Berry’s Port William books remind me of the best pastoral visits - meaning that people open up. Such visits are a chance to hear how the terrain of a person’s life has formed them and how they have formed it. Hannah Coulter was especially familiar to ministry in this regard because of the woman’s humility. You never get the sense that she considers her life in any way notable other than the fact that it is hers.
This book is written in the first person from the perspective an elderly woman named, not surprisingly, Hannah Coulter. I have just started reading ‘Nathan Coulter’ written from the perspective of Hannah’s second husband. I appreciate the fact that the voice of the Port William books are really quite similar and yet distinct. Each narrator is discernible as an individual person but there is an authenticity to the voice that is also distinctly Berry’s. He is a fine author.
The book explores a good many topics at a leisurely pace. Perhaps most notable in this series of books is the topic of “the membership” which can be described as the community which cares for its own. The membership is accepting of misfits and requires nothing of them other than their commitment to the membership; it is a bond of common grace and I use the term “common grace” intentionally because it is hard not to see the membership as a sort of religious-less church. The membership seems to be Berry all that appreciates about church while leaving out what he finds distasteful. The membership is a bond of common grace because, from what I have read, it seems to have no way of dealing with matters of sin. A community that cannot deal with sin is a fantasy. The church is far different. It can deal with sin; it, unlike Port William, is real and properly messy.
That aside, or perhaps in part because of what I have just written, I find these books psychologically soothing. They are like white noise for a mind which has some compulsion to continually process. If you find yourself always thinking, and not always in a good way, this might be a helpful series for you to read. They don’t require any judgment calls or application. They simply are; that is part of their beauty.