Tuesday Tome - Jayber Crow Again

My wife is currently re-reading Wendell Berry's wonderful novel, Jayber Crow. Making her way through the book once again, she has been reminded of so many beautiful and thought-provoking passages. She reads some of these aloud to me, making it inevitable that I too will soon be revisiting the little village of the Port William Membership, probably this summer.

Here are a few examples of the pure gold to be gleaned from the pages of this story written by this humble village barber, whose hands remember the shape of so many heads, and whose insights reflect the wisdom gained from the quiet observation of so many lives.

This , I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’sPrayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified….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?” (p 51)

“By then I wasn’t just asking questions; I was being changed by them.” (p52)“If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free,for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself…something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.” (p. 56)“I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.” (p 253)

“I could see no escape. We [humans] are too tightly tangled together to be able to separate ourselves from one another either by good or by evil.We all are involved in all and any good, and in all and any evil. For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless. It is why God grieves and Christ’s wounds still are bleeding.” (p 295)