Incarnation and Imagination in Jayber Crow: Wendell Berry’s Divine Comedy

Abstract

Wendell Berry models Jayber Crow on Dante’s Divine Comedy, and in doing so, he dramatizes a fundamental mystery of Christian theology: the Incarnation. Dante and Jayber make parallel errors on their winding pilgrimages to the beatific vision. At times they are tempted to enjoy created goods for their own sakes. At other times they experience frustration with the need to know Christ through the fallen-yet- redeemed members of his earthly body, and they seek instead to apprehend him directly. Yet both eventually enjoy the transcendent gift of God’s presence, and they do so mediated through his earthly body, the communion of saints.

Near the end of Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry’s barber narrator confesses that, while “it has been a close call,” his book is “a book about Heaven.” Yet he does not mean by this declaration that otherworldly concerns fill his book and life story. Rather, he comes to this conclusion because he has recognized the ways in which “the earth speaks to us of Heaven.”¹ It has taken Jayber most of his life to come to this realization because the earth’s speech about Heaven remains prone to misinterpretation. Indeed, the precise ways in which our love for creation might lead us to know and love the Creator remains a contentious theological matter. Given the phenomenological character of such knowledge, perhaps the best way to make this embodied epistemology intelligible is not through discursive, analytic prose but through narratives that dramatize and render imaginable—if not entirely comprehensible—how the earthly story of a human life might compose a book about Heaven.

This acknowledgement of incomprehensibility might appear to doom our expository efforts in this essay, but rather than attempting to explain the mystery of the Incarnation, we have set ourselves the more modest task of tracing how two fictional works—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow—dramatize an individual’s encounter with the body of Christ. These two works allow readers to imaginatively experience what it can be like to fall in love with God through a love for members of his creation. In tracing these narratives, we do not propose to “explain” them, as Berry’s opening “NOTICE” warns that “persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise ‘understand’ [this book] will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.” Rather than suffer this fate, we merely echo Philip’s response when Nathaniel expressed his skepticism about the merits of this Jesus fellow: “Come and see.”²

While Dante is a straightforward choice for this invitation, it might seem strange to turn to one of Berry’s novels for an encounter with the mystery of the Incarnation. Berry calls himself a “bad-weather churchgoer,” and while Jayber Crow attends church weekly, he confesses that he does so “over a cobble of quibbles.”³ Some Christians have praised Berry’s theological insights—Eugene Peterson cites his deep debt to Berry and writes, “Whenever Berry writes the word farm, I substitute parish: the sentence works for me every time”⁴—but others question whether his accounts of the Incarnation, creation, and the church idolize earthly goods such as place and embodiment. In a review of A Need to Be Whole, Berry’s nonfiction door-stopper about race, John-Paul Heil concludes by critiquing in particular Berry’s failure to reckon with the Incarnation and its implications:

the deepest and most hidden wound in the human heart, the disconnect that causes all others, the cancer that Berry confronts (more explicitly in this book than anywhere else in his corpus—though he cannot cure it) is the alienation of humanity from God. Only the Incarnation can cross this divide and make whole this sundered communion, but though Berry is an outspoken Christian, he pays little attention to Jesus as God, as the logos through whom all creation was made, the archetype of our being made in imago Dei.⁵

This omission, however, has more to do with the essayistic genre of A Need to Be Whole, and thereby its rhetorical and argumentative aims, than it does with Berry’s theological understanding. ⁶ While Berry avoids doctrinal claims in his essays—with some significant exceptions—his fiction strives no less than Dante’s to show how embodied persons can be reconciled to God through the refinement of their erring loves for one another. Such narrative forms better convey this poetic knowledge, this phenomenological experience, than does discursive analysis.⁷

Berry has, in fact, a long history of expressing his frustrations with the didactic, propositional form that theological discussion tends to take. In one of his Sabbath poems, he responds to a “solemn communication” questioning the correctness of his “‘theology’”—a word he encloses in scare quotes:

    Have I foundtoo much of the Hereafter in the Here? Orthe other way around? Have I found too muchpleasure, too much beauty and goodness, in thisour unreturning world? O Lord, please forgiveany smidgen of such distinctions I mayhave still in my mind. I meant to leave themall behind a long time ago. If I’m a theologianI am one to the extent I have learned to duckwhen the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead,dropping their loads of whitewash at randomon the faces of those who look toward Heaven.Look down, look down, and save your soulby honester dirt, that receives with a lordlyindifference this off-fall of the air. Christmasnight and Easter morning are this soil’s only laws.⁸

