Hannah Coulter

Or, I should take my husband's book recommendations more seriously

I’ve known my husband for over a decade, and in that time I’ve come to realize that he has a very particular taste when it comes to entertainment (whether that be books, movies, or music). That taste can be summed up in one word: melancholy. I remember a particular occasion in college when he wanted me to a listen to a really good song he’d discovered. So I listened. It was indeed a really good song. But it was a really good song in which a man narrates his and his (dead) wife’s love story to their son. And, since, I happened to be emotionally exhausted from studying for midterms, it was a really good song that made me cry.

Since then, I’ve learned to listen to, read, or watch any sort of media my husband recommends when I am a) not in public and b) at peace with the prospect of tears. All this to say, there’s a reason I’ve put off sampling one of my husband’s favorite authors, Wendell Berry. This summer, I finally felt emotionally secure enough to handle some Big Feelings. In addition, after moving into a colonial home that was once the center of a working farm, reading about rural America sounded appealing. I began with Berry’s Hannah Coulter, in which the titular character, near the end of her earthly pilgrimage, reflects on the joys and sorrows that have defined her life.

As expected, I cried. As I did not expect, I didn’t mind that I cried. The tears I shed were those rare tears that J.R.R. Tolkien describes in The Return of the King, where one “pass[es] in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”

One of the (many) quotes that brought forth these heady tears comes from Hannah reflecting on the birth of her first child, Margaret. Hannah recalls that “To know that I was known by a new living being, who had not existed until she was made in my body by my desire and brought forth into the world by my pain and strength-that changed me.”

I happened to come across this quote when I was reading Hannah Coulter out loud to my daughter, as part of a new nap time routine that would (hopefully) teach her to fall asleep somewhere other than a nursing pillow. Looking at her cherubic face, I was reminded of how, I too, was a woman changed by the children I’d brought forth into this world (and not just because of the near permanent state of sleep deprivation I lived in). If there is one “big” thing I’ve learned about myself in being “known” by my children, it is this: I am a fallen creature.

Oh I’ve always known intellectually about what G.K. Chesterton called, “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved,” the existence of Original Sin.¹ But it took both being married and having children to experience, as I never have before, what St. Paul describes in his letter to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”² So often, when motherhood demands that I offer up my “pain and strength” for the sake of my children, I fall short. I raise my voice, when what my toddler really needs to reset is my calm. I scroll through useless Pinterest posts while my one year old begs me to read her a book. I resolve to establish a regular family prayer routine, but forget again and again. I stomp, slam doors, and answer my children’s requests as grumpily as possible when I am in a bad mood. And on, and on, and on.

I know the kind of wife and mother I want to be. But, like Saint Paul, I struggle to put my ideals into action, and all too often act in ways completely contrary to these ideals. The “new living beings” who were “made in my body by my desire” call on me to pour out every last drop of love I have for their sakes. And it turns out I have a pretty shallow well. And the water in that well is tainted with self-love. And the mechanism that draws love from my well is broken down.

This, of course, is why I need someone to dig a new well within me, a well that draws from an infinite stream of perfect love. I need someone who will fix the broken down machinery and give me the strength to operate it. That someone is, of course, God. Hannah Coulter, addressing her nephew, asks “By whose love, Andy Catlett, do we love this world, and ourselves, and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves?” She asks already knowing the answer. The only way to truly love is to love with the “love that holds us all.” God’s love is free to all who ask for it, but we must be willing to ask, and willing to accept the shape that love takes: that of the cross. It is the supreme blessing of motherhood that I have learned how desperately I am in need of that love, and that I am surrendering, day by day, inch by painful inch, to being transformed by it.

1. From Orthodoxy Chapter 2: “The Maniac”

2. Romans 7:15 in the RSVCE