Not Far from the Tree

(Christian Courier column, Jan. 28th, 2013 issue)

For over a decade, along with other volunteers, I taught a Sunday school class for children with special needs. It was indeed a special learning time. Particularly for me!

One of those students, John Curtis, has Down syndrome. In the beginning, at eight years old, he was extremely shy and not very verbal. He could communicate with his family, but I could hardly understand him.

I learned patience. I did my best to interact with John Curtis on his own terms. I prayed with him about his family and praised his faithful giving, a loonie every week. When we finished our lesson, we played games. Slowly, he warmed up to me. It took years, but we finally got to a place of relaxed friendship. He would tell me which game he wanted to play instead of pointing. He liked Pop-o-matic Trouble the best. He’d pop the bubble and urge on the dice with Vegas enthusiasm: “C’mon, six!”

Once he mentioned a girl that he liked at school. I couldn’t quite make out her name. “Nancy?” “Francine?” He wrote down the first letter: A. Finally I guessed, “Angie”? “Yes!” he shouted in delight. “That’s it! You got it! Good job!”  

Right now I’m reading Far from the Tree by well-known journalist Andrew Solomon. Solomon, who’s gay, explores the parenting of children who are “far from the tree,” who present unfamiliar needs to their parents, as he once did to his. He investigates families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, prodigies, children from rape, children who become criminal and those who are transgender.

It’s a sobering read. Parenting is a navigational nightmare for many of these families. Marriages wither. Parents burn out. Some operate in a vacuum, with inadequate information and no support. Others are bombarded by competing opinions almost immediately. Fierce divisions exist within the communities that spring up around these conditions. Those who support prenatal screening, with the option of abortion, against those who stand for the sanctity of life, calling for respite care, educational programs and appropriate housing. Those who lobby on behalf of their particular disability in order to procure government funding against those who defiantly reject being labelled. Take the issue of dwarf-tossing, for example. Yes, you read that right. Some Little People are mobilizing to have this “sport” outlawed. Aside from its inherent indignity, the activity is hazardous to skeletal structure already compromised at birth. Yet, other Dwarfs vigorously oppose such advocacy, asserting their right to a lucrative income. Even the use of identifiers such as Little People and Dwarfs is divisive and debatable.

Ethical complexities surround “identity” versus “illness” in our culture. Solomon points out that the very existence of genetic screening exerts enormous medical and social pressure to use it. Michael Berube, a disabilities advocate, cites a study which showed that women who do not use prenatal testing or who continue a pregnancy knowing the child will have a disability “were judged more responsible, more to blame, and less deserving of both sympathy and social aid.” The ramifications gather coldly in the subterranean currents of public opinion. Bluntly, if you choose to have a child who requires costly educational support or expensive medical intervention, don’t count on society to help shoulder the burden.

Or, to highlight another dilemma, consider this. The Deaf culture has finally achieved a notable level of public acceptance after centuries of marginalization. Now it is being undermined, potentially even dismantled, by the increasing popularity of cochlear implants. Similarly, just as Little People move into mainstream media and political influence, gaining a respect often denied in the past, treatments such as limb-lengthening and cosmetic surgery are emerging as attractive options to the next generation.

Is the problem the disability or the societal discrimination against those who are “different”? In light of Solomon’s research, the question reveals itself as hopelessly reductionist. Sometimes it’s the impairment, sometimes it’s the prejudice and, often, it’s both. Moreover, whether by way of “selective termination” or by advances in medical technology, reducing a “diverse” population has consequences. Solomon warns, “Accommodations are contingent on population; only the ubiquity of the disability keeps the disability rights conversation alive at all. A dwindling population means dwindling accommodation.”

Back to my friend John Curtis. When we see each other at church, he gives me a hug. I give him a smile and ask how he’s doing. He belongs; I belong. Both broken; both redeemed; both loved by God. Solomon’s book is significant, but it doesn’t offer a more hopeful or better answer than this: John Curtis and I are not far from the Tree at all. We’re branches, grafted on the one true Vine.