The questions Berry asks in this poem indicate the fundamental impropriety of attempts to “explain” theological mysteries such as the Incarnation and its implications for how the earth might speak to us of heaven: such attempts divide what is only intelligible in embodied form. The Hereafter and the Here, the goodness of this world and the next, the soul and the soil must not be extracted from their places in the drama whose protagonist is the Incarnate Christ. Doctrinal paradoxes cannot be fully expressed as abstract propositions—what Elizabeth Jennings calls “barren notions”—but must come to us as perceptible and hence imaginable forms, ideally as constituents of the same form as that taken on by God in the enactment of the grandest doctrinal paradox: the form of a human life.⁹

Rather than expositing propositional claims, then, Berry in the above poem confesses his belief in the central dramatic acts of Jesus’ life: Christmas night and Easter morning. Berry’s confession is hardly the cultural Christian’s begrudging appreciation of holiday traditions; it is instead the believer’s full-hearted attention to the essential mysteries of the Christian faith, the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Berry elaborates his understanding of the formal implications of these events most profoundly in his fiction, particularly his novel Jayber Crow, and in doing so he models Jayber’s life on one of the greatest works of theological imagination, Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Dante and Jayber make parallel errors on their winding pilgrimages to the beatific vision. At times they are tempted to enjoy created, earthly goods for their own sakes, idolizing people and veering away from their proper divine end. At other times they experience frustration with the need to know Christ through the fallen-yet-redeemed members of his earthly body, the church, and they seek instead to apprehend him directly. Sometimes they see human community and human loves as ultimate goods, and at other times they see human relationships as messy hindrances to be discarded in their pursuit of the divine. Yet both eventually enjoy the transcendent gift of God’s presence, and they do so mediated through his earthly body, the communion of saints. They learn to recognize Christ through his incarnate body, to love the Hereafter in the here and now.

The relation between earth and Heaven—which parallels the relation between Christ’s human and divine natures and the relation between the visible and the invisible church—is a paradox, a mystery. These pairs must not be collapsed, nor can they be divided. Rather, they pose questions regarding creation, the church, and our means of knowing God that we must, in the words of Jayber’s professor Dr. Ardmire, live out a little at a time (54). Living out these questions and recognizing Christ in his body in turn reorders human affections for earthly goods and enables those so transformed to care for fellow creatures not in an appetitive or selfish manner but with a cruciform, sacrificial love. Indeed the novel Jayber Crow represents Berry’s fullest effort to imagine the far-flung implications of finding, as Dante puts it, the human “effigy” within the Triune God.¹⁰

Dante’s Journey

Jayber admits that “it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven” (131). His own pilgrimage, however, has been much more circuitous than Dante’s journey. Yet while Dante’s pilgrimage is more straightforward, he too encounters the mysterious union between the earthly and divine in many forms over the course of his travels through hell, purgatory, and paradise.

Near the end of his journey, three heavenly figures examine his understanding of the three theological virtues. St. John appropriately examines him on love, and when asked to name the target or telos for which his soul longs, Dante gives the technically correct reply: his love is set on “the good with which this court is satisfied.”¹¹ But John is not satisfied with this Sunday school answer; of course the “Alpha and Omega” of Dante’s love is God.¹² John insists that Dante must nonetheless “sift with a still finer sieve” or, to mix metaphors, explain “who led your bow to aim at such a target.”¹³ Dante’s initial response to this question betrays a theological error that defines the Christian institutions Jayber experiences in his youth: the tendency to reject earthly goods in pursuit of heavenly ones. Like the denominational college Jayber attends that shuns “anything bodily or earthly,” Dante’s temptation here is to skip over natural goods in an effort to jump straight to divine ones, but this impulse denies God’s acts of creating earthly goods and taking on the human form himself (49).

After St. John prods him to expound on how he came to love God, Dante specifies that both natural reason and divine revelation have helped rightly orient his loves, teaching him that each good outside God’s “Essence . . . is nothing but / a ray reflected from Its radiance.”¹⁴ Yet John remains dissatisfied with this answer, pushing Dante not to dismiss created goods so easily as mere instrumental goods that can be discarded once they have led us to God. So for the third time, he presses Dante to articulate how he learned to love divine splendor, to “tell me, too, if you feel other cords / draw you toward Him, so that you voice aloud / all of the teeth by which this love grips you.”¹⁵ John’s final prompt introduces a new metaphor, figuring Dante not as an arrow directed by some bow toward a divine target, but as a creature bitten by a predatory God—a hound of heaven, as it were—whose teeth are the particular created goods that draw Dante into the divine maw. In reply, Dante finally voices an acceptable account of how he came to love God:

    “My charityresults from all those things whose bite can bringthe heart to turn to God; the world’s existence

and mine, the death that He sustained that Imight live, and that which is the hope of allbelievers, as it is my hope, together

with living knowledge I have spoken of—these drew me from the sea of twisted loveand set me on the shore of the right love.

