FOLLOWING WENDELL BERRY, RELUCTANT PROPHET

Marshall V. King

Wendell Berry was raised a Southern Baptist. But as an Anabaptist whose particular stream of Anabaptism is Mennonite, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if he were an Anabaptist-Mennonite. Of course this farmer-thinker-writer-conservationist isn’t going to become one of us, so to speak. His thoughtful view of the world is rooted in his community, his Kentucky ancestry, not that of my Mennonite heritage with its covering strings, cape dresses, or shoofly pies.

Still, when he came to Goshen College last fall, someone at this Mennonite school suggested that Mennonites adopt him. Someone else, however, said if that happened, Mennonites would chew him up and spit him out as we do other heroes.

Since the late 1950s, when Berry completed his first novel, his writings have exhorted people to think about the places in which they live and how they treat them. At first, it sounds as if Berry is advocating a return to the land. That’s a notion that entices many who reminisce about or live out of the agrarian ethic. Berry says that he doesn’t advocate going back to anything so much as creating communities that work. The things that make them work, according to Berry’s way of thinking, happen to be some old-fashioned values and common sense.

The crowd that gathered for the first of Berry’s two September 2002 speeches at the college included Mennonites, Catholics, Unitarians, and more. In his thinking farmer way, Berry debunked the rational mind that pervades modern culture. Industrialization has crept into just about everything, including religion, and people tend to think of much of life as commodities and economic products, he said. He prefers to approach living with a sympathetic mind, one that still values faith, loyalty, and, above all, love.

In his Kentucky drawl, Berry read the story from the Gospel of Matthew of the shepherd who goes in search of the lost sheep. A shepherd with a rational mind would write off the loss of one sheep among a flock of 100. The shepherd in the story, one with a sympathetic mind, values the individual sheep and seeks wholeness. The shepherd knows or imagines what it’s like to be lost and goes to find the sheep to spare it and return to being able to tend the whole flock. (Berry knows sheep. About the only commercial enterprise on his 125-acre farm is a flock of lambs they raise to sell as meat, he says.)

Berry as Guide
Through Our
Cultural Wilderness

Many Anabaptists have never heard of the man The New York Times called the "prophet of rural America." He doesn’t dispense the pop psychology of Dr. Phil or Deepak Chopra. But my guess is that more Anabaptists, or Anabaptist sympathizers, would rather trust Berry than any pop psychologist as guide through the wilderness that is contemporary Western culture.

Berry himself would have no such thing. He’s too private a man and says he isn’t comfortable with the title of prophet. He’s simply a man with work to do—work that includes sitting with a pencil and paper and writing. If you call Berry’s home and get a busy signal, it’s not because he’s online. He says he’ll never buy a computer and that his wife, Tanya, will continue to convert his handwritten manuscripts into the typed ones that have become 32 books.

But Anabaptists and those of like mind would do well to read Berry in one hand and the Bible in the other. He’s not calling for everyone to buy a team of horses and go back to farming, but he wants all of us, whatever religious affiliation we may claim, to use what little intelligence we have to live in such a way that we do less harm to the land.

He admires the Amish and how they maintain their landscapes and communities. He praises David Kline, an Amish writer in Holmes County, Ohio, who has found a way to provide goods for a local economy and value his place among God’s larger creation.

But seeking wholeness isn’t relegated to a type of people or only rural residents, though that’s the place Berry prefers and works out of. People in cities should make agricultural decisions to eat responsibly and not contribute to the industrialization of modern agriculture, which Berry says dumps toxins into the biosphere and contributes to the erosion of the land we’re responsible to care for.

At Goshen College, a few young Mennonites asked for advice as they sought higher education and vocation. Having taught for several years, Berry has been critical of higher education and, fed up, has left academia. Vocation, meanwhile, he has always advocated.

Berry isn’t comfortable being asked for advice. He prefers to think and put forth ideas, hoping people will latch onto them. After the speech, Berry’s son Danny, who drives with Berry to some events, stood outside the church waiting for his father to be done with the admiring mass. That didn’t happen until nearly 11:00 p.m. Danny quietly protested how his father was asked for advice and said simply, "He’s a thinker."

Being Inspired by Berry

This thinker said he likes Mennonites, as he’s experienced them. But more important than being liked by him is being inspired by him.

Two generations ago, many Mennonites were separated from the modern culture. As practices within the church have changed, so has the comfort level with the surrounding culture. Now, many of us, particularly those born since John F. Kennedy was president, are engaged in the culture. This has made us, in belief, lifestyle, and appearance largely indistinguishable from those around us.

At a denominational Mennonite assembly at Nashville in 2001, I was surprised on July 4 to see Mennonites wearing Old Navy T-shirts emblazoned with American flags. Wearing a brand name T-shirt with a flag on it seems a far cry from the days of capes and coverings and offering allegiance only to God.

