In Christianity Today, this blog’s reader and commenter Jake Meador writes about what urban Christians have to learn from Wendell Berry. Excerpt:
What I see in Berry, and what I’ve been learning to live out, little by little, is the centrality of worship to personal and communal health. By that I mean something like one of Clyde Kilby’s resolutions for mental health: “At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.” In short, Berry has taught me to be grateful for Lincoln [Nebraska, where Meador lives], grateful for the particularities of the plains and her people. Before I read Berry, my relationship to my hometown was ambiguous at best. I didn’t hate it, but I certainly didn’t love it either. I had learned to tolerate it while counting down the days until graduation and the chance to move to bigger, more exciting pastures.
Berry has changed the way I see my home. The landscape became more beautiful. Now I can drive 15 minutes down Highway 77 toward Crete, passing farms and what’s left of the prairie, and the scene shoots straight through me. I can go on walks and feel the gusting winds off the Great Plains and welcome them with “unconsecrated relish,” to borrow a phrase from Berry. The gospel of Christ alone changes hearts, but God works through many means in his creation. And one of the mightiest means through which he’s done deep soul work in my life is through Berry.
That’s it! I have never been the sort of person who has the same sort of relationship to rural life that Berry does, in part because my own experiences there are different from Berry’s, and in part because I’m just not made that way. But Meador has put his finger on why Berry has become so important to me: he has taught me to see place — particular places, and Place itself — through different eyes. You don’t have to become a pastoralist agrarian to get in tune with Wendell Berry. You just have to learn to love your own place, and love it like you would love someone in your own family.
One reason I love to be in France is that the people here have such attachment to their places, even in the city. The boulanger where I buy my baguettes most mornings has come to recognize me now, and has a friendlier smile and manner than when I first started coming in nearly a month ago. Today I was walking with Lucas and Nora up a street in our neighborhood, and Lucas waved to the Algerian guy making frites in the frites shop. The guy waved back and smiled.
“You know him?” I said.
“Yeah, Mom and I come in here. He has an American girlfriend. He likes to speak English.”
This neighborhood is a village. Just like in New York City. Man, I love that.
BradleyP 
village 
Rod,
Are you, and Jake Meador, conflating two different things? Berry’s love of place is directly tied into us being dependent upon a cosmic pattern–sun, rain, fertility of soil– enacted locally; and that Berry claims we forget at our spiritual and environmental peril. This leads to knowing the specifics of a place in terms of its fruitfulness, which is how it sustains us. For this reason, he in one essay from the 90s advises urban dwellers to have at least a symbolic garden, to in effect remember (he might say enact) the fundamental relationship that all living beings have with the earth, the sun, the particulars of the cosmos.
Does waving to a frites maker count in this kind of understanding? I’m not saying it’s bad, since it clearly is one of the wonderful ways that humans make living in a place meaningfu; instead, I’m asking if it is indeed what Berry means? Are you and Meador substituting sentiment for something literally more grounded in WB’s thought?