Wendell Berry would understand Amelia Island

Wendell Berry, poet, essayist, novelist, social critic, environmental activist and farmer, died this week at the age of 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. If you look up Port Royal in Google Maps, you notice it is not near anything but itself. It sits on a hypotenuse of an imaginary triangle between Cincinnati, Louisville and Lexington. He lived and farmed where his ancestors had farmed for many generations.

He wrote prodigiously in front of a 40-paned window in a historic cabin called the Long-Legged cabin, which had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. He would not put in electricity because the power was derived from strip-mined coal. He did not own a computer or a cell phone. He wrote in longhand, mostly in pencil on yellow legal pads. In that, I feel a kinship to him, as most of my sermons over the years were written in longhand on legal pads. There is just something about holding a writing implement in your hand that connects your thoughts to paper.

I am not as well-read in his works as are many who are writing tributes. Nor am I familiar with the Kentucky that captured his heart and mind all his life. By sharing what I do know, I hope I demonstrate the premise in the title of my commentary that he would understand Amelia Island if he ever visited.

In February of 2010, I attended the Florida Pastors’ School at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. I took an annual winter break for enrichment and vacation. My husband and I had purchased a lot in Fernandina, but as far as we knew, retirement was still a distant dream.

It was the 25th anniversary of the conference whose tradition was to bring in four well-known speakers, authors and theologians for dialogue with each other and with the 200 or so pastors in attendance. The goal was to refresh and renew us for our return to our parishes. Three of the speakers that year were well known to me: Walter Brueggemann, Hebrew Bible scholar; Marcus Borg, Christian theologian; and thirdly, author and professor Barbara Brown Taylor. If I listed the resumes of these three, it would fill the rest of this commentary.

The fourth person was an older, unassuming gentleman with white hair and sparkling blue eyes who wore his blue shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows. It was Wendell Berry. There I was, sitting a table’s width away from these four as they shared big ideas and easy congeniality. They jousted with questions from the audience and each other. I did not take notes when Wendell Berry was speaking. Instead, I soaked in the cadence of his voice and the ease with which he spoke. He calmly delivered devastating criticisms of what we have allowed to happen to the planet. His biggest one was that we have lost touch with the land. He did not try to impress with his vocabulary. He spoke plainly and directly. His words pierced heart and soul, but somehow were also delivered with humor.

Mr. Berry’s premise was that our relationship to the land had become one of extraction. Modern society exploits the world to monetize it, not live in partnership with it. He did not need to hammer home that point to 200 pastors. We knew how antithetical this kind of relationship was to the one described in sacred texts.

His critics said then and continue to say he is naive to think that a return to small, family-run farms can feed America or be financially profitable. His argument is that we have passed the point of sustainability in how we have treated the earth. Our lives are impoverished by the loss of connection to the land and the sense of community it spawns. His 1977 book, “The Unsettling of America,” is a manifesto on how the mechanization of farming and the development of agribusiness destroyed land and lives. He is credited with helping to start the sustainability revolution. He lived his beliefs with a congruence that many of us only aspire to attain.

I think he would understand the tensions between preservation and development that we contend with here. He would have enjoyed the homes of herons and alligators. He would have inhaled the marshes and the smell of their rich liveliness. He would have marveled when a mother sea turtle lumbered ashore to dig a nest.

Had he had the opportunity, he would have looked us in the eyes, nodded knowingly and given silent assent to what we already know we must do.