For a man who called himself a “bad-weather churchgoer,” Wendell Berry (1934–2026) has had a remarkable influence among American Christians. He was recently featured on the cover of Christianity Today. This week he was feted by Commonweal and First Things, which is just one indication of the ways his influence spreads across denominational and political lines.
Berry’s influence isn’t some superficial inspiration. Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy, and Andrew Peterson, founder of the Rabbit Room, have both written about how reading Berry changed their lives. Judging by the many stories I’ve heard over the past decades and the outpouring of grief that Berry’s death this week has elicited among Christians, this transformative experience isn’t uncommon.
One might account for this influence in many ways, but I would boil it down to this: Berry sought to imagine how the death and resurrection of the incarnate God changes literally everything, from the cosmic to the quotidian. And then he tried, as a fallible, limited human in a fallen world, to live accordingly.
Go to Work
Theologians sometimes succeed in getting people to alter their doctrinal beliefs. Good preachers, of course, hope for more than this. Artists of all persuasions aspire to create something so beautiful that, as Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem has it, those who encounter their songs or paintings or poems realize, “You must change your life.”
I can think of no author who more reliably has this effect on his readers than Berry. When people read Berry, they’re liable to move, to change vocations, to eat differently, to ditch cars or smartphones, to plant a garden, to care for aging parents, to talk with their neighbors, to sell all they have and follow Jesus.
I regularly teach a course on Berry at Grove City College, and it fills up with students majoring in various disciplines who are drawn to his voice and want to wrestle with the implications of his agrarian vision and theological imagination.
Some of these students first encountered Berry in their classical school or through a homeschooling connection; he’s beloved in these circles. Others are themselves from rural parts of the country and feel spoken for in Berry’s essays and stories. Reading Berry provokes robust discussion and plenty of disagreement, but he always moves students in profound ways, inspiring them to better order their wayward loves and to then go to work enacting them.
Affection and Conviction
Berry isn’t above critique. Like any human, particularly any human who published as much as he did, he got some things wrong. Part of the task of his readers is to argue about which things those were. I’ve done plenty of this myself, and Berry welcomed that kind of lively discussion.
Reading Berry inspires them to better order their wayward loves and to then go to work enacting them.
As he writes near the beginning of one essay collection, “An essayist not only has no right to expect complete agreement but has a certain responsibility to ward it off. If you tell me, dear reader, that you agree with me completely, then I must suspect one or both of us of dishonesty.” Our public discussions, both within the church and in the broader public square, would benefit if more people followed the example Berry set in pairing generous affection with deep convictions.
But for those who may not be familiar with his writing, I want to simply give two examples, one from his fiction and one from his poetry, where Berry endeavors to make doctrinal truths concrete and tangible.
Not Left by God
One example is from his novel Jayber Crow. The main character, Jayber, has a difficult life: He’s orphaned at a young age, then the older couple who takes him in also dies, then he endures a lonely existence in an orphanage, then he feels called to pastoral ministry and enrolls in a seminary, then his theological questions lead him to abandon this pursuit, and eventually he wanders his way back to his hometown where he sets up as the barber.
But while he may have thought he was leaving the church and religion behind, God has not left him, and Jayber’s loves involve him in ongoing theological wrestling. He never finds satisfactory, rational answers to his questions about God and suffering, about how to lead a good life among fallen people in a war-torn country, but he finally concludes that his story is about heaven because he realizes he has been gripped by God’s love.
Here’s how he articulates his understanding of the radical, disturbing, awesome truth that while we are yet sinners, God loves us and the world our sin has so marred:
All my life I had heard preachers quoting John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” They would preach on the second part of the verse, to show the easiness of being saved (“Only believe”). Where I hung now was the first part. If God loved the world even before the event at Bethlehem, that meant He loved it as it was, with all its faults. That would be Hell itself, in part. He would be like a father with a wayward child, whom He can’t help and can’t forget. But it would be even worse than that, for He would also know the wayward child and the course of its waywardness and its suffering. That His love contains all the world does not show that the world does not matter, or that He and we do not suffer it unto death; it shows that the world is Hell only in part. But His love can contain it only by compassion and mercy, which, if not Hell entirely, would be at least a crucifixion.
What kind of God would this be, who would love his creation amid its rebellion? Jayber dismisses the dry abstractions of his college philosophy classes—some distant Unmoved Mover—and presses toward an articulation of a personal, incarnate God:
I imagined that the right name might be Father, and I imagined all that that name would imply: the love, the compassion, the taking offense, the disappointment, the anger, the bearing of wounds, the weeping of tears, the forgiveness, the suffering unto death. If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its love be swayed down into the world? Could I not see how it might, because it could know its creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?
Yes. And I could imagine a Father who is yet like a mother hen spreading her wings before the storm or in the dusk before the dark night for the little ones of Port William to come in under, some of whom do, and some do not. . . . I could imagine God looking down upon it, its lives living by His spirit, breathing by His breath, knowing by His light, but each life living also (inescapably) by its own will—His own body given to be broken.
This imaginative vision spurs Jayber to try to love the other members of Port William as if they were indeed eternal beings, beloved by their Creator. As anyone who has tried to do this knows, it isn’t easy. But at least the attempt enables him to participate in the love of the God who so loved the world that he gave himself for it.
Whose Sight?
For my second example, take this 2009 ekphrastic Sabbath poem that responds to Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Jesus:
For Giannozzo Pucci
“Why seek ye the living among the dead?”
Early in the year by my friend’s gift
I saw at Sansepolcro Piero’s vision:
The soldiers who guard the dead from the living
themselves become as dead men, one
tumbling dazedly backward. Awake, his wounds
bleeding still, his foot upon the tomb, Christ
who bore our life to its most wretched end,
having thrust off like a blanket the heavy lid,
stands. But for his face and countenance
I have found no words: powerful beyond life
and death, seeing beyond sight or light,
beyond all triumph serene. All this Piero saw.
And we who were sleeping, seeking the dead
among the dead, dare to be awake. We who see
see we are forever seen, by sight have been
forever changed. The morning at last
has come. The trees, once bare, are green.
The poem begins with Berry’s effort to see Piero’s vision. Yet as he describes what he sees in the painting, all that Piero himself saw, he’s awakened by the experience of being seen. And that sight, that experience of being seen by the resurrected Christ, renders him forever changed. The seeing that matters isn’t Piero’s achievement much less Berry’s; it’s Christ’s gaze that transforms.
The seeing that matters isn’t Berry’s achievement; it’s Christ’s gaze that transforms.
And it’s not merely we who were sleeping who have been transformed by Christ’s resurrected face and countenance. It’s all of creation. In the background of Piero’s painting, the trees and landscape to the left of Christ are barren. But on the right, the trees burst into green. All of creation is groaning along with us, and all of creation will be redeemed.
Berry’s writings about technology and sex and farming and economics and poetry and forestry and politics and sheep are all downstream of this fundamental reality. If you enter the world of his Port William fiction or confront his essays or sit with his poems, beware: You too may have to deal with the unsettling experience of being forever changed.
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