The Body and the Earth
On the Cliff: It has been recognized for the history of mankind that humans are part of nature, but not in control of it. Berry uses a scene in King Lear to illustrate the point.
On the Tower: In our age we have tuned creation into a sightseeing opportunity.
Health: WE tend to define health as the absence of disease. Berry defines as wholeness. And that wholeness is linked to Creation (sic).
The Isolation of the Body: The body has been isolated from the soul leading to conflict with everything in Creation.
Competition: If competition is so good, why is our society so broken. The results of bad farming are mirrored in the state of our bodies. “”… We use them [our bodies] only as shipping containers to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.”
Connections: The connections in a healthy community are complicated and multiple. When those connections go bad, eventually they are broken and the community become unhealthy. A good analogy is the circulation system of the body. The so-called identity crisis is the result of the broken connection between body and soul. “There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.”
Sexual Division: The primary sexual division came about when nurture was made the exclusive concern of women. This signified to both sexes that neither women nor nurture was very important. “Home became a place of the husband to go when he was not working or amusing himself. It was the place where the wife was held in servitude.”
The Dismemberment of the Household: The effects of sexual division and broken connections on sexuality.
Fidelity: ‘… one cannot be good, anyhow, just by not being bad. To be faithful merely out of duty is to be blinded to the possibility of a better faithfulness for better reasons.” Berry compares sexuality to energy. Marriage vows are between a man and a woman and between the couple and the community. In the end the vows are related to the value of one’s word.
Home Land and House Hold. Berry believes that there are connections between spirit and body, the body and other bodies, and the body and the earth. As a result, it is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care of the earth. He uses the epic poem “The Odyssey” to demonstrate what he means.
The Necessity of Wildness. “Invariably the failure of organized religions, by which they cut themselves off from mystery and therefore from sanctity, lies in the attempt to impose an absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge; when they forbid their prophets to go into the wilderness, they lose the possibility of renewal.” “Then there is no possibility of choice, there is no possibility of faith. ‘Ways of life change only in living. To live by experience advices to abandon one’s life.”
“Freedom” from Fertility. The freedom from fertility in both the sexual and agricultural context is dangerous.
Fertility as Waste. We have reduced the function of the body to that of a conduit which channels the nutrients of the earth from the supermarket to the sewer.
Health and Work. The current economy separates us from the sources of life and generates ill health. Work is restorative, if it is done well.