I underestimated the weight of the slim booklet I grabbed for light, in-transit reading, when I packed for travel to my father and our native homeland, Jamaica. Titled Hannah & Nathan by The Trinity Forum, the excerpt and its foreword by Image journal editor Gregory Wolfe introduced me to author Wendell Berry and his novel Hannah Coulter, which explores themes of love, family, and loss through the reflections of a fictional eighty-year-old woman from rural Kentucky. As one who had sung patriotic school songs in one country, pledged marital vows to my suitor from another, and then had sworn allegiance to that nation as we reared a family, I was no stranger to promises of fidelity stretched thin. So it was small wonder that I felt the tear in my psychological muscle as I sought to bear up under the lines I read, cruising high above the Atlantic.
The prime character, Hannah, reflecting on her younger self, thus describes her attitude during her two-month-long marriage to her first husband, Virgil, who died in WWII:
Like maybe any young woman of that time, I had thought of marriage as promises to be kept until death, as having a house, living together, working together, sleeping together, raising a family. But Virgil’s and my marriage was going to have to be more than that. It was going to have to be part of a place already decided for it, and part of a story begun long ago and going on.[1]
Despite not knowing how Hannah Coulter’s second marriage to Nathan Coulter is fleshed out in Berry’s work, his heroine’s association of marital fidelity to “place” struck an intensely familiar, though as yet unexamined, chord.
Recalling a church musical production from my youth, of the biblical story of Ruth and her mother-in-law, I remember how troubled I’d felt back then at the tragically unexpected toll that migration had taken on that family. And now, many years later, questions of patriotic indebtedness and the impacts of my leaving “home” due to marriage still linger. The song that most haunted me was one in which the musical director recast Ruth’s famous pledge of undying fidelity to her mother-in-law as a love song between Ruth and her kinsman redeemer/husband Boaz (a use to which many others have put those words over the centuries).
“Entreat me not to leave you,” the song began, echoing Ruth 1.16-17, “or to turn back from following after you; for where you go, I will go; and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die and there will I be buried.”
But this romanticizing of Ruth’s pledge still failed to grant permission to overlook the fact that Naomi, the other heroine or foil to Ruth, had also faithfully followed her spouse whithersoever he went … only, it was to the family’s detriment.
Still new to Berry, I am not sure of all Wolfe means when he writes that “in Berry’s imagination, the business of marrying and raising children is the spiritual equivalent of cultivating the soil.”[2] Yet I cannot help but believe that though his ideas ring true, hinting at biblical principles portrayed in the story of Ruth, Berry stops just short of fidelity’s ultimate call. Missing, to me, is a still grander vision that brings heaven down to earth wherever hearts meet in a covenant love relationship with the Creator. Such a vision invites every human being to be regenerated, becoming a part of God’s reconciled, betrothed, forever family. Hannah’s marriage ideals certainly watered the thirsty land of Berry’s imaginary Port William, as this WWII era couple—Nathan battle-scarred and Hannah with her orphaned child—dares to rise in nuptial pledge to rebuild a home with the help of a community yearning for rejuvenation. But the Gentile Ruth’s marriage to Boaz fused her storyline with not just Naomi’s Israelite family line, but with their Messianic line, and thus, God’s eternal purpose of a redeemed humanity and a renewed earth.
Though Berry seems to balk at making a clear transcendent connection, his point through Hannah remains a powerful one for our transient age. As he voices through her,
“Most people now are looking for a ‘better place,’ which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one … There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it, and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”[3]
Scripture does not specify that Ruth’s mother-in-law and her deceased husband, Elimelech, suffered for having left their native place in Bethlehem. But it was through returning home, where God had smiled again, that the two women found not only subsistence but full restoration and, above all, a place in God’s cosmic redemption plan, becoming matriarchs in Messiah Jesus’s lineage.
As one of the first generation of an independent Jamaica, I have a unique love for that land, yet when the call came to yoke to one from another land, the answer was clear, if not painless. Amid the shifting shadows of love’s flame, we knew our joint quest and fidelity were not primarily for either of our homelands but for an eternal one whose builder and ruler is God. And so we come in and go out as every Christ follower does, looking to see the glory of Heaven coming down on the ache of every beloved, broken place where we land.
