"A very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works"

Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, is a fictional first-person account of the life of the Port William barber. He attended the small church in the small community--a church often led by brief pastorates of young seminary students. Jayber remembered most of the young men in this way:

The sermons, mostly, were preached on the same theme...: We must lay up treasures in Heaven and not be lured and seduced by this world's pretty and tasty things that do not last but are like the flower that is cut down. The preachers were always young students from the seminary who wore, you might say, the mantle of power but not the mantle of knowledge. They wouldn't stay long enough to know where they were....They were not going to school to learn where they were, let alone the pleasures and pains of being there, or what ought to be said there. You couldn't learn those things in a school. They went to school, apparently, to learn to say over and over again, regardless of where they were, what had already been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works--although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.'

Great line: School was where they learned to have "a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works." Of course, Jayber writes, "what they didn't see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest."

The young preachers must not have understood that to deny "the world" is not to deny the beauties of God's creation but the corruptions of a world-system at odds with God's rule. No, it is not God's creation that we are to deny. Jayber beautifully describes what is right and good to praise about this world of God's creative hand:

In Port William, more than anyplace else I had been, this religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me. To begin with, I didn't think anybody believed it. I still don't think so. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes. Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at. By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best. The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk.

 

(pp.160-161, Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry)

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