Posts Tagged ‘Wendell Berry’

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Br. Keith Nelson

Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

The agrarian poet Wendell Berry wrote:

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.¹

We are each radically dependent upon our Creator, who holds each creature in life every moment. And we are horizontally embedded in a web of dependence, one creature upon another, simply by being alive. Berry uses the poignant language of sacrament or desecration to characterize our response to both God and the creatures on whom we depend. How we live in response to the continual gift of creation may either lead us closer to or further from its Giver.

The gospels routinely use the language of indebtedness to name both our vertical dependence upon God and our horizontal dependence upon other people and creatures. Read More