One Good Tree - Ray Moore

I'm Lee C. Camp and this is no small endeavor exploring what it means to live a good life. What you're supposed to do I think is as much as possible understand that our life is a gift, our world is a gift, the creatures we live with are all gifts. That's Professor Norman Wearsba who's riding a rice is out of the rich intersection of theology, philosophy and agrarian studies. When you're living with animals and with plants you realize that you have to live on their schedule. Because if you don't take care of their needs your own needs are not going to be met. In today's episode Norman explores with us what it means to live in a deeply entangled mesh work world and how embracing our creaturely limits might be a key to authentic human flourishing. Nurture the places that nurture you. That nurture requires us to be servants of those that we take care of and that means you have to give up control. All coming right up. Hello friends Lee C. Camp here. There is as you may have noticed no shortage of content in the world. Opinions, endless outrage, plentiful, deep wisdom and thoughtful perspective slightly harder to come by. That's part of why we created the NSC notebook. It's our weekly email from the world of no small endeavor with reflections on a good life behind the scenes inside into our interviews and quotes that stuck with me long after those conversations ended. You'll also get a curated list of what I'm reading, watching and listening to, books, movies, music and other things I think are actually worth your time. It comes to your inbox every Tuesday, completely free. So if you'd like one less thing to doom scroll and one more thing to actually enjoy, sign up for the NSC notebook at nosmallendever.com. Hi friends, it's Annie F. Downs here and I am so beyond excited to share with you that I have a brand new TV show called I got to ask that begins airing Thursday, May 28th on the Wonder Project which you can find through your Amazon Prime video app. You may have heard of the Wonder Project because they're the ones who brought you the House of David and I am so honored and honestly have zero chill that I get to partner with them to make this dream come true. I love how Wonder Project is not only creating great original TV and movies that audiences can experience together but also curating content via their subscription on Prime video filled with meaningful stories. The first two episodes in my talk show I got to ask for me on May 28th followed by two episodes each on June 4th and June 11th. And every episode I sit down with a group of friends, some experts in their fields and some thought leaders, some just my real life people. And we talk about things like why is dating so hard in 2026 or how do I build a business? What do I do with fear and anxiety and so many more questions that I just had to ask? I cannot wait to hear what you think. You can subscribe today at I got to ask.com. When you're dealing with living creatures, plants and animals, they have their own rhythms, their own routines and sometimes it's something you don't want to have to deal with, right? Because you have things that you'd like to do according to your schedule. That's Professor Norman Wearsba, the Gilbert T. Row Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University. But central and his academic work is a much earlier identity in his life, namely having been raised on a farm in southern Alberta, Canada with the Rocky Mountains on his western horizon. When you wake up on a farm, it's one of the plants need. They have to be irrigated if you're living in an airy climate like southern Alberta isn't that man getting up at four or five in the morning to change irrigation pipes and then doing that two more times during the day and you're doing that while you're getting mosquitoes that are just attacking you as you're out in that green wet climate. That kind of thing requires you to put yourself aside. That's a thing that is hard for a young person to navigate. I think you see adults who have been farming for a long time and this is just part of the way that they live. There's a kind of sense that the world shouldn't exist on our terms, but that we need to figure out how to put ourselves in their terms and that requires a kind of patience, a kind of gentleness and a kind of mercy. After leaving the farm, Norman Wooden time find a love of philosophy and then he would find in time that his love of philosophy and his childhood experience as a farm boy were not antithetical to one another. Instead he discovered that the philosophy he loved and the agrarianism that he loved were mutually enriching. I'm at an interplay between the two could help us all learn to see reality much more clearly. We think of ourselves as single, unitary self-driving self legislating beings and what I want to say is from any sort of physiological point of view that's simply false and it's reflected every time you eat. You have to live by consuming the life of others. And the many you start to acknowledge the physiological dependence that we have on other creatures and you start to then reflect about social dependence on others and you start to realize I could not be who I am apart from parents, apart from teachers, apart from friends, apart from coworkers, all of whom have invested in me and have made it possible for me to do the things that I do. I mean, even something as simple as speaking a language already reflects your need of others because languages are social things which means that every time I speak others are speaking