I haven't posted for a while, and I'm not sure I've ever posted anything that wasn't a commentary Scripture. (I started the blog to assist my last congregation in Bible reading, after all.) However, this quote is on my mind. It's from Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth. If you haven't read Berry, you should. I haven't read his non-fiction, but his fiction is a wonderful observation of the meaning of community and the human cost when community is lost. Anyhow, this exchange happens between Mat Feltner and his daughter-in-law, Hannah, as he is describing a farming mistake that his son, Virgil, had made which resulted in a landslide.
"'Finally, I put my arm around him and I said, Be sorry but don't quit. 'What's asked of you now is to see what you've done and learn better.' And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence--that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I've tried to keep before myself. What you do on earth, the earth makes permanent.' He laughs, and looks at Hannah, 'Every time I make a mistake, that gets more painful to believe.'"
I've come to see the wisdom there. I've certainly been guilty of not seeing the permanence in my actions. Theologically, I tend to think on my feet. I tend to talk until I've worked out an answer. I notice this especially in Bible study, but sometimes I find it happening in sermons, too. I say something for shock value, to elicit a gasp, to gain attention, and I forget that words once spoken can't be unspoken. Said another way, I'm struggling to understand that nothing is purely academic. A preacher talks about suffering as an academic, bloodless subject at his own peril because he is talking to a roomful of sufferers. A preacher who discourses on the fate of the unbeliever better reckon with the reality that his hearers include a lot of folks who know a lot of folks about whose salvation they are less than certain. Frankly, it's one of the reasons I don't talk much about politics: what I take as obviously ill-advised, another may take as equally obviously wise--and a word once spoken is permanent.
Every word is spoken into a context. Some contexts we can identify and address. Some contexts surprise us when a landslide opens at our feet. Everything is personal for someone. I wish I were better at anticipating the many contexts in which my words will be heard than trying to clean up the landslide.
