Kruse's Keys: Read "The Lemon Tree" to Better Understand the Israel-Palestine conflict

Need book recommendations? Check out all 301 (and counting) books that I've read at Dad's Bookshelf.

This was the third and final (for now) installment in my exploration of the Israel and Palestine conflict.

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War by journalist and ex-Israeli soldier Matti Friedman. While this was the third book that my 14-year-old daughter Macee and I read to start to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it falls (chronologically) between The Lemon Tree (my review here) and A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (my review here). This is classic soldier memoir storytelling in the vein of Phil Klay or Christopher Robinson, except set at an outpost—Pumpkin—inside Lebanon in the 1990s.

There’s plenty of worthy insight into the nature of combat and brotherhood in this slim novel that will ring true for any veteran reading it. Take for instance his comments on the way that “basic training is like marriage: inside its unforgiving intimacy you can't hide who you are for long.” That intimacy—the laying bare of one’s weakness, a thing usually so hard to develop among men—becomes absolutely essential in combat. Friedman pulls the thread on this beautifully:

“Friendship in a platoon is created under great pressure and is difficult to explain to those who have not experienced it themselves; armies plan it this way, knowing the strength of this bond is what will keep men together and functioning in the lawless netherworld of war and, when the time comes, cause them to commit the unreasonable act of following each other not away from enemy fire but into it.”

But Macee and I didn’t read this book to learn about relationships and war, but rather to glean insight into the Israeli psyche and point of view. The soldiers at Pumpkin and other outposts were placed there ostensibly as a buffer against Hezbollah. But this enemy proved to be too nebulous and abstract for the Israeli public (and the long-suffering mothers of the soldiers). The Israeli government was no doubt prompted to establish the post due to the country’s national DNA: “Fear that we are no longer sufficiently tough is one of the key chemicals in our country's communal brain.” But the author acknowledges that “On the hill we had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts, or fades but doesn't end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible.”

In the author’s case he made it out safely, but many others did not before the government eventually closed these outposts—due in part to the work of groups like the Four Mothers Movement (birthed in the aftermath of a horrific troop transport helicopter crash). The tenacity and power of this group stemmed from the fact that “Dead young men are an important group in Israel, maybe the most important group.” Perhaps the most striking insight Friedman offers is one that continues to be a useful lens to view current events: “Another important thing to know about this country is that we tend to see either unadulterated victory or disaster.” This tendency towards extreme swings in interpretation and vision is obviously a broad brush to paint an entire nation, but it can be a useful lens to start to understand the country’s stance and posture going forward.

