Jayber Crow is the barber in Wendell Berry’s recommended fictional community of Port William. As such he witnesses how life and circumstances sometimes transform people . . .And, in that sense, there is a parallel between Jayber Crow’s job of being a barber and mine as a pastor.
But you could not be where I was with experiencing many such transformations. One of your customers, one of your neighbors (let us say), is a man know to be more or less a fool, a big talker, and one day he comes into your shop and you have heard and you see that he is dying even as he is standing there looking at you, and you can see his his eyes that (whether he admits it or not) he knows it, and all of a sudden everything is changed. You seem no longer to be standing together in the center of time. Now you are on time’s edge, looking offing into eternity. And this man, your foolish neighbor, your friend and brother, has shed somehow the laughter that followed him through the world, and has assumed the dignity and the strangeness of a traveler departing forever. Jayber Crow, page 129.
See also, “We’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.”’ “Living long won’t kill you, not for a long time.” And, “Take a rest in Port William fiction.”
