Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel and in no way frightened by those opposing you. For them, this is evidence of their destruction but of your salvation. And this is God’s doing. For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for him as well, since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.
(Philippians 1:27-30, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
I keep several Wendell Berry books near my desk.
Looking at my shelves, my eye is drawn to a collection of “Sabbath poems” written between 2013 and 2023. The story behind their composition, a practice that dated back to the late 1970s, had piqued my interest: On Sunday mornings, Berry would walk through the land around his Kentucky farm, allow his mind to wander, and set down such “unintended thoughts” as might emerge. As I read them for the first time, I came to admire the clarity of his language, the specificity of his imagery:
I wake in the dark
in the deep night
and the room is filled
with the smell of rain.
But I didn’t turn to Berry’s poetry after his death at the end of August. Instead, I found myself reaching for What I Stand On, a two-volume edition of Berry’s nonfiction published by the Library of America just under a decade ago. I had a specific essay in mind: “The Burden of the Gospels,” which had appeared in The Christian Century back in 2005.
“For most of my adult life I have been an urgently interested and frequently uneasy reader of the Bible, particularly of the Gospels,” Berry wrote; though he had faith, he admitted to a frequent lack of confidence in his relationship to what he had read. For him, it came down to two questions: “If you had been living in Jesus’s time and had heard him teaching, would you have been one of His followers?” and “Can you be sure that you would keep His commandments if it became excruciatingly painful to do so?”
I think we would all benefit from wrestling honestly with those questions.
As the essay continues, Berry turns to a promise Jesus makes as he unpacks the parable of the good shepherd: “I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10) He notes that Jesus doesn’t offer his followers greater abundance in life. No, instead of material wealth, Jesus invites us to a greater abundance of life—a life filled with greater joy, greater peace, and above all greater love.
If we believe in that promise, we have to hold up our end of the covenant, but that doesn’t always come easy. The apostle Paul understood the difficulty. When he wrote to the Philippians he was sitting in prison, yet he remained confident “that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my salvation.” (1:19) He endured the suffering because, even though he longed to be with Christ in death, by staying alive he could continue to minister to the Philippians (and others). “And this is my prayer,” he told them, “that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless.” (1:11)
Paul recognized that living in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ required a group effort, everyone “striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.” The abundant life Jesus promises begins, as Berry wrote, when we “become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life,” embracing our interconnectedness and working together to help one another flourish. “Love,” he explains, “is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another.”
From that premise, Berry elaborates what I’d call a vision of the blessed community.
“The way of love is indistinguishable, moreover, from the way of freedom,” he writes:
“We don’t need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another—that surely would be to have life more abundantly.”
As Quakers, I’d argue, we should want to live in the world Berry described. And that means we need to figure out how to bring that world into existence. Generations of Friends took it as, well, gospel that Jesus had provided the world with a playbook and remained on the sidelines, ready to coach anyone who would listen.
Whether we believe in that divine guidance today or not, we still have to discern what it means to love God and love one another as ourselves on a day-to-day basis. We can take comfort, though, knowing that even the earliest—and most passionate—of Jesus’s followers struggled to answer such questions.
We want to hear from you, not an AI! Please be thoughtful and use your own words. Comments on Friendsjournal.org may be used in the Forum of the print magazine and may be edited for length and clarity.