Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow is about a young man who has had a series of failures at school and work that leave him at loose ends and unattached. So, in the depths of the Great Depression, he packed his things into a cardboard box and started to walk toward his ancestral home in Port William, Kentucky.
As he walked, a great torrential rain began to fall, swelling the Kentucky River and sweeping away bridges and houses. Trudging through the stormy night, he found one bridge still standing and recklessly crossed it. From out there on the crest of that bridge, he said, the river
was like a living element. It was like a big crowd shouting. And above or within the uproar of the water, I could hear the sleet hissing down. I could feel the river throbbing in the bridge. I can’t say that I was not afraid, but it seemed the fear was not in me but in the air, like the sound of the river. It seemed to be something I had gone into and could not expect to get out of easily or very soon.
He could see barrels, logs, whole trees, and pieces of houses being swept along by the currents, and a Bible passage popped into his head: “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” It was as if Crow were traveling back in time to some primal awareness:
I’m not sure that I can tell you what was happening to me then, or that I know even now. At the time I surely wasn’t trying to tell myself. But after all my years of reading in that book and hearing it read and believing and disbelieving it, I seemed to have wandered my way back to the beginning—not just of the book, but of the world—and all the rest that was yet to come. I felt knowledge crawl over my skin.
He marched onward, trying to make his way to Port William, but constantly taking wrong turns and getting lost, his teeth chattering in the cold and hunger stabbing at his stomach. He finally came to a town where refugees from the flood were stumbling into the town hall, looking for food and shelter. Crow joined the drenched lost souls and was met by love—caring volunteers from somewhere who were buzzing around and offering food and coffee.
He watched the parents around the hall tenderly put their kids to bed in the makeshift shelter. He was bone-tired and closed his eyes but didn’t fall asleep. In his mind’s eye he saw the river again. But this time, inwardly, he saw the whole river, its entire length, with the currents picking up logs and a barn and maybe an entire house itself. The world seemed to be cast adrift and tossed about on the currents.
And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly.
Crow broke through to a deeper awareness that night. A spiritual knowledge crawled, as he put it, over his skin.
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Just as earlier in this book I mentioned that I collect people’s accounts of joy, so do I also collect people’s accounts of mystical experiences. These are moments when the shell of normal reality cracks, and people perceive some light from someplace beyond shining though.
Many of these experiences, unsurprisingly, happen in nature. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James quotes a man who had such a moment as bold as a thunderclap:
I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep—the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made