Called to Wonder, Called to Wander, Called to Live: Vocation in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow

[CAVEAT LECTOR: If you wish to read the novel, there may be things revealed in the following reflection which you may prefer not knowing before actually reading it.]

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Maybe a lot of people could say the same—I think they could; the squeak between living and not living is pretty tight—but I have had a lucky life.  That is to say that I know I’ve been lucky.  Beyond that, the question is if I have not also been blessed, as I belief I have—and, beyond that, even called.  Surely I was called to be, for one thing, a barber.  All my real opportunities have been to be a barber, as you’ll see, and being a barber has made other opportunities.  I have had the life I have had because I kept on being a barber, you might say, in spite of my intention to the contrary.[1]

A life lived is nothing less than a story unfolding in space-time.  For example, a story may be prone to wander its way hither and thither, perhaps wandering far enough away from its presumed path (or plot) that it ends up in a swampy bog with a muddied vision and a lack of foresight.  At other times though, stories navigate their implicit path with ease, as if being led by an invisible guide.  At both unexpected change of directions in the plot and the arrival of anticipated outcomes, mystery remains until the end—or, perhaps even beyond the end.  Therefore, one must receive whatever is laid before them, good and bad alike, in order to finish well and so honor the story’s creator.

This analogy of a life unfolding before the one living it may adequately summarize the idea of vocation that is at work in Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow.  Jayber Crow, the narrator, protagonist, and namesake of the novel, tells us the story of his own life as he remembers it at the age of seventy-two.  He seamlessly navigates into the past to tell a story and then returns to the present with a simple paragraph change in order to reflect on his life and make observations about the interconnectedness of it all.  For Crow, deep reflection on one’s memories is what ends up defining us as persons, because the way we conceive of our memories will determine the kind of story our lives tell.  Throughout the story, he repeatedly notes how he is incapable of escaping the conviction that he was led to specific places in his life.  In what follows, we will explore the shape of his life as he narrates it, paying close attention to the notions of vocation underlying his life story.

Before proceeding any further, a caveat is appropriate here by demand of the author whose story is under scrutiny.  Similar to Mark Twain’s “notice” at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, Jayber Crow prefaces “his” book with a warning sign of his own:

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 of other explainers.

This notice ironically begets the hermeneutical question that it is attempting to deter, “what is the author saying here?  What does he mean?”  With fear and trembling, I must venture a surmise as to why Berry has included this in his character’s personal biography.  However, this endeavor does not entail applying an interpretation directly to this warning, but rather by letting our exploration of Crow’s (or, Wendell Berry’s) idea of vocation take shape, and only afterwards discerning the untouchability of a life in its entirety. As Crow says, “But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me . . . and I have this feeling . . . that I have been led.  I will leave you to judge the truth of that for yourself; as Dr. Ardmire and I agree, there is no proof.”[2]  I believe it is only in hindsight that the mystery of this literary device reveals itself to be that which sets the tone for the narrative journey that is Crow’s life.

In the novel, the idea of vocation is not something that one can plan or look forward to doing.  While this may work that way for some, Jayber’s journey into his calling is exactly that—a journey.  It is something that happens to him as he lives into the identity of the person he is (at the same time) in the process of becoming.  Unlike John Bunyan’s linear, reasonable account of the vocational progress in his renowned allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, the working out of Jayber’s calling is not that simple.  Rather, he refers to himself as a pilgrim whose path has not been straight, or at least does not appear to be straight, as he has walked upon it.  “Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there,” he says.  “I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistake and surprise.”[3]

The development of Crow’s sense of vocation begins before he is old enough to recognize it.  His mother and father both die when he is only four years old.  By the time he is ten, his “aunt” and “uncle”, who take him in subsequent to his parents’ passing, both die, and he is sent to live in a church orphanage.  Besides developing a lifetime supply of anti-authoritarianism, Jayber also encounters his first brush with the occupation element of his vocation happens at the orphanage.  At the age of twelve, he is given the job of assisting the orphanage’s barber, Barber Clark.  Clark, a “good and brave man” by Jayber’s own description, treats him as an apprentice, and Jayber enjoys the work.  But despite the fact that ‘barber’ will end up being the “particular calling” of his, it is around this time that Jayber thinks he is called to be a preacher.  After all, this is the highest expectation he can live up to as an orphan boy taken in by church:

 I had been hearing preachers tell in sermons how they had received “the call.” . . . Not one of those men had ever suggested that a person could be “called” to anything but “full-time Christian service,” by which they meant either the ministry or “the mission field.” . .  .What was so frightening to me about this call was that once it came to you, it was final; there was no arguing with it.[4]

Berry’s characterizations of the preachers that pass through The Good Shepherd orphanage epitomize the idea of vocation prominent in the medieval church.  The only “vocation” to them is a religious one; all occupations outside the sphere of religion are inferior and mundane.  Interestingly, Berry depicts most preachers in the novel as itinerate types who lack a sense of place and, more importantly, a theology of incarnation.[5]  Nevertheless, feeling led to preach at this point in his life, Jayber enrolls in the seminary in Pigeonville.  But in his studies and meditations on the Bible, his doubts and unanswered questions lead him to an impasse, a kind of vocational crisis.  Discussing this with Dr. Ardmire, a professor at the seminary, he receives advice that will end up shaping his life from this point forward.  The professor confirms that Jayber has indeed been called, but he is probably not called to into ministry.  “You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers.  You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time.”[6]

Left to wrestle with questions and discover how one must “live them out,” he leaves the seminary en route for Lexington; he figures its time to try the urban life.  But the social scripts incurred at the hand of his own intelligence are still at work informing his wants and desires.  A learned and educated young man has expectations to live up, so if he is not going to be a minister, he reasons that he might be able to amount to “something else that would be . . . a cut or two above [his] humble origins.”[7]  What he is unaware of at this time, and what is only discernible through future reflection, is that he is on a path, on a specific journey even as he seems to wander around Kentucky.  The deep irony at play in Jayber’s wandering season, however, is that the form of his life will take as the Port William’s barber is exceedingly more pastoral than the archetypal pastor of the time.  He will become a barber, yes, but he will also be for others a particular sort of presence.

Once he makes it home and has settled into his life as the Port William barber (a occupation which, almost literally, “floats” out of nowhere), a new insight occurs to him in connection with God’s creation from nothing: “’And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ . . .  I seemed to have wandered my way back to the beginning—not just of the book, but of the world—and the rest was yet to come.  I felt knowledge crawl over my skin.”[8]  To be sure, his life from this point on is full of suffering—loss, pain, doubt, and loneliness, among other types of hardships.  The transformation of his life is not the loss of such things, but the discernment to see these hardships as part of his story, part of what it means to be a relational and local being.  “I could no longer imagine a life for myself beyond Port William.  I thought, ‘I will have to share the fate of this place.  Whatever happens to Port William must happen to me.’”[9]  Upon returning to that place, to the place for him, Crow discovers that the land will shape his life and vocation.  He discovers it always has.

If anyone really endeavor to know who Jayber Crow is, he or she must begin by learning the stories, the customs, the names, and the faces of the town with which this character shares a fate: Port William.  As Jayber Crow recounts retrospectively the story of his life, the town of Port William figures prominently in that retelling.  This includes the land, the animals, the river, et cetera; in short, it includes all of the parts that constitute Port William as a concrete location.  It is not stretching it to say that Port William is just as much of a living and breathing character as any particular friend or foe in relation to Jayber.  Early in his narration Crow says, “My relation to that place, my being in it and my absences from it, is the story of my life.”[10]  Therefore, the notion of Christian vocation, which is the particular interest at hand, should be examined as if the notion itself belonged organically to the world Berry creates; for Crow’s understanding and living into his sense of vocation are as dependent on the setting in which these things exist and occur as it is on the form and content that materialize from that sense.

            The novel’s motif of place is quite evident in Berry’s reoccurring descriptions of the Kentucky River, the transformation and destruction of Athey’s farm (especially the “Nest Egg”), and the overlooked details of dilapidated buildings—all of which are textured with story and memory.  The thing about place in relation to vocation is that the particularity of a place affords one with all the necessary knowledge and wisdom for living out one’s vocation well in the idiosyncracies of that place.