Pumpkinflowers: Organized Themes, Highlights, and Quotes

1. The Unique Forging of Combat Brotherhood
   • Page 13: Basic training is like marriage: inside its unforgiving intimacy you can't hide who you are for long. Soon Avi softened. It turned out that he always had books in his knapsack, and when he saw he wasn't alone he began passing them around.
   • Page 15: Friendship in a platoon is created under great pressure and is difficult to explain to those who have not experienced it themselves; armies plan it this way, knowing the strength of this bond is what will keep men together and functioning in the lawless netherworld of war and, when the time comes, cause them to commit the unreasonable act of following each other not away from enemy fire but into it.
   • Page 33: When he looked again the second soldier was on his back, a red pool spreading under his head. A third soldier ran up just then, and when he saw what had happened he fell to his knees and began hitting his head against the concrete wall of the trench. The dead soldier was his friend.
   • Page 72: Avi's old friend Gal, the Angel, manned the radios with him. By this time Avi was so broken-dicked that sometimes he put his head on Gal's shoulder and just left it there, eyes closed, and Gal embraced him until Avi found the strength to move again.
   • Page 127: In this country if you identify someone as a friend from the army, it is recognized as something different than saying friend. It's a different category.
2. The Cultural Mythologizing and Sanitization of the Dead
   • Page 24: In the jargon of army radiomen, wounded soldiers are "flowers." Dead soldiers are "oleanders." It isn't a code, because it isn't secret. Instead the names seem intended to bestow beauty on ugliness and to allow soldiers distance from the things they might have to describe. If you listened to the language of the Lebanon troops, you might have thought they occupied a kind of garden.
   • Page 81: Dead young men are an important group in Israel, maybe the most important group.
   • Page 83: There is a special language used to describe our dead soldiers, a language that makes them all sound the same, not just because you can't say anything bad but because most were so young that there isn't much to say at all. What they really were was potential. So in this language they are always serious students, or mischievous ones, and loving siblings, and good at basketball, and there was a funny thing they did once on a class trip, and in the army they always helped their friends. And they are, forever, "soldiers," though most thought they were just doing that for a while before their real life resumed. It is said in their honor that they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the rest of us, but of course they weren't, not most -they just thought it wouldn't happen to them, and the lucky ones weren't given time to realize they were wrong.
   • Page 104: Eyal was the same age as Alter, who died in the helicopter crash. They grew up together and they were more like siblings than friends. Eyal showed up late to Alter's funeral that February, armed and in uniform. He stood with the rest of the kibbutz and surprised his mother by bursting into tears. This was in the days of the debate about whether crying at funerals should be allowed, the real question being whether we're still strong enough to survive here. There were generals who said soldiers shouldn't cry, but it turned out not to be the kind of thing you can regulate.
3. The Evolution of Warfare and the Attrition of National Identity
   • Page 18: In the years of these events, the 1990s, many people in Israel thought peace was coming, and if you look through old newspapers you'll find lots of news about peace negotiations. People were talking at the time about a "new Middle East," and the war in Lebanon was of less interest. So civilians in Israel were thinking about this new Middle East, and the army about the real war, but nothing came of either. It turned out that what was happening in Lebanon was both the new Middle East and the new real war.
   • Page 32: Hezbollah understood that the images of an attack could be more important than the attack itself. This seems obvious now but wasn't at the time. It was the very beginning of videotaped violence and the media war, which is a war not for territory but for "consciousness."
   • Page 34: Fear that we are no longer sufficiently tough is one of the key chemicals in our country's communal brain.
   • Page 34: Another important thing to know about this country is that we tend to see either unadulterated victory or disaster.
   • Page 86: The crash was described at the time as an atom bomb, the release of a destructive force compared to which the insignificance of the cause-a series of arbitrary mishaps one evening in northern Israel-seems absurd.
   • Page 98: When the same reporter behind the first essay about the complicity of Israeli mothers interviewed them in the kibbutz newspaper two months after the crash, he called them the "four mothers," like the four matriarchs of Genesis. This was the birth of the Four Mothers movement.
   • Page 100: That's why this war never had a name-a name would suggest a decision. Instead it was referred to simply as Lebanon. It was something that just existed and always would.
   • Page 114: It is hard to recall how little you once knew, and harder to admit it. I understood that we were Israeli soldiers; that our enemies were Arab fighters, whom we called terrorists, and that we should kill them before they killed us; that the battlefield was this place, Lebanon. I knew I couldn't let my friends down. That was it.
   • Page 142: The militia was a remnant of the Lebanese civil war, when Christians in Lebanon's south allied themselves with Israel to protect themselves from Palestinian guerrillas and from their Muslim neighbors, but though the senior officers and some of the men were Christian, by the nineties many of the soldiers were Shiites and Druze who were in it for the salary Israel paid in American dollars.
   • Page 154: Israel had gone into Lebanon all those years ago because of Palestinian guerrillas attacking across the border, but the Palestinian groups were long gone. The enemy had changed, and now it was Hezbollah.
   • Page 154: They didn't want us to leave; they wanted to push us out, which is not the same thing.
   • Page 154: But even talk of goals like these is just a way that Western observers, with their disdain for religion and the power of the tribe and their unwillingness to take seriously the people involved in the conflicts they are observing, make sense of things to themselves. It's old-fashioned.
   • Page 185: The Israel that believed in compromise, a country rooted in the old left of the kibbutz movement, was shattered. The left went from ascendant to defunct in a matter of months. The triumph of the Four Mothers was, in retrospect, the last charge of the kibbutzniks.
   • Page 185: Sometimes it wasn't just the same tactics but the very same people. Hezbollah, one American intelligence man said after a few of the group's operatives were picked up in Iraq, was the "A-team" al-Qaeda was just the "B-team."
   • Page 186: Felt as if by squeezing the trigger on that last night in the spring of 2000, my friends had freed a wrathful millennial spirit trapped inside the hill and released it into the world.
   • Page 222: On the hill we had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts, or fades but doesn't end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible.
4. Preserving Humanity and Sanity in an Austere Environment
   • Page 14: His favorite literary guide to the world was Romain Gary, immigrant.
   • Page 27: "Sea" of Galilee is to a real sea or as the trickle of the "river" Jordan is to the Mississippi.
   • Page 28: There were no women. There was nothing feminine, nothing unnecessary to the purposes of allowing you to kill, preventing you from being killed, and keeping you from losing your mind in the meantime. Nothing was soft or smelled sweet.
   • Page 47: The Book of the Giving of the Torah, in which the rabbi argued that altruism was at the center of the Jewish religion. "We must understand that all of the commandments of the Torah are no more and no less than the sum of the details to be found in the one commandment 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,'" wrote the rabbi.
   • Page 48: The Ladder was the name of the rabbi's most important book.
   • Page 65: I'm almost 21 and I've seen so much violence, so much blind cruelty, dreams shattered, lives cut short suddenly and without warning or sign....
   • Page 72: Romain Gary's The Kites. One part that Avi loved was when the hero's old French teacher admits that he once dreamed of being a writer but that only one of his creative projects had ever succeeded—his wife. He had spent the fifty years of their marriage inventing and reinventing her, and she him. This was the secret of their long happiness.
   • Page 76: There were seventy-three men on board the two helicopters, and I realize while writing this that when I think of my country I'm thinking of them.
   • Page 102: There was bad news about someone Dani knew from home. A hill in Lebanon, a mortar shell. We all saw him start to cry, and there was the Pumpkin again.
   • Page 190: Making do in this way is perhaps a fundamental national ability, something Jews have done throughout the centuries no matter how inhospitable the soil. It reminds me of the impromptu rave that erupted in one of our bunkers one night in 1999, with shirts off, military light sticks glowing green and orange, and "The Rockafeller Skank" on repeat. Laughter inside the perimeter; outside, the quiet of the trench and young men in guard posts.
   • Page 207: "Lebanon is the most precious gift of God, the most precious thing he gave us," he said, and then waved his hand at the dismal street. "But here there is no way to change your life."