(With gratitude to the Beintema family for permission to write about John Curtis)

War Horse

(Christian Courier column, November 26th issue, 2012)

$200. That’s what it cost me to see War Horse last month. Bus fare, ticket, meals, driver’s tip. I’m reading Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution right now, so I’m wincing at the admission. His remarks about consumerist Christians feel up close and personal.

But let me tell you about War Horse. I’ve read the book, seen the movie, but “the play’s the thing.” With minimal staging, we were cleverly ushered into farmyards, village squares and even battlefields. I loved how scythes could become fences simply by turning them over and butting them together, farmers becoming immobile posts. I loved how stringing pennants up into the audience could rope us effortlessly into a celebratory town meeting, the recruiter cajoling us with stirring patriotic rhetoric. “It’ll all be over by Christmas!” he vows. This is the pulse of drama, suggestiveness coupled with imagination, disbelief suspended. Thomas Merton said, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” And it’s true. I’m there, ready to sign up for King and country.

A screen above the stage, like a huge torn scrap of paper, afforded further orientation. Simple pencil drawings, sketched live, outlined the geography – patchworked pastures and village rooftops. Archival film footage of the crossing of the English Channel and the twisted, charred tree trunks of No Man’s Land lent sobering realism. But abstract images were equally powerful, a single red drop spreading like blood on the white canvas, dripping, metamorphosing into poppies with quavering paper-thin petals slipping off the edge.

The puppetry is the wizardly part of the production. It’s beyond description really – life-sized horses operated with flawless choreography by agile puppeteers. In seconds you’re mesmerized, hoodwinked, believing the horses are real, every snort and hoof beat credible. They even breathe. The puppetry, not only with respect to the horses but also the larks, crows and a comical goose, represents a phenomenal achievement.

Celtic folk songs smoothed the transitions between scenes, universal and timeless ballads of mothers, wives and sweethearts longing for their men to come home, for their families to be reunited, for the fighting to be over. The plaintive melodies were juxtaposed against the deafening din of battle scenes, the booming artillery reverberating with terrible authenticity. Music, noise and silence combined to generate a subliminal kinesthetic commentary – physiological meaningfulness penetrating muscle and bone.

The story starts small with the love of a boy for his horse, but ripples out concentrically, encompassing the family, Albert, his alcoholic father and long-suffering mother, the village, with its petty local rivalries, and, finally, the whole world, nations engaging in cataclysmic confrontation. Within these overlapping circles, the enduring questions keep bumping against each other: the whys and what ifs.

Was the $200 well-spent? I marveled at the talent and ingenuity of the production, my awe undergirded by praise and adoration for a creative God, the God whom we image in every artistic human endeavour.  T.S. Eliot, in Choruses from the Rock, sums it up so elegantly: The LORD who created must wish us to create / And employ our creation again in His service / Which is already His service in creating.” Amen and amen.

But, further, I’m grateful for any artistic expression that allows us to not only lose ourselves, but to find ourselves, to perceive the multiplicity of our own being – the wild amalgam of nobility and degradation, holiness and profanity that we are – because such discovery can propel us toward the “other,” the neighbour who is not so different from us, after all. The fact that Joey, the war horse with an oh-so-human name, served on both sides of the combat deliberately places such recognition in the crosshairs of our consciousness. As we gaze upon the fractures in Albert’s family and in Europe, upon the dead and dying horses in the mud of Flanders, we also see the cracks and fissures in our own families, in our own neighbourhoods and in our world. But as Christians, we’re invited to look with the eyes of Jesus, the Saviour who ignites redemption and restoration through Incarnation, the supreme example of embracing the “other,” divine embracing human. What Marilynne Robinson said about fiction is true of all the arts: “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”

Exiting the theatre, a turbaned teenager stepped back to allow me to leave ahead of him. I smiled and thanked him. It was … priceless. And when I got home, Shane’s book still on my night table, I gave a donation to our church’s school-building project in Belize: my heart stretched, perhaps, by this exercise of its “capacity for imaginative love.”

