Wendell Berry Freedom in Connection

Wendell Berry

Freedom in Connection

Wendell Berry, a writer, poet, farmer, and champion of environmental causes, has addressed the idea of freedom in a number of his writings and speeches. Over time he has defined freedom in a way that is personal to him, and in his writing he expresses this very personal view of a quality of life that every person has at some point desired. In defining freedom in a way that is highly personal and even idiosyncratic, Berry asks his readers to consider the ways in which they define liberty and whether this definition still serves them in the way that it did when they first formulated it. Part of freedom for Berry is the necessity of allowing for change and the possibility of death without rebirth.

One of Berry's best-known pieces of writing is his poem "The Peace of Wild Things," which appears to be a paean to the virtues of being able to find freedom by escaping from human ties. In the poem he writes of waiting in fear of "what my life and my children's lives may be" to flee back to the world of wild things, the fount of freedom, a place where grief is met only when something has occurred that must be responded to. Grief for the not-yet-happened is not one of the burdens that one ever has to carry in the peace of the natural world, something that is very different from the life in the embrace of family and indeed in the family of humanity.

Freedom for Berry arises not from being in the wild among untamed creatures (although certainly he would see these things as being a part of the picture of what creates a sense of freedom), but from being in a state of grace. This reading is not the most common one of either this poem or of Berry's work in general, but a reading of his works collectively within the context of his biography and his activism. Berry is a lifelong Baptist, a man whose life has been steeped in and defined by the concept of grace, by the concept of a well of goodness from which all can drink (Angyal 119).

Grace allows each person the chance at joy and at freedom from all of the limitations of earthly life. For the Christian, traditionally grace can only be obtained through belief in Christ, whose crucifixion created grace without the possibility of end. Berry, however, has expanded the concept of grace (and thus seemingly of salvation as well) to include the actions that humans take in the world. The actions that people undertake to save others, and even more those actions that people undertake to save the world as a whole, produce grace as well.

One of the major tensions in Berry's work (although he rarely acknowledges it) is that between his advocacy of the vitality of farming and that of environmentalism. Certainly it is true that there are a number of ways in which farmers and environmentalists can find common cause and there are parallel paths that the two can take toward their common goals. However, while farming can be done in a way that makes it as gentle as possible on the land, it is never the same as natural growth.

He seems to be arguing (although this is not an argument that he makes in explicit terms but rather one that must be teased out in the process of comparing a number of his works) that farming is one of the activities that are available to humans that is most likely to produce grace. Farming, he suggests, can be seen as a form of resurrection, a chance for the land to be reborn in the process of saving humanity.

Berry's focus on resurrection is explicit in the ending lines of "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front":

Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

This call to seek rebirth, not just once as a Christian does after death, but in the far more ancient search for rebirth that obtains in the observation of the seasons and in the not-so-ancient sowing and reaping in concert with those seasons (Berry 49).