Our lives are surrounded by and suffused with stories that flow together like a river whose source sprang forth eons ago before the dawn of time. It flows past, picks us up along its way and sweeps us on in a weave of infinite complexity on channels and river beds that wind a tortuous route toward an eschatological ocean at history’s end. Sometimes our stories flow together and draw us into community, but often, along the way, each of us somehow comes to believe that our stream is the only one, and thus our lives become fragmented and we become deaf to any other story.
We live in just such a time, when the controlling mythology has us convinced that we are isolated individuals whose lives are radically disconnected from each other. The Marlboro Man is the icon of our age of rugged individualism, and the “welfare mother” is his opposite number. The dominate story in which they play leading roles frames a vision of reality in which poverty or disease are signs of moral failing and compassion is weakness.
The dominant story of our time tells us that we are part of a species that is even more radically disconnected from the rest of creation than we are from each other. In this story nature is merely economic resource, and its beauty is reduced to another consumer good or, too often, simply reduced to waste without even the dignity of returning to dust. But the poet Wendell Berry offers an alternative economy with but a handful of words:
We join our work to Heaven’s gift,
Our hope to what is left,
That field and woods at last agree
In an economy
Of widest worth.
High Heaven’s Kingdom come to earth.
Imagine Paradise.
This strikes me as the perfect Lenten discipline for a people journeying from Ash Wednesday’s reminder – you are dust and to dust you shall return. Yes, certainly, but also this: O dust, arise! Imagine paradise! Cast a vision for a future otherwise.
From “The Clearing Rests in Song and Shade,” in Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 49.
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