In Memoriam: Wendell Berry

The author Wendell Berry passed away a few days ago. He is one of the reasons I decided to focus on American literature in my later graduate work, and he is one of the subjects—if not the primary subject—of the dissertation I am currently writing on American short-story cycles set in small towns. In fact, I am now at the point in the process where I am most concentrating on the sections of the dissertation that have to do with Berry and his stories. He has been on my mind a lot lately, so it was even more startling and saddening than it might have been to come across his name while skimming the headlines the other morning.

Despite my long admiration for the writer ever since I first read the stories “Pray Without Ceasing” and “Fidelity” ten years ago, I have to date only read one of his novels (Jayber Crow, multiple times, if you count audiobooks as reading), a bunch of his short stories (my dissertation will have a half-chapter on the collection That Distant Land), and a bunch of his essays (all of the ones in What Are People For? and Standing by Words, as well as several from other essay collections). I have only looked at a few of his poems. The internet will be replete in the coming days and weeks with tributes to Berry from people who read his work more widely and knew it more intimately than I do, and some of the things I could say about his importance and influence would be redundant. So, right here, I will only note one thing in Berry’s writing that has left a strong impression on me, something that may not get as much attention in other tributes: namely, his idea of the tragic imagination.

In reading many of Berry’s essays and interviews to better understand and contextualize the stories I am analyzing for my dissertation, I noticed how often Berry would talk about the importance of the imagination. In the essay “American Imagination and the Civil War,” he explained that “By imagination I do not mean the ability to make things up or to make a realistic copy. I mean the ability to make real to oneself the life of one's place or the life of an enemy—and therein, I believe, is implied, imagination in the highest sense” (Imagination in Place, 2010, p. 30). Imagination is seeing beyond surface appearances and perceiving the underlying realities. It is also, as he expressed it in “Imagination in Place,” seeing things “whole” (pp. 3-4), as opposed to disparate and isolated parts. For Berry, one’s capacity for this kind of seeing is connected to one’s capacity for sympathy and compassion—and, dare I say, in a time when the concept is so controversial, empathy? He told Rose Marie Berger in an interview that 

The serious question is whether you’re going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It’s a difficult business, being human. (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 177)

Berry was particularly concerned that the imagination, if it is to help us accomplish the “difficult business” of “being human,” must have room within itself for accepting and assimilating tragedies. In the 1987 essay “Writer and Region”—which for me has been the most formative and important essay Berry ever wrote, and the inspiration for the direction my dissertation has taken—he argued that Americans “have hardly begun to imagine community life, and the tragedy that is at the heart of community life” (What Are People For?, 1990, p. 76). He explained that "Community life . . . is tragic, and it is so because it involves unremittingly the need to survive mortality, partiality, and evil” (p. 77). The problem is that, if we cannot imagine and reconcile ourselves to the fact that community life will always be marred by “mortality, partiality, and evil,” and then tragedy inevitably strikes, then we will not know how to cope with it. One outcome Berry foresaw in that essay is that we will withdraw from others and refuse the responsibility and forgiveness that healthy community life requires of us. He wrote that 

What is wanting, apparently, is the tragic imagination that, through communal form or ceremony, permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne, and that makes possible some sort of consolation and renewal. What is wanting is the return to the beloved community, or to the possibility of one. That would return us to a renewed and corrected awareness of our partiality and mortality, but also to healing and to joy in a renewed awareness of our love and hope for one another. Without that return we may know innocence and horror and grief, but not tragedy and joy. Not consolation or forgiveness or redemption. (What Are People For? 1990, p. 78)

Berry was an idealist—he had an exacting vision for what it would mean for neighbors and family members to be faithful to one another and the places they inhabit together—but his idealism was tempered by his tragic imagination. He understood his ideals could never be fully realized, and that he and others would constantly fail to live by them. But expecting the worst is a precondition for being able to face it. For example, he said in an interview with Bruce Williamson that “the ideal of loving your neighbor has to take on the possibility that he may be somebody you’re going to have great difficulty loving or liking or even tolerating" (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 10). Imagining the possibility of the neighbor’s transgression prepares us to finally forgive it.

Of all the things I have learned from Berry over the years and especially in the past few months, this is the insight I am most thankful for. It is related to Bonhoeffer’s warning not to impose our ideal vision for community onto actual, fallible ones, and also bears a resemblance to Tolkien’s idea of joining the long defeat. If we are to do life together, we must expect to fail and be failed, wrong and be wronged, and ultimately die on each other. Finally, we must also imagine each other as God sees us in reality: as His image-bearers, dearly beloved. As one character puts it in the story “Pray Without Ceasing,” “If God loves the ones we can’t, . . . then finally maybe we can” (That Distant Land, 2004, p. 70).