The leaves enleaving all the garden ofthe Everlasting Gardener, I loveaccording to the good He gave to them.”¹⁶

Dante’s response names at least four teeth by which God’s love has bitten him: creation itself (as in Psalm 19 and Romans 1), Christ’s passion and redemptive death, his hope for sharing in Christ’s resurrection and new life, and a “living knowledge.” Earlier in this canto Dante has referred to Beatrice as the one who “brought me the fire with which I always burn,” so she seems to be the living knowledge that forms this last tooth with which God has bitten Dante.¹⁷

St. John’s line of questioning teaches Dante that even here in heaven, as he nears the beatific vision of the Triune God, he cannot discard the created goods by which he has learned to set his love upon its proper divine end. For, indeed, as Berry says, the “earth speaks to us of Heaven.” Dante has suffered from an excessive love for various earthly goods; he has spent plenty of time lost in “the sea of twisted love.” Over the course of his journey, he has learned to subordinate his misdirected loves for political power, poetic glory, and—most of all—Beatrice to his love for God. Idolatrous attitudes toward created goods have hampered his pilgrimage; at the top of Mount Purgatory Dante confesses to Beatrice that “‘Mere appearances / turned me aside with their false loveliness, / as soon as I had lost your countenance.’”¹⁸ Instead of recognizing Beatrice’s beauty as a reflection or icon of divine radiance, he saw her beauty as a final good in and of itself and so was turned aside from his journey to God. But here, at last, in his conversation with St. John, Dante has learned to love created goods “according to the good He gave to them.” Dante’s imagination has finally begun to reckon with the Incarnation.

It is through the natural that we learn to desire and enjoy God himself. From church fathers such as Clement and Gregory of Nyssa to Reformers such as Calvin and scientists such as Galileo, Christians have figured creation as a book that teaches us about its Creator.¹⁹ This pedagogical role culminates in Christ’s Incarnation. Humans can hope to truly enjoy knowledge of God because Christ condescended to assume human nature, to, as St. Bernard puts it in the last canto of Paradiso, “make Himself the Creature of His creature.”²⁰ St. Bernard echoes Augustine’s wonderment at the fact that Christ “created her of whom, as man, He was to be created.”²¹ Christ’s Incarnation clarifies that nature—and in particular human nature—may indeed “speak to us” of its Creator and Savior. Hence Dante’s answer to St. John that articulates the natural mediators through which he was seized by God’s love.

Part of Dante’s answer should be common to all Christians, but the last “tooth” he names is unique to his own story. If Jayber were examined by St. John, he would certainly name the living knowledge of Mattie as one of the teeth by which God’s love bit his soul. God mediates his presence to each of us through particular persons and particular instantiations of his body, the church. Such mediators ought to be loved and cherished—in Augustinian terms, both used and enjoyed.²² Anthony Esolen articulates this dynamic as it plays out in Jayber Crow:

It is then true and not true that Port William leads Jayber Crow to the church, or that Mattie Chatham leads him to Christ. If what we mean by “lead” is that they serve as ladders, which when they are climbed may be dispensed with, we have mistaken Love entirely. They lead only because the One to whom they lead is already here. If we love them rightly, we love them for the sake of the Father, whose love sustains them in their very existence.²³

And the wonder to which Dante and Jayber testify is that in loving Florence and Beatrice, Port William and Mattie, these pilgrims come to see Christ more fully and, in turn, to love these places and people in the sacrificial fashion that Christ exemplifies.

Dante gestures to this experience at the conclusion of his conversation with St. John. During their dialogue, Dante cannot see because he was blinded in the previous canto when he looked intently at the glorified form of John, trying to discern whether his glorified body had already been raised from the dead (given Jesus’ ambiguous promise in the final chapter of the Gospel of John). After he provides John a satisfactory answer regarding how he came to find himself on the shore of right love, Dante receives his sight, “better than I had before,” as “Beatrice dispel[s], with her eyes’ rays, / . . . the chaff / from my eyes.”²⁴ This has been the pattern throughout Paradiso, of course, as Dante rises to each new level of the heavens when he gazes into Beatrice’s eyes, which are themselves fixed on God. Until Dante’s eyes have become strong enough to gaze upon God—which does not occur until the final lines of the Comedy—he relies on Beatrice and others to mediate the divine presence to him. They serve as members of the body through which Christ manifests himself.

