Space Enough, and Time

Nouwen and the First Question

Posted on May 10, 2018 by awtraughber

For a number of years I have been convinced that one of the best things that I can do as a teacher is to ask good questions. Question-asking has been particularly fruitful with upperclassmen, as it allows for a more mature response amongst people who may have been around one another a lot without really getting to know each other all that well. So I was pleased to see that the editors who put together Henri Nouwen’s Spiritual Direction used the framework of questions, with each chapter posing a question tied directly to the disciplines of Heart, Book, and Community. The book’s first question is one I found to be one of the most pertinent: who will answer my questions?

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One of the statements in this section of Nouwen’s book that strikes me most is the assertion that

Without a question, an answer is experienced as manipulation or control. Without a struggle, the help offered is considered interference. And without the desire to learn, direction is easily felt as oppression.

As a teacher I’ve had to wrestle with that first sentence: answering a question before it is even asked. The better option, of course, is to lead people to ask the right questions and to understand the stakes of asking the right question well. I think this is especially true . . . and difficult . . . when it comes to the spiritual life. Here’s how Nouwen connects direction and questions:

Seeking spiritual direction, for me, means to ask the big questions, the fundamental questions, the universal ones in the context of a supportive community. Out of asking the right questions and living the questions will come right actions that present themselves in compelling ways. To live the questions and act rightly, guided by God’s spirit, requires both discipline and courage . . .

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I would argue that many of us don’t know where to go to ask the questions rooted in our hearts, the big questions. As Nouwen points out, the willingness to ask questions and seek answers brings with it a vulnerability that can be difficult to handle. We don’t like not having the answers. Beyond that, we don’t know what to do with that weird no-man’s-land that exists before the answer we find gets internalized on our part. By that I mean there’s a small-but-wide distance between the head knowledge of an answer and the heart knowledge of that answer. We do our best to live with the first until we find ourselves embraced by the second, but that can take time.

What is clear from holding life up to Nouwen’s framework of Heart, Book, and Community is that the three are so intwined that you can’t hold them apart for long. The answers to our hearts’ questions are answered in the Bible. And those necessary questions are best understood in the context of the Christian community. And yet sometimes the three seem so opposed to one another . . . or at least so distant from one another . . . that the dissonance keeps us silent and distant ourselves.

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And so who will answer our questions? involves but is bigger than the heart. For Nouwen, part of asking the question means living the question (something that I learned from Donald Miller years ago, actually). The other part means finding people who can ask and answer and live through those questions with you. Which means we need pastors who can ask and answer questions with us. We need teachers who can ask and answer questions with us. Parents and children and friends co-workers. We must learn to ask the questions together knowing that there are answers, that God provided and provides those answers, and that those questions and their answers have and can be lived out with real conviction.

(image from 3aw.com.au)

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Triangulating for Spiritual Direction

Posted on May 9, 2018 by awtraughber

Triangulation Before beginning the main discussion in Spiritual Direction, Henri Nouwen points to three different points of connection, spiritual disciplines, that are necessary for a healthy approach to a wisdom that can help us “to slow down and order our time, desires, and thoughts to counteract selfishness, impulsiveness, or hurried fogginess of mind.” Those three things deserve some attention, I think, before moving forward.

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The first “discipline” for spiritual direction is what Nouwen calls “the discipline of the Heart.” Nouwen sees this as “first and most essential” in a way that could cause concern for many Christians. But I understand where he’s coming from: it’s clear that most of us have absolutely no idea what to do with our hearts. We know it’s “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17) even while it is the thing we need to guard “because everything we do flows from it” (Proverbs 4). Nouwen links this discipline with the work of more ancient Christians, particularly in the area of prayer. Nouwen asserts:

The discipline of the Heart makes us aware that praying is not only listening to but listening with the heart. Prayer helps us stand in the presence of God with all we have and are: our fears and anxieties; our guilt and shame; our sexual fantasies; our greed and anger; our joys, successes, aspirations, and hopes; our reflections, dreams, and mental wandering; and most of all our family, friends, and enemies– in short, all that makes us who we are. With all this we have to listen to God’s voice and allow God to speak to us in every corner of our being.

I read this and remember what Eugene Peterson once said: that his main task as a pastor was to teach his parishioners how to pray. The kind of prayer Nouwen writes of hear sounds a million miles removed from most of our experiences in churches and with other Christians. But I also think that Nouwen is onto something, particularly in light of the quote that closes this post.