Kruse's Keys: Read "Theo of Golden" to See the Beautiful in People"

Need book recommendations? Check out all 301 (and counting) books that I've read at Dad's Bookshelf.

There’s not much allegorical fiction being written these days. Theo of Golden makes me want a lot more of it—at least more of it written by Allan Levi. Published in 2023, but somehow I only heard of the novel a month ago from a pastor friend named Steve. The story is about an octogenarian named Theo who mysteriously arrives in the town of Golden and proceeds to—incredibly—get to know perfect strangers! He uses the gift of hand-drawn portraits as the mechanism in this quest and along the way offers a winsome example of kindness in action.

Before I go too far, I should probably address the notion of “Christian fiction.” If you look it up on Goodreads, that category shows up next to the title (along with others), but I wouldn’t call it that. I’d call it literature that happens to have a Christian lead character. The novel never comes across as preachy or proselytizing—instead, it’s the rare novel centered around a genuinely good person trying to bring happiness to people’s lives. That he goes about it with such introspection is part of the novel’s power. Theo reflects after giving the first portrait:

“I confess that at first I did it hoping to make someone else happy. Now I fear my reasons are almost entirely selfish. I do it because it brings me such happiness.”

This, of course, is what true kindness reaps—a self-reinforcing circle of virtue.

Later in the novel, Theo asks a homeless woman named Ellen: “Could you tell me about the happiest day of your life?” This question immediately brought me back to David Brooks’ life-changing book How to Know a Person, where he focuses in one section on the types of questions one can ask to grow deeper in relationships. Having read both of these books, I can’t think of a better graduation present (other than money) to give the young men and women in your life.

Ultimately, Theo is about how to truly see the people around us. And it turns out that ‘seeing’ people can be uncomfortable, fraught with peril, awkwardness, and turmoil—but also beautiful, life-giving, and life-changing. Because everyone wants to be ‘seen’ by others in deep and raw ways, but very few are willing to slow down enough to allow it to happen. As one character named Kendrick opines: “God gave us faces so we can see each other better.” Specifically, God made our faces in his own image so we could seek and see him.

