Dissonance

Leaders who are looked up to constantly, who give out answers competently, who everyone assumes are living what they are saying, often have acute experiences of dissonance: “Who I am and what people think I am aren’t anywhere close to being the same thing. The better I get as a [pastor] and the more my reputation grows, the more I feel like a fraud. I know so much more than I live. The longer I live, the more knowledge I acquire, the wider the gap between what I know and what I live. I’m getting worse by the day...”

Eugene Peterson: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, © Eugene Peterson, 2005

Wendell Berry - Sabbath Poems - 1982 VI

To Den 

We have walked so many times, my boy, 

over these old fields given up 

to thicket, have thought 

and spoken of their possibilities, 

theirs and ours, ours and theirs the same, 

so many times, that now when I walk here 

alone, the thought of you goes with me; 

my mind reaches toward yours 

across the distance and through time.

 

No mortal mind's complete within itself, 

but minds must speak and answer, 

as ours must, on the subject of this place, 

our history here, summoned 

as we are to the correction 

of old wrong in this soil, thinned 

and broken, and in our minds.

You have seen on these gullied slopes 

the piles of stones mossy with age, 

dragged out of furrows long ago 

by men now names on stones, 

who cleared and broke these fields, 

saw them go to ruin, learned nothing 

from the trees they saw return 

to hold the ground again.

But here is a clearing we have made 

at no cost to the world 

and to our gain—a re-clearing 

after forty years: the thicket 

cut level with the ground,

grasses and clovers sown 

into the last year's fallen leaves, 

new pasture coming to the sun 

as the woods plants, lovers of shade, 

give way: change made 

without violence to the ground.

At evening birdcall 

flares at the woods' edge; 

flight arcs into the opening 

before nightfall.

Out of disordered history 

a little coherence, a pattern 

comes, like the steadying 

of a rhythm on a drum, melody 

coming to it from time 

to time, waking over it, 

as from a bird at dawn 

or nightfall, the long outline 

emerging through the momentary, 

as the hill's hard shoulder 

shows through trees 

when the leaves fall.

The field finds its source 

in the old forest, in the thicket 

that returned to cover it, 

in the dark wilderness of its soil, 

in the dispensations of the sky, 

in our time, in our minds— 

the righting of what was done wrong.

Wrong was easy; gravity helped it. 

Right is difficult and long. 

In choosing what is difficult 

we are free, the mind too 

making its little flight 

out from the shadow into the clear 

in time between work and sleep.

There are two healings: nature's, 

and ours and nature's. Nature's 

will come in spite of us, after us, 

over the graves of its wasters, as it comes 

to the forsaken fields. The healing 

that is ours and nature's will come 

if we are willing, if we are patient, 

if we know the way, if we will do the work. 

My father's father, whose namesake 

you are, told my father this, he told me, 

and I am telling you: we make 

this healing, the land's and ours: 

it is our possibility. We may keep 

this place, and be kept by it. 

There is a mind of such an artistry 

that grass will follow it, 

and heal and hold, feed beasts 

who will feed us and feed the soil.

Though we invite, this healing comes 

in answer to another voice than ours; 

a strength not ours returns 

out of death beginning in our work.

Though the spring is late and cold, 

though uproar of greed 

and malice shudders in the sky, 

pond, stream, and treetop raise 

their ancient songs; 

the robin molds her mud nest

with her breast; the air

is bright with breath

of bloom, wise loveliness that asks

nothing of the season but to be.

(from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems © Wendell Berry 2013)