I’m rereading some Wendell Berry, partly to bolster a feeling I need to finish a drafty post and partly because this is simply never a waste of time.
Yesterday, I noticed how Auden put a very fine point on the eternal command “Go play outside.” Berry, unsurprisingly, does so as well. But today, the specific (and eternal) command is to “Go pray outside”:
The Bible gives exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) attention to the organization of religion: the building and rebuilding of the Temple; its furnishings; the orders, duties, and paraphernalia of the priesthood; the orders of rituals and ceremonies. But that does not disguise the fact that the most significant religious events recounted in that book do not occur in “temples made with hands.” The most important religion in the Bible is unorganized, and is sometimes profoundly disruptive of organization. From Abraham to Jesus, the most important people are not priests, but shepherds, soldiers, men of property, craftsmen, housewives, queens and kings, manservants and maidservants, fishermen, prisoners, whores, even bureaucrats. The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples, but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, by rivers and on beaches, in the middle of the sea; when there was no choice, they happened in prisons. However strenuously the divine voice prescribed rites and observances, it just as strenuously repudiated them when they were taken to be religion:
Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.
And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide mind eyes from you: yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.Religion, according to this view, is less to be celebrated in rituals than practiced in the world.
I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a “hypaethral book,” such as Thoreau talked about — a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. That is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold anc empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the fuming of water into wine–which was. after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is fumed into grapes.