the power of words

beginning in early december, i started reading wendell berry's fiction. i only wish i had followed the urging of several friends and visited the world of the port william membership even sooner. last night, i came to the end of the port william stories (at least as of this moment). in hannah coulter, wb once again was masterful. every one of his stories, frankly, had moments that amazed, grieved, amused, and brought ecstatic joy. the passing of uncle jack beechum in the memory of old jack. the impromptu funeral in a place on earth. a barber's love in jayber crow. the death of a husband as remembered in light of his life in hannah coulter. in the hands of an amateur, words are deadly. but in the hands of an artist, those same words are powerful beyond measure. wendell berry certainly belongs to the latter category.
now, i suppose i might move on to read some of wb's nonfiction and poetry. without doubt, though, i know i will revisit several passages from the stories i only recently finished. the world that berry has created is not a perfect world, by any stretch. but it is a very real world, marred by sin and changed by grace. his stories about this community could be seen, i believe, as a sort of port william theology, which teaches much about god's grace to a fallen and sinful world.

"As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, Andy Catlett, do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn't." (hannah coulter,158-9)