through me, every time I move my body, the bodies of other creatures are moving through me because I ate them. So the practices of the farming and some of the key constructs of philosophy each begin to inform the other. Farming can strew as an act of care and devotion. What it means to be a human can strew as an interdependent existence instead of some naive individualism and the reverence we owe not merely to one another but to the rich panoply of creatures all around us. How do you get an apple pie? It's an astounding thing to think about. Somebody had to realize that if you take flour and butter and cold water, you can get a flaky crust. It's a miracle that pie exists in the world. But to do that, you don't have to say, okay, I have to be grateful for wheat germination and that there's an agricultural community that figured out that you can take wheat, grow it and you can mash it and make a flower. And then someone had to realize that there's a thing called a cow that if you take its milk and you beat it up, you get butter and you have to mix butter with flour and you have to make sure that the water's cold and not hot when you're making this flaky crust. Right? This is it's a kind of miracle that reflects the kind of devotion that people had along the way to give us this amazing thing called apple pie. Today, my conversation with Professor Norman Wearspa. Norman Wearspa, welcome to Nuswond ever. Great to be with you Lee. So you are a farm boy become theologian. And I would suspect that there's something about you being a farm boy that's made it possible for you to do things as a theologian. You could not have done otherwise. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think that is fair to say. I would also say I didn't come to it by myself. It was really getting to know some other people who really helped me understand that first of all, scripture is an agrarian book. And I had never thought of it even though I grew up with farm folks and the person who helped me see that was Wendelberry. And so that put me on this trajectory. On the one hand, it was a way for me to reclaim some of my past, which was a really wonderful gift because it meant I could be more integrated as a person whenever I did theological or philosophical work, but it also put me on a path that I think was a little bit different because so much of the way theologians and philosophers have thought about things has been from an urban point of view. When you think back about days as a farm boy, what are visions or smells or memories that arise for you? There's so many. I mean, I grew up in southern Alberta and so the Rockies were my western horizon. And it could be very windy, but the wind often carried the smell of sweet grass. The smell of freshly cut hay is just still something that just forced me back to big skies and fresh air. It was just a wonderful time to be outside so much of the time and know that the place that you were in was just brimming with life. The large family, small family? Yeah, I was the fourth of four kids and my parents were obviously the ones who were running the operation with my older brother, but then a grandfather who was my mom's dad was at our place almost every day and probably the most important influence on my formation as a youngster because He was one of these people who had a kind of uncommon attentiveness to where he was and really was so gentle with the life that he took care of. And that made a deep, deep impression on me so much so that I remember I was supposed to start grade one and I refused to leave the farm. And so I missed the first week of school because I just preferred to be with my grandfather than being a clinician. When you say that he was gentle with all of the life he took care of, what does that look like? There was never an occasion where he would get angry with the animals that he was taking care of, even when the animals could be rather rebellious, even contancorous, and they could hurt you. He said, "These are animals that are taking care of our family. And we have to treat him with respect and just an example of the way he thought about the animals in his care. We had chickens and we had a bunch that we would raise for food broilers, but we also had egg-ling hands that we would keep about 25 or so. And they could go anywhere on the farm that they wanted to, but in the summer months in particular, after lunch, he would often grab a side and a bucket and he would go find some grass, six inches tall or whatever, and mow it down. This is really fresh grass, and so it's just something that chickens would love and he would walk to the chickens and they would come running to him. He would throw the grass and the chickens would jump in the air to catch the grass. And it was a totally unnecessary thing to do because these chickens could go anywhere they wanted on the farm, get their own grass, right? But he figured this made his chickens happy. So he said, "I got to take care of them because if they're going to feed me, I want to make sure that their life is a good life." And so that little ritual, it still sticks in my mind all these years later because, "A, it was so unnecessary and B, it was an indication of his kindness, but also his understanding that a farm can be a place of shared joy, not just for people, but even with the animals." And that's an amazing thing because you look at chicken farms now. There ain't much of that happening. [Music] Your book, The Sacred Life, you begin talking about the predominance of the notion of the anthropocene, which you kind of describe