the deepening ground

Flipping through my copy of Wendell Berry’s This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, I found myself drawn to the poems that conclude the volume, echoes of the Mad Farmer filling the pages. Try as I might to find a softer piece for this post, I kept returning to this poem and the haunting refrain, “This is the way, the truth, and the life.” In many ways it, too, is an echo of Rudyard Kipling’s warning poem Recessional with its own prophetic line, “Lest we forget—lest we forget!” And, my, how easily we forget!

Here, Berry’s persona (I swear it’s the Mad Farmer) echoes the empty phrases of the modern narrative in mordant scorn and links us to the powerful words of Jesus Christ in John 14:6 – “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” We leave the poem, if not offended by the speaker’s caustic imperatives, sobered to the empty lives we’ve chosen to live defined by the peddlers of modernity. Having exposed these charlatans who claim to offer “the way, the truth, and the life,” we are free to follow the Way, walk in the Truth, and savor real Life. Only then can you appreciate tomorrow’s post.

XIV (2012) by Wendell Berry

Praise "family values,"
"a better future for our children,"
displacing meanwhile the familiar
membership to be a "labor force"
of homeless strangers. Praise
work and name it "jobs."
With "labor-saving technology"
replace workers at their work
and hold them in contempt
because they have no "jobs."
Praise "our country" and oppress
the land with poisons, gouges,
blastings, the violent labors and
pleasures of the unresting displaced,
skinning the earth alive.
This is the way, the truth, and the life.

Welcome the refugees set free
from the "nowhere" of rural America,
from the "drudgery" of the household
and the "mind-numbing work"
of shops and farms, into
the anthills of "liberation,"
the endless vistas of "growth,"
of "progress," the "limitless adventure
of the human spirit" rising
through inward emptiness into
"outer space." Welcome
the displaced naturally "upwardly
mobile" to their "better world"
as they gather bright-lighted
in "multicultural" masses
in the packed streets. Catch
those who inevitably
fall from the light-swarm
in meshes of "safety nets," "benefits,"
"job training," the army,
the wars, mental hospitals,
jails, graves. Forget
vocation, memory, living
and dying at home. This
is the way, the truth, and the life.

Flourish your weapons of official
war where they are needed
for peace, bring death by chance
but needfully to small houses
where children play at war
or a wedding is taking place
so that the bride and the groom
will not be separately killed,
for you have an enemy
somewhere, who must be killed.
Therefore forgive the unofficial
entrepreneur who brings
your weapons to your
school, your office, your
neighborhood theater, bringing
death randomly but needfully,
for his enemies are his
as yours are yours. This is
the way, the truth, and the life.

“XIV” (2012) by Wendell Berry from This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems © Catapult, 2014: pg. 389-390.