Happy Groundhog Day!
Let this greeting serve as my annual reminder that everyone should watch the classic Bill Murray film from 1993. It might be the funniest exploration of the book of Ecclesiastes you ever see.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: The Many Ways of Fidelity
Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. -Proverbs 3:3
A young man watches by his father’s bedside as he struggles through his last breaths. At intervals, the young man digs a grave — in the glen where his father would want it, in the place he loved best.
A soldier is left by a bus at the foot of the hill in the middle of the night. As he ascends the road toward his hometown, he reflects on names and places he’s known in the town, and how they’ve made him. The return from war is not an easy thing, as he is deeply changed. He understands those at home to be unchanged. How will they come together again?
A flood rises and threatens the farm of a next-door neighbor. A man sets out in the dark to call out: “is everything all right?” The lanterns from the neighboring farm reassure him that everyone is where they ought to be; everything is all right.
These are three out of five vignettes from Wendell Berry’s collection of short stories Fidelity, which served as my introduction to the world of Port William and its residents.
We frequently think of “fidelity” as a word that applies to marriage. Its inverse “infidelity” in modern usage applies only to the idea of being unfaithful to your spouse. Other than references to marriage, the word doesn’t usually come up very often.
However, the idea of fidelity — of “faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support” — is larger and broader than the marriage vow. It binds up communities; it holds friendships together; it lends stability. My marriage is made stronger because of the fidelity of friendships around it. We two, vowed to one another until death, are woven more tightly together because we are in a larger fabric. The threads of male friendship, female friendship, church community, and extended family weave in and lend it stability.
This is perhaps most obvious when a marriage dissolves. The tear in the fabric affects more than just the couple in question. Threads of friendship are broken; the community around the marriage is damaged. Children take on the task of making their lives in two places and celebrating holidays twice — something that sounds like it doubles the joy but instead halves it. While the marriage bond is made stronger by those around it, those around a marriage ought to be strengthened by the institution in return.
It is a mysterious tension we all hold, the interconnectedness of persons.
There is an old piece by Garrison Keillor called “Letter from Jim"1 which discusses a man’s life at 40. Among other things, he sees in himself a destructive tendency to enjoy the company of a female coworker. He feels his family overlooks him; his attractive colleague laughs at his jokes and finds him smart. He eventually comes to a reckoning over it:
As I sat on the lawn, looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gasses come out of the ventilators in the elementary school.
When we shout in anger at our children or gossip about a person in our friend circle, we weaken the whole piece. Sin pollutes in insidious ways, breaking trust and making our communities more fragile. In ways we cannot fully see or understand, our “private” actions are publicly felt.
There are many places and times to be faithful. Our fidelity, or lack thereof, gives strength and health to the people around us, in spite of the diversity of personal history we all carry. It cannot be denied that relationships are strengthened by simply showing up in quiet faithfulness, time after time, week after week, for years.
Wendell Berry calls his Port William people a “membership.” It is the idea expressed best here in A Place in Time:
… a mere gathering, not held together by power and organisation like the army, but by kinship, friendship, history, memory, kindness, and affection - who were apt to be working together in various combinations, according to need, and even, always, according to pleasure.
For the Anglophiles
When our children were little, we taught them to play Pooh Sticks anytime they were near a bridge over moving water. This week I learned that Magdalen College has a Pooh Stick Society.
Reads & Listens of the Week
Tsh gave us a nice essay on books and how we are what we love. “Just like a steady diet of cotton candy would cause cavities and stomach aches, a regular consumption of shallow teaching and entertainment leads to laziness, poor thinking, and restless hearts.”
A beautiful letter from mother to child: When Discipleship is a Wound. “Jesus is not yours by right. He owes you no warm feelings, no gentle words. His companionship may feel more like discipline than devotion. Following him may feel sometimes like a wound. You may know his caress only in the life to come. But even unto death is the call of a disciple.”
4 Ways Sir Roger Scruton shaped me: A nice tribute piece here, revisited from three years ago. “Rage and resentment may build movements, but they cannot sustain a people, much less secure necessary political goods. Scruton taught me patience speaks a better word.”
Lastly, we laugh at February to keep from crying (the bit with the umbrella does me in every time):
Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.
- Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection
possibly my favorite piece from Garrison Keillor. You can hear the whole thing here.
Pooh Sticks! hah - also your family is such a beautiful example of living out fidelity in our community. And of course I love Tsh's essay on reading books (I mean obviously ...), but just a small quibble with her heavy reliance on audiobooks. I'm an audiobook lover, but don't think we should rely so much on them!
So, so good.