for us with the significance of that construct and what it helps us see. I guess the best way to start is to say that for about 10,000 years we've been living in this period called the holocene. And that's this period in which there was a kind of regularity, predictability to natural cycles. This was so important because it's within this 10,000 year window that human beings could develop agriculture. It's where we got food, it's where we learned how to develop fiber and forestry and so forth. And so the predictability of climate was really, really important for that civilizational development. But geomorphologists and natural earth system scientists said that around the year 2000 or so, we began to question whether or not something like nature's predictability could be assumed any longer because we had been putting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we were destabilizing the systems predictability because what all that CO2 does when you put it in the atmosphere, it acts like a kind of blanket. And that has now created this destabilizing effect and whether it's the great way to see this, but there are other ways as well, right? Acidity in the ocean, sea level rise, melt of glaciers and snowpacks. But one of the things that's really done is it's made weather systems much, much less predictable so that things like an early frost or a late frost are very hard to understand or predict. And so we're now in this world where we are through our industrial economic activity changing in fundamental ways, earth systems. There's another side to it too, which would be biological systems because of genetic engineering. We have obviously done genetic manipulation of plants and animals for some time. We've used a lot of poisons to try to control the kinds of weeds that we don't want to have in our fields. And these toxins are working their way into the tissues of living creatures. And the question is now, what is a human being when so much of its food contains all these elements that are affecting physiological function? And when you think about the prospect that we can engineer, cells and organisms, is it reasonable to say that we live within nature or that we are the bosses of nature, right? That's why it's called the Anthropocene because it's the Greek word anthropos, which is human. And it means that we're in the era of the human because whatever human beings decide to do, and obviously the deciding is not being done by everybody, it's going to shape the future of all life on the planet. And that's a new thing, right? Historically people have been dwarfed by the power of nature. You said there that it's not all humans. And in the book, you use the language that I think you pick up from somebody else of maybe as opposed to Anthropocene, maybe capitalocene. I'm back that for us. This is where history gets very, very important. When we think about the fact that for so many people, they've been peasants or they've been villagers and they have very little power. But then when you get the development of industrialization, and we look to 19th century England as the place where this really takes off, right? We get Isaac Watt who develops the steam engine and that puts in place a whole factory system that now runs not on water, that runs not on sunshine, muscle power, it runs on machine power. Right, that's a major innovation. And who decided that, right? It wasn't decided by most people. In fact, what we learn when you pay attention to the history is that industrialized methods of production require concentration of people in cities. It meant the world that Charles Dickens described where you have children working in factories going into minds to do this work. And there's a lot of coercion and there's a lot of violence involved in that shift in the way people navigate their daily lives. So they didn't have a choice in this, but there were certainly business and political elites who saw that it was tremendously to their advantage to put in a system in which the kind of wealth that can be generated through industrial systems is enormous. And so the capitalist system, the capitalist system that we see going off in industrialized worlds is not being democratically decided, it's not being democratically governed. And so you have to say that not everybody decided that they want to have this industrialized world. Before you have industrialized capitalism, you have mercantile capitalism. And that's so important because what this way of thinking about the world did is fundamentally changed how we thought about land. Think about how settlers when they came to these indigenous communities and claimed them as property, the people and the land. This is a completely new way of thinking about earth and about fellow creatures. To think that you could make it private property is a completely new innovation in the way people thought about their relationships to land and to fellow creatures. And so that transformation in what we think the world is is so important for putting in place then a whole new economy, political systems that all depend upon private property, the securing of it, the profiteering from it, right? That becomes the bedrock of modern cultures. And that's again something that a lot of people have not had to say in. I think it was in your book that I saw that you said that something like 90 corporations helped me with what it was. Yeah, I mean, the kind of wealth consolidation is really staggering. And even if you think about the current environment that we're in, the top 0.1% of the population controls