Wendell Berry on the Trinity

Last updated on: May 22, 2016 at 7:28 am by Tim Suttle

Wendell Berry on the Trinity 2016-05-22T07:28:12-06:00 Tim Suttle

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It’s Trinity Sunday today, so here’s a quick quote from Wendell Berry and his great novel Jayber Crow. Berry is not only an author and poet, but a fairly sophisticated theologian. This quote is of Jayber reflecting upon what he learned about the nature of God, and how it fits with what he knew of the farm and of nature… of the actual experience of God here in the world. Like everything Berry writes, it is beautiful and smart.

“From my college courses and my reading I knew the various names that came at the end of a line of questions or were placed as periods to bafflement: the First Cause, the First Mover, the Life Force, the Universal Mind, the First Principle, the Unmoved Mover, even Providence. I too had used those names in arguing with others, and with myself, trying to explain the world to myself. And now I saw that those names explained nothing. They were of no more use than Evolution or Natural Selection or Nature or The Big Bang of these later days. All such names do is catch us within the length and breadth of our own thoughts and our own bewilderment. Though I knew the temptation of simple reason, to know nothing that can’t be proved, still I supposed that those were not the right names.

I imagined that the right name might be Father, and I imagined all that that name would imply: the love, the compassion, the taking offense, the disappointment, the anger, the bearing of wounds, the weeping of tears, the forgiveness, the suffering unto death. If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down into the world? Could I not see how it might, because it could know its creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death?

Yes. I could imagine a Father who is yet like a mother hen spreading her wings before the storm or in the dusk before the dark night for the little ones of Port William to come in under, some of whom do, and some do not. I could imagine Port William riding its humble wave through time under the sky, its little flames of wakefulness lighting and going out, its lives passing through birth, pleasure, suffering, and death. I could imagine God looking down upon it, its lives living by His spirit, breathing by His breath, knowing by His light, but each life living also (inescapably) by its own will – His own body given to be broken.”

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