Mentorship through the Written Word

I have been tremendously blessed to have many mentors, living and dead, people who have taught me through word and example and people who have taught me through their writings and stories. As I build a life for myself, I find myself reflecting on what I have learned. Over the past year or so, three mentors of the written word stand out (as do so many who have taught me personally). I wanted to give tribute to these three in this post.

First, Will Campbell. He died just a month or so ago, near his longtime home in Tennessee and part of me wishes I could have met him. He’s one of those authors I feel like I know, whose words and stories have resonated deeply. A white man of the south, he shared much of my culture, the culture of the white working class. He was, at the same time, its most vocal critic—a leader in the civil rights movement and tireless in his fight against racism and racist structures (including prisons) in this country. What moved me most about Will Campbell was his decision, after years of seminary training and a few working in liberal institutions, to embrace his identity as a Baptist “bootleg preacher” (he had been ordained at 17 in a tiny Southern Baptist church). He recognized that he had begun to privilege only one kind of knowing—academic knowledge—and was pursuing respectability as much as he was justice. Instead, he chose a harder path. He moved to a small town outside of Nashville, truck farmed and sang country music at bars, and sometimes baptized people in his backyard and shared moonshine Eucharist. The country tavern became his church and he found himself the pastor of those who never darkened the doors of a church building. He was as fiercely independent as he was committed to community and he was deeply and sometimes harshly critical of institutions of all sorts. His was a sort of backwoods, Christian anarchism, if I may call it that. As a person who has often been torn between my culture of origin and my academic pursuits, a person torn between my love of place and my call to pastor on the edge, Will Campbell has offered me an example of a man who honestly and sometimes painfully navigated the same questions. 

A second mentor has been Wendell Berry. Anyone who knows me or even occasionally glances at my facebook page will not be surprised to hear this. Wendell writes clearly and forcefully on the importance of land and of place. It was his novels that kept me company when I became unbearably homesick for the forest and the smell of the soil while in seminary and his essays that have inspired much of my theological and ethical reflection. Perhaps it has been Jayber Crow, Wendell’s fictional character that has most influenced me. Maybe it’s because Jayber cut hair for a living and I used to cut dog hair for a living, I don't know. A young man who dropped out of seminary and walked back to the town of his birth, who lived as the town barber and gravedigger, and finally, in his old age, found that he did believe in God and community after all, Jayber Crow captured my own struggle with what it means to minister with people instead of to them. Berry has frequently criticized Christian ministers for being too interested in heavenly things and too removed from the life of the community to minister effectively. In Jayber, he created a character who was the town minister in the guise of a barber and who discovers, after long years of thought and hair cutting, that he has found a new vision of church—a vision that includes the whole community. Not just the people who live in an area, but the whole history of a place, dead and living, as well as the fields and the river, the camping and drinking places, the deer and the livestock and the tidy farmhouses. A community that encompasses all life and a gospel that embraces all life, that finds heaven not so much in the future but in the love of people and the life of the land.

Finally, and perhaps unexpectedly, my final mentor has been Juliet Marillier. I am an avid novel reader and fantasy is my guilty pleasure. One would perhaps wonder why a fantasy fiction writer would make this top three list, but her stories have allowed me to capture my childhood love of fairy tales and my deeply rooted connections to my own heritage and to nature spiritualties. Most of Juliet’s stories are set in ancient Scotland and Ireland, set in a historical frame, and inspired by Irish and Scots folk tales. She is meticulously attentive to the landscape as it might have been and her stories are deeply rooted in the “old religions,” the pre-Christian nature religions of the ancient Celts. Her strong female leads are strongly connected to the natural world and generally end up on a quest that tests their strength. Perhaps I love these books so much because it is often so difficult to find strong women in fantasy stories and because so many of her characters are called to ritual and religious roles. I’m pretty taken by her recent Shadowfell books, in which a young girl finds herself gifted and called to unite the human and non-human (the good folk, or the spirits of the earth) forces of Alban/Scotland to overthrow a tyrant king. Underneath the simple enjoyment of fairy tales and stories of love and loss, I find a certain resonance with my own love of the land and connection to the natural world.