Lastly, a plug for someone who is embracing his inner Theo and slowing down to see others—his Instagram handle is @contagiouspoetry and he’s my younger brother Patrick—check him out.

Key Quotes and Reflections

Page 34

“He would take only what she offered.”

Context: Theo gifts his first portrait to Minette. She provides a guarded summary of her life.

My Reflection: Theo acts as an archetype for God, showing deep wonder toward the individual.

Page 118

“Ask an artist what it takes to make good art and you’re almost sure to get an autobiography in response.”

Context: Theo asks Asher for a definition of "good art".

My Reflection: A humorous look at the artist's inherent subjectivity and ego.

Page 123

“How is it, Theo wondered, that a piece of paper... is suddenly transformed by placing it in four bits of wood beneath a pane of glass? What does it mean that we place permanent boundaries around transient moments?”

Context: Theo muses on "The Frame" and the human desire to freeze "minute particulars." References the idea of being "fearfully and wonderfully made."

Page 127

“I'm certain that some of the people see themselves clearly for the first time when they look at your drawings of them.”

Context: Theo observes that art functions as a mirror for the soul, allowing subjects to see their true potential.

Page 127

“I confess that at first I did it hoping to make someone else happy. Now I fear my reasons are almost entirely selfish. I do it because it brings such happiness to me.”

Context: Theo admits his motivation has shifted from altruistic duty to personal joy, reinforcing his "wonder" as a source of personal vitality.

Page 146

“Could you tell me about the happiest day of your life?”

Context: Theo speaks with Ellen, a homeless woman.

My Reflection: An incredible, dignity-restoring question to ask when getting to know someone.

Page 194

“...to read with either was to drink from a chalice of gold.”

Context: Highlighting the sacred, elevated nature of reading or perceiving things through a specific, refined lens.

Page 198

Reference to Bach’s The Art of Fugue

Context: A musical nod to interlocking, complex, yet perfectly designed patterns. It serves as a structural metaphor for how individual human stories weave together under a grand design.

Page 207

“The little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love”

Context: A direct quotation from William Wordsworth's poem Tintern Abbey. It reinforces the book’s ongoing emphasis on the immense value found in quiet, unglamorous, everyday grace.

Page 213

Sadness as “the universal affliction.”

Context: Levi identifies sadness not as an anomaly, but as a baseline human condition that connects every character in the book. We are all sad because we’re missing something, and until we find it…

Page 255

“If you’re not sure what you gotta do you gotta choose one or the other. I always say go to the mercy way you make a mistake. Make it for mercy, bad mercy don’t hurt nearly like bad justice.”

Context: A core moral thesis statement for the novel. Erring on the side of grace is explicitly elevated above rigid legalism, noting that the fallout of "bad mercy" is far more salvageable than the cruelty of "bad justice."

Page 258

Kendrick talks about looking at someone’s face and releasing them—really seeing them.

Context: Relational liberation happens through focused, intentional attention. True sight requires letting go of preconceptions to see the person as they are.

Page 259

“God gave us faces so we can see each other better. I used to not look at people’s faces so much but I’m learning.”

Context: A raw realization about human connection. The face is the primary canvas of divine communication, bridging the gap between isolation and community.

Kruse's Keys: Read a Marriage at Sea to Live the Unthinkable

Need book recommendations? Check out alll 301 (and counting) books that I've read at Dad's Bookshelf.

SPOILER ALERT in review.  In 1973 a British couple sailing to New Zealand (with no radios or transmitters) collided with a whale.  Their boat sank and yet somehow they survived, lost at sea, with only a life raft and dingy for 117 days.  Author Sophia Elmhirst not only resurrects this couple’s 50 year old saga but humanizes it in her NY Times best selling book A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck.  This is incredible reporting that reads like a novel as she turns a harrowing survival tale into a portrait of a marriage and a broader reflection on escapism and the human spirit.  

Elmhirst writes beautifully as she draws upon a wide variety of sources to bring the readers to a liferaft-side seat as they watch the couple face starvation, thirst, despair, and loneliness.  As I listened to the audible narrator, I started to wonder if they would survive or if this book was re-created from lost journals.  Once they are rescued, however, the book started to lose its power–it felt like a much too long denouement.  It didn’t help either that the husband was not a particularly likable character–I ended up wondering what his wife really saw in him.  The fact that the book didn’t convince me on this gap means that he either was a self-involved miserable person…or that the source material just wasn’t there.  

