No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality. | Wendell Berry
I began Sunday by saying that any sermon that brings up gender and roles will be read through the lens that you bring to it. This is true of everything, but especially those issues where the ‘common sense’ view has superseded the Biblical one. In our case, the culture believes so strongly in the concepts of autonomy and self-determination that the imperatives in the Bible do not make sense to us. We want God to give us what we are looking for, rather than hearing what He is telling us.
I had a great conversation after church about this. One of the things that was said was: I agree with what you said, but people are looking for recognition and feeling like they are going to be remembered. I think that this is correct. Most people do not feel like they are valued or doing enough unless they somehow make their mark on the world. The focus becomes on the scale of the response rather than the faithfulness of action. The internet can replace real life because it gives us the opportunity to reach more people and get more likes than we ever could in our own town. God’s emphasis on small-scale service and consistency seems quaint and old-fashioned. In order to be able to understand the Bible’s teaching, we need to get beyond the cultural narrative.
One of the people pushing back against it is Wendell Berry. He is an agrarian who writes about being connected to and committed to the place where we find ourselves. In the quote above, he says:
Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.
In other words, we are not our own, but we are part of a community. We should measure ‘success’ by how we fit into and build up the relationships that we are part of. This means recognizing the role that we have and doing our best to live out the responsibility that this role calls us to. As Berry puts it:
One can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.
I believe that one of the most difficult things about living in the twenty-first century is embracing the concept of limitedness (or partiality, he calls it). I don’t just mean the fact that each one of us is limited in our ability, but that the options set before us are inhuman in scale. We must intentionally limit our lives in order to be able to properly live it. Saying NO to what we are told we can and should be is the only path to finding fulfillment in this life.
Berry gives us another example of this in an essay he wrote a long time ago, titled: Why I will never own a Computer. He received quite a bit of negativity in response and wrote an amazing article to make clear what he was trying to say. All of this is summarized in a blog that I wrote called Old Man Wendell vs. the feminists. The point of this is not to be against feminism, but to point out that the modern idea of feminism goes against the relationship of man and woman that God created. It is love of God’s ideal, and embracing of His definition of limitation, that makes us push back. It is an understanding of God’s roles and promises that make other options rejectable. As Berry puts it:
This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction.
God’s good helps us to see what is not. It is only by living out His way that we will be able to find freedom, common ground, and a common satisfaction. It is worth ‘sacrificing’ a lot to secure these.