The Wind’s Prayer, the World’s Sabbath: Spirit and Place in Lance Henson and Wendell Berry

Elizabeth Burkemper ,David C Mahan

doi:10.3390/rel12090697

Abstract

Although a vast body of poetry celebrates the natural world and addresses issues concerning the environment, it can be overlooked in the discourses of environmental activism. In this paper, we seek to demonstrate the unique contributions that poetry makes to a thoughtful, and in this case, theological, engagement with our present environmental crises. Here, we create a conversation between two poets of two different religious traditions. Cheyenne poet Lance Henson’s poem “we are a people” reimagines humanity’s self-conception in light of earthly interconnectedness from the perspective of his own Native American spiritual sensibilities. Christian poet Wendell Berry’s poem “Sabbaths IV” (1983) relocates our understanding of Sabbath beyond its liturgical designations and practices, asking us to attend to “the true world’s Sabbath”. We offer close readings of these two poems that mark the distinctions that emerge from and interact with their respective theological visions, but also where they find common ground. Through this work of reading literature theologically, we argue that these poems both refine our attentiveness to the earth as the site of religious import and consequence, and call upon readers to enact other ways of being in the world amidst the climate catastrophe that are inspired by faith and spirituality.

Highlights

A vast body of poetry celebrates the natural world and addresses issues concerning the environment, it can be overlooked in the discourses of environmental activism
We offer close readings of these two poems that mark the distinctions that emerge from and interact with their respective theological visions, and where they find common ground
Through this work of reading literature theologically, we argue that these poems both refine our attentiveness to the earth as the site of religious import and consequence, and call upon readers to enact other ways of being in the world amidst the climate catastrophe that are inspired by faith and spirituality

Summary

Introduction

Refusing to specify “race” (it could be Cheyenne, or Native American, or even the human race), the poem draws our attention toward a hidden ground of being that lies underneath all coexisting things at all times Detecting this interconnectedness by the poem’s terms, seems possible only after, and through, the waiting and the listening. With first-person plural pronouns making entrance into the poem only after the owl and the badger have been named, it is almost as if the fourth and final stanza is introducing a new sense of peoplehood Perhaps, this poem suggests, there never has been a human subject understood as distinct from the other creatures of the natural world, the human being backgrounded in favor of land and place and time. Henson enacts an inspirited vision of the living world, a vision which defies a ‘special’ spiritual understanding of the human species

Wendell Berry’s True World’s Sabbath

Poetry as ‘Complex Reminding’