questions about questions for Wendell Berry and Jake Meador

I have a question about this section of Jake  Meador's good  new article (the whole article may not be visible unless you are a subscriber to CT..which any reader around here is likely to be, eh?). .I will post it after the jump/excerpt:

Wendell Berry's work is far from perfect. But we would do well to attend more closely to the agrarian writer who has spent much of his life farming in Kentucky near a village of 100 people. Often when city-minded evangelicals read Berry, we pick up on the themes that already appeal to an urban readership. We note the environmental message of his work and go off to buy our food at a local co-op or farmers' market. These may be good decisions. But if that's all we take from Berry's work, we have missed the spiritual underpinnings that inform so much of it.

In the best page of fiction he will ever write, Berry lays out the reason for the little way. The page is in Jayber Crow, the story of a barber in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. In the portion quoted below, Jayber is a divinity student at a denominational college. Jayber has long felt called to preach due to the pressures created by the fundamentalist director at the orphanage where he grew up. But he felt swept away by lingering questions brought up by his studies, and he wondered if he was fit to preach. He talks to one of his professors, an old man named Ardmire. After a few minutes, he realizes he can't be a preacher:

I said, "Well," for now I was ashamed, "I had this feeling maybe I had been called."

"And you may have been right. But not to what you thought. Not to what you think. You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time."

"And how long is that going to take?"

"I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps."

"That could be a long time."

"I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take longer."

Over the next 300 pages, Berry tells the story of how Jayber lives his questions out. In time, Jayber arrives at peace. The novel ends with a beatific vision in which Jayber says that he "was covered all over with light." His orphaned soul finally is restored.

But living out the answers took time—52 years, to be exact. Ardmire spoke with Jayber in 1935. The story ends in 1987. When I realize this, the devastating question hits me: Do we American Christians create communities where answers can be lived out, decade by decade, over a lifetime?

No, we don't all have to move to small towns to find these communities. But small towns make that sort of community more plausible. Big cities run on transience and mobility. They are filled with rental housing and freeways designed to make movement over large areas easier. And they are supported by an economy that assumes people will switch careers and homes several times in the course of their lives.

In such a world, the memory of small-town life is an antidote to the frantic pace that defines the city and deadens the soul. But with small towns withering away, what will protect us from the hectic, hypermobile life of the city? In a world where so many of us are like Jayber—haunted by the pains inflicted upon us as well as our own sinful heart—where will we go to be healed and restored? How many of us will be given the time to slowly, quietly live out the answers to the most important questions?  LINK,  "Why We Need Small Towns :How they correct the supersized spirituality of evangelicals" by Jake Meador

Okay, three questions:

1)Why did the writer need to qualify "Wendell Berry's work is far from perfect'?  
There must be a backstory.   
 (Related, see same writer's Why Urban Christians Need Wendell Berry)

2) How can he promise this is "the best page of fiction he [Berry] will ever write"?
 Berry's still alive.  U2 is still alive, and still time to top their masterpieces (Hopefully next year.. One can pray) 

3) In Berry's text, "You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out,"  do you see the "them" as referring to
 "questions"
or 
                                                                                         "answers"?



If  Berry meant "living out the questions," then why would Meador respond:

"But living out the answers took time—52 years, to be exact. Ardmire spoke with Jayber in 1935. The story ends in 1987. When I realize this, the devastating question hits me: Do we American Christians create communities where answers can be lived out, decade by decade, over a lifetime?

In the previous paragraph, Meador  wrote "Over the next 300 pages, Berry tells the story of how Jayber lives his questions out. In time, Jayber arrives at peace ."

It looks like he shifted from "questions" to "answers" intentionally..
.BUT did Berry intend us to read that we don't ever (in this life) live out the answers,
  just the questions?

Just a question (:


Post answers/questions below.