When Great Literature Grants Permission to Grapple with Faith

Or rather, what Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry taught me about the failure of love and the mercy in mystery

The following preface to such a profoundly and painstakingly beautiful novel should, perhaps, come as no surprise to readers familiar with the work and life of Wendell Berry—but I have to admit that the words printed at the start of Jayber Crow initially (and greatly) intimidated me:

NOTICE

Persons attempting to find a “text” in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a “subtext” in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise “understand” it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Am I supposed to laugh at the possibility of being exiled to a desert island? Because I definitely want to—I’m just not entirely sure it’s a joke completely void of sincerity.

Then again, gathering all of us “explainers” together on a desert island to discuss and interpret Jayber Crow might just be exactly what Wendell Berry sought out to accomplish.

(Can you imagine? What. An. Island.)

Nevertheless, with a bit of fear and trembling in tow, I’m going to attempt to work out how I feel about this deeply meaningful book; it is a book I have eagerly read and yet it is one I am willing to sit with for years to come.

Who knew a fictional memoir, told from the barber of the Port William Membership, could feel so hauntingly real? Aside from Jayber Crow’s “marriage” to Mattie Chatham, I found nearly every part of this fictional man’s story—every pull in his wrestlings, every question he raised—to be of the utmost sincere form of reflection. (And the only reason I didn’t find his mental marriage to Mattie Chatham quite as “real” is simply due to my personal bias in which I am highly skeptical that a man could ever love a woman so purely for so long while receiving nothing in return; that isn’t to say I didn’t find it heartbreakingly beautiful, though.)

What I truly appreciate about reading a Wendell Berry novel is the brutal, upfront honesty you’re going to get. Pair that with his poetic prose and I can easily feel as if I am holding the very secret that could restore our world in my hands.

But I’m getting a bit carried away.

At the very least, Wendell Berry has the power to point us toward the questions we probably should be asking but might not yet be asking.

What did love have to say to its own repeated failure to transform the world that it might yet redeem? What did it say to our failure to love one another and our enemies? What did it say to hate? What did it say to time? Why doesn’t love succeed?

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Marred with grief from an early age, Jayber Crow is not a man to take weighty matters lightly. When he feels “called” to preach in his young adult years, he wants to be certain he is up to the task; it is not a mere career path.

The entire chapter titled “Pigeonville” is quotable—and really, if you are a person of faith it’s an essential sort of read for you (in my humble, probably completely irrelevant opinion). Rather than quote the entire chapter, however, I’ll just highlight the portion on prayer, which caused me to revisit an idea I’ve been toying with for quite some time now:

“But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said ‘thy will be done,’ what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray ‘thy will be done’ after you see what it means?

And what did these questions do to my understanding of all the prayers I had ever heard and prayed? And what did they do to the possibility that I could stand before a congregation—my congregation, who would believe that I knew what I was doing—and pray for favorable weather, a good harvest, the recovery of the sick and the strayed, victory in war? Does prayer change God’s mind? If God’s mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if derring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him at all? And what are we to think when two good people pray for opposite things—as when two devout mothers of soldiers on opposite sides pray for the safety of their sons, or for victory?

Does God want us to cross the abyss between Him and us? If we can’t—and it looked to me like we can’t—will He help us? Or does He want us to fall into the abyss? Are there some things He wants us to learn that we can’t learn except by falling into the abyss? Is that why the Jonah of old, who could not say ‘thy will be done’, had to lie three days and three nights in the dark in the belly of the great fish?

‘Father, remove this cup from me,’ I prayed. And there I stopped. For how would I know what God’s will was, even provided I could have the strength to submit to it? I knew a lot of hearsay about God speaking to people in plain English, but He never had (He never has) spoken so to me.

By then I wasn’t just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren’t confrontations with God but with the difficulty—in my own mind, or in the human lot—of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed—into what, I had no idea. It was worse than wondering if I had received the call. I wasn’t just a student or a going-to-be preacher anymore. I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where.” ¹

To read that someone else is doubting the very thing you might be afraid to admit you are doubting yourself offers a strange sort of solace: I have sincerely and painfully been wondering if perhaps the function of prayer is less of an agency to change things and more of a communion to change oneself.