Job's Final Test

When I finished reading through the Book of Job a few days ago, I was intrigued by this detail, as rendered in the ESV: “And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends” (Job 42:10). 

God had censured Job’s three friends, saying, “My anger burns against you . . . for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (v. 7). God showed them grace, however, by offering them a way to atone for their sin through Job’s intercession on their behalf: “Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves. And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly” (v. 8).   

I remembered this part of the narrative, but what I had not noticed before was the potential connection between Job’s praying for his friends and the reversal of his sufferings at the end of the book.

Now, there may not be a direct causal link between the two. In both the NIV and the CSB, the verse reads, “After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord restored his fortunes.” Just because B happens after A, that does not necessarily mean that A caused B. But in the NASB, just as in the ESV, there is a “when” instead of an “after”—“The Lord also restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends”—implying simultaneity between the praying and the restoring.

What if Job’s final test was, not only after everything else to endure the cruel suspicion and slander of the friends who ought to have comforted him, but to then obey God’s command to pray for their forgiveness—which would require that he be willing to forgive them himself? This magnanimity is the text’s final proof that Job was who God said he was from the first: “a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil” (1:8, ESV).

Of course, this should remind us of the dying words of the ultimate servant of God who suffered unjustly and was betrayed, denied, and abandoned by his friends. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

You Love Him More Than I Do

There is a scene somewhere in the second half of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life in which Fani Jägerstätter is praying for her husband, Franz, who is in prison and facing execution. Fani tells God, “You love him more than I do.” It is a moment of recognition that, if Franz should die for his faithfulness to God, it will not be because God abandoned him.

I don’t know if this line originated with Malick or if it came from his reading the real Franz and Fani’s letters. But in the past eleven months since I last watched the film, this statement, “You love him more than I do,” has been a comfort and help to me. 

The idea seems so obvious. If I am finite and God is infinite, He has an exponentially greater capacity for loving others than I do. Moreover, if am a sinner and God is holy, His love is pure and it is far wiser and more constant than mine. 

And yet, the idea that God loves my loved ones more than I do is hard to accept in practice. It is more intuitive to me, in my pride and from my limited frame of reference, to think that I know what would be the most loving thing to do for so-and-so—and for some reason God doesn’t see what I see and is failing to love so-and-so in that way. It also comes more naturally to me, when I don’t know what would be the most loving thing to do for so-and-so, to despair and think there is no remedy as he or she wanders in error or sinks deeper into suffering. I assume that if the situation is beyond me, it’s beyond God as well. I’ve also realized that I tend to think that if I don’t do something for so-and-so or pray to God and his or her behalf, so-and-so’s plight will escape God’s notice or fall further and further down His priority list. God is so busy managing the cosmos, after all, and if I don’t help him out with some of his minor administrative tasks, or if I don’t keep spamming his inbox with petitions, He may never get around to loving so-and-so in the way I think so-and-so needs to be loved. Indeed, I take for granted that if so-and-so’s sufferings increase, or if so-and-so departs from the faith or never receives the faith to begin with, I will be at fault because I did not love so-and-so enough to intervene in action and intercede in prayer at the most crucial moments. It sounds ridiculous to think this way once I say it loud, but this is how my mind works.      

“You love him more than I do” is an antidote to this way of thinking that, even though it purports to be about my love for others, is really more about propping up my skewed sense of my own importance.

First, it has made a difference in how I pray. Several times in the past eleven months, when my heart has ached over the situation of a loved one and how little I can do to help or don’t know where to start, God has graciously brought it to mind that He loves that person more than I do. If my heart, with its weak, imperfect love, aches for them, how much more is His heart, with its strong, perfect love, intensely moved for them—and not only moved, but moving to do something for them, even if I can’t see or understand it? If He is as all-powerful and all-wise as He is all-good, then can’t I trust Him to love them with that fierce, faithful, all-surpassing love of His in a way that will be truly best for them? When I remember this, it relieves me of the false burden of thinking I need to convince God to care about so-and-so or figure out for Him (presumptuous thought!) a strategic plan of response. Instead, when I don’t know what else to ask, I can pray, as Fani does in the film, “Lord, you love this person more than I do.” When I acknowledge that truth before God, I release the person into God’s care—or rather, acknowledge that the person was always in God’s care, not mine—and find myself more at peace.