Greater involvement in culture need not in itself be a bad thing, but I think Mennonites who know little about cultivating the soil would do well to cultivate some of the discomfort Berry has with contemporary culture. Weighing what politicians, media outlets, and megacorporations which produce food would like us to consume is important. So is dissecting the marketing plans being aimed at us as we learn to express our different Christianity in a different world.

Rethinking Patriotism and Terror

Since 9-11, Berry has exhorted people to rethink patriotism and terror (see his article in this issue, pp. 5-7 ). He reminds people that if they love their family, people in other places likely do too and would experience loss the same way after an attack. Retaliating with an attack isn’t the answer. "It’s a choice really between anger and generosity," Berry said in Goshen. "If your government has rationalized its anger, then you’re going to be stuck."

Berry first told the Goshen crowd that if he’d had a gun and the opportunity, he would have killed five terrorists to save hundreds of other people. He later recanted, noting that was a hypothetical situation one can never know the true end of. "How are you going to know the outcome? You don’t know in time," he said.

Part of the answer to dealing with terror is to be peaceable before a crisis starts. Anabaptists do, or at least should, know a little about that and may do well to share such learnings with neighbors.

Reclaiming
Anabaptist-Mennonite Strengths

In a culture that focuses on immediacy, Berry is still thinking about the lessons of a great-great grandfather and how he might live in a way that doesn’t damage the earth for future generations. As a farmer, he knows this year’s crop isn’t the only one to think about. He knows that the trees and the stones are part of his land, not something to get out of the way so the land can produce more. Mennonites would do well to think about the larger point of view, valuing the generations of the past and thinking about those to come.

My generation of Anabaptists, like so many before it, is a bridge from the way we were to the way we are becoming. Some of us are from Amish families that worked with horses and without electricity only a generation or two ago. Some of our parents were involved in serious conversations about whether women should wear a prayer covering.

In Mennonite circles these days, there’s fresh talk about such issues as evangelism, about the need for new church structures, about what to do about such a controversial issue as homosexuality. As we brainstorm what fresh forms of congregational life and denominational structures are needed, I hope we think about creating institutions that work.

I hope we build institutions the way my conservative "Old Order" Mennonite neighbors built part of a barn following an early morning fire. Hours after the fire was put out, about 30 of them gathered to rebuild the portion that had been damaged. By evening, when the men stopped for a supper provided by the family, they were nearly done. The previous summer they had done the same thing down the road for another member of the church and even donated animals to replace the ones he lost.

They rallied together to support each other and build something one of them needed. They enjoyed the work together, laughing and bantering in Pennsylvania Dutch.

The portion of the barn won’t stand forever. When it or another portion falls, more of them will gather to build something that works for the next number of years, something that helps one of the people in the community get along. In the broader church, I hope we take the same approach.

Such barn-building is a tradition among some of us. Others of us simply admire that tradition. At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I think Berry would have us find our own traditions and carry them out. Living responsibly in a place means knowing where you came from and where you’re going. Anabaptists have rich traditions that should be recognized and carried forth into a world where plastic and yammering televisions are now predominant.

Eating Well and Rightly

Berry also encourages people to think about what they put in their mouths. Even those who live in a city can eat responsibly and eat well. Much of Mennonite cooking started with what was available on the farm: lots of meat, eggs, and garden produce.

Now most of our food is grown for us, rathen than by us. Some among us have chosen not to eat meat. Some have grown to value the simple, ethnic foods found in such Mennonite-related cookbooks as More with Less and Extending the Table.

I hope Mennonites continue to eat well but think about food in a larger sense. Reading Berry has taught me that eating is an agricultural and social act that has larger ramifications than quenching hunger. Eating food produced in a local economy is a more sustainable practice than opting for that produced by industrial agriculture megacorporations. Mennonites may not be as agrarian as they once were, but they can still play a role in creating communities that work and are sustainable.

This formerly Southern Baptist farmer (my impression is that he is now a nondenominational Christian) came to Goshen College for a couple days. He talked about living responsibly in the world around us and living thoughtfully, but with a sense of life as a mystery, not a commodity. Then he went back to his farm in Kentucky. The people who came to hear him went back to class or to their jobs as nurses, ministers, social workers, and much more.

I don’t know if anything happened because the groups met. I hope so.

—Marshall V. King, Goshen, Indiana, is a reporter for The Truth, an Elkhart (Ind.) County newspaper. He discovered Wendell Berry while studying at Eastern Mennonite University in the early 1990s. He now resides in rural Goshen with his wife, Bethany, and a lovely dog named Kohl, who is enjoying the two acres they recently moved to.