Hannah Coulter

If there's a fiction book more full of gospel love and truth than Hannah Coulter is, I haven't read it.
But this book has also done something very few others have done: made me truly ponder if my way of life is the right one.

When most people imagine an old man in rural America griping about how times have changed, it's common to assume he's perhaps acting out of a misplaced nostalgia, and that he's wrong to want to emulate the past. But Wendell Berry has struck firmly on something that I think he's 100% right about: for most of human history people have lived in much tighter social networks than we do now, and the jury is out on if the modern way of life is a clear winner.

Of course, lots of good things have come from the modern social model! People can move to find education and work that's a better fit with their interests, specialized research has flourished (especially medically), and traveling to meet people different from ourselves is a good thing.

However, people today lack a sense of deep local ties to specific places and people, and I have to believe that's centrally related to the widespread sense of loneliness and isolation in society, especially among young people. (Social media surely contributes as well). Some people find small towns stifling, and they can be, but regular interaction with people who have known you and your family for decades surely helps people feel less invisible and like more of a true member of a community.

I'm an example myself, having parents who moved a bit away from home for school and jobs, and now I've moved even farther from home for the same reasons. But this book makes me think about how the Fear Of Missing Out that can drive a lot of our personal interactions also plays out on a larger level. FOMO makes us always wonder if there are “better” things to be doing, people to be meeting, and places to be living. And when you're looking over your shoulder at other opportunities, you aren't as present and committed to the relationship – to a person or to a community – right in front of you, and you can more easily let yourself bail on them. And if you start treating some relationships as “bail-able,” it's easy to let yourself treat more and more things that way. In some ways that's the point of marriage: to agree together not to look out for shiny new options, but to get to the unglamorous work of building the relationship that's right in front of you. As Berry says about residents of the town in the book: They were not striving to “get someplace” because “they think they are someplace” already.

All monks take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but some take a fourth one that's less well-known: stability. It means that you never leave the grounds of the monastery you've entered. Chastity is often seen as the most “outdated” in today's world, but to most people similar to myself - young, college-educated, and living near a city - I think stability may well be the hardest to entertain. Thomas Merton said that taking the vow of stability makes the monk “renounce the vain hope of wandering off to find a ‘perfect monastery.'” If you're always looking for perfection, you aren't content with the imperfections around you. When you're looking around for the Next Big Thing that you could have, you aren't investing in what you do have right in front of you.

Hannah Coulter demonstrates a special kind of love that is only possible when you are known deeply; not just your quirks as a person, but your whole world and context. I don't have the answers here: I'm not planning to move back to my home area and become a farmer. But I know that I long for feeling deeply known and loved, and Wendell Berry has captured that more than anything else I've ever read. I do know that I believe the solution going forward lies in long-term, deep investment in relationships with people and places, and the kind of trust and mutual reliance that only builds up over time. Perhaps we all ought to take a type of vow of stability.