Second, more recently I’ve realized that “You love him more than I do” is a counter to my over-scrupulosity and my paranoia about the possible effects of my actions or inaction, or what Faith Chang identifies as a Christian variation on perfectionism. In Chapter 7 of her helpful book Peace Over Perfection (The Good Book Company, 2024), Chang writes about how perfectionism can keep us from trusting God’s providence. Earlier I mentioned my fear that “I will be at fault because I did not love so-and-so enough to intervene in action and intercede in prayer at the most crucial moments.” Now, it is true that people bear responsibility for others, including their souls, but Chang reminds us that, “though Scripture affirms both human responsibility and God’s providence as equally real, they are not equal in influence. The Christian’s future is not ultimately determined by her own power to always know and do what is right but by the gracious providence of God” (p. 119). That’s good news! If it weren’t so, we would all be doomed—and doomed to doom others by our shortcomings and failures to love them well enough. Chang goes on to say that “it is the love of God for those I love which anchors me when I’m tossed around by regret and fear—his love and his power to accomplish his perfect will, in spite of my weaknesses” (p. 124). Thus, when I trust that God’s love for others is greater than mine, I can still take responsibility for loving them as well as I can, but I can do so without suffering under the debilitating presumption that my failure to love them could separate them from the love of God (Romans 8:38-39). 

When I was reading this chapter a few weeks ago, the phrase “the love of God for those I love” immediately reminded me of Fani’s prayer in A Hidden Life. In fact, at the end of the chapter Chang includes “A Prayer for When You Fear Missing the Way (and for All That’s Left Undone),” which includes this almost-identical statement: “You love these dear ones more than I do” (p. 130). I wonder if Chang has seen the film. Either way, she confirms the liberating power of acknowledging this simple yet profound truth.

Some Thoughts on Burnout

How intent should Christians be on avoiding burnout? How do we balance Christ’s call to come to Him so He can give us rest from our labors (Matthew 11:28) with His other call to pick up our crosses to follow Him even unto death (Matthew 16:24)? 

This summer my pastor shared with me a Facebook post from another pastor who wrote that, with all the discourse about “soul care, sabbath’ing, and rest,” he is seeing a trend of younger pastors shrinking from the typical demands and sacrifices of ministry. The post made me wonder how many people may be using the fear of burnout as an excuse to not commit themselves to costly and exhausting acts of service. 

Not long after my pastor told me about that Facebook post, I read a blog post by Tim Challies (whose book Do More Better has been immensely helpful for my productivity) about how, despite how long and how hard he’s tried, he has never found a cure for his struggle to stay asleep. This reminded me of people I know (or know of) who have experienced chronic fatigue. But life goes on, and the people God has placed under our care still need whatever time and energy and attention we can give them. For some of us, at least, sleeplessness might be one of those Paulian thorns that reveal God’s power and all-sufficient grace through our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).

These two posts put me in mind of something I had read a decade earlier in Kevin DeYoung’s Crazy Busy: “One of the reasons we struggle so mightily with busyness is because we do not expect to struggle” (Crossway, 2013, p. 103). When we expect or demand that our lives not be so busy, it makes the feelings of being overwhelmed worse. This, too, raises the question of whether we just need to accept tiredness as an unavoidable side effect of doing good work.

I think there’s truth in all this. If I had written this post in August when I first had the idea for it, I might have left the matter there. But then I went through a semester when I was at risk of burnout myself—until I lowered my expectations for what I could accomplish this semester and the next—and meanwhile I observed the ominous warning signs of burnout in a close friend. These experiences lead me to conclude that we do need to guard against burnout as much as we can, while also resisting the temptations to sloth and self-preservation. 

What that pastor posted on Facebook, warning against under-exertion, is a timely, needed corrective, but even he acknowledges that burnout exists and is harmful. And I suspect—because of what I know of my own predilections and of the many hard-working, driven people I’m surrounded by—that there are still many people out there who need to be warned against over-exertion. Some people who are scared at the thought of burning out may not even be close to it themselves, but those who are on the point of burning out risk far more than a season of exhaustion. I’m not thinking only of the risks of depression, of hospitalization, of needing years-long recovery, or of never fully recovering. The overworked also risk hurting those they are trying to help. As Christopher Ash warns in Zeal without Burnout, “The problem is that we do not sacrifice alone. It may sound heroic, even romantic, to burn out for Jesus. The reality is that others are implicated in our crashes. A spouse, children, ministry colleagues, prayer partners and faithful friends, all are drawn in to supporting us and propping us up when we collapse” (The Good Book Company, 2016, p. 24). Ash goes on to quote a pastor who is a volunteer firefighter: burnout is “a form of heroic suicide that is counterproductive because you’re now no longer effective in fighting fire and the resources that were dedicated to fighting the fire are not dedicated to saving you” (25). Moreover, as David Murray warns in Reset (Crossway, 2017), burnout can precede major moral lapses. His book opens with the warning, “Slow your pace, or you’ll never finish the race.”

