From My Nature Journal: The Bible as 'An Outdoor Book'...

With my apology for my frustrating inability to find the time to write lately, I need to get a little assist this week and draw on another Wendell Berry quote I recently ran across.

I’ve just finished a newer book from Zondervan’s Biblical Theology for Life series entitled Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World, a 2018 publication by father/son academics Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan A. Moo. It’s pretty good. The book is formatted with many quotable quotes in its margins, and I really liked one by Berry, who has long been one of my faves. Berry, an environmental activist, farmer, poet, essayist and novelist, has appeared in my blog before, one of my heroes. Here’s a link to my first post in which I highlighted him; you can find others through the index tab above, though I confess it has been quite some time since I fully updated my index. I’ll get to that some day.

When Wendell Berry speaks, many Christian environmentalist/naturalist types listen, and he is vastly respected outside the church as well. He’s one of the few voices of faith well known in the larger public sphere who does not embarrass Christians every time he opens his mouth. We need many more of those. I am less familiar with his essays than his fiction and poetry (an FYI shout out for my favorites – one of his poetry collections, A Timbered Choir, and his novel Jayber Crow), but I more often run across quotes from his essays, and value what he says in one about the Bible as a book best read outdoors:

I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a ‘hypaethral’ book, such as Thoreau talked about – a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine – which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.*

Hypaethral. How can you not like a word like that? It’s from the Greek by way of Latin and simply means ‘exposed to the heavens,’ as Berry infers. God’s most awesome cathedral IS outdoors, after all. So it stands to reason that God’s word might best be appreciated there. 

What do you think? I’m reading through the New Testament this fall with several dozen others in our church, so I think I’ll do some of my reading outdoors and see how it feels.

“The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the skies his craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make God known.” – Psalm 19:1-2

Get outside.

~~ RGM, October 30 2020 

*Source: Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, Community: Eight Essays (1993)

QOTM...*: Wendell Berry's Spring

(*Quote of the Month)

To sit and look at light-filled leaves

May let us see, or seem to see,

Far backward as through clearer eyes

To what unsighted hope believes:

The blessed conviviality

That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise,

Time when the Maker’s radiant sight

Made radiant every thing He saw,

And every thing He saw was filled

With perfect joy and life and light.

His perfect pleasure was sole law;

No pleasure had become self-willed.

For all His creatures were His pleasures

And their whole pleasure was to be

What He made them: they sought no gain

Or growth beyond their proper measures,

Nor longed for change or novelty.

The only new thing could be pain.

                        ~~ Wendell Berry

I have shared quotes and poetry before by Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers. (Click here for one of those posts.) But I recently reread his A Timbered Choir, a collection of pieces he calls his Sabbath poems, written during and after Sunday walks on his Kentucky farm. I was particularly touched by this piece, titled simply 1979, III.

It’s an Eastertide poem to me, something of which my spirit remains full. Speaking of the time before sin entered our existence, before we even had need of a Redeemer, it tells the ‘blessed conviviality of Creation’s seventh sunrise,’ when ‘our whole pleasure was to be what he made’ us to be. But other pleasures came to prevail within

and about us, many of which could only produce pain. Inferred here in spite of them is the hope of redemption, the longing for a restoration, or a re-creation, that could also only come from Creation’s Creator.

But for me it’s also a poem of springtime. The young season here has been nothing but a wild one so far. It started out with a bang -- a foot and a half of snow on spring’s third day -- in a storm that was supposed to have brought only three to five inches. (It’ll give us some great spring wildflowers in our arid meadows.) But since then we’ve had wildly vacillating temps between the teens and even the 70’s, tempestuous winds in excess of fifty miles an hour, a little bit

of rain, sleet and flurries, and much sunshine. The snow is long gone, but it still seems there’s a battle waging between old man winter and Mother Nature’s summer. We know, of course, which will prevail. At least for now…

Through the days here at 6000 feet, the leaf buds have swollen and we’ve begun to see the first hint of green on the river willows and cottonwoods, always the first deciduous trees to show here in Colorado. But I find my anticipation swelling along with the buds, and it brings me back to the joy of the poem. In my mind’s eye I already see that spring sun shining through those leaves, and I celebrate the hope-filled images of joy, life, light and a re-created earth that Easter makes 

                                         possible. Read the poem again if you have time, and enjoy these 

                                         images with me.

