My wife and I took a lovely vacation last week, centered around a friend’s wedding in Walla Walla, Washington. I had an essay lined up about being inspired by the local food economy in eastern Washington. But life can change with the blink of an eye, or in our case, the whiff of smoke.
This morning (I’m writing on Tuesday, August 30), I heard an odd-sounding pop in our house. I walked down the hall and saw some smoke. I thought “that’s not ideal.” I opened the closet with our house’s central electrical panel and it was full of smoke. As Lauren called 911, the smoke drifted out of the closet and I saw an orange glow above the electrical panel, where the wall had caught fire.
The fire was quickly extinguished. Our house will require significant electrical work and that will displace us for a (hopefully) short time. There’s never a good time to have a housefire, but if there is, it is definitely not the morning you return from vacation, when your to-do list is already massive. Today’s festivities transpired as people were going to work, taking their kids to school, or returning from school drop-off. We live on a busy street, so it did not take long for word to get around. That is a good thing.
I finally lured Lauren into reading “Jayber Crow,” so I listened along to her audiobook a few times on our trip. This is Wendell Berry’s most famous work of fiction. The title character is the bachelor barber of fictional Port William, Kentucky. Berry describes Port William’s people as its “membership” (a reference to Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and Ephesians). There’s a reason why this book is taught in seminaries. In many ways, the Port William membership is an allegory for the Church itself.
There’s a famous segment of the book, where Jayber describes the Port William membership thusly:
What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... 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. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. 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.”
This morning, I watched the Stamford Volunteer Fire Department run in and out of my house. Every one of those firefighters is a friend of mine. Lauren and I were both inundated with love, encouragement, and support. People called, texted, or stopped by, and each offered to help in the manner that they were best suited to help. In each of those people, I thought of Port William. I thought of Jayber’s description of a community imperfect and irresolute, struggling with its flaws but always full of goodwill.
I don’t care about politics. I am tired of culture wars, cable news, social media clickbait, and people who seek to divide in the name of power and influence. I care about community. In “Jayber Crow,” Wendell Berry outlines how a community should work. If we look out for our membership, if we struggle past our failings, and if we focus on love, compassion, and forgiveness for one another, our communities will be powerful and resilient beyond belief.
I felt that in Stamford today. I hope that each of us work to ensure that others feel it whenever and wherever they need it, no matter where your community might be.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.
Thank you, James, for a beautiful essay. It kind of hurt my heart when "Jayber Crow" was published the very year after I had submitted my dissertation to the UTD Humanities Dept., entitled "Living Responsibly in Community: Wendell Berry's Port William Fiction." I read every novel and collection of short stories available at the time (not to mention poetry & essays to deepen my research), and after it was all over, here comes Jayber. So sad not to have had that one to really pull things together in a grand way. But I'm just glad to have had Wendell B. as the other man in my life for those years devoted to reading & research.
What a joy to read your reflections on how a community should work. You and Stamford a fortunate to have each other! --CCPerkins