Practice Resurrection: A Reading of Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto”
Wendell Berry published his poetic “Manifesto” in 1973, and its freshness more than 50 years later shows its brilliance. Berry’s warnings against greed, consumerism, and predictability still sound prophetic, and his exhortations to love and sacrifice still bite. Subtitled “The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front,” the poem presents a countercultural, deeply Christian pattern of life that may seem mad to the world yet still beguiles by its beauty.
“Practice resurrection” is the poem’s dramatic final line. Berry coined the phrase, and it entered English usage; Eugene Peterson even borrowed it for the title of his commentary on Ephesians. In the poem, the phrase names practices “that won’t compute” by the world’s logic. Some are explicitly theological (“Love the Lord” ln 14); others carry theology in the background (“Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts”).
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As a concept, “practice resurrection” calls us to a radically new and generous life because Jesus rose from the grave. Jesus is our example, but he also gives us eternal life, freeing us to spend this life. We practice resurrection now because we trust the resurrection to come. As Paul writes:
Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Romans 6:3
Stanza by Stanza
In its original form, Berry’s “Manifesto” was not divided into stanzas. Reprints often add divisions for ease of reading and commentary. I’ve organized the poem into five stanzas, organized by thematic coherence and rhyme markers. Though the poem has no consistent rhyme scheme, each stanza in my organization includes a rhyme or half-rhyme that begins in its first or second line.
Stanza 1 (1-12)
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
Like a fisherman, Berry opens his poem with a bit of bait. Do I “love the quick profit, the annual raise, / vacation with pay”? Of course. Who doesn’t? But the next line makes my nibble feel risky. Do I “want more of everything ready-made”? Sometimes, but not always. Then Berry sets the hook: these economic affections may make us “afraid / to know your neighbors and to die.”
The fear of death is the poem’s key concept. Berry argues, implicitly, that modern culture encourages this fear and uses it to turn us into complacent, predictable consumers. When fear drives you, “not even your future will be a mystery / any more,” because “when they want you to buy something / they will call you.”
Berry’s logic in this first stanza is both apocalyptic and conspiratorial. A critic could note that good work and a raise do not necessarily connect to the fear of death. And who are the forces selling products—the ominous “they”? Presumably other people: big business, big government, or even your neighbor selling vegetables at the farmer’s market.
In Berry’s defense, he targets not economic activity itself but nameless, faceless bureaucracies that treat consumers as numbers rather than names. He also identifies a real danger: ungoverned desire for economic gain. In this warning against greed, Berry sounds much like Jesus and Paul:
Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.
Luke 12:15
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.
1 Timothy 6:10
In other words, economic gain for its own sake is a kind of idol, which both our Lord and this poem warn us against. But how do we take this warning seriously in the everyday practice of our lives? In the next section of the poem, Berry proposes his alternative.
Stanza 2 (13-24)
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
In this second stanza, Berry shifts from prophetic warning to alternative practices. He presents them as biblical proverbs: exhortations without narrative context or clear structure. Like the practices themselves, the form “won’t compute.” Yet a deeper logic undergirds both the actions and the poem, though the world cannot grasp it.
“Love the Lord. / Love the World.” Berry begins with a twin exhortation that captures the Christian call and its apparent madness. The two commands seem mutually exclusive: you can love the Lord or the world, not both. But that assumes love stays contained, when in fact it overflows even to those who do not deserve it (theology calls this grace). Scripture pairs love of God with love of neighbor, as Jesus says:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Matthew 22:37-39
Berry’s reference to the government, the flag, and the free republic feels clichéd, but he knows what he is doing poetically. He plants an idea early in the poem, like a flag, and returns to it later with greater significance.
The stanza closes with a move I find harder to accept: praise of ignorance. Berry often distrusts science and applied technology because he links them to destroyed land and weakened communities. Yet retreating from knowledge is the wrong answer; without moral deliberation, destruction often grows.