The function of prayer aside, I found Jayber’s ultimate conviction to turn from the call to preach rather endearing; this was the precise moment I knew I could root for this character “come hell or high water” (which, quite literally, did come.) Readers learn early on that this is the sort of narrator that can fully and truly be trusted to spin us a tale worth telling.

Much of Jayber Crow wades through the inevitable grief we encounter in life when we lose people we love suddenly and harshly and when we lose people we love slowly and painfully. Berry has never shied away from the reality of death in his writing, and in this particular novel I felt he took it a step further to explore the implications of love and mystery—both of which (seemingly) fail us in this life, only to prevail in the next.

It is nearly impossible to not feel lovelorn alongside Jayber Crow, though he never professes his love for Mattie Chatham to a living soul. (Although, I vaguely recall a Port William short story in which Jayber does say aloud the name of the only woman he has ever loved…and if you can recall the story please, please let me know—I’ve been running circles in my mind.) Unto to her death, Mattie is devotedly married to an unfaithful man that does not seem to know or rightly understand the meaning of marriage, all the while Jayber remains silently steadfast in his vow to be her husband. In this sense, love has very much “failed” the both of them—just as Jayber feels it has failed to heal a world at war.

“Maybe love fails here, I thought, because it cannot be fulfilled here. And then I saw something that a normal life with a normal marriage might never have allowed me to see. I saw that Mattie was not merely desirable, but desirable beyond the power of time to show. Even if she had been my wife, even if I had been in the usual way her husband, she would have remained beyond me. I could not have desired her enough. She was a living soul and could be loved forever. Like every living creature, she carried in her the presence of eternity. That was why, as she grew older, I saw in her always the child she had been, and why, looking at her when she was a child, I felt the influence of the woman she would be. That is why, in marrying one another, we mortals say ‘till death.’ We must take love to the limit of time, because time cannot limit it. A life cannot limit it. Maybe to have it in your heart all your life in this world, even while it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.” ²

To recognize the very real and possible failure of love in this life—and its transcendental nature to prevail beyond this life—is a great comfort to the glass-half-empty soul I possess. We know that love itself is not fully explainable, but I often think we misinterpret its power; perhaps it won’t fix everything, but it will surely outlast everything.

The real comfort I derived from this devastatingly beautiful novel, however, came in the unexpectedly harmonious duo of mystery and mercy. Throughout the story of Jayber Crow, Berry raises the possibility that the real mercy of life on this blessedly broken planet isn’t in love or nature or goodness or even beauty—but indeed only in the mystery.

There is a conversation on page 149 of the novel between Jayber and Mat Feltner, in which Jayber is attempting to comfort Mat in the midst of his grief over losing his son, Virgil Feltner, to war. Jayber suggests that goodness and beauty are “the mercy of the world” but he is met with an apt reply:

“Mat said, ‘The mercy of the world is you don’t know what’s going to happen.’”

The simple logic behind this idea is downright glorious, isn’t it? How can one even argue against it?

We don’t know what we don’t know—and couldn’t know it even if we tried—so we can’t argue if what’s to come is good or bad or in between. The mercy lives and breathes in the very fact that we don’t know what we don’t know.

Of course, Berry finds a way to beautifully tie this idea into the faith Jayber is so earnestly wrestling with. In the final chapter of the novel, Jayber is thinking about an imaginary friend he calls “the Man in the Well.” It is a friend who—you might imagine—falls into a deep, long-forgotten, and out-of-the-way well. It is an utter mystery as to how, or when, or even if he will find his way out.

But still, Berry encourages us to hold fast to our doubts and our questions and our non-linear wanderings; for it is in our very uncertainties and the endless possibilities where mercy truly lies.

“Listen. There is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing. He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man whose work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman forsaken in a nursing home in California. He believes that those who make their bed in Hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the outermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.’

Have mercy.” ³

Even in our unknowing, we are not lost. There is a mercy the extends beyond what we do not know and cannot see— and even in our speculative “answers.”

In the well, we are held.

1. Berry, Wendell. Jayber Crow. Counterpoint, 2000, pg. 51-52

2. Berry, Wendell. Jayber Crow. Counterpoint, 2000, pg. 249

3. Berry, Wendell. Jayber Crow. Counterpoint, 2000, pg. 357