At a small, experimental college on the coast of Maine, a farmer took the stage to address the graduating class of 1989. Commencement speeches have invited the best work of many writers, offering an audience at a pivotal moment, ready to be directed into the challenges and opportunities of life. Some of those speeches, like that of Steve Jobs at Stanford, prod toward inspiration to go out and make a dent in the universe. Others like that of the novelist David Foster Wallace seek to cultivate compassion. This speech was something very different. Tall, and lean, this farmer spoke with a Kentucky drawl into the microphone: “The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.”
These were not normal students and this was not a normal college. It was the College of the Atlantic, a place dedicated to the study of human ecology, and all those graduating had been initiated into a call to make the world a flourishing place for all creatures. Even so, when the farmer and writer Wendell Berry addressed them, his speech proved a challenge to anyone hoping for a better future without a radical undoing of the standing order. He didn’t call for the students to “buy green,” or “invest in windmills,” or “shop organic.” Instead, he said that they would have to deny themselves: “We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.” Berry then named the central challenge they would face: “The great obstacle is simply this,” he said, “the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do.”1
Berry is no religious leader, and he despises the label prophet, often applied to him. And yet in his clarity about our situation, his understanding of the needed remedy, and his naming of the obstacle standing in the way of our achieving it, I could not help but think of Jesus at the end of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 8.
The moment at play there isn’t quiet a graduation, but it is a critical turning point. This is the first time Jesus tells the disciples about his coming crucifixion and from this time forward the story will move toward its culmination in Jerusalem. Where we pick up the story is just after Jesus had fed 5,000 men, a number that represented a military unit. The disciples are beginning to see their dream of revolution coming to fruition. And revolution was exactly what Jesus also had in mind, but he had to clarify that this new order would be a complete subversion of the old. Instead of working through the standing powers of violence and control, Jesus was going to deliberately suffer humiliation and injustice before finally being raised from the dead. Peter doesn’t like it, but Jesus brushes him aside, giving him the name of all that opposes human life in its fullness—the Adversary, the Satan.
Then Jesus begins to give them a commencement address of sorts: a lesson in how to move from the safe confines of the campus of discipleship and into the world of God’s new creation. That journey isn’t one in which they will reach for the the stars, using their talents to remake the world in the image of the best and the brightest. Instead, Jesus calls for them to enter the descending path toward death and humiliation, a path in which they will end in themselves all those pattens of life that have kept them addicted to the world as it is: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
What Jesus is offering, much like Berry after him, is the only path toward the fullness and beauty of a world freed from the distortions of our desires—addiction to what is wrong, which is really the best description I know of sin. In my work as a pastor, and my experience with the varied people in my life, I frequently see people unwilling to sacrifice their own desires or fears for the sake of fullness. It seems absurd, and it is to someone on the outside, and yet I also know that all too often I too am unwilling to make the radical choices that would lead me into freedom and the healing that is salvation. Repentance, though, is a turning, and Lent offers us the opportunity to turn once again. We may have to turn in our old tokens of sobriety and start anew, but with time, we’ll earn those coins back. We must learn to let go of all those realities that we cling to and yet are killing the very life of the earth of which we are apart. We must learn to recognized that all too often we are addicts whose injection sites have turned gangrenous, requiring amputation (see Mark 9:43-50). Such radical choices are the hard road to healing, the place, as Berry says elsewhere, that “the scattered members come together…flesh is graced, and the holy enters the world.”
I have sometimes wondered if any of the students in 1989 took Berry’s message to heart and learned to live poorer, wasting less and creating communities of dependence. I do know that Jesus’s disciples listened to his speech, and came, with time, to live it to the very end. For that I am grateful because more than any technologist, or titan of industry, or even novelist, they changed the world and we still live from that light.
Berry’s speech was later revised and published as the essay “Word and Flesh” found in What Are People For?