Canadian Chiaroscuro: A Blessed Snarl

(Book review, Christian Courier, September 24, 2012)

 
The epigraph of Samuel Thomas Martin’s novel, A Blessed Snarl, lays down the paradox in one thick stroke: “In Newfoundland nature is a blessed snarl, humans an imposition.” For Martin’s characters, yes, Newfoundland is a knife, scaling them like so many “fish washed up on a rock,” frantically flopping about for salvation. The Rock with its “fanged north coast” is a harsh landscape; the Atlantic, “terrifying, frothing where it gnaws at the jagged shoreline.” This isn’t Ontario, warns a cop: “You hit a moose here at that speed and its ass will take your head clear off.” The austere topography becomes a metaphor for life, where characters and readers alike struggle to find hope in the darkness, where, as in one of Rembrandt’s paintings, the flickering light of a candle seems a hopelessly frail defense against the gathering gloom.

 
Rev. Patrick Wiseman, “strangely sure-footed in his Sunday shoes,” is as fervent as the original Irish saint. He moves his wife Anne and his son Hab from Ontario to Newfoundland to pastor a Pentecostal church in a suburb called, of all things, Paradise. His father-in-law, Gurney Gunther, also a preacher, tells Patrick, “Newfoundland was once the Pentecostal capital of Canada, you know,” he himself having performed miracles of healing, including, it is said, having raised his daughter Anne from the dead. But as Patrick gets caught up in the busyness of New Life Church, his family falls apart, despite their faith heritage. Anne leaves him for a high school crush; Hab moves in with his girlfriend Natalie. Patrick is left dazed, exiled by his own, like Jeremiah or David or Absalom, not able to make “sense of his life without seeing it enmeshed in the biblical story.”

 
Natalie works in a group home, terrorized by a psychotic resident. She drinks and pops pills to stave off her anxiety and to deaden tragic memories. Her roommate Gerry, a writer, is also haunted by his history. Inflamed by those long-ago wounds, Gerry commits an appalling crime. Patrick’s estranged father, Des, communes with the Virgin Mary in his cabin, her visage materializing from a creosote stain on the wall. An old secret excoriates his soul, the guilt still not expunged after decades of sobriety. But these characters are not grotesque; you sense that Martin pities them and is keenly aware of their worth, their individuality lovingly outlined like faces in a Van Gogh portrait.

 
Martin’s debut work, This Ramshackle Tabernacle, was a finalist for the 2010 Winterset Award and for the 2011 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. A Blessed Snarl, his sophomore effort, corroborates his talent. There’s careful weight in the description and dialogue, but the plot moves briskly through a typically Canadian ordinariness. Anne drives on the 401 from London towards Hamilton. Patrick, Hab and a stranger take shelter together during a vicious storm. Conversations are littered with the profanity you hear on the street. All so very Canuck.

 
Fair warning: the language offends. As it should. Wyndham Lewis once remarked testily, “If I write about a rotting hill, it’s because I despise rot.” Here, too, the blunt obscenities serve to confront, to underscore that something stinks. Similarly, Martin’s locales are unflinchingly gritty, degradation slouched up against libraries and coffeehouses. But, like overlapping leaflets on a graffitied wall, poignant questions about God are plastered on the same page as  vulgarity and despair. And that could be the very blessing of the snarl. In trouble, you look for help. Hab pinpoints his own need simply: “He wants to share a meal with people who sit around a table and talk. He wants a glass of wine, and for God to answer his prayers.”