For Further Study:

117 Days Adrift

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/08/nx-s1-5135663/how-one-couple-survived-a-shipwreck-and-kept-their-marriage-afloat

https://wavetrain.net/2025/08/08/maurice-and-maralyn-bailey-a-marriage-finely-tempered-in-the-misery-of-a-survival-drift/

Kruse's Keys: Read A Day in the Life of Abed Salama to Understand the Origin of a Father's Anger

Check out our readings lists from 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014.

My 14-year-old daughter loves history and is a voracious reader and had been asking me questions about Israel and Palestine and I realized that much to my embarrassment I actually didn’t recall much from my high school history classes beyond the bare bones facts so I pulled this unread tome off our book shelves.  

Jewish-American author Nathan Thrall first wrote this story as a long form journalistic piece for the New York Review of Books and I can’t imagine this made any friends within the Israeli government. He expanded that article into this book that earned him a Pulitzer in 2024 for general nonfiction. Thrall is a masterful researcher and story-teller–my daughter didn’t realize that it wasn’t fiction until she’d nearly finished it.  

The author uses a singular event–a horrific school bus accident–to extrapolate the dizzying, dehumanizing level of bureaucracy and indignities Palestinians endure living in the West Bank.  Along the way, he delves into the broader history of the conflict at a surface level.  In peeling back the myriad onion layers that led to a Palestinian father losing his son, Thrall offers the reader a truncated history of how the current system was created.   

The book’s strength comes from the author’s focus on the humanity of “the other’ (an idea of which I wrote at length in my review of Ayah Ahktar’s Homeland Elegies (my DoD Read review is here) which addresses the broader idea of “they groups”).  In A Day there are grotesque caricatures of either side–only individual  and gut wrenchingly personal snapshots in time of a father’s grief or a mother’s disorienting isolation. Indeed, Thrall’s eye is for the specific and his writing leaves the reader reeling from what a life is like spent dying by a thousand paper cuts of checkpoint, colored IDs, permit denials, legal obfuscations and bureaucratic hurdles–all just to exist. It becomes readily apparent how two people groups’ identities have become tied to one other–for the worse. As the main character notes in Homeland Elegies: “Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion.” 

In crafting a book as eulogy, Thrall offers something that often gets buried, blurred and lost in the 10-second news clips and scrolling videos cycle on this conflict: humanity. When headlines only capture the horrid of one side in a conflict it becomes impossible to see “the other” as anything but a monolith.  Of course, this book is decidedly only one side of the story but that should not be taken as criticism.  As I sit with my 14 year old daughter in the midst of a barrage of global tragedies (to include the abhorrent October 2024 Hamas attacks), I hope to instill in her the value of reading and listening to one side of the story, and then another, and then another until she can form for herself a more nuanced (and ideally empathetic) understanding of something as visceral as a father’s grief amidst his child’s death in a fiery bus crash on a the blackened side of a West Bank road.  

Next Up: For a deeper dive in the Israel-Palestine history, we are reading "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East." My full review is here.

Kruse's Keys: Read "Practicing the Way" to Change Your Life

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2026, 2025, 2024,  2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

 Practicing the Way (Audible).  Last year we read Comer’s “Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (my review is here) and it was life changing. https://kruzoo.blogspot.com/2025/07/kruses-key-read-ruthless-elimination-of.html

This book is for those who read Ruthless and ask themselves:, so how do we actually implement an unhurried and contemplative life? Practicing the Way lays out a path that is less rigid implementation and legalistic system and instead is a call first and foremost to eat Jesus’ dust.  This refers to the Jewish practice of following and imitating a rabbi so closely that you literally would be walking in his dust were you a first century Jew following him on a dirt road.  This act of following was called apprenticeship and this is what we are called to as Christian.  It’s noteworthy that the term Christian appears only 3 times in the New Testament, while the word for "Apprentice" (mathētēs)appears 269 times. In this case words matter because they translate to actions (or inactions) in our daily lives.  