One of the starkest—and strangest—examples of this mediation is after Beatrice rebukes Dante at the top of Mount Purgatory. Dante confesses his wayward loves and is baptized in the river Lethe. The four cardinal virtues then lead him to the head of the griffin, whose dual nature as both lion and eagle symbolizes Christ’s hypostatic union. The griffin pulls a chariot, representing the church, and Beatrice stands in the chariot, which forms part of a larger procession including the seven candlesticks from the churches in Revelation, the twenty-four elders, the writers of the gospels, and the authors of the other books of the New Testament. All these mediate the griffin to Dante as the Scriptures and the Church mediate Christ to all Christians. As Dante looks into Beatrice’s eyes, she gazes steadfastly on the griffin himself, and Dante marvels to see “the double-natured creature glea[m] within, / now showing one, and now the other guise.”²⁵ When Dante looked directly at the griffin he saw an unchanging and unified creature, half eagle and half lion. But reflected in Beatrice’s eyes, the griffin reveals itself as fully eagle and fully lion. The paradoxical mystery of Christ’s character only appears to Dante through the mediation of his beloved Beatrice.

Even at the end of Paradiso, when Beatrice steps back into the rose and leaves Dante to gaze into the bright light of the “Primal Love” himself, Dante’s vision of God remains mediated by the communion of saints.²⁶ St. Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary to intercede for Dante that God would give him the virtue necessary to see God. He concludes this prayer by exclaiming, “See Beatrice—how many saints with her! / They join my prayers!”²⁷ Dante’s culminating beatific vision comes as the answer to these many prayers on his behalf. He does indeed come to know Christ—and finally the Triune God in all his glory—through his body, the gathered communion of saints who embody and mediate the divine presence.

Jayber’s Journey

Jayber, likewise, comes to know Christ through his earthly body, and this also entails a long and circuitous road. As Berry’s novel progresses, Jayber sheds the tendency to reject earthly goods in pursuit of heavenly ones, and he comes to embrace a life that is both earthly and heavenly, for, as he says, the story of his earthly wanderings composes a “book about Heaven.” Jayber first divides natural and divine, exalting the divine over the natural, then he succumbs to the opposite error, cherishing natural goods as ultimate and thereby mistaking earth for heaven. Jayber finally comes to imagine the divine incarnated in the natural through his love for his own Beatrice, Mattie. And in his encounter with Christ mediated through the gathered community of Port William, Jayber finally learns to participate in Christ’s sacrificial, redemptive love for these oft-wayward members of his body.

Dividing the Natural from the Divine

Not far into Berry’s novel, all of young Jayber’s relatives die, and any childlike faith Jayber has unravels under the pressure of the gnostic dualism that characterizes his guardian institutions. Jason Peters helpfully defines Berry’s understanding of this dualism: “Whether we call it Manichaean or Gnostic makes no difference. . . . It is a heresy characterized principally by suspicion of, if not hatred for, the material world, including our own flesh; it assigns importance only to that which is immaterial—mind, soul, spirit—and holds that salvation comes by knowledge rather than by works or faith.”²⁸ As a natural consequence of such institutionalized hatred of the earthly, Jayber suffers confusion and personal disintegration; he no longer has access to the divine love that has been confined to a distant, immaterial realm.

As he enters the “divided world,” the “net of rules tightly strung” that is the Good Shepherd orphanage, Jayber senses immediately his separation from his home, the world of Squires Landing and Port William (32–33). Here, the superintendent’s disintegrating stare separates his students from their persons, contorting students’ given names by reducing them to an initial, which renders each “not quite nameless, but also not quite named” and “in some way faceless to ourselves and to one another” (32). Jayber—Jonah—becomes “J”; his identity is separated from his body, his place, and his tradition. The Good Shepherd thus introduces Jayber to dualism, dividing the supposed spiritual order enshrined in the orphanage from the students and the students from themselves.

Yet Jayber, despite his initial discomfort with such division, eventually sets aside his homesickness for Port William to embrace the Good Shepherd’s posture that privileges abstract, disembodied spirituality. His inexplicable suspicion that he is called to preach reveals his changed allegiance. After hearing “the theme” of pastoral “calling” emphasized repeatedly, Jayber believed himself called, even in the absence of any earthly evidence (42). Jayber recapitulates Jonah’s story: called by God’s voice, Jonah must obey. Jayber likewise remembers what befalls Jonah when he refuses obedience. Frightened, Jayber waits each night for a voice calling his diminished name, J. Crow. Though he hears only gaping silence, Jayber accepts the call he did not hear—“just in case it had come and I had missed it”—and is lauded as a success in the Good Shepherd’s divided world, which, in turn, deepens the division Jayber suffers between flesh and spirit, for Jayber’s “call” lands him at a seminary marked by this same division between earthly and divine, secular world and sacred institution, natural and supernatural.

As he embarks on his seminary studies, Jayber struggles with several theological quandaries. In particular, he worries there is no way of telling whether or not prayers work. Christ’s “terrible prayer” in Gethsemane was refused—except for its concluding “thy will be done.” And, after all, won’t God’s will be done regardless of our prayers or desires? There is no double-blind test Jayber can design to verify the efficacy of his prayers, no formula for explaining how a human prayer might affect the divine will. Hence Jayber can find no way of crossing the “abyss” between God and man (52). These theological questions prompt him to drop out of seminary, and Jayber leaves this institution in much the same state that Dante begins his journey: “I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where” (52).