 
Literature as canvas
The novel is painterly, patiently-applied imagery colouring in the story behind the story. A fishing motif arises naturally from the East Coast setting. When Anne knocks on the front door of her Facebook lover, she is overcome, “like something gutting her, like a fillet knife in a fish’s belly.” When the rendezvous reveals a bitter truth, she “felt like a fish hooked through the gills ….” In happier times, she had taught her nephew Kyle to catch muskie, but once he had unexpectedly snagged a ling, a strange north-water cod that her father called a “dirty fish and not much sought after by real fishermen.” The battle to land that mystery fish is an iconic memory for Anne, but also for the reader who catches traces of Jesus inviting fishermen to be “fishers of men,” faint suggestions of just how “dirty” those fish are, how nasty the fight to reel them in.

 
Fire is another evocative image, one that mesmerizes Natalie as a photographer. But after she survives a harrowing tenement blaze in which twenty-three lives are lost, she becomes unhinged: “It seems unreal, the fire, even now, after replaying it over and over in her head, trying to separate it from her imaginings of Hell and her ten thousand photos, lost, of fire and furious light.” She recalls that it happened on Ash Wednesday, thousands walking the streets of Toronto “marked with the sign of the cross.” Again, obliquely, Jesus is present, an uncomfortable juxtaposition. Christ and crisis, side by side.

 
As a child Natalie had once heard Gurney Gunther preach about “fighting fire with fire,” constrasting “Holy Spirit fire that purifies against hellfire that destroys.” River, her schizoid client, is a pyromaniac who’s already burned up a shed and plans to do worse. Natalie gets twisted up in his malevolence. And there’s Martin’s subtlety again – nudging us to see in that bond between Natalie and River our own kinship with the damaged and the hurting. How different is Natalie from River, really? Gerry discovers that he shares the same last name with his victim, the neighbourhood drunk. How much separates these two characters from one another? The last chapter features a literal conflagration and a whisper of rebirth. The name Natalie, after all, comes from the Latin word for “Christmas Day.”

 
I can be critical. Friends who raved about The Help were surprised I was blasé about it. I loved Mary Lawson’s first book, Crow Lake; I found her second, The Other Side of the Bridge, predictable and disappointing. But when I read a thoughtful novel like A Blessed Snarl, I simply stand and applaud. I might even be tempted to call Martin’s accomplishment anointed.

Heron River: It’s about what’s real

(Christian Courier review, February 27, 2012)

Promise me you’ll read this novel twice. Don’t worry, you’ll want to. The first time through you’ll be so caught up in the dramatic tension that, like me, you’ll simply gulp it down in unseemly drafts, impatient to discover how these disparate characters, who reside in a “small safe town,” are connected. There’s Madeline, a middle-aged teacher battling multiple sclerosis and other multiple losses. Her son Adam lives in a group home, developmentally-delayed from an accident she thinks is due to her own “critical error.” Imaginative and likable Jacob, an adopted kid, proves susceptible to the adrenaline of slipping into his customers’ homes when they’re away. Nineteen year old Orrin is a powder keg. Tara, a dedicated cop, serves and protects. The lives of these five individuals intersect, but not until the gathering dread reaches a gripping level.

 
 “The details are not the details,” said Charles Eames, noted mid-century modern designer. “They make the product.” His insight certainly applies to Hugh Cook’s achievement in this meticulously-constructed novel. Acutely observant, Cook builds an authentic community out of precisely-rendered and scrupulously-ordered details. The barbershop with its “slightly curved oak pew that Tony picked up when Sacred Heart installed an elevator several years ago,” the Native reserve, the mill and the river itself – all granite solid, crafted with measured description that’s spare and sinewy, never fussy. 

 
Such attention to detail informs Cook’s characters as well. No slap-dash here. Even minor characters are drawn with a particularity that implies more, like the fisherman with eyes “the colour of the beer bottle.” Every conversation, glance and gesture positions the characters in a real world, one we recognize as our own. And, familiarly, the currents of life along Heron River create a mash-up: callousness, sadism, and physical deterioration log-jammed with compassion, caring and courage.