These actions are what Comers describes as our daily practices and grappling with them gets to the heart of the tension between legalism and grace.  He frames this with Dallas Williard apt statement that "grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning."  This daily effort is what fuels a believer’s transformation and casts aside the sense of entitlement that comes from the idea of earning one’s salvation.  Importantly, this daily bread is not the world’s way filled with hurry, coercion and pride but Jesus’s that is prayer-centric, humble, unhurried, sacrificial, and contemplative.  

All of this is easier said than done in a world full of distractions but Comer advocates that we must keep memento mori at the forefront of our minds.  Remembering that we must die one day is not meant to be morbid but rather to shift our focus on the eternal–this is the call we see countless times in the Bible to ‘look up.’  We do this over a life time of failure and progress in the right direction in these practices (quoted from the book):

• Sabbath: A 24-hour period of rest, delight, and worship designed to counter the culture of hurry and exhaustion.

• Solitude and Silence: Withdrawing from noise and people to be alone with God, often emphasizing early morning, undistracted time.

• Prayer: Viewing prayer not just as a duty, but as communion with God (described as "looking at God, looking at you, in love").

• Scripture: Regular reading and meditation on the Bible to renew the mind and align with truth.

• Fasting: Abstaining from food or other comforts to cultivate self-control, hunger for God, and solidarity with the poor.

• Community: Engaging in deep, authentic relationships with other believers for accountability and support.

• Generosity: Practicing radical giving to combat consumerism and greed.

• Service: Actively loving others through acts of service, mirroring Jesus’ humility.

• Witness: Sharing the Gospel and living out the way of Jesus in the world. 

Our men’s group at church also went through an 8 week study on it which truthfully I probably need to do about five more times to begin digesting the depth and richness of incorporating this into my daily rhythms. (Practicing the Way Course Trailer).  But what I continue to appreciate it’s that at its core Practicing the Way of Jesus is simple:  "Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did." It is only in my own human weakness and wandering that I benefit and grow from a structure that helps me grow to be someone who does these three things.  

Finally, one of the observations that stuck with me most was Comer’s observation of the way life’s distractions–aren’t.  Take the case of our kids:

"Children are like monastic bells. They call us away from our own agendas, our own egos, and our own 'spiritual' plans, and call us back to the present moment to practice the way of Jesus in love." 

I love that idea–children as monastic bells calling us back to the present moment.  As a dad to six kids, I needed that reminder.  And it’s given me fresh ears to hear my little ones as they call to me to ‘come home’. 

Key Quotes:

• "It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon... It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we." 

• "Children are like monastic bells. They call us away from our own agendas, our own egos, and our own 'spiritual' plans, and call us back to the present moment to practice the way of Jesus in love." 

• "He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial."

• "Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning." — Dallas Willard

• "He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Key References For Further Study:

• Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer.

• The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard.

• Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

• The Jesus Way, Eugene Peterson.

• Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton.

• Letters from a Modern Mystic, Frank Laubach.

• The Monasticism of Daily Life Ronald Rolheiser

Kruse's Keys: Read Jayber Crow to Appreciate Life's Sacred Spaces

Need book recommendations? Check out alll 301 (and counting) books that I've read at Dad's Bookshelf.

(Kindle Read) Published in 2020–60 years after his first novel Nathan Coulter–Jayber Crow is the 7th book (depending on how you count them) in Wendell Berry’s Port WIlliams series. Port Williams is a fictional town in eastern Kentucky and its creation has been the work and meditation of Berry’s life. There’s no author who has created so complete a miniverse–not just a town and a setting but an interconnected, overlapping anc, a omplementary web of characters (the “membership”) and stories. Faulkner did it masterfully with his Yoknapatawpha County but with nowhere near the sheer number of stories and characters.

Jayber Crow is the name of the main character and covers the arc of his life from a young orphaned boy to an aging, partially retired town barber looking back on his life. His life takes a wandering route from the orphanage barber apprentice to seminary dropout to prison chain gang to eventual Port Williams barber, gravedigger, and church custodian. Jayber’s physical wanderings provide a backdrop for his own spiritual journey in which he struggles with and internalizes what it means to believe in Jesus:

"What is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord’s Prayer... It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified."

