Although many of us do not live in an intentional community like Philip and his family did, we can heed his wisdom and take steps to control technology to the point that it doesn’t displace our neighbor.
Philip’s writings remind me of the farming community I grew up in. My father was a thresher for many years. At one point he worked for twenty-five neighbors, spending day after day at their farms threshing, husking corn, hulling clover, and filling silos with corn. Those neighbors – Methodists, Catholics, Mennonites, Lutherans, and Amish – all shared their labor for the common good. As I told my father, he probably saw the best years of American agriculture, a period when there was enough technology to lighten your load but not enough to replace your neighbor. When my father lay dying, I would turn to his diaries from his years as an active farmer, and read from them to him. “Yes, yes,” he would remember; and he would smile.
But back to the poetry that forms the heart of this book: in spite of the many hardships Philip and his community weathered in leaving his native England and hacking out a livelihood in the harsh wilderness of Paraguay, poetry never stopped flowing out of him, like water from a spring. With Wendell Berry, he believed that “life is a miracle.” And as his last poem, “Toucan,” shows, he never lost his youthful sense of wonder:
The boy there,
Standing, staring,
Staring at the bird –
Eyes alight, breath held,
Bare toes gripping the sand,
Wonder-held.
The boy there,
Standing, staring –
That’s my son –
A sound from me
And he will turn,
Dart to me,
“Daddy, did you see?”
Reading Philip’s prose and poetry, you feel the kinship he had with all living things around him, both human and wild. His ability to see into the mysteries of their lives reminds me of what I have read of the Lakota Sioux. They knew that, removed from nature, a person’s heart becomes hard; and that lack of respect for living things soon leads to lack of respect for one’s fellow humans too. Philip kept himself close to the softening influence of nature.
To be sure, Philip’s poetry also reveals his total commitment to Christ as Lord of his life. He believed the Sermon on the Mount where it reads, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33), and he trusted the promise of the Psalmist, who wrote, “I will both me lay down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety” (Ps. 4:8). And yet this belief in God and in the goodness of creation did not make Philip self-satisfied. On the contrary, whether writing poetry, farming, or probing the science behind it, he kept grappling with the question, “How shall we live?” It is this tireless search that gives him undiminished relevance so many years after his early death and makes his contributions as a poet and a lover of the land deserving of as wide an audience as possible.
David Kline, an Amish organic farmer in Ohio, has written three books: Letters from Larksong, Great Possessions, and Scratching the Woodchuck.
* A.E. (George William Russell), “Earth Breath.”
TO THE READER
JENNIFER HARRIES
Let this be the way that I go,
And the life that I try,
My feet being firm in the field,
And my heart in the sky.
Who was Philip Britts? His life was short, and his biographical details are easily summed up: He was a farmer and pastor, a husband and father. Born in 1917 in Devon, England, he became a pacifist and joined the Bruderhof, a Christian community. During the Second World War he moved to South America, where, in 1949, he died of a tropical illness at the age of thirty-one, leaving a widow with three young children and a fourth on the way.
The Bruderhof started in 1920 in Germany. Inspired by the first Christians, members hold property in common and try to follow Christ wholeheartedly, living out Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. In 1937, Hitler’s government expelled the community and its members fled to England, where an offshoot of the original group had started a community on a farm in the Costwolds the previous year. It was here that Philip and his wife Joan joined, as did my parents and I. From that time on, Philip’s story and that of the community were intertwined.
Philip was a tall, thoughtful man, not given to many words; throughout his life, he retained the typical West Country speech of the Devon farmer, slow and deliberate. He loved the work on the land and the mystery of growing things. For him to be part of creation was joy – to work with nature, not against it, and “to see in growing corn the fingerprints of God.”
After Philip died, his friends began, from time to time, to receive gifts from his young widow: poems that she had found and collected after his death, and copied out for them.
Most of Philip’s poems and essays have never been published before. Why now? His generation faced great dangers and upheavals, but so does ours. Philip’s response to his own age’s trials – to root himself in God and dedicate himself to a community and to the land he farmed – speaks to our age. Perhaps this is particularly true because his community was itself driven from country to country and continent to continent, and because the earth he tilled was not the West Country soil of his birthplace. His story is not a romantic agrarian elegy, a throwback, but a real human life lived in the thick of history.
Today, Philip Britts’s record of his experience of the natural world is particularly poignant because we are, perhaps even more than he was, aware of the fragility of that world and of our role in stewarding it. Pope Francis has called our use of nature “indiscriminate and tyrannical.” In his encyclical Laudato si’ he writes, “The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.” Elsewhere, he has pointed out that “an economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water … are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth.”
Today, time-tested social structures and moral teachings are being cast off, even trampled on. New wars erupt before old ones have ceased. And technological changes threaten to uproot us from the natural world. In a world of concrete and smartphones, we find ourselves craving reality.
Philip Britts shows us where and how we can slake that thirst. Later writers have shared his sense, best expressed in his poems, that nature is not just nature, but points to something mysterious and profound beyond itself. Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Paul Brand, and many others have sought to express the sense of awe, the link to the transcendent, that they find in the natural world. Wendell Berry writes about life as “miracle and mystery,” and Albert Einstein says, “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.”
But
