Wendell Berry, Good Friday, and Earth Day

The Christian cross can be approached from many angles, and this year, as we prepare to observe the 53rd anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, it makes perfect sense to approach it ecologically — with Wendell Berry as our guide.

First, here’s Berry’s Sabbath poem, “II, 1988, ‘It is the destruction of the world’” — a fitting poem for Good Friday.

It is the destruction of the world
in our own lives
that drives us half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken,
our bodies existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
in our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.

[Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode that reflects on this poem, “Jesus, Wendell, and Henri - Part Six: Holy Week.”]

Here Berry understands any destruction of the world to be, in the end, self-destruction: a form of despising the world that ultimately means despising ourselves and each other. At its root, it’s an abdication of our proper role, identity, and mission: “To destroy that which we were given / in trust: how will we bear it?”

Berry takes this to be a “religious” question — though, as he puts it in his classic essay, “A Native Hill,” he’s uncomfortable saying so.

“I am uneasy with the term,” he writes, “for such religion as has been openly practiced in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth... And so people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere — to a pursuit of 'salvation' that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their lives beyond the life of the world. The Heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions.”

And then Berry turns to his crucial point: “This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artificial and ugly division in people’s lives, so that a man, while pursuing Heaven with the sublime appetite he thought of as his soul, could turn his heart against his neighbors and his hands against the world. For these reasons, though I know that my questions are religious, I dislike having to say that they are.”

For Berry, there’s a deep unity between a) any malformed religion that divides “body and soul, Heaven and earth,” and b) an “artificial and ugly division” in our lives that allows us to turn against our neighbors, against the world, and against ourselves.

This Good Friday, if we see through Berry’s eyes, this “artificial and ugly division” is on display in the crucifixion. We betray and mock and destroy the Maker of creation, thereby setting ourselves destructively over against creation itself — which includes, of course, our own kind. In our “greed” and “haste,” as Berry puts it in the poem, we “despise” ourselves. One of Jesus’ ancient names is “Child of Humanity,” or “The Human One.” In effect, when we hang Jesus on the cross, we hang Humanity on the cross. Our violence is self-inflicted. The cross is suicide.

But at the same time, when we kill Jesus, we also kill the Logos, as the Gospel of John puts it, God’s “Word,” the underlying pattern of life and love and beauty running in and through everything. We kill “the bread of life,” in Jesus’ turn of phrase; we kill “the resurrection and the life.” In short, we kill Life. The cross is biocide.

And yet, with almost unimaginable mercy, God steps into this ugly, divisive choreography — to save us from self-destruction. God takes our place, and dies. And in the crucifixion itself, like a mirror for all to see, God lays bare not only divine mercy, but also what we’ve done — or rather, what we are continuing to do. This mirror isn’t meant to shame us; rather, it’s meant to move us, to change us, to wake us up and send us out along a different path, leaving suicide and biocide behind. God gracefully forgives, and calls us to return to the Way of Life.

In the destruction of Christ’s body, if we look deeply enough, we can see our suicidal, biocidal attempts at “the destruction of the world.” And in our destruction of the world, past and present, if we look deeply enough, we can see the crucifixion.

Easter morning will come. And two weeks later, the 53rd anniversary of Earth Day will follow. Another opportunity to rise from ashes, to turn away from the tomb, to turn toward life, sanity, humanity, love — all of that is on the way. But first, Good Friday is for reckoning with what we have lost, wantonly, and for reflecting on what we have done and left undone. It’s a day for feeling, and naming, and facing “the presence / in our very bodies of our grief.”

+ Matthew Myer Boulton

[Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode that reflects on this poem, “Jesus, Wendell, and Henri - Part Six: Holy Week.”]