In Jayber’s case, much of his suffering is in silence as he pines for a woman he will never have–Mattie Chatham–who is married to a man who is antithetical to the very essence of life in Port Williams. Jayber’s love for Mattie morphs into some slightly weird territory at one point as he forswears all other women but ultimately Berry brings it back to the firmer familiar Port WIlliams series territory of meditation on the death of farming in America. And in this novel’s case, farming’s death symbolizes the loss of something even more precious–the loss of sacred spaces. As Jayber noted later in his life as he struggled with his own faith and its role within the larger notion of organized religion–it’s these very spaces where Jesus spent his ministry:

"Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one... to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures... toward the membership of all that is here."

It’s noteworthy that Jayber Crow is by no means a religious novel–there is plenty else there for a secular or naturalist reader to ponder and appreciate. In my own personal Port WIlliams ranking it occupies second place behind the standout Hannah Coulter (my review is here of one of the best novels I’ve ever read).

The Port William Series (Publication Order)

Nathan Coulter (1960) — (Covers 1929–1941). My short review is here.
A Place on Earth (1967) — (Covers 1945). My full review is here.
The Memory of Old Jack (1974) — (Covers 1952, with flashbacks to 1860)
The Wild Birds (1986) — (Short Stories covering 1930–1967)
Remembering (1988) — (Covers 1976)
Fidelity (1992) — (Short Stories covering 1935–1990)
Watch with Me (1994) — (Short Stories covering 1908–1932)
A World Lost (1996) — (Covers 1944)
Jayber Crow (2000) — (Covers 1914–1986). My full review you just read.
That Distant Land (2004) — (Collected Stories covering 1888–1986)
Hannah Coulter (2004) — (Covers 1922–2000). My full review is here.
Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006) — (Covers 1943)
A Place in Time (2012) — (Short Stories covering 1864–2008)
How It Went (2022) — (Short Stories covering 1932–202)

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story (2025) — (Covers 1906, narrated from the 2020s)

Key Quotes

Location 196
Context: Jayber’s first "awakening" to being seen by another.

"The brief, laughing look that she had given me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark."

Location 345
Context: The river as a metaphor for the passage of time and memory.

"The river, the river itself, leaves marks but bears none. It is only water flowing in a path that other water has worn."

Location 436 & 439
Context: The inverse relationship between time remaining and memory accumulated--getting older.

"Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time."

Location 485
Context: Finding happiness in the simple dignity of being required by one's community.

"It was a time under a shadow, and yet I remember being happy, for I had responsibilities then, and I knew that I was useful."

Location 514
Context: Jayber's perspective on the nature of oral stories and history

"Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear."

Location 695
Context: The moment a stranger (E. Lawler) is integrated into the "circle" of the community.

"She was waiting. I did not understand that she was waiting, but she was. And then one day as her classmates were joining hands to play some sort of game, one of the girls broke the circle. She held out her hand to the newcomer to beckon her in. And E. Lawler ran into the circle and joined hands with the others."

Part II: The Education of a "Man Outside"
Location 900
Context: A stark realization of what "Thy will be done" actually means for someone

"What is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord’s Prayer... It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified."

Location 928
Context: Jayber’s critique of the "talky professors" at the seminary who lacked the weight of lived doubt.

"The problem was that they’d had no doubts. They had not asked the questions that I was asking and so of course they could not answer them. They told me I needed to have more faith; I needed to believe."

Location 1284
Context: The intellectual isolation of a seeker.

"It seemed to me that I hungered and thirsted to hear somebody talk about books who knew more about them than I did."

Location 1747
Context: The unchanging nature of home.

"But it seemed to me that even if everything had been changed, I would have recognized it by the look of the sky."

Location 1892 & 1915
Context: Describing a man of total presence—likely Burley Coulter.

"There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him."

Location 2142
Context: Country humor/justification for a good drink

"His favorite Bible verse was, 'Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities'—which he quoted frequently when he was sober."

Part III: The Membership and the Rememberers
Location 2385
Context: A tribute to the elders like Old Jack Beechum and Mat Feltner who carry the town's history.

"They were rememberers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port William ever have. I listened to them with all my ears... Things went to the grave with them that will never be known again."

Location 2519
Context: Jayber sees Mattie, really sees here for the first time

"A neat, bright, pretty, clear-spirited girl with all her feeling right there in her eyes."