“If you are a barber and you stay in one place long enough, eventually you will know the outlines of a lot of stories, and you will see how the bits and pieces of knowledge fit together. . . . You don’t have to ask.  In fact, I have been pretty scrupulous about not asking. . . . And yet I am amazed at what I have come to know and how much.”[11]

But the conditions of the world in general are not particularly agreeable with an honoring of what is local.  This fact is exemplified in the overly ambitious Troy Chatham, who is to Jayber Crow a perpetual test of Jesus’ call to love our enemies.  Troy’s environmental ethics (or lack thereof), his self-interested striving for faster and more production, and his ignorance of his surroundings make Troy’s life and the ways in which he undertakes his work a subversion to Crow’s understanding of vocation and calling.  The contrast between Crow and Troy’s inhabitation and presence in Port William is a central thread throughout his story, which culminates in Troy’s destruction of the Nest Egg.  But it is at that moment when Jayber is able to see even Troy as loved and therefore redeemed.  Jayber says, “I stood facing that man I had hated for forty years, and I did not hate him. . . . For finally he was redeemed, in my eyes, by Mattie’s long-abiding love for him, as I myself had been by my love for her.”[12]  The difficulty of loving one’s enemies confounded him for a lifetime; indeed, it took him a lifetime to live into the questions he posed to Dr. Ardmire about such.

In the end, Jayber Crow is content with what he has received and been able to give to others during his life.  This detail is poignantly illustrated in the tender bond he recognizes between himself and Mattie Chatham, the woman for whom he made a living by loving and being faithful to, despite the impossibility of any kind of formal romance developing between them.  It is not until she is on the precipice of death that Jayber’s love and fidelity are affirmed with Mattie’s small and yet profound gesture of opening her hand to him as she lays in a hospital bed dying.  But as grace goes, Jayber ends up receiving more than was due to him.  It is in light of this, and other “mundane” offerings from the world, that he is able to write the following words near the end of his life: “Troubled or not, grieved or not, you have got to live.  And the facts of the case are even harder than that, for however troubled and grieved you may be, you will often find, looking back, that you were not living without enjoyment.”[13]

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[1] Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 2000), pp. 65-6.  Unless otherwise noted, the following citations come exclusively from this text.

[2] p. 66.

[3] p. 133.

[4] p. 43.

[5] See, e.g., p. 49.

[6] p. 54.

[7] P. 56.

[8] p. 79.

[9] p. 143.

[10] p. 12.

[11] p. 94.

[12] p. 361.

[13] p. 358.

 

3 reasons why you should read old books

I’ve been reading excerpts from Athanasius’ On The Incarnation for my Church History class this week. In the “Popular Patristics Series” edition that I have, there is an introduction by C.S. Lewis in which he lays out a few reasons why old books should not be neglected on account of their old age. (If you’re interested in reading On The Incarnation, and I hope you are, there is a full text of the English translation HERE, complete with Lewis’ fabulous introduction.)

• The Test of Time.

A new book is still on trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light… If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said (4).

• Every age makes mistakes, but they do not all make the same mistakes.

The only palliative [for reducing the blindness caused by our prejudices an biases] is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books… People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction (5).

• They help us realize that our differences are trivial in comparison to those things we have in common.

The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any[one] is tempted to think–as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries–that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, [they] can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of [their] own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages “mere Christianity” turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible” (6).

A Million Miles In A Thousand Years

For one week during the spring semester, my high school required juniors and seniors to intern, or “shadow,” a profession of our choice.  At that time in my life, I thought I wanted to be a writer, or if that didn’t work at least do something in the vast world of publishing.  My mom, who was still teaching in secondary school, happened to be teaching a girl whose father was a publisher at Thomas Nelson, a Christian publishing company based out of Nashville.  Everything went smoothly and the publisher kindly allowed me to be his wingman for a week’s time.  I got to practice-edit drafts, sit in on important conference calls, drink coffee with the design team and laugh at their jokes, and eat lunch with Oprah’s publisher.  More than any of these experiences, though, what I remember most about my brief stint with Thomas Nelson is all the free that were given to me.  My loot included a book by Donald Miller titled Blue Like Jazz.  I had never heard of the author, but its simple yet catchy cover, and its revealing subtitle—“Non-religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality”—drew me to it.  I felt privileged to possess a copy of it since it had yet to be released to the public, and also because the publisher’s secretary told me it was going to be the next “big Christian book.”  And I eventually learned that she was right.  The book was a New York Times bestseller, and can be found on the bookshelves of most hip, Christian college students everywhere.