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The second discipline on Nouwen’s list is probably the one that most of us would put as first: “the discipline of the Book.” For this, Nouwen speaks of looking “to God through lectio divina— the sacred reading of the scriptures and other spiritual writings.” This reading leads back to prayer, Nouwen asserts.

When we listen to a sentence, a story, or a parable not simply to be instructed, informed, or inspired but to be formed into a truly obedient person, then the Book offers trustworthy spiritual insight . . . Scripture does have a personal word for us, yet knowledge of the historic Christian teaching helps us avoid the easy trap of wanting scripture to support our own designs.

For me this means having a sense of the Biblical Story as a whole (with thanks to Wright, for me) so that I can understand how to play my role fittingly (with thanks to Vanhoozer, for me). It is the reminder that whatever “self-actualization” or “will of God” for my life must fall in line with the work of the Trinity in the Bible and the world around me. This doesn’t mean proof-texting and abstracting Scripture so that it means whatever you want in the moment.

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The third area of focus from Nouwen’s perspective is “the discipline of the Church or faith community.” Nouwen asserts that “this spiritual practice requires us to be on relationship to the people of God, witnessing to the active presence of God in history and in community.” He goes on to say that

A faith community reminds us continuously of what is really happening in the world and in our lives.

Nouwen speaks if the importance of the common language and practices of “church liturgy and lectionary” and the formation that can occur when we follow “Christ’s life throughout the year.” Nouwen adds that

To listen to the Church is to listen to the Lord of the Church.

This, I would argue, is not what most of us think when we consider how the Church can help us understand the world around us. I consider the local church vital to my own spiritual growth as a youth and young adult, and that was without liturgy and lectionary. And now that I have a better sense of those two things, I find some confusion about the role that the Church should play. How does one bring the events of life and the world to bear on conversations with the Church about the spiritual life? Even still, the Church in both its history and immediacy should be vital to making headway in spiritual direction.

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In yesterday’s post I attempted a “play” on the Nietzsche-quote-turned-book-title about “a long obedience in the same direction,” which is a goal that we all should have with the spiritual life, particularly as we embrace it over a life-time in the context of a shifting (church) culture. The great hope, of course, is that things will “get fixed” when we get all of the right ingredients in place, particularly our hearts, Scripture, and the church. Thankfully, Nouwen reminds us to think wisely and clearly about that:

To receive spiritual direction is to recognize that God does not solve our problems or answer all our questions, but leads us closer to the mystery of our existence where all questions cease.

That, I think, is no vague truth. It is to behold well the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life in all His crucified, resurrected, and ascended glory. But the beholding, even for a moment, isn’t all that easy.

(image from 4n6.com)

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Nouwen and a Long Obedience with No Direction

Posted on May 8, 2018 by awtraughber

No Direction In yesterday’s post I asked a question that twisted the popular 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 passage a bit: what if the changes effected in contemporary culture have led us to feeling more renewed in body but more diminished, even damaged, in soul? And if that is true, what, if any way, can lead us towards some kind of healing? And is there a way beyond the fad and fashion of the moment that can help us?

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I would like to exist in a world where good and honest questions can be asked and the Bible could be used both to open and answer those kinds of questions. In my experience, that’s not as likely as it should be. So one way of trying to draw out the necessary conversation is to insert the work or words of another. And so bringing in Aquinas to help triangulate a discussion of faith and the nature of the universe can work well in ways that simply presenting Genesis 1 or Colossians 1 cannot (which is not the Bible or God’s fault, mind you). And so you bring C. S. Lewis into a conversation on morality or J. R. R. Tolkien into a conversation about creativity. You could also venture out into areas and authors not normally tied to particularly Christian conversations. That can work as long as there is a real grounding in Christian orthodoxy matched with a real sense of how to handle more ambiguity in conversation than usual.

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One of the Christian authors who has been particularly helpful for me over many years when considering the spiritual condition of people has been Henri Nouwen. His Creative Ministry was a huge early influence on my understanding of the various aspects of ministry (and I picked that one up because the closest bookstore didn’t have a copy of The Return of the Prodigal, his most famous book, and one I still have not read). As with almost any other Christian thinker (and feeler), Nouwen has his detractors, which is understandable. It’s rare to agree with everything anyone says. But I have found real nourishment and challenge in his writing. That’s part of the reason why I spent spring break reading through two posthumous collections of Nouwen’s thought: Spiritual Direction and Spiritual Formation. I read them partly to balance out some of the headier reading that I was doing. I also read them because this year of transition (tied to what I’ve called my temporary vocational stretch) had left me in need of some framework for processing the current moment. I found that in both books, with the questions of Spiritual Direction and the “movements” of Spiritual Formation.

