Jayber Crow - sitting in church

Rereading Wendell Berry's wonderful novel Jayber Crow over Easter, I identified to an extent that scared me with the account by Jayber Crow of how he relates to the church services he attended as a byproduct of his work as church handyman and cleaner.

In general, I weathered the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.  ... What I liked least about the service itself was the prayers: what I liked far better was the singing . Not all of the hymns could move me. I never liked " Onward Christian Soldiers" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Jesus' military career has never compelled my belief. I liked the sound of people singing together, whatever they sang, but some of the hymns reached into me all the way to the bone: "Come thou fount of every blessing," "Rock of Ages," "Amazing Grace," "O God, Our help in Ages Past."...

I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that they world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but they still liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and to be forgiven, their need for one another's help and company and divine gifts, their hope and experience of love surpassing death, their gratitude.  (p162-163)

Towards disorganised religion

I have been doing too much reading to do anything very original by way of commenting on current events. Attending an Anglican ordination at the weekend led me back to some comments in Wendell Berry's wonderful novel Jayber Crow that I have just finished re-reading. Such an event brings out all my anarchist tendencies captured nicely in Jayber's reflections:

I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for 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 a disorganized 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. (p.321)

Though from a very different tradition to Nicholas Lash quoted in previous postings, a strong case can be made that Berry is a theologian, in his novels and poetry as much as in his essays is a theologian in a sense that Lash has defined the task.

Being ecumenical is reaching for points of connection and orientation across significant differences. That is the sense in which I want to be ecumenical and why I find encouragement from such differing sources.

Wendell Berry - novelist

Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 2000.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful story teller, is a sharp observer of the changes in a community and a real theologian to boot.

This is the first novel of his that I have read. I will be looking to get hold of others. I was moved and engaged by the story of Jayber Crow, orphan, barber and bachelor - a man who discovered he did not have the call to preach.

Berry's doubts about organised religion find voice in the life and spiritual struggles of Jonah Crow. After years of readig the Gospels Jayber observes that he has come to believe that ...
Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one.

Berry is also good in his critique of the spiritualisation of Christianity, that finds voice in the reflections of Jayber Crow on the importance of the body and the goodness of creation.

In a fine review of this novel Michael Wilt observes:

Taken to a church-run orphanage, young Jonah believes he hears the call to be a preacher and, when the time comes, enrolls in college on a scholarship in “pre-ministerial” studies. But it is not long before he finds himself in trouble.

If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins –- hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust -- came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Jonah comes to recognize that he is not called to preach. “I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where,” he says, echoing Dante. After some trial and error, that somewhere becomes Port William, the community in which he had been born but from which he had been absent since the age of ten. His journey to Port William, through the rising waters of several days of winter rain, evokes the biblical Jonah’s water-journey, but is most memorable for the hospitality he receives at its end. Having picked up the barbering trade in the orphanage and practiced it for a time to support himself, Jonah buys Port William’s vacant shop and opens for business. He is eventually re-christened Jayber by the locals, and can finally say, “I felt at home.”
http://www.nimblespirit.com/html/jayber_crow_review.htm