Dividing natural and divine, earthly and heavenly, not only distorts orthodox Christianity, it also distorts the human person, the imago Dei. As Jayber departs the world of institutional Christianity and strives to make his own way in the big city of Louisville, he does so as a broken young man. Coming and going, as it seems, from nowhere to nowhere, Jayber sees himself as a “theoretical person” and begins in sorrow to sense “a motion of the heart toward my origins. . . . I needed to know the original first chapter of the world” (72–73). Caught in the abyss left by dualism’s rending of heavenly and earthly, divine and natural, Jayber senses that he must get his feet on dry land. He must, in other words, come to grips with the earthly before he can hope to find—or perhaps, beyond his wildest hopes, be found by—God.

Mistaking the Natural for the Divine

Frustrated by an imperceptible and inaccessible divine, Jayber turns to the satisfactions offered by the natural world and finds solace in the earthly community of Port William. Like Dante who pursues the “false loveliness” of “mere appearances” after Beatrice’s death, Jayber gives up the quest to recognize the Creator as manifest in these created goods. As long as the earthly goods of Port William remain disparate from their divine origin and end, however, they remain incomplete and distorted, as Jayber’s narrative attests.

Jayber’s journey back to Port William is marked by a biblical re-creation that contains the promise (but not realization) of a restored life, in which earthly and divine may be rightly related. As a storm gathers and the flood rises on Jayber’s journey home, flashing “human lights” recall the words of the creation story to Jayber’s mind:

And this is what it was like—the words were just right there in my mind, and I knew they were true: “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 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 all the rest was yet to come. I felt knowledge crawl over my skin.

(79)

Feeling knowledge on one’s skin typifies the incarnational epistemology by which divine knowledge comes in bodily form. Jayber does not yet see the divine Logos dwelling in his community, but Jayber’s vision of the Spirit “shaping and reshaping” the world does lay the conditions for such a revelation (83). Even the language of “shaping” foreshadows Jayber’s turn from dualism: in Creation, the divine God lovingly and personally “shaped” Earth and called it good. What’s more, God still “shapes” the world, in that he continues to sustain his creation.²⁹ As Berry writes in “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” “the Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the constant, continuous participation in the being of God.”³⁰

But the flood does more than signal to Jayber’s mind the reality of the Spirit’s shaping: it also heralds Jayber’s remaking. The flood carries Jayber into new life in the same way that baptism—of which Noah’s ark amid the Old Testament flood is a type—ushers believers into a new life with Christ, for Jayber spends three days caught in the water of remaking—of the “floating world rising and falling” (93–96). Baptism pictures a “rising” like Christ’s resurrection. As Gregory of Nyssa wrote in “On the Baptism of Christ,” “we in receiving Baptism, in imitation of our Lord and Teacher and Guide, are not indeed buried in the earth,” but by baptizing “thrice” per the Trinitarian formula, “we represent for ourselves that grace of the Resurrection which was wrought in three days.”³¹ Though Jayber’s baptism here may not be according to the Trinitarian formula, it does symbolize Jayber’s new life in a kind of “covenant” community. What is more, baptism particularly pictures the role the natural plays in manifesting the divine: as Peters emphasizes, “Grace comes by means of the natural, not in spite of it. Baptism occurs in water, not in contempt of it; our participation in the divine necessarily involves matter intimately.”³² Jayber’s new life after the baptism of the flood, as such, promises to introduce him to Christ and his body.

It is Burley Coulter—fishing in a boat on the now-stilled river—who calls Jayber into the remade world. Though Burley is hardly a Christ-figure, Burley’s call of Jayber echoes Christ’s call of Simon and Andrew in Matthew 4. While Jayber was never sure if he was in fact called to be a preacher, there can be no doubt that Port William needs a barber, and Burley makes a persuasive case that Jayber is the man for the job.

After these shadows of baptism and calling, Jayber, a new resident of Port William, is invited to the “Little Worter Dranking Party,” a type of naturalized communion that involves fish, alcohol, and laughter with some of Port William’s men. Through such social ceremonies, Jayber begins to be at home in Port William and feels “a tenderness” for all of the “rememberers” about him, whose hair he cuts and whose hospitality he receives (126–27).

Yet Jayber succumbs to the temptation to immanentize the eschaton, acting in his love for Port William as if he might enjoy heaven fully here. He does not yet see that earthly goods have their origin and proper end in the Word who exists outside of time. Such an idolatrous vision regards the natural as sufficient in itself, while a properly incarnational imagination apprehends the earthly community in relation to its divine analogue. Jayber’s tendency to idolize the Port William community results in his willingness even to go to war for it, against his better judgment.