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I first learned of the concept of “spiritual direction” from Eugene Peterson (in one of his pastoral books, The Contemplative Pastor, perhaps). The concept has always intrigued me, partly because of the potential it holds for someone in the pastorate but also because of my own need for some kind of direction that goes deeper than just a “duty” mentality for the spiritual life. But spiritual direction can be hard to find.

In fact, I’d posit that a large chunk of any contemporary Christian malaise could be attributed to our inability to engage in the kinds of conversations that spiritual direction implies. From the book’s introduction:

The goal of spiritual direction is spiritual formation– the ever-increasing capacity to live a spiritual life from the heart.

And then:

Any spiritual direction commitment affords the opportunity for spiritual friendship, and provides the time and structure, wisdom and discipline, to create sacred space in your life in which God can act.

On some level, this is Christian Discipleship 101. It is time and space shaped by prayer and Scripture and accountability. But it also intentionally brings what one of my college professors called “the vicissitudes of life” into the conversation in a way that looks like a conversation longer than a quiet moment here or there. It includes something Nouwen calls “spiritual friendship,” which is maybe a way of elevating the idea of “brother in Christ” as something including but much more than simply a “brother in crisis” when life goes haywire.

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The title of this post is a twist on a Nietzsche quote “redeemed” by Eugene Peterson as a title for a book on “discipleship in an instant society.” One could easily argue that many of us now exist in a contemporary Christian culture worn out by constant movement, unending activity, with no real sense of direction or intention (beyond “that’s what we’re supposed to do”). What I’d like to do over the next few days is glean some wisdom from Nouwen’s approach to spiritual direction as I think about a transition from one moment in life to the next. Nouwen asserts, I think in most instances rightly, that he has

a lot more to say . . . because the journey of the spiritual life calls not only for determination and discipline, but also for an experiential knowledge of the terrain to be crossed . . . In the terrain of the spiritual life, we need guides.

If we are going to move with intention and direction, if we are going to move from one world to the next with a real hold on the nuts-and-bolts of the Christian life as vital to the human experience, He might have something to say. The terrain is beautiful but also dangerous, easily to get lost in and even easier to give up on. I’d like to go as far as I can in the right direction.

(image from a band on Facebook named “No Direction”)

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A Different Wasting Away

Posted on May 7, 2018 by awtraughber

clay jars Long before I knew him as the author of Old School, one of my favorite novels, Tobias Wolff was the author of one of my favorite quotes: we are made to persist– that’s how we find out who we are. Last week I posed the question of what it might look like for us to persist in light of what some perceive to be an interregnum between “ages,” between worlds and ways of life. This week, I’d like to spend some time drawing some spiritual connections for the contemporary moment, what it might look like to persist as Christians in this particular context.

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This past weekend I was reading a book that made passing mention of 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 in the context of the spiritual life. It’s a famous passage, though perhaps not as famous as Paul’s image ten verses earlier about “this treasure in jars of clay.” Paul writes:

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Paul, of course, is writing to particular people in a particular context. There are certain non-repeatable realities at play in first-century Corinth. It is clear from the context of 2 Corinthians 4 that Paul and other Christians are experiencing a real “wasting away” of the body/outer self because of persecution and hard work. At the same time, these many years later, we know (or are learning) what it feels like for our bodies to betray us, even if only from the normal wear-and-tear of life. But what if the second half of the equation has changed? What if, instead of daily renewal, we experience a kind of loss in the inner self? Oswald Chambers, I think, called it “spiritual leakage” that you just don’t notice because the damage is subtle. What if we have no real sense of the “eternal weight of glory” that we are being prepared for because our “theology of suffering” has itself suffered? What if, in line with Ephraim Radner, our traversal of the Great Transition has left us with better physical health but with less ability to understand and nurture the necessary inner self? What if our embrace of things transient has left us with little to no grasp of “the things that are unseen” and eternal? And how do we “redirect” ourselves in better ways that call us back to a daily renewal?