Berry’s refusal to support anti-abortion laws is one example. He pleads ignorance about life’s beginning, though modern biology repeatedly identifies conception as the start of a unique human being. Here, less ignorance could mean less destruction.
Stanza 3 (25-40)
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotten into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
The third stanza develops an expansive sense of time. Instead of quick profit, Berry tells us to “invest in the millennium” and take as our crop a sequoia forest “that you will not live to harvest.” He repeats the millennial theme with humus that builds over a thousand years. Natural death and decay lay a foundation for the future, just as carrion sings of songs to come. Berry proposes an ecology of compound interest.
Theology also lies just below the surface. Notice the theologically charged words: millennium, harvest, profit, prophesy, faith, the end of the world. They recall another saying from Jesus:
Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
Mark 8:35-36
At the section’s end, this expansive sense of time reaches “the end of the world.” Ecology becomes eschatology. Yet Berry tells us to laugh. Laughter, like eternity, is immeasurable—a foretaste of the eschaton. I think of Frodo and Gandalf laughing at the end of The Lord of the Rings, reunited after the ring’s destruction.
Stanza 4 (41-50)
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
The fourth stanza turns from time to personal relations and concrete loyalties. It is full of memorable, strange proverbs—memorable partly because they clash with the world’s ethos.
For example, where the world sees no difference between women and men, Berry counsels us to “please women more than men.” What does he mean? The key is his qualification: “So long as women do not go cheap / For power.” Men typically pursue public power, for basic biological reasons that recur across many male animal species. But Berry gives the private sphere of home and family greater significance than public power.
Berry then gives two practical tests for pleasing a woman in decidedly private moments. First, “will this satisfy a woman / satisfied to bear a child?” Second, “Will this disturb the sleep / of a woman near to giving birth?” The second proverb especially captures extreme vulnerability, when a woman nears childbirth and stands farthest from men’s public pursuit of power. In another sense, this moment of labor relates closely to men’s labor in the fields, since Genesis 3 names both as consequences of our first parents’ disobedience.
Finally, Berry takes us to the fields, telling the man to go there with his love, to “lie easy in the shade” and “rest your head / In her lap.” Beyond the line’s double entendre, Berry suggests that the love of man and woman can overcome the curse of labor that afflicts them separately. That is why the man should “swear allegiance”—recalling the flag motif—”to what is nighest your thoughts,” namely the woman in whose lap his head and thoughts now lie. Their union reflects the ultimate union of Christ and the church.
More generally, Berry urges loyalty not to abstractions but to concrete people in our places and personal relationships. Such loyalty makes us less atomized, less predictable, and less manipulable.
Stanza 5 (51-58)
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
To mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
The final stanza renews the warning against worldly power, represented by “the generals and the politicos.” The danger is that power will predict us, manipulate us, and exploit our fear of death. The antidote is radical unpredictability: doing what does not compute. For his final image, Berry compares us to the fox, “who makes more tracks than necessary / Some in the wrong direction.” When I read this, I wondered: do foxes really do this? My research suggests they do not under normal circumstances, but may when hunted. In other words, Berry suggests that we are already being hunted—by external powers or by the allure of power and money within. These forces use the fear of death to steer us. But those who see through the world’s false promises can choose a better way. We can “practice resurrection.”
A Personal Appreciation
In multiple particulars, my own views diverge from those of Wendell Berry. He was skeptical of the industrial and information age, where I am far more enthusiastic of our technological progress. He was a lifelong New Deal Democrat, I am a lifelong conservative Republican. But Berry’s “Manifesto” is remarkable in part because it reaches across these lines. More than a commentary on culture and politics, it is a commentary on the human condition. And most of all, I appreciate how practical it all is. I’ve always thought of the resurrection as good news; in Berry’s pen, the resurrection is also a battle plan.
On Video
Here is a stirring reading of Berry’s “Manifesto” by Evan Koons. Interestingly, and perhaps appropriately, it is the only video associated with Koons’ account:
Image: Ancient Sequoia Woodland, photo by Virrage Images Inc. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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