BLACKBERRY PICKERS

Today's blog post is meant to do double duty – it will give me something to post here AND it will help me sort through aspects of a paper I have to write by Wednesday, comparing two books: You are What You Love by James K. A. Smith and For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann.  

Smith’s book contends that humans are shaped by their pursuit of what they most love. And even though we believers say we love God, we are living in a culture which is caught up in the pursuit of material pleasures and entertainment. Our characters and spirits are shaped by our habits – holy habits (such as worship and the liturgies of the church) form us as disciples while worldly habits (like consumerism) and binge-watching Netflix slowly de-form us.  

Schmemann’s book is interesting – and challenging – because he writes from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, a tradition which closely embraces ritual and liturgy and sees them as the gateway to the great mysteries of life and faith. Schmemann wants his readers to get beyond the idea of sacraments as mere symbols of reality and to get beyond the arguments over the mechanics of various sacraments (questions like “When and in what way does the bread become the body of Christ?”) and instead experience sacraments as a window into deeper realities, God’s very present holiness embedded in our physical experiences.  

My paper is meant to explore what the books have in common, and I think it is this: a warning against making a false division between the spiritual and the physical.  

It put me in mind of a famous line by poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, /And every common bush afire with God; /But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, /The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” 

When I looked up the poem containing this line, I was excited to see my instinct was right: Browning, as Smith and Schmemann after her, warned against dividing the spiritual and the physical:  

“Natural things,  

And spiritual,—who separates those two,  

In art, in morals, or the social drift,          

Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,  

Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse, 

Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men, 

Is wrong, in short, at all points.  

 

The result of not seeing the spiritual reality embedded in the physical is that humans sit around picking blackberries, unaware of the glory of God around us. Furthermore, according to Browning, humans then “daub their natural faces unaware, /More and more from the first similitude.” 

Her image is this: the blackberry pickers also apply more and more makeup to their own faces, all the while getting further and further from the image of who they were created to be in the first place!  

I don't want to be a blackberry picker, do you?