Given this erring imagination, when he takes on pastor-like roles in his community—digging graves, cleaning the church, and comforting those afflicted by the loss of their children (149)—Jayber seeks to discharge these responsibilities on his own strength: “As I buried the dead and walked among them, I wanted to make my heart as big as heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted. I couldn’t do it, of course, but I wanted to” (158). In his love for the visible body—for the community of Port William—Jayber yearns to accomplish what humans cannot accomplish: he yearns to gather his community in a perfect love. He is given a glimpse of such community in a dream-vision that comes to him one afternoon while cleaning the church: he sees all those who have ever attended Port William’s church across the many years gathered in harmony (164–65). Jayber knows—“of course”—that he cannot achieve such a gathering. Something or someone beyond himself—something beyond the limited human heart—is necessary for a perfect love “in all time and in no time,” but he does not yet acknowledge this need for God in his dream-vision of the timeless church. In his love for God’s creation—particularly as manifest in Port William and in Mattie—Jayber must yet learn to remember these beloved people in their rightful place as members of Christ’s body.

Jayber (and Berry behind him) thus reminds his reader that, despite the sacramental elements in these chapters, Jayber has not yet “arrived” in a right relationship with the divine. Jayber’s narrative testifies that his sacramental experiences do draw him toward God, but it is in the grace that comes through his love for a particular person that Jayber’s relationship to God and his understanding of earth and Heaven are finally restored. This person is Mattie Chatham. Fittingly, Mattie is introduced just after Jayber’s admission that he has “been led” by God’s mysterious sovereignty, signaling a connection between her person and the bite of God’s love.

However, disordered love marks Jayber’s relationship to Mattie from its outset. Jayber admits his dislike of Troy Chatham, Mattie’s boyfriend and eventual husband, even while he struggles to justify this judgment (134). As Jayber grows to love Mattie, he begins to “contrive . . . to be near her,” and his desire for her becomes “like a spoiled child, insisting that it should be given what it did not have,” overtaking his mind and making him restless (193). Jayber’s initial lust for Mattie divides, again, body and soul, for Jayber’s inner life grows radically distinct from his outward behavior. Jayber’s girlfriend Clydie—whom he pursues even while lovesick and lusting after Mattie—provides a prime instance of the fact that Jayber has become “furtive, leading a secret life in my thoughts. . . . I might as well have been back at the orphanage, surrounded by strangers and dreaming of home” (193).³³ Only after seeing Mattie suffer over the death of her daughter and remembering Mattie’s free will—the fact that she has, in fact, freely loved and married Troy—can Jayber shed “presumption and delusion” and become “able to imagine her as she was and not as the subject of a dream” (198). He still struggles to imagine how to responsibly enact this necessarily private love, but after encountering Troy with another woman at a dance, Jayber realizes that if he does not want to be like Troy, he must change his faithless behavior—he must align his actions with his love for Mattie. He leaves behind his car and girlfriend that night and commits himself to the work of faithful love, the ongoing task of harmonizing emotions and actions, spirit and body.

Thus, between Jayber’s youthful confinement in dualistic institutions and his eventual affirmation of an incarnational imagination, Jayber errs—in the word’s original Latin sense of wandering to and fro—as he undergoes a slow re-creation. As he wanders through Port William and begins to know it, he clings to it, fixing himself too tightly Here without seeing the Hereafter shining out in Port William’s midst. His idolatrous love for Mattie finally forces him to see the errant way he has clung to the natural and neglected its iconic dimensions. For, as we will see, learning proper love for Mattie attunes Jayber to the heaven that is both Here and Hereafter.

The Divine Gathering

As Jayber learns to walk the way of love, his vision of both earth and heaven clarifies. He finally comes to see earth and heaven, natural and divine, gathered together by “a Father who is yet like a mother hen spreading her wings . . . before the dark night for the little ones of Port William to come in under, some of whom do, and some do not” (252).³⁴ Although Jayber does not travel in a straight line from Hell onward, he has steadily learned to see the redemptive hand of the triune God at work in the natural life of creation and the human community.

After Jayber’s love for Mattie begins to be reoriented, in particular by his recognition of her deep and private suffering, Jayber experiences a “vision of the gathered community,” which “replace[s]” and refines his earlier dream-vision of the gathered church (205). This new vision of the gathered community clarifies two flaws from his prior vision: first, it includes in its membership all the inhabitants of Port William, all of whom are “held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection” (205). Second, Jayber’s new vision explicitly acknowledges this membership’s dependence on divine grace. Only “beyond time” and “by grace” may this human, earthly community be perfected (205).

