Prayer for Finch

Oh Lord, you are the resurrection and the life.

You have promised that we who believe in you,

Though we are dead

Yet we shall live;

And that we who live

And believe in you,

We shall never die.

You are our Shepherd,

Therefore we lack nothing.

We lift up our eyes to the hills

From whence comes our help.

Our help comes from the Lord

Who made heaven and earth,

Who leads us into green pastures

And brings us beside the waters of comfort.

Except we become as this your child

We shall not enter your kingdom.

Receive this child,

Your servant, Finch,

As you would have had us receive him,

And conform us to him

That we may one day stand together with him,

United in the presence and fulness of your joy.

We commit the body of this child to the ground,

Knowing that he shall hunger nor thirst any more.

For the lamb who is on the throne shall feed him

And lead him to fountains of living waters

And shall wipe every tear from his eyes.

God our Father, Father of mercies and giver of comfort,

Deal graciously with we who mourn,

That, casting our cares upon you,

We would know the consolation of your love.

And give to us to endure and persevere to that day,

When this casket will be shattered,

And these clothes will fall away,

When we shall be clothed,

And be changed,

And made like him,

Beholding him face to face.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen.

Interview with Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry in The Hedgehog Review →

I’ll get this out of the way: lots to quibble with in this interview. Nonetheless, Wendell Berry makes me re-think what the church should be doing like few others can. Some quotes to whet your appetites:

…and meanwhile, we’ll let the churches be in charge of getting people to heaven, and they won’t have to worry about our economic life at all. And the arts will concern themselves with nature but only as subject matter, only as a source of metaphors. That’s wrong, in my opinion. I think all the disciplines gather under the meaning of economy, the making of the household, the making and maintenance of the human household, and that involves everything.

When you’re talking about the land use economies, you’re talking about the fundamental economies. What we are talking about are the arts of life, and the fundamental arts of life are the arts of land use. We have preferred to think of the arts of life as the arts of living, the code of hospitality to guests, good table manners, and so on. But the issue is more economic and more serious than that. So if we began to think about all the arts of life, then we would maybe have the beginning of a real criticism. Are these good arts or bad arts?

And the engineering arts also are economic arts. They are the way that we construct, so to speak, the household of the human economy. And to turn the construction of that household over to a bunch of materialist specialists is a serious mistake.