Challies is right that God may withhold the gift of deep and thoroughly restorative sleep, but he also clarifies that we still have a responsibility to seek it. He writes, “I have decided I ought to receive this as God’s will—as a reality to be accepted rather than resented.” At the same time, “That doesn’t mean I won’t keep praying and won’t keep trying—praying for sleep and trying to get better at it. That doesn’t mean I won’t try the next herbal concoction someone recommends as the one that changed their life.” God can still use us when we are sleep-deprived, but Scripture, scientific studies, and street smarts all attest that He designed us to be at our best when we get good sleep. As Ash and Murray each argue in their respective books on burnout, to act as if God didn’t create us to be finite and sleep-dependent is dangerous hubris. So we should do what we can to sleep well, and above all trust God: trust Him to use sleep as He designed it, to restore us, and trust Him to sustain us even when good sleep eludes us. “Either way,” Challies concludes, “it falls to me to trust that he loves, that he cares, and that he knows best.”

I don’t need to nuance or counterbalance what DeYoung wrote, either, because he did so himself in that same chapter of Crazy Busy that’s haunted me so long. I remembered his startling diagnosis that “You Suffer More because You Don’t Expect to Suffer at All” and forgot the careful qualifications he placed around it. He writes, “This may seem a strange way to (almost) end a book on busyness. But keep in mind that this is the last of seven diagnoses, not the only one. … There’s a reason this chapter is not the only chapter in the book” (101). Even as DeYoung is concerned that “We simply don’t think of our busyness as even a possible part of our cross to bear” (103), he also reiterates that we need “rest, rhythm, death to pride, acceptance of our own finitude, and trust in the providence of God” (102). My takeaway from DeYoung is the same as the one I get from Challies: I should do what I can to rest in the midst of my work, and hold on to God’s goodness when that rest isn’t enough and the work won’t ease up. 

DeYoung is right to ask, “If we love others, how can we not be busy and burdened at least some of the time?” (105). So, to return to my opening question, we should be intent on avoiding burnout, but not on avoiding sacrifice. But as soon as I say that, I must also add that we should just as vigilantly guard against the martyr complex. DeYoung quotes John the Baptist: “I freely confess I am not the Christ” (48; see John 1:20). Neither are we! The questions we should be asking are: What are these sacrifices for, really? Will they be worth it? Are they actually for God and others, or are they for propping up our own egos? Or as DeYoung puts it, “Am I trying to do good or to make myself look good?” (39). And do our sacrifices—of time, of sleep—proceed from unbelief in God’s redemptive involvement in all things and a proud self-reliance, or do they proceed from a bold confidence that God will use the seeds that fall into the ground and die to bring forth new life (John 12:24)?

That's Not Your Story

For years I’ve been reminding myself—or rather, God keeps graciously reminding me—of something Aslan tells Shasta and Aravis in The Horse and His Boy: “That’s not your story.”

Actually, that’s a misquotation. What Aslan tells Shasta in Chapter Eleven, in response to Shasta asking him why he attacked Aravis, is “I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own” (p. 165 in the 1994 HarperTrophy edition). And in Chapter Fourteen, Aslan tells Aravis, in response to her asking him about what will happen to the slave girl who was whipped when Aravis ran away from home, the same thing: “I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own” (p. 202).

But “That’s not your story” comes to the same thing, and I can’t say how many times those four words have resurfaced in my mind to  either convict or comfort me. 

When I am tempted to ask Person A for the details of Person B’s difficult situation: That’s not your story. When I am tempted to tell Person B what I know of Person A’s difficult situation: That’s not your story. When I want to know what is going on with Person C, who I thought was a Christian but has been living in a way inconsistent with the gospel and the cost of discipleship: That’s not your story. When I wonder why Person D seems to have it so easy compared to me: That’s not your story. 

When, like Asaph in Psalm 73, I am bothered by how the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer: That’s not your story. When, like Job’s friends I want to know why a believer is suffering so intensely: That’s not your story. When, like Peter at the end of the Gospel of John, I want to know what God may have in store for another believer: That’s not your story. I think also of what Jesus told Peter in that moment: “What is that to you? You follow me!” (John 21:22).

Of course, telling ourselves “That’s not your story” won’t do much to quell our confusion or envy or love of gossip if we don’t believe there is a Storyteller who is both sovereign and good. But if there is such a Storyteller, we can trust Him to bring our stories and every other person’s story to a fitting end. He is telling us our own stories, and no one else’s. Let’s follow Him.