and in what its small membership seems to appreciate to be continuing mostly because “this is the way church was when I grew up.” Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) has a working relationship with the bigger church across town that offers a smorgasbord of opportunities for service and worship in comparison with the traditional way of First Reformed. Pastor Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer) is the pastor of the bigger church and he is providing the leadership for the coming celebration of the old church’s 250^th anniversary. It may be First Reformed’s anniversary but Pastor Jeffers wants to make sure his mega church doesn’t suffer from a poorly planned or prepared celebration. Reverend Toller seems sometimes to be as much a museum curate as a church pastor. It is a difficult place to thrive if you are a somewhat morose man who often experiences regular bouts with depression.

            As First Reformed prepares itself for the important 250^th anniversary, Reverend Toller as museum curate is explaining to children on a tour of the church how the church was a participant in an activist role in matters in the course of American history. Pastor Toller finds himself challenged by his present distance from activism, while museum curate Toller can happily describe the activism.

            History can sometimes linger over a place. There is one story I love to tell about my favorite theater in my city. If you look from the outside of the building you might see windows on a second story in the old theater building. There were apartments above the theater in those early boom days for the theater and the surrounding community. I like to imagine someone living in those apartments, looking out her window as people started lining up on the street below to see the latest movie. Sometimes she walks out of her apartment, makes her way down the second floor hallway, and then down the stairwell, soon to be joining the customers buying tickets for the movie. Maybe she dreams of one day being in one of those movies. The audience will be there to see her and she will be performing the role as well as she can for them. In my little story of the gal from the upstairs apartment the magic of that upstairs apartment creates a miracle. The young woman goes to Hollywood and is cast to play a lead role. The audiences come to see her. She impresses the critics, and she wins best actress of the year. The thing is, Jennifer Jones starred as Bernadette in “The song of Bernadette” in 1943. Jennifer Jones was awarded the Academy award as Best actress for her performance. Only a few years before that happened she had been living in an apartment above the Tulsa theater that had been built in 1928. The magic had really happened.

            History can be romantic. Happy endings are something we love. But a small congregation having a hard time paying its bills, reliant on the kindness of another congregation – could with little difficulty become a place where people feel as if they are the outsiders destined to live in buildings that become empty and in communities where no one expects you to amount to much anymore. There could be a sense of abandonment or betrayal that the path which seemed to be offering abundance now seemed only to deliver frustration. The pressures of being in such a place could be immense especially for an earnest but sullen leader of the church. This could all go so wrong or perhaps there would be a miracle moment when the message to “stay gold” sounded out loud and clear and gave hope in a difficult setting. History can be romantic and it can be tragic. Who knows which way a hard day will be completed.