Photo by KRBrid/iStock

Early fall sunrise across Kentucky farm country.

November 17, 2009 | Editor’s note: The following is the concluding section of “The Poetry of Care and Loss,” given by Ellen F. Davis on Oct. 27, 2009, at Duke Divinity School as her inaugural lecture as the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology.

In the lecture, Davis discusses how the poetry of Wendell Berry, Anne Porter and Mary Oliver has enabled her to appreciate the traditional functions of poetry and see them at work in the psalms.

The complete lecture is available on iTunes U.

“Often, our theology does not have sufficient poetry.” John Chryssavgis

“Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” Mary Oliver

The holiness of place

Wendell Berry, like Mary Oliver, is a consummately local writer. Nearly every piece of his poetry, fiction and essays takes as its chief subject the place he knows best, his Kentucky hillside farm and its immediate neighborhood. While Oliver focuses on the life of wild creatures, Berry attends most closely to what has been placed within the realm of human care:

The bounds of the field bind
the mind to it. A bride
adorned, the field now wears
the green veil of a season’s
abounding.

Berry has various counterparts among the psalmists, who celebrate the bounty of the Israelite field: grain, wine and oil, flocks of sheep and goats. One, the poet of Psalm 37, is, like Berry, especially sensitive to the economic vulnerability of small farmers and the loss of blessing that attends the loss of land. Five times Psalm 37 affirms, va‘anavim yirshu-’aretz, “the lowly [or “vulnerable”] shall inherit land.” In verse 18, the psalmist affirms that their “inheritance” shall endure forever (venaḥalatam le‘olam tehieh) -- naḥalah, the plot of arable land that was the intergenerational holding (ideally speaking) of every Israelite family. It seems that Jesus himself pondered this psalm, since that repeated phrase appears in the Beatitudes, where we generally render it, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5) Have we lost something essential with that less material, and therefore less economically freighted, translation?

I would judge the strongest link between Berry and the psalmists to be their shared conviction about the holiness of place. That conviction is so basic to Berry’s self-understanding that he gives himself this advice in “How to Be a Poet”:

Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
[He mentions electronic screens, for instance.]
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Here we have come to an area of mass insensitivity for urban Western Christians. The secularity of place is part of our cultural mindset -- or more accurately, it is the gap in our mental frame that destabilizes the whole structure. For most of us, place is little more than real estate, wherever we happen to be paying rent or a mortgage at any given time. Therefore the biblical insistence that God can invest hopes and dreams in a particular place, can even make a kind of home on this earth, is incomprehensible and often offensive.