So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

I am still mulling this over. the first stanza is pretty clear, but the second I am trying to parse. what is “a woman satisfied to bear a child”? is this about sexual courtesy and kindness, i.e. a man not pestering his wife for intercourse when she is pregnant? it sounds rather kindly and reponsible but then there is an undercurrent, a suggestion that pregnancy is a woman’s only excuse for refusing “conjugal rights”?

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

…excellent, the essence of tactical agility

I’m glad to see that you’ve discovered Wendell Berry. Besides being an agrarian anarchist, Berry is also a fine novelist and poet. (Wendell Berry enjoyed reading Edward Abbey, whose books are also well worth reading. Both Berry and Ed were influenced by the poet Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry is timely and timeless).

My favorite Berry poem is the following:

MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.
Want more of everything made.
Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery any more.
Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something they will call you.
When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.
Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

[...]

[Entire poem here, well worth a visit!]

Would seem that Jesus was a revolutionary. Otherwise, why did the state execute him ?

I tend to think of the Bible as record of ancient Jewish history. Valuable in that regard. However, it is important to study other cultural traditions.

“Nature belongs to God.” have to think about that, and as to whether that is likely to make people act right.

In the film, The Thin Red Line, the protagonist has a kind of internal dialogue with God, in which the man’s voiceover meets its replies in images, many of them of nature.

He asks questions like, Who are you to live in all these forms? And, What if there is just one big soul and each of us a part of it, like a coal that’s thrown from the fire?

Berry makes an important if oblique point about how we do politics here. A lot of us who are on the left have little to no familiarity with the Bible. Yet it is the one book with which the majority of our culture has at least some passing familiarity. And before I leave that sounding purely instrumental, religion is sought after to fill a real need.

Liberation theologians talk about three poverties: material poverty (a sin to cause or allow), spiritual poverty (death in life, disconnection, disenchantment), and solidarity with the poor (faith-as-practice, obedience to God).

As far as God and Nature, the “Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away “, as in the various mass extinctions followed by new speciations down through the eons. So, God herself doesn’t act like all her creations are holy.

Problem is, to my mind, that he’s trying to reform and re-immanentize the God of a faith (Christianity) that came about in an effort to reform and re-immanentize the God of a previous faith, that of Judaism:

Moses’ pulverizing and melting down the Golden Calf [in decrying the worship of "idols"] … gives rise for the first time to the idea of something earthly that is ‘nothing but’ earthly, for it is deprived of its imaginal shine. As God becomes worldless by obtaining his absoluteness, so earthly reality becomes God-less.

– Wolfgang Giegerich, from this essay.

The problem was there in the Old Testament, had a failed attempt at rectification with the New Testament (remember that bit about “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”? Didn’t catch on too well, for some reason) and continues to this day. The reason God must be regarded as distant, abstracted, apart from the earth, why nature must have been created ex nihilo and not from the substance of the divine, is because if the opposite were true, then communion with the divine could happen anywhere, at any time, without need of an intermediary. Without need of an intermediary between ourselves and the ultimate authority, earthly power structures fall apart. This is why Berry’s Christianity is so radical, why it is The Big Heresy.

But something about this “reform Christianity” has always bothered me, which is the way in which one gets to pick and choose the good bits from the holy texts, and selectively discard the other stuff (like that old bogeyman Leviticus.) This, of course leaves you open to certain charges from the other side, who of course practices a similar selectivity — “Love thine enemy” is all too conveniently forgotten when it’s time to get your war on, for example.

I dunno, I guess we have to work with what we’ve got. The religious impulse isn’t going away, including within myself, and starting over from scratch would be a most hazardous undertaking.

Personally, I admire Derrick Jensen’s bravery in admitting that he talks to trees, has conversations with the salmon and coyotes, etc., and not merely as metaphor … for if we’re not entering into conversation in SOME form with the natural world, it’s all too easy to regard it as dead matter, there to be commodified. Next thing you know, we extend that to our fellow human beings.

But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation.

The problem, of course, is that throughout capitalist history the true opponents of Caesar have found it necessary to erect counter-Caesars of their own to fend off Caesar’s armies, and thus you have the birth of “contender regimes.” This is why the opponents of the political economy of Caesar, with its domination and exploitation, have eventually been drawn into its orbit. It’s also why I think of Kees van der Pijl as an essential writer.

The amplification of the ecosystemic threat in the neoliberal era will perhaps persuade the human race to give up on the political economy of Caesar’s regimes. Everyone loses with a dead planet. It is in such a context that Berry’s writings become so meaningful.

Secondly, while Berry operates on the mythic plane, my thoughts repeatedly go back to the problem of “the Ring” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s polytheist/Catholic fantasy The Lord of the Rings.

To a certain extent, Tolkien’s “Ring” is a metaphor for the destructive powers of modern technology. In the story, the wizard Gandalf tells us that to keep Sauron’s ring to use it against Sauron would be to create a second great evil to match Sauron’s own. Thus to employ destructive technology to fight the lead technologists is to compound the problem presented by the technologies themselves.