Hungry

On reminding myself to let love eat

I am 45 years old these days and too old to believe my thoughts are Important. I write less and more slowly, because I am unconvinced of your need for my words. Aren’t there enough words out there?

Sometimes people think that because I’m a writer, writing is easy, something like delivering a fifth baby—it might happen by accident in the car. Those people are mistaken. Writing is (almost always) like climbing a tall mountain in a storm. You have to have a very good reason to do a stupid thing like that.

I said to my husband in the car yesterday, “I’m so thankful to have grown out of my pride, but sometimes I miss it. It fueled a lot of writing.”

Vices do thrust us out into the world, don’t they? They keep us seeking—affirmation under bushes, identity in the tall grass, pleasure buried in the x-marked spot. I say, “It’s hard to write from contentment.”

(It’s easy to write when you’re hungry.)

-

Have you read Yesteryear? The book everyone’s talking about, the one about a “tradwife” influencer? Hate it or love it, one can’t help but find it fascinating. It’s a book about lots of things, but one thing it’s (unintentionally) about is the way vice thrusts you out into the world. For our protagonist, and for the women who ferociously consume her Instagram content, anger fuels a remarkable amount of activity. Anger builds a family, a farm, a career, an empire. And anger burns it down.

Yesteryear is one of those books you read in two days because the pace never lets up, because something is always happening, something is always being built or rebuilt or destroyed.

It’s Yesteryear I’m thinking about as I read Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, a book famous in certain Christian circles for its glowing presentation of a simpler way of life. The books don’t have much in common on the surface (Jayber Crow is slow-paced, told from a distinctly male perspective, and hopeful), but I think they’re actually sibling stories.

Both main characters, Natalie and Jayber, feel the absence of a parent. Both struggle to find their place in the world. Both feel uncomfortable in their faith community, even as they feel bound to their faith, and both turn to the ways of the past for hope in the present. At the end of each book, we find our main characters living away from civilization without running water or electricity. In Yesteryear, this ending is tragic (verging on horrific). In Jayber Crow it’s edenic.

Jayber says in the second to last chapter, “This is a book about Heaven.” Yesteryear is a book about Hell.

What makes the difference?

You might say, Jayber is a man and Natalie is a woman. Jayber is a bachelor and Natalie drags dependents behind her like chains. Jayber can live on his small garden and the kindnesses of friends. Natalie, who has no friends, is the metaphorical ever-nursing mother, every person around her expecting more and more from her. These are legitimate differences.

But the one I’m personally most interested in is this difference in fuel. Natalie is driven by vice; anger (and pride and selfishness and fear) make her hungry. She cannot stop seeking and chasing and wanting. Eventually she runs away, and her hunger becomes madness. Jayber, on the other hand, is driven by love. And love slows him. It roots him. Love plants Jayber like a tree beside a river.

Is there a version of Natalie’s story in which she might put down her anger and receive the gift of love? How does a tradwife influencer with a half dozen children live from love?

Maybe I’m asking because I didn’t like Jayber Crow. Not as much as I wanted to. Because it seemed to me that love made Jayber too content. That it stripped him of ambition and bounded the depth and width of his (and his neighbors’) potential joy. Maybe I didn’t like Jayber’s version of love, because I’ve noticed the same thing happening in me, a settling down turned atrophy.

Jayber says about Heaven, “It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself… it is like the reflection of the trees on the water.”

Yes. Beautiful.

But also, Jayber’s Heaven is something to observe, something he’s tiptoeing on the edges of (until one day when he’ll be fully ushered into the heart of it). I think Heaven is something to seek and cultivate and grab hold of and share. I think Heaven is less the reflection of trees and more the trees themselves—bark, leaves, roots, sap, and fruit. I want to take a walk in the forest and climb into the branches and pluck the orange, and then I want to eat it with joy and gratitude, my grinning face sticky with juice.

Enough of this looking out the window and yearning (and yawning). I want to be thrust out into world, because I’m hungry.

Can love do that?

-

I’m reading Isaiah in the mornings with coffee. Isaiah is a strange combination of Heaven and Hell. It’s written to Israel in a time of widespread disobedience and suffering. God has turned his people over to their multiplying vices. In their hunger they have sought out every pleasure, bowed down to every god, and devoured every blessing from the true God’s hand. Soon they will eat their own children as they wait to be devoured themselves by invading armies.

Hell is what happens when God lets us have what we want.

Of course, Heaven is the same.

You know that moment when Jesus asks the blind men, “What do you want me to do for you?” They know what they want and what they want is what they get.

I know what love has given me. I know all the ways it’s weaned me. I’m trying to pay attention to what love is teaching me to want.

Isaiah says, 
Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,
you who seek the Lord:
Look… (51:1)

Four more times in five verses he tells them, “Look.” A few chapters later in Isaiah 55:6 he says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call to him while he is near.” And then Isaiah 58:2, a description of the Kingdom to come, of a people faithful to their God: “They seek me day after day and delight to know my ways, like a nation that does what is right and does not abandon the justice of their God. They ask me for righteous judgments; they delight in the nearness of God.”

Which is it? Do they enjoy God’s nearness? Or do they seek Him?

Can’t it be both?

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I’ve been teaching Look to Love at my church, the book I wrote years ago about reading the Bible to fall in love with God. In it I talk about what it’s like to be married to the same man for 25 years (a man I met when I was 13), about how sometimes I think I know everything about him, about how I may know more about him than he knows about himself.

There’s something lovely about knowing him, about delighting in his nearness. It’s a kind of Heaven.

But it’s not all of Heaven, because he’s not only near. He’s not all near. He can also be sought.

Sometimes we’ll be out to dinner and I’ll ask a question and he’ll answer with a story I’ve never heard or tell me about a book he’s read that I don’t know anything about. On the luckiest days he’ll share some emotion he’s been feeling or some idea that has him wondering.

And I will grab at the fruit and grin while the juice drips down my chin.

A lover doesn’t wait patiently for the person across the table to reveal himself. Lovers are hungry.

-

It’s been a while since I sat down to write, and in just a few hours I have been re-romanced. I’ve been passively avoiding writing partly because writing happens alone in a room, and lately I have preferred being out amidst the action. I’ve been teaching and mentoring and helping shepherd my kids into adulthood. I’ve been hosting young couples for dinner and babysitting my friends’ kids. I’ve been meeting people who’re doing extraordinary things from and for love.

Around every corner, I’m discovering God in His people, and they are (He is) exquisite.

It’s hard to remember that God dwells in the writing, too. But He does. I sit at the table and God is here with me. I delight in His nearness. I am stilled and contented.

But I’m not just contented. Sentences materialize like breadcrumbs, and soon I find myself on a new path. I’m discovering and learning. I can see parts of God I’ve never noticed before.

There’s fruit in the tree. I climb up, reach, grab…

I eat and I’m satisfied.

I eat and I’m hungry.

-JL

Me teaching Look to Love this summer. Mmm… I love talking about loving God. I love it so much that I’m considering releasing a 5 year anniversary version of Look to Love in the fall. Maybe we do a little teaching tour? What do you think?

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