“A Place in Time” is Wendell Berry’s 10th book in the Port William Membership -- stories of the imaginary town on the Kentucky River, its characters, families, landscapes and changes. I’m normally a speedy reader, but I read the 20 short stories in this 2012 collection slowly, so that I could savor Berry’s words and images.
My favorite story in the book is “Stand By Me,” narrated by Burley Coulter. Burley describes in straight-forward fashion the time after the death of his brother Jarrat’s wife Lettie. When Lettie dies, leaving behind five-year-old Nathan and seven-year-old Tom, their Uncle Burley says, “the boys all of a sudden, instead of belonging just to her and Jarrat, belonged to us all.”
Burley, a 34-year-old bachelor, living with his parents on the farm, says simply, “And I was one of the ones they belonged to. They belonged to me because I belonged to them. They thought so, and that made it so.”
They belonged to Burley, he continues, because they needed him. From the time he brings them home to his farm, away from their grieving father’s house, the boys stick to him “like burrs.” They follow him around in a “regular procession.”
“They needed their mother, was who they needed,” Burley says. “But they didn’t have her, and so they needed me. Sometimes I’d find one or the other of them off somewhere by himself, all sorrowful and little and lost, and there’d be nothing to do by try to mother him, just pick him up and hold him tight and carry him around a while. Their daddy couldn’t do it, and it was up to me.”
This natural sense of belonging is reflective of the whole community at Port William, a community that has a strong and abiding sense of membership.
That sense comes, in part, from a shared history and decades of living on the same piece of land, but also from economic relationships and a tradition of caring for each other physically -- sharing daily work, feeding each other, helping one another with chores in times of illness, caring for children like Burley does.
Even most of us churchgoers don’t share this kind of economic and physical dependency with our fellow church members. How can we discover places where we can claim a sense of the embodied belonging so rich in the story of Burley and Jarrat? And, as Christian leaders, how can we form communities in which people just know, as Burley says, “they belonged to me because I belonged to them”?
If you think Berry’s Port William sounds like idealistic fiction, we can look to Acts for our inspiration.
New Testament scholar Kavin Rowe provides us with a place to start as we think about creating and sustaining such communities where people feel a sense of real sharing, belonging and mutual dependency. He points to six features of thriving communities seen in Acts.
“Acts is the only biblical text that narrates the formation of early Christian communities in their earliest days,” Rowe writes. “It corresponds, therefore, to the theological shape of God’s work in establishing communities that were meant to thrive.”
