“Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones / And those who are in misery cannot remain so long / If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth / He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.”
-William Blake, “The Holiness of Minute Particulars”
“No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.”
–Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth”
Among the numerous ‘centering’ quotes plastered on the wall of my office is the above statement by Wendell Berry. I remember the feeling I had upon reading his words for the first time several years ago: refreshment, possibility, hope. Berry in 1965 left an illustrious position as professor of English at New York University, to return to his native Kentucky, where he and his family would tend a 117-acre Henry County homestead.
Berry’s essays, poems, and novels, speak as prophecy to me; prophecy not in a predictive sense, but in an apocalyptic (unveiling), truth-disclosing, existentially re-orienting sense. His sentiments emerge from a life that has become nearly indistinguishable from its place, from a human heart that beats as one with household, earth, and air.
Our world today is beset with a bewildering array of crises, from viral pandemic and nuclear war to rampant gun-violence and civil strife. It is tempting, at such a time, to deride figures like Berry as being escapist, separatist, or worse: passive. Yet Berry’s localized conscience, his sense of “particular responsibility,” may be the best cure for these problems which plague our world.
William Blake, one of Berry’s poetic ‘instructors’, writes: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars / General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer / For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars / And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.”
Any attempt to generalize our conscience, to be concerned for “the world” at large, is a plea of the scoundrel, the hypocrite, the flatterer. It is an exercise in emptiness, futility, even folly.
“No matter how much one may love the world as a whole,” writes Berry, “one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.” Walking the streets of New York City, this acclaimed literary critic was doubtless bombarded with grand visions, activist pleas, global proposals for progress, peace, and salvation.
Berry, however, returned home, to the earthy rural womb of Lane’s Landing, Kentucky. (He writes about this place with piercing tenderness in his famous essay, “A Native Hill.”) Berry, like his predecessor Blake, believes that effective, transformative living can only happen on a local scale. To love and serve “the world” then, is to love and serve one’s household, one’s neighborhood, one’s place.
Such particularized action is not passive; it’s neither separatist, escapist, nor inefficient. Such action is the only kind that is real, that can actually, concretely change the world.
“Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones / And those who are in misery cannot remain so long.”
To ignore the “little ones,” to neglect the “minute particulars,” in favor of grand visions, global impact, and world change, is to truly do nothing at all. It’s to live somewhere other than here, to commit hypocrisy in the grossest sense of the term, and to fall ever more deeply into folly.
Berry and Blake thus provide hope to little ones in little places. They provide hope to the nameless, the ordinary, the small. They provide hope to those suffering other-than-newsworthy pain; hope to those serving communities unacknowledged, undistinguished. They provide hope to the myriad “little persons,” like you and me, whose efforts at times feel too small.
The specific, the small, the local, together is the world. These tiny worlds-within-worlds, households, neighborhoods, institutions, and the work we are doing therein is real, it’s constructive, it’s worth it.
As you go about your days and weeks, loving your families, helping your neighbors, serving your communities, know that you are changing the world. You are transforming and reconstructing the only world there really is, a world that is holy and particular.
To Blake and Berry then, I might add another, whose words have been fulfilled beyond our wildest dreams:
The kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed that a person took and sowed in their field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds even make nests in its branches (Matthew 13:31-2).
Jonah Bissell
Associate Pastor