(image from neighbourhoodchurch.org)

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The Thing with Tully

Posted on May 6, 2018 by awtraughber

Tully The first thing I did after breakfast yesterday was buy a copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, Adjustment Day. This was an unpredictable decision, as I haven’t read any long-form Palahniuk in a good long while.

The next thing I did was catch an early showing of Tully, a dark comedy from Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman starring Charlize Theron.

Then Tully, almost out of nowhere, turned into a kind of Chuck Palahniuk story.

And just a few paragraphs into reading it, Palahniuk’s new novel turned into something that could easily be found in today’s headlines.

It was a weird Saturday morning.

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Tully is a difficult movie to watch.

And Charlize Theron is brilliant in it.

One could easily see this as a thematic “sequel” to another Cody-Reitman-Theron story, Young Adult, which was equally gripping and disturbing.

By disturbing and difficult, I don’t mean unwatchable or disgusting. I mean so potentially grounded in reality that you can’t help but feel the awkward laughter rising in your gut because, even if you’re nothing like Theron’s character, you know you’re watching something true.

In Tully, Theron plays Marlo, wife of Ron and mother of three (the movie begins with #3 on the way). Upon realizing how utterly defeated she feels with her life-situation after the birth of Mia (#3), Marlo decides to take her brother up on his offer for a “night nanny.” Enter Tully, played deftly by Mackenzie Davis. Watching Marlo and Tully bond over Marlo’s life experience is both awkward and enthralling (the awkward is the first few times Tully comes to work, the enthralling is the period of time that Tully effects real change for Marlo).

Tully is ultimately the story of a lonely woman, wife, and mother, struggling to make sense of her moment in time. Theron and company do an amazing job of helping Marlo’s world feel claustrophobic with a dash of meaninglessness, too. And when the resolution comes, and it comes from an unexpected place, it rings true in a good but difficult way.

“I’m here for the transition,” Tully tells Marlo twice as the story comes to an end. It doesn’t take spouse and children to know that such is life . . . and such is the need for others who can be with us through those transition moments.

(image from nytimes.com)

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Education and the Industrial Solvent

Posted on May 5, 2018 by awtraughber

Factory Much like liberalism, industrialism has acted as a kind of universal solvent that has assisted in what some would call the dissolution of whatever the most recent world might have been (though we now exist in the wake of its passing, some might say). And so industrialism can seem opposed to the arts, to social and mental health, to home economics, to a kind of self-sufficiency. Considering education in light of industrialism is also an easy (but not untrue) step to take. I think it was media guru Seth Godin who first introduced me to the idea that things like scantron tests are the epitome of education’s embrace of the industrial approach to learning.

So even though he’s almost always talking about agriculture and a particular way of life ,I often read Wendell Berry’s thoughts on industrialism and its effects on society as a way of thinking about education (particularly of a kind of Christian education). This was especially true of one part of “The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age.” There are a few times in the following excerpt where you could replace “agrarianism” with “education” and it still make some good sense.

Industrialism and agrarianism are almost exactly opposite and opposed. Industrialism regards mechanical or technical functions as ideal. It rates its accomplishments by quantitative measures. Though it values the prestige of public charity, it is motivated necessarily by the antisocial traits that assure success in competition. Agrarianism, by contrast, arises from the primal wish for a home land or a home place– the wish, in the terms of our tradition, for the freedom and independence that come with dependence on a parcel of land, however small, that one owns and is owned by or has at least the use of. Agrarianism gratin its highest practical value to the good husbandry of the land. It is motivated, to an extent effective and significant, by neighborliness, family loyalty, and devotion to the coherence and longevity of communities.

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How you think about education matters. How you think about knowledge shapes the entire learning enterprise. There has always been a kind of “jumping through hoops” to learning . . . hoops that often start early and properly in the memorizing of facts and figures but that, in the long run, see learning as not much more than a manipulative to get at something else.

Real learning, I am convinced, comes with qualitative measures that have striking social component and that don’t settle for simple win/lose competition.

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At some point I hope to get to Patrick Deneen’s thoughts on education as found in Why Liberalism Failed. Until then, it’s good to mindful of writers like Berry who help us see the costs of many things easily lost in our current culture of transition. And the arena of education is a vital part of that picture.