something like 50% of the wealth of the world. Now that's just a staggering figure to contemplate. And what kinds of problems is it creating when you have that kind of wealth inequality? Thomas Piketty's talked about this in his writing about wealth inequality is doing to our society is the kinds of resentments it's causing. But also how the wealth inequality is creating a class of people who are mostly oblivious to the damage that they are doing through their economic policies. And because these are people who can shield themselves, right? And I'm part of that class. I mean, I live in a place where I don't have to see toxic dumps. But if you live in Cancer Alley in Louisiana, you're seeing that the cost of fossil fuels is reflected in cancer rates in water pollution and property values that have plummeted because they are now on toxic sites and things of this sort. So we're doing this. condoning a kind of wealth inequality, which is creating two classes of people, those who are insulated from the effects of what they do, and then the very large number of people who have to live with the effects of the dominant economy. You're listening to No Spong Never and a conversation with Norman Wearsba. I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode, you can reach me at [email protected]. You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in the episode and a full transcript. A lot of riches there that we hope you'll check out and make use of. We also have a free weekly newsletter in which I riff on themes and the behind the scenes going on called the NSN notebook. You can subscribe to that newsletter for free by going to our website at NoSmallIndever.com/newsletter. We'd love to get to connect with you in that way as well. Coming up, Norman and I discussed transhumanism, the problem with techno-optimism, and the hidden costs of convenience. Many of you don't want to just listen to these conversations. You'd like to go deeper than that. That's part of why we created NSC+ which is our subscriber community, where we share additional conversations, reflections, and bonus material connected to the themes of the show, especially looking for ways that this can relate to the practice of your own life. Recently, we started a new series called Reflections on a Good Life, in which I share brief reflections arising from some of our favorite NSC interviews. You might think of it as a weekly seven minute episode in which I pull out some pearl of wisdom from an interview and suggest a question on which you might choose to meditate to further cultivate some goodness in your own life. We've also launched a new bonus series called Books You Should Know. In the first installment, I sat down with Dr. Lee Warren for a conversation that quickly became one of my favorite interviews I've done in quite a while. So I'll waiting for you over at NSC+ and just as importantly NSC+ is what helps keep no small endeavor on the air and available for free to everyone. Subscriptions start at just $5 a month and if these conversations have been meaningful to you, we would truly love to have you join us. You can learn more at nosmallendever.com or click the link in the show notes and join NSC+ So you place the rise of transhumanism within this context that when one sees the so-called environment as something to be used or manipulated property to be used or manipulated people to be used or manipulated that in time you get transhumanism. So for those who can't see how you get from A to B, how does that happen? Yeah, I mean it connects a little bit to what we started talking about right where you're living with animals and with plants and you realize that you have to live on their schedule right to meet their needs because if you don't take care of their needs, your own needs are not going to be met. That nurture as I said requires us to be patient, it requires us to be servants of those that we take care of and that means you have to give up control and that's something that is very difficult for a lot of people to handle right. We want to be the ones in control, we want to be the ones that set the terms for our own life and that means you have to take control of others and so we've done that by taking control of land right putting it in the terms of property that we can assign various financial values to. We do this with agricultural products, we do this animals, we do it with workers, right. People think of other people as units of production or units of consumption. But eventually this has to turn to ourselves, our own bodies because to be in a body and not just have a body, we are our bodies. You then have to deal with the fact that our bodies they fall apart, they don't always do what we want them to and we don't like that and so transhumanist part of what they will be doing is they will be trying to figure out how do we bring our bodies under a kind of regimen in which we can stave off illness where we can even solve death as a division of Google is talking about. And so we get visions of engineering, the human being, so that we can live forever, right, right, right, Kurzweil, one of the founding figures in the transhumanist movement. He longs for the day where all of the physical infirmities that he deals with are solved. And that's a very strange way I think of looking at a human being that we are a problem to be solved. I think the much better way for us to think about ourselves is to say that we're a mystery that we're supposed to cherish and take care of and honor and celebrate. I mean, that's the important thing to be doing. The