“The world, knowing how all our real investments are beyond the grave, might expect us to be less concerned than other people who go in for what is called Higher Thought and tell us that ‘death doesn’t matter’; but we ‘are not high-minded’, and we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus—not, surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours.
“The nature which He had created as God, the nature which He had assumed as Man, lay there before Him in its ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame…. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to—well, its unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it.
“Because Our Lord is risen we know that on one level it is an enemy already disarmed; but because we know that the natural level also is God’s creation we cannot cease to fight against the death which mars it, as against all other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.”
— C.S. Lewis, “Some Thoughts”
I didn’t learn until recently that “Practice resurrection” has become a sort of slogan. The phrase has worked itself into many sermons since Wendell Berry closed his “Manifesto” poem with the words, and it’s also the title of a 2010 book by Eugene Peterson. The only place I’ve personally read or heard it is in this poem. This post has been in my drafts folder for several months, since before Wendell Berry died. It is a wonderful expression of the fervor of his love that called out and pushed back against the wasting of communities, and of souls.
