On Tuesday 22 March 2011, I realized that my heart would always be broken. I think my heart had been broken for a long time before that, but that is the day I realized the magnitude of that brokenness and understood that it was irreparable. It was not a girl who broke my heart--indeed, I am currently in a relationship that is going exceedingly well. I have not had any dreams shattered. In fact, I have been accepted to my two first choice graduate programs. Neither is it a sort of depression. I have found a deep, abiding joy in Christ and enjoy merely living. What I believe I have found is the pain of loving that which is beyond oneself--the pain of caring.
For a seminar I am taking called Sermon on the Mount and Story, we are reading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. The titular character is a barber in a small Kentucky community called Port William. As his character grows through the story’s progression, the functioning of the community teaches him about what it means to love a person. Once he himself then learns to love the beautiful Mattie Chatham with a pure love, he then sees what it is to love the world.
If God loves the world, might that not be proved in my own love for it? I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die. I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world. . . . His love is suffering. It is our freedom and His sorrow. To love the world as much even as I could love it would be suffering also, for I would fail. And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart
Reading this book, and perhaps the above passage in particular, was the culmination of many things in my life. All my life, I have had a growing love of beauty in the world. It is that love which has drawn me to my artistic pursuits as well as to my enjoyment of hiking and camping. The beauty of nature has particularly captivated me--I see it in almost every aspect of creation. I can find as much beauty in fog as I do in sunshine, as much in a flower as in a bone. I also marvel at human ability to create beauty, whether it is a painting, a building, or a story. Something of an artist myself, I often attempt to create beauty as well, and in so doing feel closer to God. As I have recently begun exploring the medium of photography, I have found myself drawn to certain subject matter, one of the most overarching of which is the decayed. Things that are rusty, broken, chipped, peeling, dirty, and forsaken draw me to them. And in a strange way, in finding a beautiful composition or engaging colours, I understand a bit more of God’s redemption. Making the ugly beautiful is a kind of love.
It is my love of beauty that has driven much of my life. I think it is also the reason why, for a long time, I have had a nagging resistance to those who reject this world that God created (as distinct from the world as the system of values perpetuated by those who do not follow Christ) in the hope of heaven. I saw beauty as a measure of heaven on earth and, in a small way, a fulfillment of Christ’s prayer "on earth as it is in heaven." To think that we might all be snatched away to some other place while the world crumpled into destruction made less and less sense to me.
Then I read N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. It connected me with an understanding of eternal life that, for some reason, no one had really told me about, by way of the resurrection of the dead into glorious transformed bodies that resembled Christ’s resurrected body to live forever in a fulfilled earth: the New Jerusalem. This was a revelation. I suddenly understood why I felt so drawn to the beauty of creation; I understood the worth inherent in the world. I also understood the responsibility placed on humans to take care of this world and to serve as agents of God’s redemption in the world, something we do by caring for both this creation and for the people in it.
This is something that Jayber Crow demonstrates beautifully. The book is filled with his reflections on the beauty of nature and the sight of heaven. After all, Jayber himself 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.
Furthermore, by living out the questions that he has about his faith, he comes to what seems to be a Christ-like love for his world and for the people in it, even for his enemy, Troy Chatham. This love brings him tremendous pain, especially as he must grapple with loss of all kinds:
I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.
I am too young to know fully the sort of loss that Jayber describes here. But I have begun to know a measure of it. I have lived in communities and loved them and then left them--its own sort of loss. There are so many people from high school whom I have not seen since graduation, and will likely never see again. Last year, I was in Oxford living in one of the richest communities I have ever known, made some friends that I care fiercely for, and I had to say goodbye to that. It took leaving my home and finding a home nearly four thousand miles away to make me understand that I have no real home, not one that is permanent anyway. In an instant on Monday, March 21, a simple hand gesture someone made reminded me of a friend from Oxford and sent a wave of memories and emotions I could not have expected. And it hurt. Such losses I already carry with me, and as I look forward to another graduation, I know that more are to come.
I have also, in some measure, learned to love the people in this world. One of the things that my college experiences, and notably the literature/philosophy seminars, have awakened in me is a humanist passion that sees worth in all people, a worth I see, in large part, derived from the love that God bears them. And thanks to the internet, to the News as Jayber would put it, I am able to learn instantly of unspeakable tragedies all over the world, tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns in Japan, rioting in the Middle East, rape and genocide in Africa, wars and rumors of wars. It is heartbreaking. However, I myself am not given to emotionalism. I would never respond, as my friend Kate did to the crashing of a Polish flight in Russia last year, saying, "How can you even think of anything else when this tragedy is happening?" I am not stabbed with pain by such situations. I know that there is little I could do for most of the grief in the world, whether I think about it or not, and this knowledge is what makes me ache for these situations. A week before, my friend Bea posted on her blog about her struggles accepting the fact of her relative comfort and all of the pain in the world. Her thoughts were incisive and forced me to face the ache that has lived in my heart, to acknowledge it and speak its name.
And the night of Monday, March 21, I read of Jayber’s love, and his pain. Tuesday, 22 March 2011, I had not been awake for a whole hour when the rush of thoughts of friends, of suffering in the world, and of the eloquent thoughts present by Wendell Berry, and I realized that my heart would never not be broken. In some ways, that realization was a prayer--as Jayber says, "sometimes a prayer comes that you have not thought to pray, yet suddenly there it is and you pray it." It was a dangerous prayer. Those words said only to myself were the birth of a little white bird that has plunged its beak into my chest and now carries my heart.
Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
