For many spiritual seekers, author Wendell Berry was a fellow pilgrim and contrarian

For Kentucky author Wendell Berry , the environmental crisis he lamented to such great effect in his essays, poetry and fiction was also a human crisis — a deeply spiritual one.

Berry, who died Monday at home at age 92, drew that connection in poignant writings across many decades.

“Persons cannot be whole alone,” Berry wrote in “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture,” his classic 1977 work. “It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.”

While Berry inspired writers, artists, local-food activists, environmentalists, agrarians and many others, some of his deepest admirers were moved by his spiritual vision.

Spending Sundays amid the ‘timbered choir’

That’s despite — or maybe because of — Berry’s skepticism of organized religion. He called himself a “bad-weather churchgoer” because in finer weather, he often skipped church to spend Sundays in what he called nature’s “timbered choir.”

He was too steeped in the Bible and his Baptist heritage to fit the common notion of “spiritual but not religious.” But he was too independent-minded to be pigeonholed…