(image from thewheelz.com)

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Provision

Posted on May 4, 2018 by awtraughber

Lembas One of the reasons I am drawn to a consideration of moving “from one world to the next” is because I spend a good deal of time talking with students who are making their own transition from one world to the next. Just this week I was able to check in with many students who were making final and major decisions about what schools they will attend in the fall. And so, to borrow a phrase, I get to stand at a kind of “thin space” between two parts of life. Their stories are a reminder that I stand in my own space between worlds. The question, of course, is what we will carry with us.

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A couple of days ago I found myself praying with my students about the provisions of God. “Provisions” is an odd word, really. One we often have a sense of without thinking too much about. It’s also a word that Wendell Berry takes some time to unpack in “The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age.” As he speaks of what it means to consider living a “limited” life while the world around us blindly expects something limitless, Berry asserts that provision is “being attentively and responsibly present in the present.” He goes on to say that

We do not, for example, love our children because of their potential to become well-trained workers in a future economy. We love them because we are alive to them in this present moment, which is the only time when we and they are alive. This love implicates in a present need to provide: to be living a responsible life, which is to say a responsible economic life.

Which doesn’t sound very Romantic, for sure. But part of what Berry seems to argue for regularly is an attention to what is right in front of you while remaining mindful of a greater, divine horizon. Berry continues:

Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life. As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do. We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter. We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact. We must teach the children. But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize about the future. Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old– we may die or the world may end before we are old– but so we may live under a sound roof now. Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility. Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” Provision accepts, next, the important of diversity. Perhaps the next-wisest saying is “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.” When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take the best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.

This is a kind of living that we do just below our level of consciousness, often. And yet it is something that maybe we aren’t learning to do all that well anymore. One reason might be because of our obsessional with disposable living. With that might be a twisted version of the second wise saying: our multiple baskets exists as ways of “hedging our bets” in ways that actually work against what is good and true.

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Why the picture of lembas from The Lord of the Rings? I guess because it is the perfect example of a provisional gift. It is something simple: bread. And it is something profound: bread that will last a long while and strengthen you well for your journey. And it requires care and economy, because once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Also, if it hadn’t been lembas, it would have been some depressing screenshot from the cinematic version of The Road, a story all about provision.

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Perhaps we would do well at this time in the Story to remember the connection between provision and Providence.

(image from the University of Leicester)

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Celibacy and the Reversed Revolution

Posted on May 2, 2018 by awtraughber

reed More often than not, Ross Douthat’s New York Times columns serve as Rorschach tests for contemporary political and social issues. Today’s column, “The Redistribution of Sex,” has proved especially thought-provoking and line-drawing. And rightly so. You can read it here.

I recently read somewhere (Twitter, I think) that what we are witnessing now is not the dissolution of the Christian worldview but the dissolution of whatever worldview replaced the Christian one. I think there’s some truth to that. As such, it’s definitely a case for adding it to the “Notes for A World’s End.”

I quite like the column; I think Douthat gets a lot of things correct, particularly this paragraph:

. . . because the culture’s dominant message about sex is still essentially Hefnerian, despite certain revisions attempted by feminists since the heyday of the Playboy philosophy — a message that frequency and variety in sexual experience is as close to a summum bonum as the human condition has to offer, that the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states. And this master narrative, inevitably, makes both the new inequalities and the decline of actual relationships that much more difficult to bear …

Should we be disturbed by some of the conclusions drawn (and by some of the sources used). But in an immanent culture, economic terms are one of the few categories of thought that can apply (the other, really, is the category of personal rights and freedoms).

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So, if we ask questions of “what’s at stake?” and “what are we losing?” and “what can we do to salvage what is good but in danger?” a la Harris and Berry and others, what positive answer does Douthat give? Well, it’s a good one. A difficult one, but a good one. Near the end of the column Douthat asserts:

There is an alternative, conservative response, of course — namely, that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the special respect owed to the celibate.

This, of course, is where the church could chime in. Unfortunately, we are too often as impotent as everyone else at addressing this well (partly from culpability and partly from a lack of language in most denominations). Monogamy. Chastity. Permanence. Those are words you don’t hear all that often, unless you might hear it in marriage counseling? And celibacy? Well, one of the reasons I spent a couple of weeks writing through Ephraim Radner’s A Time to Keep is because of his thoughtful articulation of the place of the celibate single in the context of the church traversing the seasons of life. No non-marital counseling opportunities to talk through celibacy in most churches, unfortunately. If you’re not a church that has wrestled with a theology of the body that goes beyond the wedding night (the Catholic church has and the Anglican church has a few thinkers who have wrestled with this), then you’ve got some real work cut out for you. If you want to be there to help pick up the pieces of the lives shattered by the sexual revolution (something Dreher has written about a number of times, I believe), then you’re going to need to enter into long and difficult conversations about truly significant things.

