community

Review: Marce Catlett

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Cover image of "Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story" by Wendell Berry

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, Wendell Berry. Counterpoint Press (ISBN: 9781640097759) 2025.

Summary; A story spanning three generations beginning Marce’s disastrous experience of selling his tobacco at a loss in 1906.

The story begins on an evening in 1906 when Marce Catlett and a neighbor rode horseback part of the way, and train the rest, to Louisville to witness the sale of their tobacco. Tobacco that had been carefully tended, sorted, and packed for shipping. Burley tobacco of the highest quality. Marce had hopes of paying off expenses, and paying down the mortgage on the farm. There was one problem. James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company held a monopoly on the market and the price they paid out barely covered the cost of shipping to Louisville.

It was a terrible blow. There were few words to be said on the journey. “Long day” about summed it up. But that long day became a story with force to shape a family over three generations. It became a story for Marce of a way of farming by which a family sustained its life upon its land. It marked the beginning of Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. Then Marce’s son Wheeler, who had risen to a position as a Washington lawyer in the Roosevelt administration, walked away from it all to lead the Association in negotiating fair prices for the growers. His efforts bought a space for several decades for growers to make a decent living off their efforts.

But the times were changing. Mechanized agriculture came in after the war. However, many of the children went off to college and it changed them. Children like Wheeler’s son Andy, for a time. Yet his work after college on an ag publication made him long for the old ways. And so he returned to a hillside farm in Port William. That meant returning to a community where each helped the other when they needed help at harvest. That meant hours telling stories as they stripped and sorted the tobacco..

Then times changed more. Tobacco farming ended as the cancer risks of smoking came out. Then farms were turned over to tenants instead of being passed to children. Andy, living the story, carried on as long as he could. But Port William had changed. Increasingly, those who lived in Port William didn’t work there. Not only did many yield to a changing way of life. They also forfeited a way of living on the land that had been the Catlett story. And they forfeited membership in a community that made life there so rich.

At 91, one wonders whether this is Wendell Berry’s valedictory statement (though I hope it is not the last of the works we will see from his pen). One has the sense of Berry saying this of his own life as Andy reflects:

“He gives thanks for life continuing on the earth, and for the earth continuing alive. He gives thanks for the continuing so far of his own life, the story of which is longer than his life.”

Andy speaks of “the breakages of broken times.” But he ends not in despair but in hope that somehow the story that carried him and the generations before him will outlive him.

Berry moves me to reflect on the stories of my family and the community we also called home through three generations. Although urban, rather than rural, similar changes to those of Port William ravaged my community. For that community, I can’t help but think that remembering and building on their communal story has been, and will be key to their survival and flourishing anew. Likewise for our nation, community by community, family story by family story.

Books and Community

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Books and Community: elderly women spending time in book club
Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Pexels.com

“Gathering a community of booklovers.” That phrase has been rattling around in my head ever since I heard it from Justin Bessler at Birch Tree Bookery. It reminded me that what I love about books is not only losing myself in them but also finding myself among others who love talking about books. This week I wrote a report summarizing reports on twenty-two book groups for a grant funder. That reinforced the idea of how powerful it can be to gather people around a good book. Books and community are a powerful mix!

Book groups help people find like-minded people. It is wonderful to know we are not alone in love for an author or in seeing the world in the way we do.

Book groups also can foster good disagreements. We may need to define “rules of engagement” about respect and curiosity. Disagreement can force me to think more deeply. It may make me stronger in conviction. Or it may change my mind.

Book groups build community. The shared experience of working through a book can transform acquaintances into friends, people we want to be with and have as part of the fabric of our lives.

Discussing books with others etches a book into our lives. Till We Have Faces is, perhaps, C.S. Lewis’s most profound book. But I just didn’t get it until a group of us struggled through it together.

Books are often a mirror by which we look at our lives. Sometimes, the comments and questions of another help hold that mirror for us.