Location 2585
Context: Athey Keith’s mathematical subtraction of a man's character.

"I knew that he had subtracted Troy Chatham’s talent as a basketball player from Troy Chatham, and had found not enough left over."

Location 2658 & 2672
Context: How war is felt in the hometowns

"Where do dead soldiers die who are killed in battle? They die at home—in Port William and thousands of other little darkened places... This new war... would be a test of the power of machines against people and places."

Location 2675 & 2678
Context: The impossibility of reconciling the Gospel with the machinery of war.

"I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies... The thought of loving your enemies is opposite to war."

Location 2679 & 2786
Context: On the visibility of a community and the endurance of grief.

"Maybe you don’t have to love your enemies. Maybe you just have to act like you do... I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure."

Location 2788 & 2823
Context: Mat Feltner on enduring loss and being present.

"'What can’t be helped must be endured,' Mat Feltner said... 'All I could do was hug him and cry.'"

Part IV: Organizations vs. The Mystery
Location 2863 & 2880
Context: On "church religion" versus a lived, mysterious faith.

"Roy lived too hard up against mystery to be without religion. But like many of the men, he was without church religion... It was a disappointment like a nail in your shoe. It wasn’t completely disabling, but it couldn’t be ignored either."

Location 2989-3001
Context: A scathing critique of seminary students who have a "high opinion of God but a low opinion of His works."

"They had imagined the church, which is an organization, but not the world, which is an order and a mystery. To them, the church did not exist in the world where people earn their living and have their being... They made me see how cut off I was. Even when I was sitting in the church, I was a man outside."

Location 3023
Context: The hidden benefit of a dull sermon.

"Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons."

Location 3330
Context: The integrity of a man whose words match his thoughts.

"There was never much room between what he said and what he thought."

Location 3404-3419
Context: The "unraveling" of the old fabric of communal work via the "new way" of industrial farming.

"The new way of farming was a way of dependence... on machines and fuel and chemicals... we didn’t want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together."

Location 3437
Context: The balance of how farms used to operate.

"The law of the farm was in the balance between crops (including hay and pasture) and livestock."

Part V: Love, Eternity, and the "Unorganized" Religion
Location 4604 & 4615
Context: The failure of love in time, contrasted with its fulfillment in eternity.

"Why doesn’t love succeed? Hate succeeds... I saw that Mattie was not merely desirable, but desirable beyond the power of time to show... she carried in her the presence of eternity."

Location 4625, 4644 & 4678
Context: The "terrible prayer" and the realization that God loves the physical world.

"'Thy will be done,' I said, and seemed to feel my own bones tremble in the grave... My mistake was ignoring the verses that say God loves the world."

Location 4679-4690
Context: Christ’s Gethsemane prayer as a testament to his mortality and the "unreasonable" prayer for Port William.

"That He prayed that prayer at all showed how human He was... I prayed unreasonably, foolishly, hopelessly, that everybody in Port William might be blessed and happy."

Location 4709
Context: The heartbreak of loving the world.

"And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart."

Location 4990 & 5233
Context: How the interstate highway system changed america

"That shout of limitless joy, love unbound at last, our only native tongue... More even than television, the interstate brought the modern world into Port William."

Location 5342
Context: An honest admission of the difficulty of Christian love.

"It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy."

Location 5993
Context: Jayber’s defining credo: Christ came to found an "unorganized" religion.

"Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one... to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures... toward the membership of all that is here."

Part VI: The Final Reckoning
Location 6197
Context: Wry observations on the modern "emergency to relax."

"The people are in an emergency to relax... They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee... They look neither left nor right."

Location 6600 & 6621
Context: The relationship between Earth, Hell, and Heaven; Jayber’s summary of himself.

"But the earth speaks to us of Heaven, or why would we want to go there?... I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith."

Location 6652-6655
Context: The definition of faith as the belief that nothing and no one is truly lost.

"A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost... His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing."

Location 6721
Context: The release of a forty-year-old hatred--forgiveness.

"I stood facing that man I had hated for forty years, and I did not hate him."

Location 6774 & 6775
Context: The final benediction: Mattie’s smile.  The power of a woman's smile.

"To know it’s being ruined is hard... She gave me the smile that I had never seen and will not see again in this world, and it covered me all over with light."