Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Abby Hogge: My Choosing#4

       Wendell Berry “The Kingdom of God”

             Below is an excerpt of what one scholar suggests through Wendell Berry’s work, “The Kingdom of God”, a mystery that man cannot seem to understand despite all the earthly developments and progress made.  This mystery is between creation and mankinds inability to understand all that is within nature.  Berry notes that humans are limited in their understanding of nature and of creation.  We have to accept ourselves as lower than our Creator and not expect our intellect to reveal every mystery on this earth.

            "To call the unknown by its right name, `mystery,' is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, smaller patterns," Berry writes. When humans rename mystery as "random," they either marginalize the importance of the unknown or they hold out hope for some future understanding. The failure to admit human ignorance, Berry warns, ultimately leads to the exploitation and destruction of creation” (Berry). 

            We want answers and quit answers to just about every mystery or problem that we face. We have so much technology and so much knowledge and intellect that we often find frustration in the things we can’t explain. Nature can be seen as one of these things. Something so beautiful and wonderful filled with many mysteries.  We will create theories, gather evidence and whatever else to try and say we have answers to these mysteries but reality is we do not.  We can only answer so much about nature and maybe this is meant so that we will enjoy what we do not know and soak up the beauty of these mysteries. As Eisenberg writes in Ecology of Eden, we have to be willing to touch nature and not just look. Touching nature gives us an intimacy for this mystery that we cannot understand any other way. 

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