one other obvious big category that relates all this is just the notion of a frictionless life. And our pursuits of ease. What do you see that doing to us? Yeah, that's a really important question. We know that there's something wrong with that. The minute we translate that to the level of interpersonal relationships, right? So imagine somebody says, "I will be a friend to you, but I will only be your friend as long as you don't cause me problem." Right? The minute that happens, you're going to say, "Well, that's not a friendship." But that's the reality of a human being's life, right? We can be beautiful, we can be wise and witty, but we can also be really difficult and complex and a bother to other people. And so to think that we should have relationships that are governed by control and ease or the friction-free future that Silicon Valley wants to promote, it just breaks down immediately when you translate it to interpersonal relationships. One could assume from what you've described for so far that climate change is not merely a scientific problem, but maybe a moral and social one as well. Yeah, I think that's really important to say because the world that we have in which climate change has become such an all-encompassing and vexing issue, is a world that didn't just happen, right? Choices have been made that drive economies that are creating the very problems that we're dealing with. And if we don't talk about the choices that are being made by decision-makers, political, economic leaders, and so forth, we're going to assume that we can just keep going and things will somehow just get better. And that's a delusion. We know what some of the mechanical or geophysical drivers are of climate change. We know about CO2, we know about methane, we know about sea level rise, we know about how these things are working in the mechanics of their working. But we're not talking about the kinds of cultural transformation that are going to be required for us to prevent these kinds of things. And I think most people would agree that we're now past the stage of preventing. We've already gone 1.5 degrees Celsius past into pre-investual levels. So really what we're at now is this stage where we have to figure out how are we going to do the adaptation in various communities. And some of them are going to have to adapt in ways that others are not. So for instance, in North Carolina where I live, coastal people are already thinking seriously about how long we're going to be able to stay in their communities because when hurricanes come through, these communities are facing tremendous flooding. And we need to be serious about thinking how do people who are living in these communities handle something like migration, which is a big deal, right? If you've grown up in a place and you think this is your home, and suddenly you have to leave because you just physically cannot stay there, it's not safe. This is a serious issue. And what I want to emphasize is that while we are facing this difficult future, we can still create moments and places where beauty and goodness can thrive. But we have to do this with a kind of clear vision about what's required of us, how we need to change, not just our economies and our built environments, but we have to change ourselves in terms of what our expectations are. [Music] That would your respond to someone who says, "You're just being pessimistic. You're lacking optimism that you're not taking seriously the human capacity to use technology to solve our problems." I think one of the reasons I don't like techno optimism is that it assumes that there's a kind of savior, Elon Musk, for instance. He's going to come up with that gizmo that's going to get us energy that costs nothing to the environment, costs nothing to us personally. And I'll be the first to say there's a lot of technological development that I applaud. And I want to say we don't want to go back. I mean, who wants to go back to an era before antibiotics, for instance, or the kinds of sanitation systems that we have. But I think we also have to be very clear idea about how so much technological boosterism is marked by this singular inability to subtract. It's only the positive things that get mentioned and never the negative side effects, which invariably are unforeseen and then they come as a kind of shock. What are the costs associated with our desire to have artificial intelligence, for instance? When you think about data centers, when you think about the numbers of people who are putting in data who are not getting paid a living wage or you're thinking about the cobalt mines in the Congo where people are living lives of misery so that we can have the chips that we need and the batteries that we need to run all of our technological devices. We need to expand the scale of our vision and think about how are we doing accounting that is more honest, that is more unphasing of the good and the bad. When we do that, I think we can get into a position where we can start to say the costs of some developments are simply too high. It's interesting that you refer to accounting there, especially given that I think so much of the popular rhetoric around these kinds of conversations is that those who speak on behalf of the, we'll use the problematic word environment or the theological word creation, those who speak on behalf of such entities or realities are oftentimes typified as being anti-human and/or even anti-business and yet there you are referring to obviously as we'll talk to you in just a moment, you're very pro-human but there