Cultural critic, poet, and Kentucky farmer, Wendell Berry, is to the publishing monolith what the late Robert Duvall was to Hollywood: a talented force who does not care a bit about changing trends and what is and what is not being liked on some silly social media platform.  In effect, Berry is true to himself and his art, making his words a breath of fresh air in a world where the aims are rarely noble.  He tells it like it is, and in doing so, remains a rarity, which is why his insights are that important, especially when they apply to universal experiences the vain and the self-absorbed can hardly speak to. 

I am fifty-one years old, and while I know that this is not ancient, it is an age, I am learning, where certain thoughts are unavoidable.  The cast of characters – family members and even friends – who populated my youth continues to dwindle.  Aunts and uncles are gone.  Cousins.  Folks in town.  We all had that landscape of humanity, and depending on where you are in your own lives, dear listeners, you can also likely understand what it feels like to experience its change.  It is a surreal feeling.  Were they really there, or was I dreaming?  Did they impact me more than I knew at the time?  What does it mean to cross paths in time and space?  Do our souls possess a greater wisdom that cannot be accessed in the here and now but only then: upon our parting? 

In my study, rosaries hang from the framed photographs of those who have gone on.  I share some thoughts on the meaning of the rosary in Episode 2 of The Professor’s Bayonet, and I invite you to revisit it.  The rosaries are reminders that death is but a transition – that death, as John Donne characterizes it, is nothing more than a comma – a pause – on the way to something greater.  In this life we can have intimacy with God; in the next, union.  For the latter is more robust than the former.  It is the preferred way.  It is, as the Baltimore catechism teaches us, “to be happy with Him forever” in the next life. 

As I write this, Wendell Berry is ninety-one years old.  If certain thoughts for this fifty-one-year-old man are unavoidable, I can only imagine that those thoughts and others are, for Berry, very front and very center.  For this reason, I am grateful for his wisdom: hard-won and given freely in a poem he wrote entitled “The Loved Ones.”  I share it here with you, dear listeners.  I hope it lands well. 

The Loved Ones 

The loved ones we call the dead 
depart from us and for a while are absent.  And then as if 
called back by our love, they come 
near us again.  They enter our dreams. 
We feel they have been near us 
when we have not thought of them. 
They are simply here, simply waiting 
while we are distracted among 
our obligations.  At last 
it comes to us: They live now 
in the permanent world. 
We are the absent ones.