Liturgy for the Migrant Heart
Shammah, “God who is there,”
Recall my wandering view from seeking You
In the face of the saint, Elsewhere.
Forgive my averted eyes,
My distracted gaze,
Too often drawn away from You—
The “God who is here.”
Forgive my always locating You some place
Other than where I find myself today.
Missing the Rock, I slip and slide
With nowhere safe to land
But under Your mercy.
~~~*~~~
When the wicked rule and the people mourn;
When You strike the land with a curse;
When the ground yields thistles and thorns;
When we strike out for new territory,
For the children’s sake, we say;
When we fail to bear Your indignation
And run away
To a place of our own choosing,
Find us we pray.
Where we stagger and stumble under the weight of self-determination,
Fleeing the dry land we carry
On the inside—
In mercy, airlift us to a place of love’s surrender.
~~~*~~~
When we land yet find the ground
Still yields its meat and its herb
Only by our sweat and our toil,
Let us not also offer our blood.
Though driven and disillusioned by influences
Too strong for us,
Let us not forget to look for Your face in the Mirror,
And for Your face mirrored
In another’s visage.
When rich in this world’s goods,
We adorn our emptiness
With all of Vanity’s shiny fare;
When mothers still grieve
And babies still cry;
When husbands and sons die
From battles without and within;
Remind us why
We were made.
~~~*~~~
Let our gaze at the stars be at Your invitation,
As tuned to Your voice we respond to Your call
And embark on a different journey—
One where Your words guide our steps
To a land of true promise,
Where we are kept by a hope that makes not ashamed,
Where the battles we fight and the spoil we claim
Are laid at the feet of the One True Priest of the eternal order.
From Him, of the brazen feet and the flaming eyes,
May we seek gold refined in the fire
And garments pure, rather than fool’s gold.
Cover our nakedness and our shame
With the brand of Your Name.
Grant clear eyes to see You here,
Making of our poverty, mourning, and hunger
Beatitudes of Your grace.
~~~*~~~
Restore vision for our inheritance that languishes
Back where the Kinsman-Redeemer waits
To bless again, the “house of bread.”
With the terror passed—
The locust and the palmerworm filled and flown—
Let the wounds be healed and the bitterness released,
As the covenant with the land is renewed.
May it yield meat in plenty
To the song of joyful harvest,
As the hearts of the fathers and sons
Are turned again to each other.
Let the song of the bride and bridegroom be heard again in heart and street,
Where the young dance together
And sing a redemption song
Over every child joyfully laid in a grandmother’s arms.
Amen.
—Denise S. Armstrong
(Otterberg, Germany, 03/20/2023)
[1] This quote is from Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter (Shoemaker and Hoard) as quoted in Gregory Wolfe’s Foreword to Hannah and Nathan (The Trinity Forum).
[2] For further reading, reference Gregory Wolfe’s insightful foreword to the Trinity Forum’s Hannah and Nathan.
[3] Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, quoted in Gregory Wolfe’s Foreword to Hannah and Nathan.
The featured image, “Autumn View,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
Denise Armstrong (née Stair), blogs from a Christian cross-cultural perspective at denisesarmstrong.com. Born Jamaican, she received her Diploma in Education and a BA degree from Shortwood Teacher’s College and the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Jamaica.
She delights to serve in areas of Christian discipleship, alongside her husband Claude. Their marriage of over thirty years which has joyfully produced three ‘Jamerican’ offspring, has also generated much fodder for marriage ministry to young couples. They thoroughly enjoyed serving in this capacity in their recent five-year tour of duty in Germany where they ministered among the US military community there. She also earned an MA in Christian Cultural Apologetics while there.
Denise’s work in playwriting, poetry, and creative-non-fiction essays, has appeared on Jamaican television, in international poetry reading events, and in The Joyful Life and Cultivating, as well as in The Caribbean Writer, a Literary Journal of the Virgin Islands.
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