This is a beautifully written book. Beginning with the preparatory notice outlawing any attempt to understand the book, we are invited to suspend judgment and simply watch the charmingly meandering story of Jayber Crow's life.
The book begins with Jayber's birth and ends with the death of his beloved Mattie Chatham. Jayber was born Jonah Crow, an appropriate name for a reluctant prophet. He was named J. when he entered the orphanage and was finally named Jayber when he was accepted into the life of Port William where he worked and lived as a barber. Jayber comes to love a married woman, Maggie Chatham with a love so secret not even she knows about it. Unlike her husband Troy, he forsakes all others for her.
This is a book about the importance of people and the importance of place. We are invited to spend all our time with one man and most of it in one place. This is a powerful contrast to Jayber's criticism of the short-term pastorates of the Port Williams's young preachers. "The preachers were always young students from the seminary who wore, you might say, the mantle of power but not the mantle of knowledge. They wouldn’t stay long enough to know where they were, for one thing."
We are invited to stay long enough to know something. We are invited to know Port William and Jayber Crow. We are discouraged from assessing Port William. We are invited into its life to merely witness. We are discouraged from assessing Jayber Crow. We are invited into his life to merely witness.
This suspension of judgment is the chief charm of the book for me and, I imagine, the reason that it is so hallowed at seminaries wisely encouraging their students to know their churches. Much of ministry consists of witnessing lives over a long haul and doing so often involves suspending judgment. Jayber zooms in on each individual, on Port William, and on human nature until he finds what is lovely. There is much to commend this. We see the attraction in his words about Port William, "It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace."
These words also show Jayber zooming in so far that he misses what is graceless. The above quotation, like parts of mainline theology, zoom in so closely upon the common grace within us that it misses what is untouched by grace.
We see this blindspot in Jayber's understanding of himself, which, of course, is Wendell Berry's presentation of Jayber Crow. Berry focuses so exclusively on Jayber's apparent virtue in secretly committing himself to Mattie Chatham that he obscures the fact that Jayber has moved well beyond coveting Troy Chatham's wife. Berry obscures the fact that Jayber visits another man's wife on her deathbed and takes this opportunity to profess his love to her. We are pressed to feel Jayber's thrill in this final moment of the book, "she held out her hand to me. She gave me the smile that I had never seen and will not see again in this world, and it covered me all over with light."
Here we see the danger in the virtue of this book. This book wisely urges us to spend enough time with one man to know him. This virtue runs wild when it presses us to approve of sin because we are so busy witnessing the man. In a way, however, this virtue run wild is compelling because that's how life so often goes - we find it hard to see sin for what it is when it resides in ourselves because we are so biased towards ourselves.
This beautifully written book has the feel of life about it. I found it compelling enough to read in three or four sittings and I think it will entice anyone with an introspective bent. It is certainly worth any pastor's time.