Dear Friends,
In less than two weeks we have lost remarkable people to death—Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Steinem. Though spanning music, theater, movies, philanthropy, essay and poetry writing, political activism and more, these four strike me as sharing some remarkable qualities. They were each smart and funny. Though they each saw reality clearly, they were each generous and large-spirited, pointing to the goodness of this world and of humans and working for it when that goodness wasn’t always evident (or poking fun of it, in the case of Parton and Curry).
Each one of these folks had reached a ripe age, long enough to evolve and change and influence culture over decades (the first two died at 80; the last two at 92). No one could say their death was a “tragedy” after long, full lives and, yet, we mourn them. We mourn whenever someone dies that we love, of course, but even though we don’t know these four, we mourn all they represent and the ways they made us, collectively better. From them we learned to laugh at ourselves, cherish the beauty of this world, protect the vulnerable, and fight for the world we (and God) dreams of.
I am especially heart broken at the death of Wendell Berry, a writer and philosopher, small farmer and conservationist. He wrote novels and poetry, though he was probably most famous for his passionate essays urging us to resist “the machine”—of capitalism, of modern life, of bureaucracies that want to make us less human. A Christian, Berry didn’t go to church much but walked his land in Kentucky on Sundays, which often ended in one of his Sabbath poems. I love that Berry is contrarian in the way Christians ought to be, confounding both Republicans and Democrats, refusing to be defined by the terms of this world. Of course, we often fail, but that’s the aim. If I’ve piqued your interest, you might read one of the volumes of his Sabbath Poems or the collection The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry.
See you in church!
Faithfully, Suzanne+
P.S. The Season of Creation is in full swing. See the articles below about this, especially about moving some things around in church–look for our new baptismal font!