A Little Foolishness

A few days ago, I posted a poem on here and said I was going to write a little bit about it. There are a lot of wonderful things to write about in Wendell Berry’s poem, but I’ll just write about the initial thing that struck me when I read it (you can scroll down and read it if you want).

Primarily, I love that poem because it reminds me of something that I need to be reminded of (whether I want to be or not). That is, I am complicit in perhaps (to my mind) the church’s gravest failing; we’ve become boring. This poem points out something that I certainly (and I think many other Christians as well) forget so often. That is, we Christians forget that if we are going to be serious about following and imitating that Jesus fellow, we’re going to have to do some wild and crazy things. Because that Jesus character, that Man of Sorrows and Divine Comedian all in one, was a madman.

He’s the fellow who went around saying that he was God, saying that he could forgive sins, saying that he could raise people from the dead, saying he was going to be raised from the dead himself. All that stuff he says is crazy. And it’s even crazier when it turns out it’s true.

It almost goes without saying that if He showed up saying those sorts of things today, we’d institutionalize him (or give him a lethal injection or something). We’d not listen anyway.

I don’t think we’re listening now. We Christians so often tend to be some of the more boring people in the world (the url “sharetheboredom” is more of an acknowledgement of my complicity in this perpetuation of boredom than it is indicative of my view of the world—I’m not a bored person, though I am a pretty boring one). And we’re awfully easy to peg (particularly if you look at how easily manipulated we are by our politicians).

And we shouldn’t be that way. We should be just as elusive and mysterious as our Messiah is. Because if we do what He did and do what He said to do, we just won’t quite fit in the world. We won’t compute. We’ll be sort of like a resistance movement during an occupation, constantly fighting against those forces of death and oblivion and soulnessness that rule here. We’ll be Christian fools and will certainly never be normal or boring.

“Your are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again?”


There’s certainly no new ideas here (I haven't had one (at least not a good one) yet). St Philip Neri said way back in the sixteenth century, “If a thing is dull it is not Christian.” And the scriptural Jesus, with all that wit and those dramatics, can’t be seen as boring. But I guess that finding out that the Christian story is something new and something adventuresome to be lived is something each Christian must discover and must remember. That’s why I love that Wendell Berry poem. Our words and our world sometimes seem so old, and Berry’s poem makes them seem new to me again. And it reminds me that resurrecting old, dusty words and an old, broken world is our job.