~~Blessed Eastertide,

RGM, April 6 2016

Blowin' in the Wind: In the Woods with Wendell Berry

("Blowin’ in the Wind" is a regular feature on my blog consisting of an assortment of nature writings – hymns, songs, excerpts, prayers, Bible readings, poems or other things – pieces I may not have written but that inspire me or give me joy. I trust they’ll do the same for you.)

Some books take you where you want to be in the middle of a snowy winter, but can't easily make it there for the weather. Such a book to me is Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.

Some books take you where you want

to be in the middle of a snowy winter, but

can't easily make it there for the weather...

It is a collection of short pieces he wrote on or after Sunday walks on his Kentucky farm, and it’s filled with natural images and passions, deep environmental respect, and an ethic that reaches out and draws a person into ardent embrace of the land. One reviewer says his meditations here "...express a rich personal spirituality and affinity with the natural world," and yet I find the same holy reverence in his fiction as I do his poetry and essays; cases in point: Hannah Coulter, That Distant Land, and, one of my most favorite novels of all time, Jayber Crow.

I confess I’ve always struggled with poetry, but, interestingly, A Timbered Choir is a book that makes it easy for novices like me; yet it also invites more seasoned readers to its thoughtful woodlot saunters. I wrote once before on Berry, and will do so again, but you can find my previous blogpost featuring him by clicking this link, which will not only tell you a bit more about Berry himself but also shares another notable forest image.

The poems are without title, only separated by the year in which they were written and then numbered. Here is 1995, number 2, the complete poem. Let it take you to a place of peace and thoughtful repose.

The best reward in going to the woods

Is being lost to other people, and

Lost sometimes to myself. I'm at the end

Of no bespeaking wire to spoil my good;

I send no letter back I do not bring.

Whoever wants me now must hunt me down

Like something wild, and wild is anything

Beyond the reach of a purpose not it’s own.

Wild is anything that's not at home

In something else's place. This good white oak

Is not an orchard tree, is unbespoke,

And it can live here by it’s will alone,

Lost to all other wills but Heaven’s -- wild.

So where I most am found I'm lost to you,

Presuming friend, and only can be called

Or answered by a certain one, or two.

Of course, for me, that ‘certain one’ can only be the One I call the lover of my soul.

And here’s an excerpt from 1991, number 9.

To rest, go to the woods

Where what is made is made

Without your thought or work.

Sit down; begin the wait

For small trees to grow big,

Feeding on earth and light.

Their good result is song

The winds must bring, that trees

Must wait to sing, and sing

Longer than you can wait.

Soon you must go. The trees,

Your seniors, standing thus

Acknowledged in your eyes,

Stand as your praise and prayer.

Your rest is in this praise

Of what you cannot be

And what you cannot do.

In the midst of what seems my constant labor, I’ve often found the forest just the place of rest I need to help put all my work into perspective.

I pray you’ve enjoyed these.

~~ RGM, January 30, 2016

P.S. Each time I post to my blog, I send out an announcement of such on my Facebook page. Frequently there, I will ask my friends to consider sharing my post with others of their friends or family members whom they know may also find nature an important spiritual pathway to God. Let me place that request here for a change: do you know others, whether followers of Jesus or not, and perhaps particularly the latter, who find (or might find) these posts inspiring? Please consider sharing my site with them, www.rickmylander.com. I would treasure nothing more than that these words be shared as ongoing testimony to the creative glory of our good God. Thank you.

QOTM...*: John Greenleaf Whittier

(*Quote of the Month)

It has been a lengthy cold snap here in Colorado, longer than is typical, two weeks without seeing a nice fifty-degree warmup. Family members in Chicago, Minneapolis and Seattle have seemed to suffer worse than I, however, and it seems the ones who have had it the easiest this winter, relatively speaking, are my daughter and son-in-law's family in Alaska! So it all has caused the snatch of poetry that follows to stand out strongly: 

The moon above the eastern wood

Shone at its full; the hill range stood

Transfigured in the silver flood,

Its blown snows flashing cold and keen,

Dead white, save where some sharp ravine

Took shadow, or the somber green

Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black

Against the whiteness at their back.