A Million Miles In A Thousand Year, Miller’s latest release, picks up his story a few years after Blue Like Jazz ends.  The content of A Million Miles is aptly summarized in its subtitle: “What I Learned While Editing My Life.”  Years after Blue Life Jazz became a huge success, two filmmakers approached Miller with the idea to turn his memoirs into a movie. As he collaboratively worked with the filmmakers to re-create his memoirs into a manner appropriate for the screen (the “fictional Don”), he begins to understand that this process can also be undergone in real life; we can all decide to re-create ourselves and live better stories. In essence, what you find in the book is Donald Miller writing about Donald Miller writing and editing a movie based on Donald Miller.  The more he learns about fictional character, the structure of narrative and the elements thereof, the more he relates these to his own existence.  Throughout the book, Miller attends Robert McKee’s famous Story seminar, hikes the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, rides his bike across America in support of Blood:Water Mission, and all the while muses our place and part in The Narrative —that is, God’s story.  “We are all trees in a story about a forest,” he says.  Miller draws from this experience of having his book adapted into a film in order to expound his thoughts on how life—real, non-cinematic existence—can be understood through the language and elements of story, how life is similar to narrative fiction in that we “create” our own story, and how God wishes for us to live good stories.

What I liked about Million Miles is what I liked about Miller’s other books: his impressive method of recounting personal anecdotes in a manner that is universally applicable.  His writing style is simple, unpretentious and frank, and therein lies its allure.  The humor found in his other books is still there, albeit a little bit more contrived.  Overall, I think I enjoyed reading it more than I expected to.  There is nothing theologically astute about Miller’s theorizing, and I’m positive that he is aware of this.  Miller’s aim is to point his readers towards an understanding of life that is not existential or overly contemplative, but full of intentional living that recognizes ours is not the only story.  “A good story consists of a character who desires something and must overcome conflict to get it.”  Just as this is the essence of a good film or novel, Miller believes it is also the essence of our lives here on earth.

three more years at Hogwarts

Succumbing to the constant entreats of my friend Peter, a self-proclaimed Harry Potter nerd, I have decided to finish the epic saga that is Harry Potter. Two summers ago, only  a few weeks before the Fall semester was set to commence, I  started to read the series due (again) to the entreats of a good friend, and my recent viewing of the The Order of the Phoenix adaptation. Given the page-burning and easy-to-read nature of each book, I hastily made my way through the first 3 1/2 books before school started. I was close to finishing The Goblet of Fire, but gave up reading it once the semester began. I could have easily finished them the following Christmas break or even that next summer, but found myself too immersed in the works of other writers, whose sentiments had captured my interest the previous semester, to pick up Harry and company where I left them.

Not until the beginning of this summer did it really dawn on me to finish the books; I cannot discern whether this was due to my own need for good fiction – unquestionably evoked by the academically-grueling year of college I had just finished – or to Peter’s recent completion of all seven books, which he could not help  but talk to me about.Since I had only finished half of it, I decided to regress a little and start Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from the beginning.

One day at work, Peter asked me with a victorious grin, “How’s the rereading going so far.”
“Honestly, I’m a little bored with it right now. I’m hoping this is due to the fact that I’m rereading a section of a book I never finished in the first place,” I said.
Still grinning, Peter said, “Just keep reading. It will utterly capture you upon reaching the chapters you’ve yet to read. Trust me, you won’t be able to stop.”

He could not have been more right. This ‘capturing’ took place at chapter twenty-eight, “The Madness of Mr. Crouch,” because I read the remainder of the book in one sitting. Despite seeing the film version when it came out four or five years ago, I mostly forgot how it ended, so there was plenty revelation and surprise.

I’ve limited myself to about a month’s time to complete the books, mainly because there are many others I’m wanting to read. For now, though, I will fully enjoy the magical unrealism, nostalgic adolescent angst, and overall charm (pun intended) of Rowling’s sure-to-be magnum opuses.

If you veterans out there (Mark, Jennifer) are familiar with any eccentric reading method or designated location – library archives, crowded pub, Snape’s dungeon – which will enhance the reading experience, let me know.