Creation Care Favorites
From time to time I get asked, “What are you reading?,” or “What keeps you going?” I use this page to highlight my current food for the soul.
Wendell Berry
One part farmer and one part poet, Wendell Berry lives in the rural Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, not too far from where I grew up.
One of the most sustaining ideas for me from my favorite Berry poem is that Christians are called to a deep joyfulness. He does not mean a merely superficial happiness, but a rejection of despair because it is antithetical to Gospel concepts of hope. Grief and anxiety are real and all too warranted in the era of climate change, but we must not lapse into the crippling hubris of assuming we know the future.
“Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts”
We can never ignore the facts, or pretend that we understand chemistry better than the chemists do. We are indeed obligated to listen to the scientists and learn all of the facts. But we are not obligated to despair.
In recent months, I’ve started following Mary Heglar’s writings more and more, especially on the intersections of climate change and race in America. She can be a bit foul, and I don’t know what her religious views are, but similarly to Wendell Berry, her rejection of despair is something that all Christians should latch onto.
The British satire novelist Terry Pratchett did his fair share of making fun of religion, but he was spot-on about many problems in the modern world. Although science is brilliant at taking things apart to better understand them, we shouldn’t let that understanding sap our sense of wonder or convince us that all things are reducible to basic parts. The word “miracle” really ought to be applied to so many more of the wondrous processes of nature; if we were more humble about our understanding of the universe’s complexity, perhaps we wouldn’t have as many problems as we do now. As he mentions elsewhere in the book, “Just because you can explain something, that doesn’t make it stop being a miracle.”
“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time... ”