For such a world and such a night

Most fitting that unwarming light,

Which only seemed where’er it fell

To make the coldness visible.

                                        ~~ John Greenleaf Whittier

Now having shared this, though, I have to confess: I am very sorry to say it, but poetry does not often turn me on. And I suppose the more complicated the poetry, the more quickly I lose interest, like, perhaps maybe, within nanoseconds. I have always wanted to love poetry more. Even to sit down with so fine a volume as Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir always sounds more inviting than it ends up being to me. I regret this very much, as some of the most wonderful people I know read it, write it, speak it and think it. I wish this were I.

(all photography by Rick and Gail Mylander)

Consequently, quotes from poetry masters will likely not often grace these blogposts. And though I’m not remembering where I came across this excerpt from American Transcendentalist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, this brief passage has the effect of nearly translating me to the edge of a winter forest at night, almost even feeling the piercing cold of the wind through my overcoat. It’s from a piece called Snow-Bound, published in 1866, and chronicles a memory the author had of his family holed up in their warm home during a blizzard.

Not a poetry reader? Then try this: read it through twice, silently and very slowly. Then read it aloud even more slowly, pausing not at the ends of lines but at the punctuation marks. See if this kind of read-through doesn’t cause you to visually enter the scene, maybe even make you want to pull your collar up just a little bit around your neck.

The tempest comes out from its chamber, the cold from the driving winds. By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters become frozen. (Job 37:9-10)

~~RGM, February 5, 2014

QOTM...*: Wendell Berry

(*Quote of the Month)

…The woods has many doors going in and out. It is full of rooms opening into one another, shaped by direction and viewpoint. Many of these rooms are findable only once, from a certain direction on a certain day, in a certain light, at a certain time. They could not be returned to either now, after years, or then, after an hour. Windows open in the foliage, through which, maybe, we could see a hawk soaring or a distant treetop suddenly shaken by a gust of wind. Sometimes these rooms and vistas seem arranged for us, for our pleasure, as in a human garden. But these, of course, do not constitute the woods, which is not a garden, and is not understandable and foretellable so much as a garden is. We come sometimes into a place of such loveliness that it stops us still – and holds us – until some changing of the light seems to bless us and let us go.

(Wendell Berry)       

One of our favorite places in the world is a small bit of woods in the middle of the Ottawa National Forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We have spent many years going back there, and over that time have spent uncountable hours combing that bit of woods and the expansive woodland that surrounds it. We know its colors and contours, its clearings and swamps, its rocks, plants, animals and, yes, its trees. And many times, many times, we have seen the ‘rooms’ of which Wendell Berry writes. Many we remember to this day.

The woods has many doors going in and

out. It is full of rooms opening into one

another, shaped by direction and viewpoint.

Berry (b. 1934) is a farmer, essayist, novelist, environmental activist and poet who embodies what I consider the best of an ecologist’s heart: a heart for God, a heart for people and a heart for God’s creation. Though many are acquainted with his writing through either his poetry or his incisive commentary on sustainable agriculture and the uses of appropriate technologies, it is his fiction that first captured my attention when daughter Sarah gave me his Jayber Crow, in which the above quote is found. Several of his novels and collections of short stories chronicle the intertwined lives of the people of the imaginary Port William, Kentucky; but the reader quickly comes to see Berry’s simple yet profound convictions as an environmentalist playing out in the character development and story lines of his fiction. Pick up a copy of his That Distant Land at your public library, and you will be introduced to a host of his characters over a century of time, many of whom are written of or referred to in his novels. This is no Father Tim of Jan Karon’s Mitford Series. These are characters in which you, like me, will find yourself, undergoing the normal challenges and pleasures of life -- strong characters, purposeful characters – yet in the midst of profound change and cultural shift.

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But back to the woods. We’re heading up that way again soon, you know, and are looking forward to going in and out of its rooms, enjoying the changing perspectives that sun, angle and atmosphere will present, receiving the blessing it always has to offer, and then moving along.

~~RGM, August 22, 2013