Jayber’s sight of the gathered community gives him a sense of Port William’s “true being”: “on a little wave of time lifting up to eternity, and none of us ever in time would know what to make of it” (205). Here Jayber perceives the divine, heavenly hereafter within the natural, earthly limits of his human community. In identifying grace as the means by which the community may be perfected, Jayber’s second vision invites him to re-learn the fallenness of creation and remember the eternal that redeems and completes the temporal.

After this vision of the gathered community and his vow to live as the faithful husband that Mattie doesn’t have, and so to love her in an utterly selfless, Christlike way, Jayber embarks on the “Way of Love,” which he describes in the climactic chapter of his narrative:

Maybe I had not solved a single problem or come any closer to the peace which passeth all understanding. But I was changed. I had entered, as I now clearly saw, upon the way of love . . . (maybe it was the way I followed back to Port William during the flood), and it changed everything.

(248)

As Jayber finds himself along this way, he must live, now, by “faith alone, faith without hope” (247). To do so, Jayber must renounce his selfish desires, for renunciation begins the way of love. Jayber’s way of love—renuncia-tory and revelatory—parallels the novel’s epigraph from Andrew Marvell: “Magnanimous Despair alone / Could show me so divine a thing.” Berry describes this self-renunciation in a manner that parallels T.S. Eliot’s account of the via negativa in “East Coker” III:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.. . .Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agonyOf death and birth.³⁵

Eliot’s way of waiting without hope indeed points to “the agony” of both death and life, for this way leads to “East Coker” IV’s famous “wounded surgeon”—Christ, crucified. So, too, for Jayber: self-renunciation leads to recognition of and participation in Christ’s cruciform love.

As Dante’s purified love for Beatrice leads him to recognize Christ’s two-fold nature, so Jayber’s purified, renunciatory love for Mattie leads him to recognize God’s character and his love for the world. Anthony Esolen has highlighted that, as Dante’s refined love for Beatrice leads him to “the mystery of Christ,” self-sacrificial love of Mattie leads Jayber “without any conscious design, to the body of Christ manifest in a community on earth, bound together, despite our many sins, by the grace of God and by the slow leavening words of Jesus.”³⁶ In reckoning with his love for Mattie, Jayber again imagines the inbreaking of the eternal, for Mattie, “like every living creature,” carries “the presence of eternity” (249). And his experience of earthly love now leads him toward a divine love: “Love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us we could not imagine it. . . . Maybe love fails here, I thought, because it cannot be fulfilled here” (249).

It is this recognition of the failure of human love that leads Jayber to behold divine love. And his earlier vision of the gathered community now finally culminates in a vision of the gatherer:

I could imagine a Father who is yet like a mother hen spreading her wings before the storm or in the dusk before the dark night for the little ones of Port William to come in under, some of whom do, and some do not. I could imagine Port William riding its humble wave through time under the sky, its little flames of wakefulness lighting and going out, its lives passing through birth, pleasure, suffering, and death. I could imagine God looking down upon it, its lives living by His spirit, breathing by His breath, knowing by His light, but each life living also (inescapably) by its own will—His own body given to be broken.

(252)

Jayber, much like Dante, has slowly been led by his love for earthly goods and relationships to a deeper love for and understanding of the character of God. He has been led to the Head of the church through his love for the earthly members of Christ’s body. And his vision of God’s gathering love—a vision that grants an imaginative, poetic experience of this reality rather than a noetic, propositional doctrine—leads him not only to take up prayer again, twenty years after he gave it up, but also to a participation in God’s cruciform love for the members of Port William. Now Jayber can rightly imagine what God as Father—a Father who gathers his people as a mother hen—might mean, including God’s love for Port William. Once Jayber imagines the Son of God’s “own body given to be broken,” Jayber can pray the “terrible prayer” of surrender and can pray to know God’s love for the world, which is his “step into the abyss. As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die” (254). To know God’s love is to know the abyss between God and man and the mysterious incarnation and death required to cross the abyss: to know God’s love is to know, to participate in, Christ and his cross.

Because of Jayber’s vow and consequent path along the way of love, “a possibility—of faith, of faithfulness—that I could no longer live without had begun leaking into the world” (259). Whereas his early lust for Mattie led to private fantasies, his cruciform love now leads to a renewed affection for their whole community and a tender sympathy with the pains and travails that its members endure. After describing how his marriage leads him to resume praying, Jayber breaks off into a series of anecdotes about Port William’s members, whom he now sees differently in light of his efforts to pray for them: “My strange marriage (which not a soul on earth knew about but me) seemed to have placed me absolutely. I was where I was, in body and mind and heart too” (258–59, emphasis added). Instead of indulging in impossible, self-gratifying fantasies, Jayber learns to love Mattie and the other members of his community in the way that Christ loves them. Whereas earlier Jayber indulged in the impossible fantasy that he might “make my heart as big as heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted,” now he seeks to participate in the love of the God who opens his wings to all, even if this love will lead Jayber—as it led Christ—into an abyss.

