The Quiet Work of Caring:
Establishing Life-Giving Boundaries
Within and Without
An Essay by
Jenna Henderson and Kimberly Miller
“…the work now most needing to be done
—that of neighborliness and caretaking—
cannot be done by remote control with the
greatest power on the largest scale.”
—Wendell Berry
[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”250″ identifier=”1400201616″ locale=”US” src=”http://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/51SH2dgswZL-1.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”164″] The idea that there’s always more deeply drives our way of life and informs the way we think of possessions, science, knowledge, and technology. To think otherwise is horrifying to many people. In his 2008 essay “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,” Wendell Berry mourns the effects of the “doctrine of limitlessness” on our culture and calls for “the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.” He continues, “There is now a growing perception…that we are entering a time of inescapable limits.” As the illusion of limitlessness fades, we will “come under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.”
Like Berry, we are grieved by the damaging consequences of the human race’s unrestrained actions on both personal and global levels. Becoming aware of our limits is sobering, but, in the end, results in the fulfillment of our better longings. According to Berry, there’s another way to think about constraints: “Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements…to fullness of relationship and meaning.”
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