Quotable: Coauthorship and Affirmation of this Life

From Norman Wirzba's introduction to The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002):

"Though more of us than ever before live a life of luxury and ease, fewer of us can claim that our lives are permeated with peace and joy. The frantic, stressful striving going on all around us indicates that we are profoundly lost. We seem unable to ask with any seriousness or depth the question of what all our striving is ultimately for.

Where can we turn for help and direction? In the same essay ["A Native Hill" (1969)] Berry concluded that the source of help cannot come from within ourselves for 'it is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.' The path towards wholeness depends on our discovery and acknowledgement of, and then response to, a greater goodness that contextualizes us. Our fundamental mistake is that we have presumed to be the authors of ourselves and our destinies, and thus have forgotten or denied that we are part of 'a great coauthorship in which we are all collaborating with God and with nature in the making of ourselves and one another.' We can only become what we truly are by acknowledging that we do not exist by, from, and for ourselves. Our lives are always rooted in a natural and cultural community, so that to cut ourselves off from these roots, whether that be in the name of progress or human liberation, is to ensure the eventual withering and then death of life. Once we have forgotten or denied our biological kinship with the earth and its inhabitants, it is hardly an accident that so much of human spiritual life is premised on an escape from rather than an affirmation of this life."

P.S. Watch WALL-E. Like any good prophecy, it is a distressingly incisive but still hopeful portrayal of the threshold on which we stand, and a striking wake-up call to the choices and consequences we face--not 100 or 1,000 years in the future, but NOW. Much worse off and no better prepared than we were 40 years ago when "A Native Hill" was written, will we have the wisdom to look to the sources (esp. the Source) that can help us "learn to be better than we are" and the courage to respond in time to avert (or at least mitigate) the (un)natural logical outcomes of industrial globalization and 21st-century consumer culture?