you are appealing to a business construct as crucial here. I come out of the humanities philosophy and theology are the languages that I work in most of the time and we can be notorious for just being anti-capitalist or anti-business and that's just silly because we are economic beings right we are ecological beings but we're also economic beings which means we live by the exchange of the things that we need from each other and we depend upon the use of a world and in our use of each other and of the world we need to make sure we're doing justice by how we use what we use how much we use and that's accounting and I think what troubles me about some of the various forms of accounting that we see now like fundamentalist free market ideologues they will not count a lot of things because either they don't think they matter or they're just oblivious to those costs right and so when I talked about the cell phone a second ago to run that cell phone we need lithium batteries we need all sorts of heavy metals and we need all kinds of minerals we don't see the mining sites we don't see the communities that are devastated we don't see the illness of people and because we don't see it we don't count it and so the true cost of a cell phone is not reflected coming up as a short break followed by our discussion on the illusion of the individual the true meaning of sacrifice and the wisdom to be found in rest when you talk about being a human you use this language of a mesh work world what does that mean yeah so one of the ways to talk about our cultural moment is to say that we're in the grip of a neoliberalist way of thinking and neoliberalism as many people would experience it is this idea of individualism itself reliance itself making so that if you succeed you're good and if you fail it's all your fault and it's reflected in the suspicion of social programs it's reflected in our reliance on the automobile right independent choice go wherever you want whenever you want on your own terms and anything that would suggest the common well-being is cast as a socialist or even communist so this idea that we are self-contained self-determining beings that are individual is physiologically false and it's also personally and socially false because for us to exist others have to be existing through me at the same time I was not raised on a farm and I didn't hunt much but I remember the first time I went dove hunting and I remember we shot a bird and my father taught me how to ring its neck and I remember the warmth of the blood running across the back of my hand and the first time I'd ever had that experience and I've always looked back on that with gratitude because I think one of the things that it taught me was that we live by the sacrifice of other living creatures and other living entities it made it so real to me it was a very different posture I think that I just got in that one little glimpse that you're pointing us to this sort of gratitude and joy in our interdependence that gets obscured by our consumerist world I think you're right about that and you know to bring it back to my grandfather I think that is at root what prompted gentleness in his own demeanor toward other living things because he knew that if you're going to eat a chicken you're going to take its life and that's a very sacred moment if you don't treat the chicken as just a mechanism right if you see it as a living being that is feeding you so that you can live you know the hallmark of the sort of sacrifice that you mentioned is there's always the question why in cultures around the world is the animal that is sacrificed only ever a domesticated animal right wild animals are never sacrifice in religious traditions around the world and one of the best explanations I think that has come up for this way of living with creatures where you sacrifice them is that there are two offerings that happen at the sacrificial altar one is the offering of the animal yes but the other thing that you're offering is yourself and if you're not offering yourself through the care that you show to the animal that you sacrifice your sacrifice is illegitimate and that's why I think when you look at the Israelite prophets they denounce sacrifice because what's happening in Israel at this time is that people are showing up at the temple and they're just buying animals and they're at the altar and the priests are saying but there's no life of self offering you've done nothing to care for this animal and the way we know that you've done nothing to care for this animal is that you have an uncaring disposition and that uncaring disposition is reflected in what the prophets denounce which is the fact that there are orphans there are widows who are not being taken care of right so the whole sacrificial sensibility is dependent upon the people who offer sacrifice having cared for what they are sacrificing and this is why I think the language of sacrifices becomes so troublesome is that we we see in our cultures the language of sacrifice being used to oppress people or to diminish other creatures right when we send young people into war and say you're making a sacrifice for this country but the war is not a just war we can see how sacrifice can be misused and and distorted by taking out the self offering care that is always the prerequisite for legitimate offer and he goes back to what you're saying earlier about in the quest for the frictionless life we lack the formation that can make us caring people right because it's if it's all up to what's capable to me as a consumerist being