“What I saw now was
the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always
fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of
affection. There had maybe never been
anybody who had not been loved by somebody, […]. It was a community always disappointed in
itself, disappointed in its members, always trying to contain it divisions and
gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will
toward goodwill. I knew that, in the
midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership
of Port William and of no other place on earth.”
Jayber Crow from Wendell Berry’s book of the same name.
Jayber Crow was an orphan, a man who came of age in the
Great Depression, and lived through the ups and downs, the wars, and the
technological “advances” that came with the Twentieth Century. In his life, he experienced the love of a family
and the loss of that family – multiple times.
He came to appreciate the importance of place and how ultimately the
place shapes the person. He experienced
dysfunctional institutions, in the form of the orphanage where he was force to
spend much of his childhood, and later the seminary where he studied the bible
and tried to follow his calling to learn that he was not called to be a
preacher in the typical sense, but rather a man of the people – or at least a
man called to cut the peoples hair.
And while he cut their hair, he learned to love them, and to
hate them, but whether he hated them or loved them – he respected them. In his life and through the people who came
in and out of his life, he learned what was important was to simply interact with
the other life on which he inter-depended on.
For that is what community is really about – a place where we learn to
be who we are called to be, a place that pushes us and pulls us, a place of
happiness and sadness, and a place of gifts given and gifts retrieved. Community is what drew Jayber to Port William,
the fictional town on the banks of a river in Kentucky, and the lack of it is
what drove him away from it. The twists
and turns of community bring heaven and hell to life on earth and remind us
that it is not God who creates this heaven or hell, but ourselves.
Through it all, we either accept our place in the larger
community of life – the ecosystem that we depend on – or we struggle on with the
foolish belief that our technology, our religion, our economy, or our power to
control will allow us to go beyond the realities of what it means to be human. Through acceptance we either become part of
that community, or we reject it and destroy it – and ourselves.
