News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The daffodils are in peak glory around here, and many other plants are beginning to bud. So despite the fits and starts, spring's lengthening days have been doing their work during this Lenten season.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on repair, homeschooling, and ownership.
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Joshua Pauling reflects on how our hands shape the world and are in turn shaped by this work. He concludes on an Eastertide note.
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Michael Sauter probes for a spiritual diagnosis of our culture's widespread anxiety. He finds a place to begin with "the guy who took the snow tires off my car last week, and I don’t know if he’s ever darkened the doors of a Church. I just know that he had an air of spiritual freedom about him, such that somebody might think, 'I want what he has. I wonder what makes him tick.' There’s a beginning."
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Steven Carter gives his reasons for returning to the family farm: "I am often given a puzzled look when I tell someone that I am going back to the farm: 'You’ve made it to D.C., haven’t you? Why would you go back?' I’m going back because the farm and all it means are more important than anything I can do or want to do here. It is more meaningful to go to a place that has claims on you, for that is where you can best serve and live the good life."
I don't think A World Lost is as often read or as well appreciated as it should be. It is a hauntingly beautiful novel, and the narrative is deftly constructed. The final brief chapter may be the richest two pages in all of Berry's oeuvre. Here is just a taste:
One by one, the sharers in this mortal damage have borne its burden out of the present world: Uncle Andrew, Grandpa Catlett, Grandma, Momma-pie, Aunt Judith, my father, and many more. At times perhaps I could wish them merely oblivious, and the whole groaning and travailing world at rest in their oblivion. But how can I deny that in my belief they are risen?
I imagine the dead walking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light's awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.
That light can come into this world only as love, and love can enter only by suffering. Not enough light has ever reached us here among the shadows, and yet I think it has never been entirely absent.