the wisdom of limits: a sabbath reflection

Today is a cold, dark day in the Berkshires - another of autumn's blessing for those who can bundle up and stay warm inside - but not everyone's cup of tea. There will be bread baking later along with our incremental weatherizing the windows for winter project and music, too. Before any of that, however, I find that since yesterday my heart has been mulling over an essay Wendell Berry wrote in 2008 for Harper's Magazine: Faustian Economics - Hell Hath No Limits. Two quotes cut to the core of his concern. 

The first urges us to get our theology right:

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as “higher animals.” But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: “I am that I am...” In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable—a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer.

The second speaks to the consequences of our ethics and spirituality:

Human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible... To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent... We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given.... To deal with the problems of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work.

It is obvious that the introduction of a fixed income in my retirement as well as the likelihood of moving to a smaller home in the next few years has given me a new lens through which to look at my life. Being a grandpa has been a new way of being my true self, too. Sorting through hundreds of books, decades of old sermons, and countless record albums and CDs has been a cleansing exercise. Winnowing these shared belongings has evoked memories. Our recollections have, in turn, given rise to reflection, encouraging conversations about what continues to hold meaning for us at this moment in life. Its been satisfying to be sure, sometimes sad, too; but mostly clarifying to review the arc and meaning of my journey. Fundamentally, after discarding many things and reviewing two score of ministry, I can see that mine has been a slow albeit uneven walk towards becoming small. "Small is holy" I wrote in a song earlier this year. I wasn't thinking of Berry's essay, but it was an influence:

Thinking big and acting strong – led me into all that’s wrong 

Hitting bottom taught me well strategies to get through hell. 

Touch the wound in front of you – that’s all you can really do 

Hold it close – don’t turn away – make room for what is real today. 

Small is me, small is you, small is holy and rings true 

Small is hard, small reveals the way our hearts can be healed

Two small books I saved at the height of my culling have been calling to me just like Berry's essay: Becoming Bread by Gunilla Norris and Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot. It has been years since I visited these old friends and it feels like now is the right time to rekindle our acquaintance. Already I've returned to two other favorite texts - The Spirituality of Bread by Donna Sinclair and Joy Mead's The One Loaf - to great delight. Like Berry suggests, poetry (and in my case bread baking) can not only, "remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology" from my theology and spirituality, but offer a satisfying way to strengthen being small. "Art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work." Norris puts it simply:

When the yeast is added

we will sin in the honey water

the unpredictable, the alive...

which we can never own or

truly understand. We will see

how it bubbles and froths -

how it rises up - and we will know

that we do not have control.

Eliot is, as expected, equally insightful if also elegiac:

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, 

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

o perpetual revolution of configured stars,

o perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

o world of spring and autumn, birth and dying 

The endless cycle of idea and action, 

Endless invention, endless experiment, 

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; 

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; 

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. 

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, 

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, 

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD. 

Where is the Life we have lost in living? 

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? 

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? 

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries 

Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

I like them both. You may find Berry's essay to be food for your soul as I did.(https://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/faustian-economics/) It may make you uncomfortable, too. One of his observations speaks to the challenge of living with compassion, integrity and small acts of loving courage at this time  in the age of Trump: 

The normalization of the doctrine of limitlessness has produced a sort of moral minimalism: the desire to be efficient at any cost, to be unencumbered by complexity. The minimization of neighborliness, respect, reverence, responsibility, accountability, and self-subordination — this is the culture of which our present leaders and heroes are the spoiled children. Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine. 

In a time of political hatred and fear, pipe bombs and attacks in synagogues, mosques and churches, it is likely I will feel overwhelmed. Bereft of hope given the enormity of suffering. This is precisely when I most need to trust being small and honor the path of limits. So Lord, in your mercy, hear my prayer:

O God:Give me strength to live another day;
Let me not turn coward before its difficulties or prove recreant to its duties; let me not lose faith in other people; Keep me simple and sound of heart, in spite of ingratitude, treachery, or meanness; preserve me from minding little stings or giving them; Help me to keep my heart clean, and to live so honestly and fearlessly that no outward failure can dishearten me or take away the joy of conscious integrity; open wide the eyes of my soul that I may see good in all things; grant me this day some new vision of thy truth; Inspire me with the spirit of joy and gladness; and make me the cup of strength to suffering souls; in the name of the strong Deliverer, our only Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. (http://prayer.forwardmovement.org/prayers_and_thanksgivings.php)