When the young Jayber Crow first spots a man who turns out to be Burley Coulter floating on a small boat in a flooded river, he doesn't know what he wants. He knows he's sick at heart; he knows there is some absence in his life, but he has not yet learned how to name it.
That is how it often is for us, I think; the absence announces itself to us well before its object or satiation does. When C. S. Lewis felt something in his heart twinge at the lines "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead," he could not yet name the thing whose absence provoked the pain. So it was for Jayber. I wonder, also, if there is some sense in which we rootless people today are a bit like Jayber.
Berry sketches his early days expertly. Jayber was orphaned at age three, then the elderly couple that took him in both passed just after his tenth birthday, making him something of an orphan twice over. He was then taken out of the home they had made for him and spent the remainder of his childhood in an orphanage run by fundamentalist Baptist sorts, the kind who regarded any kind of existence outside of their benevolent control as in some way a failure, or at the very least an enormous and needless risk.
Left with no sense of where he belonged, Jayber for a time decides that he is called to preach, before being disabused of that notion by a flood of theological questions that arise during his days at the denominational college. His questions have called him out of that ministerial life, just as the death of his elderly caregivers effectively called him out of their home. He floats about for a time, working briefly as a barber in Lexington and taking some literature classes at the University of Kentucky. But then he finds that the accumulation of absences in pursuit of "freedom" is no way to live a life:
By the time I had got to Lexington, I was so convinced of the temporariness of any stay I would ever make in this world that I hadn't formed any ties at all. At the trotting track and at the shop, I made acquaintances , but I didn't make any friends. At the university I came and went almost without speaking to anybody. Maybe I did and have forgot, but I don't remember eating a meal with another soul during they ear and about ten months I stayed in Lexington. For a long time I liked it that way. I enjoyed coming and going without telling or explaining, being free. I enjoyed listening without talking. I enjoyed being wherever I was without being noticed. But then when the dark change came over my mind, I was in a fix. My solitariness turned into loneliness. When I was alone those images moved and Aunt Cordie's voice sounded in my mind, and I couldn't stop them. What I had thought was the bottom kept getting lower in little jerks. When I cried it was getting harder to stop.
Here is the thing that worries me: I do not doubt that our world is still full of Jaybers. The human condition this side of Eden inherently means that all of us will relate to Jayber to varying degrees at different times.
But what led Jayber home?
In the first place, it was the memory of that elderly woman's voice and care. In the second place, it was going back to where he had been with Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie and finding that even though they were gone the community they had belonged to still existed. Amongst the first people he meets on his return to Port William is Zelma Coulter, mother to Burley. She says to him, "honey, I don't know your name, but you're welcome," and then provides him with a hot meal.
We are hearing a great deal about hope right now. It's an election season. That's normal—every winning campaign since 2008 at least has run on a variation of hope as its theme: hope and change, hope for renewal, hope for normalcy. It's a theme hardwired into our politics ever since former President Obama's first campaign. Yet this seems a category error to me, and one that is indicative of far deeper problems. One should not look to politics as a source of personal hope—politicians will fail through acts of corruption and venality, or simply through incompetence. Your party will suffer defeats. Policies you believe in will fail to pass or be somehow repealed or overturned. The role that properly political functions play in our public life is not trivial, but neither is it all pervasive or meaning-making.
But what interests me most is not the fact that we now treat politics in this way, but the reasons why. I suspect one such reason is the loss of places like Squire's Landing, where Jayber lived with his elderly caregivers after his parents' deaths, as well as the collapse of places like Port William, where people like Burley and Zelma Coulter are shaped and can be found.
This isn't to say "a renewal of small town America will fix this problem." I actually think that's a mistaken reading of Berry. Berry's first concern is not with size or scale per se, but rather with the presence of affection in a place and the potency of that affection. There are conditions necessary for human affection to take hold and endure, he believes, and conditions necessary for that affection to actually matter in a real way.
It is harder for affection to take hold when we are hyper-mobile, for example, or when we are lack the defined social relationships, such as marriage, that aid in cultivating affection. It is hard for affection to be potent, meanwhile, when we regard all social challenges and problems as technocratic problems to be solved by government or by industry or by education, which of course has been thoroughly commodified in our current moment.
What we are left with, then, is an unhappy cycle: We invest institutions and social spheres that categorically can't provide us with meaning, hope, or transcendent purpose with a significance and power far beyond their capacity. This act in itself hollows out the soft forms of communal life and belonging that can offer such things. And in the absence of those communities, it becomes inevitable that people will search for these transcendent goods in other venues, such as the aforementioned institutions and social spheres.
This creates a tricky problem: It would be wrong to wholly drop out of America's public life in order to avoid these problems. The fact that our political processes now are asked to fill roles they are not fit for does not mean that they have no roles to fill whatsoever. Even so, there is some sense in which a righteous dropping out might be necessary—dropping out not from common life, but from certain lifestyle choices, technological devices, and so on. This might make us seem "weird" to our neighbors, but then again weird is a relative term. Mr. Berry himself seems enormously weird to many today. Yet the kind of weirdness that has marked his life and that marks the characters he has made seems to me precisely the sort of "weird" we most need today. His is a weirdness of genuine belonging to a place and a people, bound up all together in a community of love and affection. It is an answer both to the accumulated absences experienced by Jayber, an orphan twice over, and to the similar absences that so many of our friends and neighbors today experience.