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"No!" she says emphatically. "And I'll tell you why. Mitford is not there waiting. You have to help make it. If you will read a Mitford book carefully, you will see that everybody is helping Mitford happen. Mitford isn't free. You've got to reach out if you want Mitford. You do not wait for somebody to bring a pie and leave it on your doorstep. You do not wait to be invited to join the country club or the Friends of the Library. You immediately get out into the community. If you're in a new home and you have hardware needs, you go to the hardware store and you start there. You start loving at the hardware store!"

That sounds faintly like an ad slogan: "Start loving at your hardware store." But I know it's true, because I'm actually very fond of my local hardware salesmen. About 20 of them sit all day in a crowded little building with a wooden Indian, and when you need a pipe soldered, they'll practically come to your house and do it for you.

"Ms. Karon, what about the church? What role does it play in creating community?"

"The church is the heart of the community. There's where you go to find Jesus Christ in the flesh in other Christians, there's where you realize that all Christians are not perfect, that all Christians have evil, wicked thoughts just like you have, and they're flawed, they're mortal. But you never say, 'I don't go to church because it's full of hypocrites.' You keep your eyes on Christ, and then you're not so absorbed in the faults and mistakes of other Christians."

"I guess you find your sense of community in Blowing Rock."

"Absolutely. I get it right here, or I wouldn't have it. There's pain everywhere you go; life is a vale of tears in the city, in a small town, in the countryside. God is going to allow some things to happen to us that we didn't pray for and don't want, no matter where we live. Something that people forget is that hard things happen to people in Mitford: there's a heart transplant, there are abused children, there's a thrown-away boy named Dooley; even Father Tim himself had an unholy conflict with his earthly father. Mitford never pretends to be perfect; it's other people who see it as some idyllic setting."

She's right. Though the Mitford books never gloss over or trivialize the sorrows of life, it's hard to carry sorrow away from them; the reader feels, as she herself said earlier, consoled. Part of this is owing to the writing itself. There is nothing gothic about Jan Karon. Though she writes about the rural South, she doesn't linger on slop jars or snake handlers.

More significant, though, is her choice of a hero. Father Tim is a "man of balance," as Karon says, "a Christ figure." He sees human suffering and ministers to the sufferers. If the Mitford stories were told through the eyes of Pauline Barlowe, for instance, a character beaten down hard by addiction and loss, the consolation would come much more slowly.

A writer of faith can only describe the corner of life God has allowed him to see. Not every story can be about a place like Mitford or a man like Fr. Tim Kavanaugh. Like the Bible itself, good Christian writing must include many voices: voices sometimes raised in praise and thanksgiving, sometimes in the record of salvation, and sometimes in sorrow at the horrors of this world.

But Jan Karon, by moving out of exclusively religious bookstores onto national bookseller racks, has shown that the world still pines for the consolation of a Christian world-view. People long for a village with a church at its heart. What remains to be seen is how many of us, with all the demands of modern life upon us, are willing to do more than read about community life and work to make it happen.

Maybe I'll go home and make my neighbor a casserole or take the folks down the road some squash from my garden. In the meantime, my waitress is back.

"Well," she says, "how about that dessert?"

"Hmmm," I say, and glance at Jan Karon. I wonder what Father Tim would recommend.

Betty Smartt Carter is the author of two novels: I Read It in the Wordless Book (Baker Book House) and The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave, a mystery, just published by Harold Shaw.

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September 1 1997, Vol. 41, No. 10