And sometimes, a book will galvanize a community into action. It will inspire and call us into action and convince us “we can do this!” or “we need to do this!” Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Hopefully, books won’t call us to war but to constructive action.

Summing up, books and community are a powerful combination. So that is why I love to host book groups, write about books and host social media devoted to discussing books online. And that is why I’d love to hear your stories of the power of books and community.

Review: Racing the Storm

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Racing the Storm, David J. Claassen. Middletown, DE: CreateSpace, 2021.

Summary: The tight community in a trailer park face the oncoming storm of the sale of their park with no place to move their trailers.

The close knit community of the Shady Acres Trailer Park would often gather at the Common Grounds in the greenspace around which their trailers were parked. And often, they would be chased back to their trailers by one of Florida’s storms–and they wouldn’t always make it. Then one morning, a letter brought the rumbles of another storm posing a different threat to the life of a community. Rose Crow, the resident manager of the park received legal notice from the park owner, Ed Casper, that their park would be sold in three months and that the trailer owners would need to be out, with or without their trailers.

This posed a problem for them all. The trailers were too old to be accepted by other trailer parks, leaving the residents facing the loss of their investment in the trailers, and for many of them, no place to live. As Rose delivers letters bearing this bad news, we meet the other residents:

  • John, the quiet security guard who was the fix-it man for the residents.
  • Granny Mae, a widowed pastor’s wife and woman of faith and prayer.
  • Preacher Man, voted out of his last church when he spoke out about misuse of church funds, deeply hurt, and struggling with his own faith even as he cared for others.
  • Jose Gomez, usually found underneath the 57 Chevy he was restoring.
  • Billy Bailey, a special needs young adult whose parents set him up to live on his own while he worked at a sheltered workshop, where he met and fell in love with Sabrina.
  • Melcomb, a reclusive man who usually spoke through his vent figure, Ricky.
  • Carl and Sandi. He was a barber who hoped to make it rich when someone left an image in the dust of a little used barber chair that looked something like Jesus. The chair quickly became known as the “Jesus Chair,” earned more money than barbering and looked like the ticket to better things. Sandi was a sensible woman who worked as a physical therapist.
  • Sue, an elderly woman and hoarder, whose children are trying to help her de-accumulate. She still drives, but only turns right.
  • Timothy and Sara. He is a philosophy PhD student working at a convenience store while Sara works at a daycare.

The crisis brings them together, whether in futile attempts to dissuade Ed Caspar from the sale, with Billy as the most effective spokesperson, or simply as each of them struggles with what this change will mean. The diverse and somewhat eclectic mix of people, how they care for each other, and how they grow as they race the oncoming storm is what makes this “cozy fiction” story work. We see how Granny Mae’s strong faith helps Preacher Man begin to experience healing and find his calling in caring for others, notably Sue who is upset by her children’s efforts. Melcomb is drawn out of his shell, even leaving Ricky behind. We smile as we hear Billy’s guileless hopes to marry Sabrina and somehow find a way to stay, even while he delivers the daily weather update, rainfall, temperature, and humidity.

I found myself liking this group, wanting it to stay together, and wanting to see whether this group would be able to “outrun the storm” and stay together. In addition to the plotline which keeps one reading, we see a parable of the power of community unfolding–how very different people come to respect and support each other, even when it appears there is no solution. In our modern love of privacy and often self-chosen isolation, we have lost the sense of neighborhood. While neighbors can have their problems and no neighborhood is perfect, this story invites us into the work of re-neighboring, where the impersonal place of a trailer park can become a community.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Community Doesn’t Stop At Your Feet

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Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

I’m in the middle of several long books, hence fewer reviews in recent days. So I thought I might share one interesting idea from one of the books I’m reading. In Majority World Theology, theologians from around the world write on the major themes of Christian theology. The situation of various writers offers unique perspectives. One of these was from some Christians from Canada’s indigenous peoples. Writing about community, one writer observed that land for indigenous people was considered part of their communal life. For indigenous peoples, separating people from the land, as occurred with the Cherokee tribes who traveled (and died along) the Trail of Tears in U.S. history, is devastating

Certainly this was true of ancient Israel as well, and part of the grief of exile was the parting of people from their land. I wonder if this is actually true of many people in the world. It makes me think that many of us modern urban Euro-Americans may be the anomaly. We live on land but often think little about it. We live in places from which we draw our life but often think little about its care or future.

