Wendell Berry & the Wisdom of Jayber Crow

 

Wendell Berry is an American author, philosopher, and curmudgeon you might not know but he has been one of my favourites for decades. He is a poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, and college professor and he just turned 91. Berry is also a Christian although his use of Christian imagery is subtle with themes of Sabbath-keeping and respect for Creation. In other words, my kind of guy.

During the past couple of weeks I've unearthed books I wasn't looking for as I was seeking others I couldn't find. Among them was one of my all-time favourite novels, Jayber Crow, written by Berry in 2000.  I'll say right away that I once quoted from it in a sermon, a parishioner read it, then declared that not enough happens it it. She was correct in a way because it's about a boy who is orphaned so taken away from his small Kentucky farmiing community to an orphanage.  Along the way he almost becomes a minister, studying at a seminary, and almost finds love, only to see the young woman marry a man for whom he had no respect. 

Jayber eventually returns to Port William, known and yet not known, and becomes the barber, a skill he learned in the orphanage. He eventually takes being the cemetery grave-digger, and the church janitor as well. In all these roles Jayber (a contraction of his nickname "Jaybird")he is an observer and confessor of small town life. 

There is a brilliant chapter with the title The Beautiful Shore in which he shares thoughts about being an on-the-edge churchgoer: "even when I was sitting  in the church I was on the outside." The young pastors who came and went talked a lot about the lost who needed to be saved or risked damnation, including everyone from other religions. Jayber didn't believe it and figured most others in the pews didn't either and perhaps the preacher didn't either. 

Jayber is convinced that these folk who dutifully listened to other-worldly sermons actually loved this world. They loved good crops and livestock and the shade of trees and wild rasbperries and laughter and music. When the service was done they went home to heavenly meals to which the pastor and his family would be invited. 

I can't do justice to this chapter but I practically swoon when I read it again. This quote speaks to me as well, even though I was deeply immersed in organized religion for decades as a pastor: 

...as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.

I'm pleased that Wendell Berry has made it through another year and hope that he is still healthy in body and mind. 

Thomas Merton’s hermitage in the mid-60s where Wendell Berry chats with Merton and Denise Levertov.