The Dark Night of the Soil: An Agrarian Approach to Mystical Life

[God] is at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence. And yet, since it is the underpinning of goodness, and by merely being there is the cause of everything, to praise this divinely beneficent Providence you must turn to all of creation. It is there at the center of everything and everything has it for a destiny. --Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names I, 5 We are all praising, praying to The light we are, but cannot know. --Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1985, III In The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry wrote that as a writer his struggle has not been to "find" a subject but rather to know what to do with the subject he has been entrusted with from the beginning. The "subject" he was referring to was Henry County, Kentucky, the region of his birth. "I was so intricately dependent oh this place that I did not begin in any meaningful sense to be a writer until I began to see the place clearly and for what it was" (141). Seeing a place clearly, Berry notes, is "an enormous labor," one that begins with the realization that we belong to a place rather than the other way around. To know that we are not the owners or possessors of the world amounts to a "startling reversal of our ordinary sense of things" and culminates, at least for Berry, in what became his governing ambition: "to be altogether at home here." The ambition to allow oneself to be entirely governed by a place, by one's belonging to thrushes and herons--this aspiration being the briefest and clearest characterization of "agrarianism"--is "a spiritual ambition, like goodness" While other creatures instinctually live in place, human beings must make the choice--informed by intelligence, propriety, and virtue--to be in place. "It is an ambition I cannot hope to succeed in wholly, but I have come to believe that it is the most worthy of all" (LLH, 150). It is unlikely many would call Berry's ambition mystical, particularly if we go by popular characterizations of the term restricting it to obscure and esoteric teachings, or exceptional, ecstatic experiences providing direct access to and awareness of the sacred. According to this common view, a mystic is someone who has extraordinary states of consciousness in which unity with the divine is achieved. As William James famously put it, a mystic has a special faculty, much like the musician has a special ear, that is open to particularly intense states of feeling into depths of truth "unplumbed by the discursive intellect" and beyond the reach of institutional religious authority (Lectures XVI and XVII). (1) Mystics, in other words, are people possessed by special powers that take them out of the realm of the ordinary, out of the places of daily life and struggle, and into the holy realm of an ineffable God. For a number of reasons this characterization of mysticism, though having historical precedent, needs to be challenged and corrected, particularly in a self-absorbed time like our own and when creation itself is threatened by neglect, abuse, or outright destruction. (2) Rather than being a peculiar type of experience or paranormal state of consciousness, we do better to understand mysticism as a practical process and a way of life that is, in principle, available to everyone. Though the goal is an encounter with God, a mystic is someone who is particularly open and attentive to the presence of God in this life and world. What the "presence of God" means, or who the God is that we surrender ourselves to, is, of course, not something that can be determined beforehand. Indeed, and as the witness of many mystics confirms, the God we meet on a mystical path is most often quite unlike what we expect, imagine, hope, or fear. This is why they speak so often of a "God beyond God" (Clement 26-35). In fact, given our propensity to worship the gods of our own devising or comprehension, the gods who will best sanction and further self-promoting agendas, Meister Eckhart advises the following prayer: "I pray God to rid me of God" (qtd. …