Even the quarter acre on which I live is vibrantly alive and I’m part of a complex community of microbes, creatures in the soil (including the grubs of the seventeen year cicadas who emerged this summer and created cacophony), and insects and spiders. Hundreds of species of vegetation draw nutrients and water from the soil and the air and return them as they decay. Squirrels, chipmunks, the occasional skunk, rabbits, possums and raccoons and birds from sparrows to vultures visit our property.

St Francis of Assisi spoke of the animals as his brothers and sisters and preached to the birds. Hildegard of Bingen commented, “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity.” John Paul II loved to ski and hike in his native Poland and urged an “ecological conversion.”

I wonder if our own lack of connection to the land and community with its creatures makes us less sensitive to those around the world who face displacement from their homes, and what a wrenching decision it is to flee one’s home. Even if they leave as a family, they leave a “family” behind, a part of themselves. As sea levels rise, as temperatures and drought in some areas, or inundations in others displace these “climate refugees,” will they find those who grieve with them or will we close our doors to them?

I’m struck that many of our burial rites even sever our relationship to the land. Where at one time, we committed the remains of those who died to the earth, now we keep them in columbariums, or even on a shelf in our homes. We believed “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). In past days, churches had graveyards, where we remembered the “saints of old,” a communion of land, and people past and present.

Might a renewed awareness of our community with the land around us begin to teach us to love the wider world? And might that awareness help us care for those displaced, including those our own forebears displaced? I’m reminded every time I hear the name of a river in my state, and even the name of my state that people lived here long before it was “discovered” and “pioneered.” Many of our roads began as their trails. They left their impact on the community in which I live, even as I will for another generation. And the land ties us together.

Review: The City is My Monastery

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The City is My Monastery, Richard Carter. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2020.

Summary: A monk moves to the heart of London and forms a community sharing a rule of life and offers a reflective account organized around that rule.

Richard Carter was a monk with the Melanesian Brotherhood in the Solomon Islands, a simple ordered life where he encountered God. Then he answered a call to serve a congregation in the heart of London, St. Martin-in-the-Fields. After a time, he lost a sense of the nearness of God amid the busyness of parish life. After a discernment retreat in Dorset, his conclusion was not to return to the monastic life but that God was saying “the city is your monastery.” So he returned to St. Martin’s with this conviction:

“I needed to discover the simple disciplines that can enable a community to grow: an obedience, a listening, a life-giving rule of life. I discerned that the way forward was to write down a ‘rule of life’ for a community living in the midst of the city. This was the community, at that stage yet to be formed, which now has become known as the Nazareth Community.”

Richard Carter, p. xxv.

This book is about the creation of that rule, the formation of that community, and the life that followed. Carter organizes the book around the rule which has these seven elements:

  1. With silence — to behold
  2. With service — to accept
  3. With sacrament — to gather
  4. With scripture — to ihspire
  5. With sharing — to enrich
  6. With sabbath — to restore
  7. Staying with — to live

The community began with forty-eight members with more to follow. Each is given a cross from made from timber from a wrecked boat on the island of Lampedusa, and becomes a part through a liturgy of commitment.

The book takes each of the elements of rule and devotes a chapter, not so much a description of “how to” as a narrative of the rule in life, written both in free verse and prose and black and white illustrations. We learn about the members of this community including the homeless who sleep on the church steps and the realities of sharing when an all-season sleeping bag bought for camping becomes the sleeping roll of a homeless man.