then I never have that kind of cultivation of self where I become the person who cares for others or cares for myself or cares for the world around me yeah I mean if you think about how when you live in the world where you manage your existence you're taking care of your livelihood through just shopping for things you never really have to figure out well what was the care that went into the making of these things right and I think that's a real signature issue for me now is we're in a world that is a wash with things that we can purchase but are we learning to cherish any of the things that we buy and the fact is that they're not often cherished because we're so content to throw them away and get the new and improve version so the ability to care I think is absolutely foundational to us being able to live better with each other but also to live better with our world to live better in our neighborhoods to live better in our homes to live better with any of the things that we use in the day to day you adopt or seemingly sympathetically nod to indigenous religious if we want to use that language indigenous religious traditions which might be surprising to someone as a Christian theologian and you explicitly set that against western traditions so how do you see that working yeah I mean it's complicated because on the one hand it's dangerous for western white guy like me to just go and sort of ransack indigenous cultures and wisdoms because We think it can solve all of our problems and have really no connection with the lives of these indigenous communities. And so I really think it's important for people who want to engage with indigenous peoples that they do this in postures of respect and have gotten consent from the people that they want to learn from because just as imperialist colonists took over indigenous lands, now we're trying to take over their knowledge. One of the things I would say is that it's not just indigenous traditions that interest me, it's also pre-modern traditional agricultural traditions. The point that's the important one is how do you find and work with traditions that have spent generations, hundreds of years actually, navigating their place in the world by learning the practices of care, the practices of attention. And I just remember talking once with Robin Kimmer about the book "Brating Sweet Grass" is a fabulous book, so many people have read it. And she talks about how the kind of life that she talks about there grows out of respect for the life that you're engaging, like learning the wisdom of trees, the beauty and the nurture of wild strawberries. These are things that, "A, you don't presume upon because you should never presume upon the life of another because every life is a sacred gift." This is something that grows out of the lived experience of taking care and being attentive, being watchful, learning practices of restraint, learning the practices of Thanksgiving, right? I mean, think about the Thanksgiving address that so many indigenous cultures have in varying forms. It's a humbling thing for you to take the time to enumerate the gifts of water and soil and seed germination. And when you do that, it changes your posture. Let's shift there towards thinking a bit more about, "Okay, what do we do with all this? What is this meaning? More concrete specific terms." So you have an opening inscription in your book that says, "We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds from Eddie Haliesom, who has understand was imprisoned in the Holocaust and then was put to death." What do you see us begin to try to do that? I'll bring it back to my grandfather again because I grew up with him in Western Canada. And obviously he was an immigrant. He had been farming in Central Europe before the war years. And so as a generation, like the generation that raised me were all refugees from that war, they saw what brutality can do to the world. The kind of destruction and devastation is simply beyond my comprehension. It's hard to fathom so much of Europe reduced to rubble. Food just simply unavailable. Civic order gone, right? And so he understood what human beings can do when they are desperate when they become violent. And I think that this prompted him to figure out or at least think about tremendously what does gentleness require so that we live in a world where the people we meet, the land we tend, the creatures we take care of, we do it out of a posture of how utterly precious this life is and how easy it is for human beings to violate that precious sacred character of life. Now, the way this translates, I think, for us today is we're going to need kinds of practices, rituals, I might even say, that bring us into the presence of each other so that we can appreciate them as precious. And this is difficult because we live in a culture that is all about optimization. It's all about acceleration. It's about maximization. And the pacing of life is brutalizing, but the pacing of life is also the sort that makes us oblivious to who we are with, where we are, who we ourselves are. Right? I mean, how often do people just take the time to reflect upon how amazing it is that you have a friend who will sit with you or eat with you or that, you know, you have a body that needs rhythms where you have rest as well as exertion. And because we've become so oblivious, one of the practices that has become increasingly important to me is the practice of Sabbath. It's one of the greatest gifts the Jews ever gave the world, I think, because the Sabbath is so much more than simply taking a