The Way of Wholeness
Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
I have a friend named Bill. We’ve been watching birds together, off and on, since I was 10. Bill, now in his 80s, has been watching birds since he was a teenager. A couple of years ago, as we birded on a fall day in Arkansas, I called out a Bald Eagle flying overhead. After the eagle passed from sight Bill said, “I think you spot so many more eagles than me because you expect to see them.” What he meant by that is that for much of his birding life, these alpha predators of the sky had simply been absent.
Their absence was because of DDT, a pesticide that was widely used until Rachel Carson’s brilliant book Silent Spring called attention to the detriment this chemical was having on birds. Eagles and other raptors were particularly affected. The pesticide that accumulated through the food chain made their egg shells weak and they would not survive incubation. Both Peregrine Falcons and Bald Eagles were on the endangered species list; a fate reversed only after DDT was banned and decades of conservation efforts paid off. Now birders of my generation are not surprised to see falcons and eagles in the sky; while birders of Bill’s generation still remember what it was like without these incredible birds soaring overhead.
To lose a species, especially in the rapid sort of decline that eagles and falcons experienced, is to have lost something of the wholeness of a place. Suddenly, something that was an integral part of its health and common life, is now gone. And that absence leaves those that remain diminished; there is a gnawing absence. As Rachel Carson writes in the opening of Silent Spring: “There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was spring without voices…only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”
I could not help but think of Silent Spring as I read our lesson from Jeremiah for this Sunday. Like Carson, Jeremiah calls attention to a place where “there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.” His is a vision of creation unraveling in a time when the earth itself is mourning from the desolation. And the source of this destruction is the foolishness of the people, their failure to live in intimate knowledge of God.
The knowledge of God, in the biblical vision, has ecological implications. It reflects a kind of wholeness rooted in the God who is One, the creator who made a world that reflects that unity in the community of all life. To live according to God’s ways, in knowledge of who God is, is to find the way toward ecological fullness. This is a truth reflected in Wendell Berry’s new book, The Need to Be Whole. In an excerpt from the book recently published in Plough, Berry writes of the way of love we are called to inhabit in the Gospels. This is a way that very much reflects what it means to know God. “As a force and a way of being,” writes Berry, “love is never satisfied with partiality. It is compelled, by its own nature and logic, to be always trying to make itself whole.”
It is this being compelled toward wholeness that is at the heart of Jesus’ ministry—a truth put forth in his dinning with those on the margins of the holy and his parables of the lost sheep and coin. Jesus was always working to bring the community of Israel away from the partial and toward the whole. And any community, any “order of loving care,” as Berry puts it elsewhere, would have at its center such a constant reaching out, the regular work of restoration, reconciliation, and healing.
Berry illustrates this work beautifully in his short story, “Watch with Me.” In the story, a mentally ill man nicknamed “Nightlife,” goes wandering away from home and runs into some trouble along the way. Various members of the community of Port William begin to follow him, working to make sure he is safe and brought back into the life of the community. At the end of the journey they have a kind of impromptu church service where Nightlife preaches on the parable of the lost sheep. His is the perspective of the lost one, and all present realize in some small way that they have participated in the parable. They had been drawn by their love for this neighbor into leaving all the work they had before them that day, all the 99 things that called for their attention, in order to bring back into the fold this lost one.
Together, Jeremiah and Jesus, offer us a message of the need to be whole and the consequences of the partial. When we move out of the life of knowing God, not a mental assent, but a participation in the way of wholeness, there is violence that extends through the whole of creation. It is a lack of knowledge that leads us to a desolation of neighbors and neighborhoods, wild and domestic. The resulting silence is not the quiet of God’s presence, but a defening absence in a world that has been fragmented by our disordered desires.
Jesus offers us the way back toward the common song of wholeness—a way that is attends and watches for the one who is separated, the person whose voice we no longer hear in the song of our common life. Our work in this world of partiality is to join the way of Jesus, looking for the one who needs to be brought back, the neighbor living in the terror of separation. If we attend to those lost sheep, seeking the wholeness to which God calls us, then there are ecological implications as well. For love, true love of the neighbor, will seek the wholeness of the neighborhood and all its members—wild and domestic, human and otherwise. Such a love, enacted, will join us to the chorus of all creation, overcoming the dreadful silences of our selfish ways.
