On how Jayber Crow Changed my Life

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.

On Process

I have been rather silent on this blog lately. It is not a matter of having nothing at all to say, but rather too much. And by the time I would finish writing about it, what I wanted to say would probably have changed entirely. I have been thinking a lot lately about a great many things. I have been changing inside, and I don't really know yet how to fully express that change. Someday I will write about it here, but I am too much in process right now. I have too much to chew on to be able to speak. However, I feel like whenever things do find their way from thought into utterance, it will come with quite a sudden rush.

On Dealing with Living

There are times when I tire of the routine of school and the expectation of a job or of more school, and at such times, I desperately desire to get away from everything and try to support myself with my art, devoting all of my energy to reading and writing and painting and drawing and creating; and there are times when I remember that I am nothing without people in my life and I would create nothing of worth if it were not for the people in my life. Because they open me up to worlds I cannot see by myself, and they make life worth living and art worth creating and because they matter more than school or work or art.

We are, each of us, a word spoken by God, and together we are the story of his love for all the world.

On Magnets

Hey, check out these cool magnets my girlfriend got for me:

I'm going to make so many poems, and I'll totally let anyone read them. In fact, I'll probably start another creative writing tumblr devoted to pictures like the one above, though with the words slightly more carefully arranged.

On Ending

Today was the first rehearsal for The Importance of Being Ernest in which I have been cast. It will be my final production in college. This department has been one of the chief joys of my undergraduate experience, and already I feel myself slowly detaching from it. I feel an incredible momentum pressing behind me, and there is no telling what effect it will have as it carries me along through the next month.

Should be exciting.

On Stories

I have long held the assurance from God that he was going to use my writing in some manner, though he has left it foggy exactly how. I have done my best to trust him in that, and done fairly well on the whole. However, I have left everything up to him to accomplish it. Lately, God has been revealing to me more and more how he wants to work with those who follow him. I have come to the realization that it is not enough to trust that God will use my writing. I need to work at including him in my writing process, seeking his words.

For a class I am taking called Evangelism and Discipleship, one of our assignments was to come up with a rule of life: a series of disciplines for our own lives as an act of seeking God. In consequence of what I had been learning from God, I decided to augment my daily scripture reading by freewriting afterwords. This has been incredibly rewarding. It gives me a large part of what I used to get from writing a poem every day without the detriment to my craft: catharsis, a burst of creativity, a place to spill some thoughts and reflections. I have been pleased with some of the ideas that are coming from my freewrites and have developed some stories out of them.

A good friend of mine suggested that I post one of these stories on my blog, and I decided to take her advice, so here is one of my recent stories inspired by my reading"

I looked out the window and saw the sun low in the sky. Still, I probably had a whole hour of daylight left before it got dark and lamps were lit. I had a whole hour left to work. I felt a hand on my shoulder. Rebekah.

"What are you writing now?" she asked.

"Still working on my history."

"Still?"

I nodded.

"How long are you planning to work on this?"

It was a tricky question. Between work and sunset every day time was short, and I could not rush. I could not hurry. This was careful work--precise work. It would likely take several more weeks before I found time enough to finish entirely, perhaps as long as a year. "As long as it takes" I answered.

She was silent for a moment stroking my back gently as my pen gently stroked the parchment. "I remember when you were writing about Ahab and Jehoshaphat," she said. "You spent a couple months on them. You have not been writing less and less about each king since then."

She was right. I had found fewer things to say about the subsequent kings. I didn't know if their reigns were really less eventful or if I was beginning to lose interest in my project as it dragged on. I hoped it was the former.

"Why are you doing this?" Rebekah asked.

I stopped. It was a simple question, yet monumental in what it asked. I had asked my self the same thing countless times, and I had come up with only one real answer. "Because," I said, "people need to know these stories. They need to be written down."

"They are already written down," she retorted.

"Yes," I admitted. "They are written in the annals. But no one reads those."

"You do."

"No one except me then," I said, shrugging. "The annals are tedious and dull court records, and if you get caught up on all the meaningless details, you miss the real story."

"Which is?"

I thought for a moment. I could spend hours answering her question, but I didn't have that kind of time--not if I wanted to finish writing about the reign of Pekah of Israel before darkness fell. I looked for words to sum up what had driven me all these months and I could find only one answer. "The grace of God," I said.

"What?" she asked, somewhat shocked. "Israel has been destroyed and Judah reduced to a tributary of Babylon. Where is the grace of God in that?"

Her words were harsh and bordered on blasphemy, but I understood the pain behind them. Everyone in Judah did. The whole nation was asking God--the God we had long ignored--to rescue us, to redeem his chosen people, but he was silent. Or perhaps we had forgotten how to hear him.

"God was so merciful for so long," I told her. The law warned what the result of disobedience would be, and yet he delayed punishment for hundreds of years. he was giving us a chance, hundreds of chances. Don't you see? In spite of all our unfaithfulness, he had not abandoned us, and through all his prophets he was still reaching out to us, hoping we would turn to him. That is the story that must be told."

She was silent for a long time, taking in what I had said. She was my wife, but even she had never heard the full reasoning behind why I was writing my history. "What about now?" she asked.

"What?"

"What about now? Has God finally given up on us?"

"I don't think so," I said. "After all, he's finally got our attention."

On Art

All great art is a reaching out after the eternally divine.

On Second Chances

I tried. I really did. I gave him a second chance, but he let me down. I still cannot abide Walt Whitman.

I have disliked that poet ever since I was first introduced to him five years ago in high school. In my English class, we studied the transcendental movement. I did not care for the ideas, aside from a few interesting quotes, but other than that, I did not think much about Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and their whole lot.

As I have learned matured and my own ideas and outlook have taken shape, I have realized more and more how much transcendentalism has influenced American culture, in my mind, for the worst. They took everything that was Romanticism and pushed it to its extremes, particularly the glorification of man to the place of the divine--something I cannot really abide. Thus, I further rejected the transcendentalists.

While studying at Oxford, I became friends with a young man named Jay. He was very smart, and I enjoyed talking to him and wish I had taken more opportunities to do so. The thing is, Jay loves the transcendentalists, particularly the poetry of Walt Whitman. He would tell me about poems or about the virtues of these men, but I just couldn't abide the ideas they had put forth, so I was reluctant to concede any ground. However, by the end of the semester, Jay had persuaded me that I needed to give Whitman's poetry another chance.

That did not happen until this week. I am taking an American Literature course, and one of the first movements we are studying is transcendentalism, which means a whole lot of Whitman's poetry. I tried. There were poems and bits of poems that I really liked, but I kept running into the glorification of the individual, spiritually communing with nature, and the exaltation of man, and it sickened me. Song of Myself was particularly troublesome. There are some truly exquisite passages--it can never be said that Whitman was shoddy in his craft--but it is all one terrific ego trip for Whitman, and the game got old quickly.

So for Jay, if you ever read this, I tried. Sorry, but I still don't like Walt Whitman.