Wendell Berry on Love, Economics, and Heaven

If you think of things
according to their categories
or their uses
or their merchantable value,
then you've converted them into abstractions
and you've made it possible
to hoard them together.

If you think of them
as embodiments of the birthright,
the sanctity, of the great world,
they're harder to monopolize and accumulate.
In the long run, this has a practical value.

+

The Amish understand
that if you love your neighbor as yourself,
then you become a neighbor to your neighbor —
that is, you help your neighbor.
And then neighborliness is not just a virtue,
not just a biblical requirement;
it becomes an economic condition
in which you and your neighbor mutually thrive.

If you love your neighbor as yourself,
you want him over there on his farm
doing well, and that means he'll be able
to come to you when you have a need.
You get the spectrum of goods;
you're not just going to Heaven.
That's a side effect, that's incidental.

What you have already
is a neighborhood
that's heavenly enough.

+ Wendell Berry
(from an interview in “Christianity and Literature” magazine)

Like many great poets, Berry’s prose and spoken words are often woven through with poetic aspects — and laying out his language as a poem can help call our attention to what he’s saying in a new way. Here he explores connections between love and economics, Heaven and Earth, thinking and living, sanctity and neighborhood.

It’s a glimpse of what it means that the New Testament ends not with believers “going up to heaven,” but with heaven “coming down to earth” — and a glimpse, too, of what we mean when we pray the Lord’s prayer, asking that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” such that each becomes, in the end, an image of the other.