break from the crazy schedules of the week. The Sabbath is about orienting people in the world so that they come to experience themselves and the world they are in as a place of beauty and goodness and therefore worthy of our delighting. And the way they put this in the scriptures, right, it's in Genesis 1 to 2, beginning in chapter 2, is they have a description of God resting on that first Sabbath sunrise. And it's an astounding thing because why would God do that? And the answer that they gave was because resting is the climax of human activity. And by resting, they don't mean stopping activity. They mean resting as being in the world so that you're no longer governed by restlessness, wanting to have more, wanting to do more, wanting to be more. What the Sabbath is saying is that rest means that you are so in the presence of the other that you are with that delight and absorption are the things that you want to achieve. And they recognize that this is not going to be easy because our schedules are such that we can quickly become damaging in the ways that we live with others. And that's why they said you need to have the Sabbath observed regularly and you need to do it in community because when you're living in an anti-Sabot culture like I think the one where it is, you're not going to be able to say, "Oh, I'm just going to do Sabbath by myself." You need encouragement, you need people who will help you be accountable. And when you're in that posture of being in the presence of another in such a way as to value and appreciate their goodness, their beauty, their never again to be repeated freshness, you might say, you learn to treat them differently because what you're supposed to do, I think, is as much as possible, understand that our life is a gift, our world is a gift, the creatures we live with are all gifts. And if we can learn to find ways to remind ourselves regularly, not to presume upon their life as if they're hours to do with whatever we want, we'll live more gently, we'll live more mercifully and we'll live much more in the posture of generosity and compassion. Talking to Professor Norman Wearsbaugh. Norman, thank you so much. Been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for your good work in the world and all of the ways you provoke us to consider things that we too often ignore and to our great peril. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. Leave us great to talk with you. [Music] Here's one closing take on today's interview. Normans telling the farm was not a place of mere food production. It was a school, a school in creaturely humility and dependence, and learning that the world does not exist on my terms. When you're dealing with plants and animals, Norman said they have their own rhythms, their own routines. And this poses a direct challenge to a great modern illusion that independence is possible or even desirable. And put it bluntly, this idea that we are self-contained, self-determining beings that are individual is physiologically false and personally and socially false. If that's true, then the quest for a good life moves beyond the pursuit of mere independence and toward practices of grateful and responsible interdependence. That sounds abstract, but it's highly practical, like Norman's critique of our ordinary practices of accounting. Because we don't see it, we don't count it, he says. The costs of our convenience, technologies, and food, the costs born by workers and land and creatures and communities, those do not disappear because I do not see them, or because they show up nowhere on our profit and law statements. Another practice is Sabbath. Not merely a break from work, but a refusal to be governed by wanting to have more, wanting to do more, wanting to be more. Sabbath schools us to see life as a gift to be cherished, as a place for delight, not merely more stuff for consumption. Which brings me to Norman's grandfather, whose story I found myself telling my wife. Having seen the brutality of World War II Europe, Norman says his grandfather had come to understand what gentleness requires. years later. on the farm, he would cut fresh grass for chickens who could have found their own grass, and he would simply throw it up in the air for them, simply because Norman said, "He figured this made his chickens happy." That sort of gentleness is not cinnamon-tality; it's a disciplined way of seeing that all around us is gift, not raw material. And maybe a good life begins there, not in getting more from the world, but in becoming the sort of person who can take delight in the flourishing of what we do not control. That's a small, but not so small take on today's episode "Peace to You, my friend." You've been listening to No Small and Never-Hunter interview with Professor Norman Wiersba, Gilbert T. Row Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University, where he also serves as a senior fellow at the Keenan Institute for Ethics. Norman is also the director of research at Duke's Office of Climate and Sustainability. We great-for-ling knowledge the support of Lily Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation, supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion. All right thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christy Bragg, Jacob Lewis, Carried Harmon, Jason Cheesley, Sophie Byard, Kate Hayes, Mary Evelyn Brown, and Audrey Griffith. Our theme song was composed by Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together. No Small and Never, it's a production of Tokens Media, LLC, and. "Great feeling, studio."