For a segment of the Christian circles I run in, “community” and “sustainability” are buzzwords. What has crossed my mind about those circles (not the only ones to talk about “community” and “sustainability”) is that there is an answer staring us in the face that we don’t want: The Amish.
I’m not talking about a sentimental picture or visiting Amish country. “Sustainability” and “community” probably go together, and it could be that the Amish questions about technology tie them together.
What if we can’t keep eating like we do? By “eating,” I mean not just what we eat but how and where it is produced.
What if the things that breakdown “community”—cars, phones, this blog—are also the enemies of sustainability?
It’s a thought experiment with and about the Amish, really. At some point, they were technologically on par with the rest of
It seems to me that it comes down to choice. The more you can choose who you hang around, the less neighborliness there is. If you can choose someone across the world on the internet, you don’t know your neighbor. If you can drive across town to see friends, chances are, your neighbors won’t be your friends.
Such choices have their benefits—neighbors can be freaks or dangerous, you may not want to get involved with them. But there is a downside as well. I have been on
As long as we are leading such separate lives, we’ll be stuck chasing after what we can get how we can get it. And that’s not sustainable, at least not the way some might like to define it. I think sometimes it gets defined in such a way that makes some kind of disaster seem inevitable because so many are hungering for some kind of different life, don’t have it and maybe an apocalypse will spur them and us on to it.
Be that as it may, “sustainability” and “community” will be very hard to achieve. We want to keep doing what we have been doing, living like we have been living, but somehow make it sustainable. What if we had to adopt many Amish ways to find community and be sustainable?
Or is that we want to differentiate ourselves, to create some gluttonous “other,” and then ascribe Holiness to ourselves? It may not be sustainable to keep talking about sustainability.
2 comments:
Aaron,
This past semester I finally got to meet Wendell Berry. The professor of my Sacraments and Globalization class - a class centered around the practice of the font and the table in the midst of global poverty, wrestling with the Eucharistic implications of global hunger, the Baptismal implications of lack of access to clean water - invited him to visit with us, and to speak before the entire seminary community in our chapel. He politely decline the chapel invite, saying he had no interest in addressing a crowd. But he happily accept the invitation to meet with our class.
So toward the end of last semester, Wendell Berry dropped by my class and captivated us for a full three hours (class was only scheduled for an hour and a half, but how do you ring the time bell on Wendell Berry?!?). His lecture - which wasn't a lecture at all, but rather a series of improvised monologues responding to whatever questions we had for him - covered just about every conceivable topic. But much of it came back to the themes here, especially community.
Long story short, this posted sounds very much like what he had to say to us that day. And, as far as I'm concerned, when you write something that sounds just like Wendell Berry, you're doing something right!
dude, the high-profile presbies in town call me an "anabaptist" and refer to our little clatch over here as something out of their playbook... ironic, since i'm a skateboarding, ipod-listening, apple-computing participant in the technological age...
i think we should meet in dry ridge for lunch.
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