Our youngest son and his wife, Dave and Ruth, live in South Carolina; so Marge and I travel from Grand Rapids to Columbia at least once a year.  On the way we enjoy stopping at some of the major craft centers between here and there—places like Tamarack in Beckley, West Virginia, and several shops and stores in Berea Kentucky.

Since I’m an amateur woodworker, I’m often struck with amazement over the wonderful workmanship of the wood crafts on display in these places.  Typically the pieces I want to adopt and take home run in the $2000 range!  To date we have not adopted any, but a comment I’ve made more than once to Marge is that I wish we had the means to purchase these pieces if for no other reason than to reward the artisans for their painstaking craftsmanship—for their unadulterated good work.

Living not far from Berea is Wendell Berry of Henry County,  Kentucky, one of our era’s most astute commentators on the importance of carefully and purposely incorporating the natural world into our local communities.  Here is how Wikipedia characterizes his thinking:

His nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction.

When I see truly good work being done in any form, I often think of what Berry has said about good work:

By denying spirit and truth to the non-human Creation, modern proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built—that is, they have legitimized bad work.

Good human work honors God’s work.  Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin.  It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love.  It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands.  It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty.  To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.  This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing his Spirit.

In the Bible we find none of the industrialist’s contempt or hatred for nature.  We find, instead, a poetry of awe and reverence and profound cherishing, as in these verses from Moses’ valedictory blessing of the twelve tribes:

And of Joseph he said: ‘Blessed of the LORD is his land, With the precious things of heaven, with the dew, And the deep lying beneath, With the precious fruits of the sun, With the precious produce of the months, With the best things of the ancient mountains, With the precious things of the everlasting hills, With the precious things of the earth and its fullness, And the favor of Him who dwelt in the bush (Deut. 33:13-16, NKJV).

Wendell Berry.  Christianity and the Survival of Creation. Pantheon Books, 1992-3.

Why not take the time to become familiar with Wendell Berry.  You will be challenged and wonderfully instructed.

See you outdoors!

Dean