Reflection on Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (2000)

I would like to share a few reflections about the book by Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (2000). This is not a book I would have chosen on my own. However, I am glad that the District Superintendent, Craig LaSuer, recommended it as reading material for pastors. I will offer my reflections in the form of a journal. Of course, as a pastor, I have special interest in the portions of the book that relate to the religious struggles of Jayber Crow.
Jayber Crow is the barber, and eventually, the janitor of the church and the grave digger, in the little town of Port William. His parents died when he was young. His aunt and uncle took him in, but they died by the time he was ten. He was placed in an orphanage, having used up his quota of such adults in his young life. He went to college, particularly interested in being a preacher. “The trouble started because I began to doubt the main rock of the faith, which was that the Bible was true in every word.” By reading the book from beginning to end, however, he could tell that “it” had changed. He found a big difference between the old people of the tribes and their ferocity against their enemies and the preaching of Jesus of the forgiveness and love of enemies. He even thinks there is a big difference between the unqualified “Love your enemies” of Jesus and the qualified, “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.” The same passage refers to doing good to enemies, “for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Where did Jesus ever see doing good as a form of revenge? He saw the Bible as a slanting upward until it got to killing Jesus, and then slanting down again when it got to Paul. The stories of Jesus moved him. He could imagine the stories being told. I can understand the disjunction he sees between Jesus and Paul. Clearly, there is a difference. However, I think that those who go through this comparison to the detriment of Paul are not willing to see the positive contribution Paul made to the growth of the church. In particular, the church was largely a Jewish concern until Paul led the way into the Gentile world. Further, my suspicion is that people who want to denigrate Paul also have an interest in critiquing the church of today. We need to remember that Paul has often been the source of much reform of the church throughout history, especially with the Protestant churches.
Significantly, I think, he says in Chapter 7 that questions were changing his mind. It got to the point where he could not open the Bible without setting off more questions. Finally, he was not just asking questions. The questions started changing him. I have often suggested that when studying the Bible, learning to ask good questions is an important skill. However, I had not thought of it in this way, that sometimes, the questions you ask start changing you. Such questions can change you toward becoming a more faithful follower of Jesus Christ. They can also lead you away. Either way, learning to ask good questions will change you.
He assumed that if he did not have the religion of Pigeonville College he had none at all. I also find this to be a struggle of many people. If raised in a home of one “brand” of Christianity, I think people often confuse leaving it to leaving Christianity. In reality, they are leaving a form or expression of the Christian faith that they find unsatisfying at some level. It may be that that “brand” needed to die in them so that the unique expression of the Christian faith that they need to make their own could arise.
With his re-introduction to the small town of his youth in Chapter 11, he says, “I began to live in my losses.” His young life had experienced so many losses. Going back to the place of those losses brought it all back. He would go back as the town barber, which he would be from 1937 to 1969.
Chapter 12 begins with an insightful reflection upon life as a journey. If one could do it, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line. One might start in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceed by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. One could take the King's Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. However, that is not the way he has done it, so far. “I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led – make of that what you will.”
In Chapter 14, we learn of Cecelia, who was “a regular churchgoer.” She was a “pillar of the church.” Yet, she was not a forgiving, forbearing Christian. He admits that the church might have stood “for some kindness or gentleness that she yearned toward in her heart.” He found that the church did not mean much to the men of Port William. If they went, they were uncomfortable. In fact, the chief occupation of the men “was to keep the preacher from finding out how they really talked and thought and lived.”
In Chapter 15, he discusses the sermon and preachers. What I found particularly instructive, as someone who has moved from community to community, is that you as a preacher are there for a brief time. The people stay in that community. You are just one chapter in their book of life. I thought of how difficult it can be to truly see yourself, as a preacher, as part of the community. In his reflection, he says the preachers in the town were young, freshly out of college or seminary. They went to school, apparently, to learn to say repeatedly, regardless of where they were, what had been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of the works of God. What they did not see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest. They had imagined the church, which is an organization, but not the world, which is an order and a mystery. To them, the church did not exist in the world where people earn their living and have their being, but rather in the world where they fear death and Hell, which is not much of a world. To them, the soul was something dark and musty, stuck away for later. In their brief passage through or over it, most of the young preachers knew Port William only as it theoretically was, lost, and as it theoretically might be, saved. This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to him. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes. Some preachers had “wakefully read some books.” In general, he weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing his mind to wander. Some of the best things he had ever thought of he thought of during bad sermons.
I can identify with much of what the previous paragraph says about the difficulty of preachers truly being part of a community. However, the religion he describes, that of not valuing the works of God, that of “lost” and “saved,” and that of “world-condemning sermons,” has never been part of my life. It has never occurred to me to scorn “the beauty and goodness of this world.” I do not remember a time when any of this was a religion from which I needed to extricate myself.
In Chapter 18, he reflects on marriage. “If you love somebody enough, and long enough, finally you must see yourself.” What he saw was a barber, grave digger, and church janitor, a bachelor, a man about town, a friendly fellow. This was acceptable, he thinks, but he was no one's husband. Sadly, a woman of the town Mattie, had a daughter who, tragically, was killed right in front of her, as a car hit the little girl while she had wandered into the road.
In Chapter 19, I liked the turns phrase, “History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world.” He also refers to “a little wave of time lifting up to eternity.”
In Chapter 22, he is slow dancing with Clydie (Mattie), who is married to Troy. “Clydie, my sweet, you feel heavy on the branch and ready to pluck.” She said, “You got it, boy.” He left the dance early. She thought he was sick. “I was sick at heart, and I don't mean that just as a manner of speaking; I was seriously afflicted.” In Chapter 23, we learn that he was married to her, “but she was not married to me.” Troy always seemed less married to her as he saw their marriage steadily worsen. Later, he refers to it as “my strange marriage,” which no one earth knew about except him.
In Chapter 27, he says that “To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there.” I thought of how difficult it can be for pastors to have such a feeling of home.
In Chapter 29, he observes that it is all right “to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing – the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.” He observes: “But of course the story of my life is not finished yet. I will not live to tell the end of it.”
At the close of Chapter 30, he wonders why Mattie stayed with Troy. He thought of two reasons. She was married to him, which she took as seriously as he would have had her take it. She also understood that, in spite of all his imperfections, he was also fragile. She sacrificed everything to hold him together. “And so she was defeated, a good woman who had too early made one bad mistake. And yet she persevered with dignity and good humor, and with a kind of loveliness that was her own.” He knew all this because over the years he would have moments with her (not sexual in nature) that disclosed her heart. In any case, she would die before Troy.
In Chapter 31, he says, “This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.” In Chapter 32, he says, “This is, as I said and believe, a book about Heaven, but I must say too that it has been a close call. For I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn to be a book about Hell.” For him, Hell would be to “fail to love one another … where we see no hope and have no faith....” He confesses, “I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love I am a man of faith.”
I found this to be a sad, melancholy book. I would like to think that life could be more full and rewarding than Jaber Crow lived. Yet, I am also mindful that for many people, the book of their lives is a close call between being a book of heaven or a book of hell. A human life is often made up of a series relatively little incidents and a relatively small number of choices that will bring about a “conclusion” to our lives, an “end” that we will not write. As Jaber Crow discovered, however, what tips the scales toward your life being a book of heaven is the degree to which faith, hope, and love have guided your life. Come to think of it, these are the theological virtues of the Christian church. If you pay attention to the letters of Paul, you will find that this triad is present, not only in I Corinthians 13, but in almost every letter. Jaber Crow, who thought of Paul as so negatively early in his life, ends up recovering the heart of the apostle.