On Calvary, Christ did not flee suffering by descent from the cross but descended into death, accepting the hatred and mockery of his creation for the sake of its redemption (254). As Jayber grows in faith to receive the reality of Christ, he thinks “a considerable amount about a friend of mine (imagined, but also real) I call the Man in the Well” (356). In Jayber’s parable, the Man in the Well has “blunder[ed]” into the “trap” of a well in the woods and “disappears suddenly out of the lighted world” (356–57). Jayber’s parabolic figure evokes his own wandering path in several ways: first, the lost man resembles Jayber himself, for both find that their aloneness becomes a “prison” and “tomb,” just as Jayber’s youthful disintegration from the world left him in a sort of death. Jayber asks of the Man in the Well, as he did of himself as a young man, whether the lost man may be saved, whether he may “pray finally the first true prayer of his life” (357). Faith gives an answer, one laced with Biblical references:

A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost . . . . 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 uttermost 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.

The final biblical reference is of course to Christ, who in descending into a tomb and even into Hell identifies with all those who are utterly lost. At the moment when Christ feels himself forsaken by his Father, he is, through his love “without hope,” extending mercy together with his Father and the Holy Spirit to all otherwise-forsaken-ones, lost in the woods and stuck in their tombs, who cry for mercy (357). Thus it is the Son of Man in the “well” of death who gives Jayber’s hope—a “kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing”—that there is no place or person, no Man in the Well, who is “lost” to God and beyond the reach of God’s love.

Thus cruciform love defines the mature Jayber’s love for the gathered community and shapes his ecclesiology, though both Berry and Jayber would likely duck at the sound of such a theological term flying overhead. It is God’s mercy as displayed in the cross that allows Jayber to rightly love the natural. Such love contrasts both with the Gnostic theology of the institutions that formed the youthful Jayber and with the technological Gnosticism of Troy Chatham, who “could not imagine himself as he was or where he was. And so he dreamed of himself as he would never be” (271). Yet even those who cannot see where they are may nonetheless be included by this love. Burley Coulter expresses this Christological truth elsewhere: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”³⁷

The two characters in this novel who most stubbornly insist they are not members of Port William, that they are not gathered by the divine love that is like a mother hen, are Cecilia Overhold and Troy Chatham. By the end of the book, Cecilia is forsaken in a California nursing home and Troy is a man whose work has come to nothing. Yet even so, as his parable of the Man in the Well reveals, Jayber does not believe they are lost. More remarkable, more miraculous, Jayber’s participation in Christ’s love for his body enables him to forgive and to love both Cecilia and Troy. And Jayber’s Nunc Dimittis, his vision of Christ’s redemptive presence, is that in their old age, he and Troy became friends. The fruit of Christ’s Incarnation is, as such, the possibility of restored human community, community marked by cruciform love (361). The kingdom of heaven with all its suffering and joy dwells amid the kingdom of this world. Jayber’s love for the natural, earthly membership of Port William—and, in particular, the Dantean “living knowledge” of his love for Mattie—leads him to imagine the God who gathers these beloved creatures. And as he experiences God’s love, he comes to love his fellow humans with this cruciform divine love.

A Book About Heaven

This ecclesiological and eschatological reality—what theologians call the “already-but-not-yet”—manifests in Jayber’s meanderings through the heavenly Nest Egg, where natural life especially speaks of Heaven to Jayber. Here Jayber and Mattie occasionally meet with rightly ordered loves, with a “patience until death,” a faith in things unseen (349). The Nest Egg is a place not to gratify human desires but to iconically glimpse the presence of the Hereafter in the here and now, hence Jayber’s confession after detailing the loveliness of the Nest Egg that

This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies.

(354–55)

What Jayber and Mattie learn—that Heaven is even now among us—will be fulfilled when this seed sprouts and the promise is fulfilled at Christ’s second coming: St. John hears a voice pronouncing in Revelation 21 that

the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.³⁸

Jayber’s “book about Heaven” as it appears in the here and now, in the embodied life of Port William and its people, reminds us not only that God dwells with us presently but also that He will dwell with us in perfected fellowship ultimately and eternally. Fittingly, Scripture presents this perfected fellowship as a marriage, commencing with the wedding feast of Christ, the groom, and his bride, the Church. This is the grand drama to which all earthly memberships and marriages—“strange” or not–finally point.

Neither Dante nor Jayber reduce this grand drama to bare theological propositions. Instead, they bear witness to its mysteries through the imaginative narratives they record, narratives that remind us we cannot rightly love Christ without loving his body, and we cannot rightly love our neighbors unless we love them with Christ’s cruciform, patient, in-gathering love.