📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00066 ¶ from The Burden of the Gospels ¶ Wendell Berry
The theefe commeth not, but for to steale and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might haue life, and that they might haue it more abundantly.
—found in The Bible (John 10:10; 1611 King James Version)
To talk about or to desire more abundance of anything has probably always been dangerous, but it seems particularly dangerous now. In an age of materialist science, economics, art, and politics, we ought not to be much shocked by the appearance of materialist religion. We know we don’t have to look far to find people who equate more abundant life with a bigger car, a bigger house, a bigger bank account, and a bigger church. They are wrong, of course. If Jesus meant only that we should have more possessions or even more “life expectancy,” then John 10:10 is no more remarkable than an advertisement for any commodity whatever. Abundance, in this verse, cannot refer to an abundance of material possessions, for life does not require a material abundance; it requires only a material sufficiency. That sufficiency granted, life itself, which is a membership in the living world, is already an abundance.
—Wendell Berry
—from “The Burden of the Gospels”
—found in The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (2005)