Here is an example of one of the poems, from the chapter on silence that I particularly liked:

Into the silent world

Into the space beyond the clutter
Into the depths of your heart
As though lowering a bucket to draw fresh water
Like the discovery of the well crystal-clear below the ground
Or becoming the wellspring.

Or like oxygen in the blood of your body
This life flowing through your limbs
Like walking into to a shower of light
The warmth replenishing you through the pores of your skin
Like being unwound
Like being healed
Like being loved
At the very centre of your existence.

Along the way, his own narrative intrudes as a hospitalization leads to a new appreciation of sabbath and prayer. He acknowledges his own need for community and direction, sharing about his twenty year relationship with Fr. Simon Holden, the last retreat they led together, and his last visit, two weeks before Fr. Holden’s death of leukemia. Among his last words, he expresses this longing, “I want to disappear into God’s love. I want the me to become us.”

This is a beautifully written book that makes the case that it is possible for a city, and a parish in the midst of the city, to be a monastery–a community ordered by a common rule and bound together by the love of Christ. If this is what it means for a city to be one’s monastery, I can’t help but finding myself hoping more people hear this call.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Enhancing Christian Life

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Enhancing Christian Life: How Extended Cognition Augments Religious Community, Brad D. Strawn and Warren S. Brown. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020.

Summary: The authors propose that as persons we are embodied and embedded in particular contexts, but also that extended cognition expands our capacities as we engage our physical and social worlds, with implications for the importance of Christian community.

The authors begin this work by reminded us of the African-American women who served as human computers during NASA’s space projects. Their calculations extended the cognitive capacities of the flight engineers and scientists. The authors argue that our cognitive capacities are not merely a function of our own intellectual achievements but also the social and physical context in which we are embedded as embodied creatures.

An important part of this argument that the authors discuss early in the book has to do with our assumptions about the mind-body relationship. They contend that the philosophical and Christian assumption of mind-body dualism has been problem in directing the focus of spirituality inwardly, ignoring the embodied social context in which we live in the Christian community. Extended cognition recognizes that our embodied relationships with people and the physical environment extend our minds beyond our bodies and enhance our Christian life beyond an inward and private focus.

They explore various ways extended cognition works to nurture “super-sized intelligence” from our families to meetings to psychotherapy and finally the church. They observe that even the seemingly personal spiritual disciplines connect us to the life of the community, our shared faith and commitments. Our praying for others may be understood as believing for them, enhancing one another’s lives as we pray, learn, and act with each other. The stories and traditions of the Christian faith are “mental wikis,” that enhance our abilities to respond to various situations in our lives.

What is compelling about this proposal is that it shifts the locus of our lives from inward private experience to our shared life in the embodied Christian community. What is controversial about this proposal is the non-dualistic assumptions behind it. The authors exchange the term, “Christian life,” for “spiritual life.” What we call “mind,” “spirit,” or “soul” are simply perceptions of neuro-physical processes. Rather than defend this proposal, the authors critique the spirituality that has developed from dualism. Both defense of these ideas, and consideration of their theological implications need to be considered. While not central to this work, one question that arises is that of the intermediate state, our fate between our deaths and the resurrection. If, when we die, all of who we are ceases to exist, then in what sense are we “with the Lord”?

More pertinent to this project is the question of how we engage with God. The discussion of extended cognition mentions a number of other physical beings and objects. While prayer is mentioned, it is spoken of as primarily for others. How does extended cognition work with a being who is defined as “spirit”?

Also, while there is a privatistic spirituality that may be justly critiqued, this seemed to me to be a bit of a straw man. One may think of many examples of dualists who combine deeply inward lives with communal engagement. Henri Nouwen, for one, comes to mind.

Still, whether one accepts the premises of non-dualism or not, the idea of extended cognition, and how our communal life enhances all of us as Christians is worth considering. It is a valuable corrective to a “solitary man” spirituality (my favorite type in my worst moments). It “extends” our biblical understanding of how our lives are interdependent, how deeply we need each other to become all Christ intends us to be.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.