Chasing Port William

There is a longing in my soul for the unfindable thing Wendell Berry held in his hands. If you’ve never ventured into the world of Port William, you can’t know what I mean. But if you’ve been there even once, Port William has followed you home. I’m unsure how to measure Wendell Berry’s impact on my life, but I’m angry at myself for misunderstanding how to find Port William.

Opening to the first pages of his book, Jayber Crow, I was unaware of what I might find. It turns out Jayber found me. An orphan, an outsider, pressed hard to make a life. It wasn’t a bad life, but something wasn’t there. Eventually, Jayber returned home. He returned to Port William. And somehow, Wendell Berry brought me there too.

As Barnabas was to Saul, Burley Coulter was there for the barber who came from the outside. An anonymous invitation slipped beneath the door of Jayber’s shop, inviting him to a drinking party. He went. There were men there who had been strangers. Before long, they weren’t. You are not a citizen of Port William; you are a member. Over time, Jayber belonged.

Wendell Berry’s words hung with me for weeks after I finished the book. Weeks turned to months. I began looking for Port William. Could there really be a place with rootedness, neighbors, familiar faces, local institutions, and people who stayed? I believed so. Everything I owned went into a truck, and my family moved from a metro area of two and a half million people to a village of five thousand, surrounded by rows of corn.

Most people in Holdrege know each other. People stay. There are institutions with a rich history. The family stories cross generations. Burley Coulters walk these sidewalks. But moving here didn’t make me a member. I had mistaken the conditions surrounding Port William for the thing that made Port William what it was. Farms weren’t it. Population wasn’t it. Knowing the cashier at Tractor Supply wasn’t it. The bricks on Main Street weren’t it.

I wanted a place where my absence would be noticed.

Four million eyes, yet nobody saw each other. We passed one another in traffic, stood beside one another in self-checkout lines, lived behind doors separated by little more than driveways. There were people everywhere. But I was anonymous. I could leave my house, buy bread, fill the car, pick up dinner, and return home without anyone knowing my name, day after day. I couldn’t imagine knowing a child in our church long enough to watch him grow up, marry, have children of his own, and grow old.

Then I moved to a place where people remembered.

They remembered when the grocery store had a different name. They knew whose boy had married whose girl, who had left town, and who had come home. Names on storefronts were the same names on mailboxes and gravestones. The same families lined the streets for the same parade every summer.  Children grew up under the watch of people who had known their parents when they were children.

I loved it. For a while, I thought I had found it.

But I had arrived in the middle of everyone else’s story. They remembered who lived in our house before we did. They had buried people together. They remembered each other as children. They could point to a building that was no longer there and still see it. I could learn the stories, but I wasn’t in them. I had come looking for people who stayed, only to discover that I was the one who came after.

Jayber came after too. Port William already had its stories when he arrived. There were names he didn’t know, histories he hadn’t lived, graves he hadn’t mourned. Burley could invite him to the party, but he couldn’t give Jayber a past. Jayber had to stay long enough to become part of the story. In time, the barber who needed someone to remember him became one of the people who remembered.

For a while, I thought perhaps that was the answer. Stay. Give it enough years. Learn the names. Bury the old and watch the young grow up. Maybe, if I remained long enough, I could finally become part of the story too. There is wisdom in that. But the gospel gives me something better.

Paul writes that “we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” I had spent years trying to understand how a man becomes a member of a place. Paul told me that, in Christ, I had been made a member of a people.

That changes the order of things. I do not have to accumulate enough years to earn a place among God’s people. Christ had already given me one. The years still matter. Staying matters. Learning names, bearing burdens, forgiving sins, burying the old, and watching the young grow up all matter. But these things do not make us the body of Christ. They are what the body of Christ does because Christ has already made us his own.

And then I thought again of Wendell Berry.

Perhaps he had been telling me this all along. Jayber did not find Port William because he finally found the spot on the map. He found it because Burley opened a door, and Jayber walked through it. Then he stayed. He learned their names and carried their stories. He mourned their dead. He loved people who were difficult to love. The outsider became part of the Membership because, over time, their lives became bound up with his.

Berry had shown me the shape of the thing. I had mistaken it for the scenery. Paul gave me the words for what I had been longing for: “we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” Members one of another. Maybe that was what followed me home from Port William.

The unfindable thing Wendell Berry held in his hands was never Port William. It was membership. People bound to one another by place, memory, love, obligation, suffering, and time. Berry made me ache for it long before I understood why.

I went looking for it in a small town. I found many of the things that make such a life possible, and I am grateful for them. But the gospel gives me what no town can. In Christ, I can be given a people. I do not share their past, but by the grace of God, I can give them my future.

Perhaps that is what Jayber finally taught me. You do not have to have been there from the beginning. Someone opens the door. You walk through it.

And then you stay.