Wendell Berry: On Ducking Doctrines

Cover of Leavings: Poems

If I'm a theologian I am one to the extent I have learned to duck when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, dropping their loads of whitewash at random on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.  Look down, look down, and save your soul by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly indifference this off-fall of the air.  Christmas night and Easter morning are this soil's only laws. The depth and volume of the waters of baptism, the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks of those most surely saved, God's own only true interpretation of the Scripture:  these would be causes of eternal amusement, could we forget how we have hated one another, bloodying the world, by means of such questions, wrongly asked, never to be rightly answered, hour after hour, day after day; year after year - such is my belief - in Hell.

-- Wendell Berry in Leavings: Poems