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Douthat, then, turns quickly back to the rest of his argument, teasing out the likely response of our contemporary culture (which doesn’t sound possible but totally is). It fits the saddest versions of our science fiction, really. And it should be a warning to us all.

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So you can add monogamy, permanence, and chastity to the list started with Berry’s “limits.” And celibacy, of course, connects intimately to the idea of limits. As with the other terms, the challenge is finding a way to articulate these ideas and practices in a way that brings out the life-giving qualities in each. The world, perhaps, is watching and waiting (even if they don’t realize it).

(image from thesharemagazine.com)

Posted in Faith, Internet, Notes for a World's End | Tagged Ross Douthat | 1 Comment

Limitless, Prodigal, and Dispersed

Posted on May 2, 2018 by awtraughber

One does not have to read far into an essay written by Wendell Berry to sense deep loss, a kind of sadness that both tugs and pulls. As he acknowledges in his introduction to his most recent collection of writings, The Art of Loading Brush, his writings “have often repeated certain movements of thought” that are rooted in a particular experience in a particular place that echoes with the experiences of many, even those of us who hear what he says as an echo of an echo (of, perhaps, an echo). Consider this from “The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age.”

The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and their carryout meals. Meanwhile, in a country everywhere distressed and taxed by homelessness, once-used good farm buildings, built by local thrift and skill, rot to the ground. Good houses, that once sheltered respectable lives, stare out through sashless windows or have disappeared.

As one might guess from the title of the essay, the issue of limits and extravagance are at the heart of Berry’s thinking . . . and sadness. To follow Michael Harris’s train of thought, Berry would see us unwittingly trading a healthy sense of limits with a sense that the world, its resources and possibilities, are limitless (and therefore worthy of our prodigal dispositions towards it).

Later in the essay, Berry comes to conclusions similar to Patrick Deneen concerning our contemporary approach to freedom:

We have the liberal freedom of unrestrained personal behavior and the conservative freedom of unrestrained economic behavior.

All of which puts us in a dangerous position as prodigal people in a prodigal culture.

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And so something about the way forward involves limits. That’s not something that is easy for most of us to hear. We would reject the sky if we were forced to believe that the sky really is the limit. Berry is invested, though in both sky and sea, land and the life they bring together. And if you’re going to talk about limits, you have to talk about the art of economics. And, Berry asserts, the arts.

The good care of land and people . . . depends primarily upon arts, ways of making and doing. One cannot be, above all, a good neighbor without such ways. And the arts, all of them, are limited. Apart from limits they cannot exist. The making of and good work of art depends, first, upon the limits of purpose and attention, and then upon limits specific to the kind of art and its means . . .

Enduring structures of household and family life, or the life of a community or the life of a country, cannot be formed without limits. We must not outdistance local knowledge and affection, or the capacities of local persons to pay attention to details, to the “minute particulars” only by which, William Blake thought, we can do good to one another. Within limits, we can think of rightness of scale. When the scale is right, we can imagine completeness of form.

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There is, of course, a danger in nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. But something should be said for understanding that what has gone before us has great value. And that size does matter. If nothing else, Berry’s sobering picture of “the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals” should give us pause and lead us to think seriously about the corner we have backed ourselves into. A proper return to scale, and a kind of rejection of our twisted limitlessness, can provide some kind of road sign for a way forward.

(image from amazon.com)

Posted in Books, Faith, Notes for a World's End | Tagged Wendell Berry | Leave a comment

Taking Two in July

Posted on May 1, 2018 by awtraughber

Now that the hubbub over Avengers: Infinity War has died down (although really it hasn’t), we can turn our attention to the next entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Ant-Man and the Wasp. The trailer dropped today and probably went a long way in giving some movie-goers some comfort after this weekend’s exquisitely traumatizing end to Infinity War. We already know that this movie is set in between Civil War and Infinity War, which gives it a two-year window. I think the closest thing we’ll get to anything Infinity War-related will be in the closing stingers for the movie.

This trailer keeps things pretty down-to-earth, which is nice. Hopefully there will be a lot more about the “quantum” nature of the universe, though, which could always come into play a good bit more in the near future.

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