 
In an Art Waves radio interview Cook remarked that the writer’s job is, first of all, “to tell stories.”  In Heron River he does just that, and it’s a compelling tale. But read the book again. Like a painting whose subject runs off the canvas, suggesting a wider plane, the narrative expands, probing our perceptions of what’s real. The small town of Caithness is indisputably real, but a spiritual reality hovers there, too, as patient and determined as a heron fishing, waiting to pierce the surface with sudden and irresistible energy.

 
The story opens with malevolence intruding on an ordinary Monday morning. It’s “garbage day.” The “stealthy, shabby” crows are cawing. Madeline listens to the Mamas and the Papas on the radio: “Oh, Monday morning, Monday morning couldn’t guarantee, That Monday evening you would still be here with me.” Prophetic lyrics. By evening, the Adam she knew was no longer with her, and successive revelations of compounded sorrow establish the wide-ranging effects of his fall, a spreading misery evoking a more cosmic fall.

 
Intimations of grace and hope
But there are other ripples, too, intimations of grace and hope. Madeline’s friend Donna has a smile that “continually plays at the corners of her mouth, as if she’s the perpetual recipient of good news.” When Madeline finds a photo of the mother she never knew in her father’s old Dutch Bible, she unearths an even better surprise – comfort in a place she’d overlooked. After a suspect punches Tara in the mouth, she must undergo the painstaking restoration of a front tooth. Her trusted dentist expertly affixes the new crown, the procedure containing within itself the faintest outline of another terra waiting to be restored.

 
Jacob’s quick-witted lying covers his misdeeds, his cunning (his surname is, in fact, Cunningham) reminiscent of that archetypal biblical deceiver who, nonetheless, was chosen and marked by the mysterious wrestler at Peniel. Young Jacob is likewise chosen, first in his adoption, and then again when he is recruited to be an altar boy at St. Paul’s. Leaving the sacristy after his first service, “invisible choirs of birds raise a riotous, chirruping psalm as if today were the first morning of a new creation.”

 
Adam, perennially on the lookout for the majestic heron as he walks along the river, is afforded a close-up view at last. As he approaches the bird, he realizes with amazement that the heron is moving ever so  deliberately to keep him in its sight as well. Eager to follow the bird as it flies off, Adam begins to cross a dangerously high railroad bridge above the river. He panics when a bystander’s warning shouts cause him to recognize his foolhardiness. Fortunately, his Native friend Keller is nearby to talk him back to safety. Before Adam reaches the bank, however, a grey shadow startles him, “large as the shadow of a moving cloud,” another allusive Old Testament nod. It’s the blue heron “flying over the water larger than he has ever seen it. As large as something he might see in a dream.” Rescued from the depths of a well, Adam has conquered the heights, thrilled with this rapturous meeting in the air.

 
These transcendent glimmers are not a facile overlay. Cook’s tenacious exactitude, whether it’s about baking a pie or cleaning a gun, that same truthfulness from which emerge his textured settings and fully-dimensioned characters, lends an equivalent veracity to these flickers of redemption. Nor are all questions tidily answered. Madeline wonders who is watching the 99 while the shepherd is out searching for the one lost sheep. Orrin, raised by an addicted mother in a highly dysfunctional home, is a complex figure whose actions and culpability challenge easy assumptions.

 
There’s so much more. Read this multi-layered book twice. Maybe even a third time. I will.

Glory at home

(Christian Courier column, January 23rd, 2012)

 

Glory at home

Very few books have actually made me weep because they were so beautiful. Godric by Frederick Buechner was one. I read it twice and wept both times. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson was another. And now, Home, also by Robinson. Its luminous hopefulness, centred in the home, ennobling women’s work, also makes me cry. 

Marilynne Robinson has been in the news a lot. She’s an articulate defender of Christianity and capable critic of those vociferous New Atheists. I was fortunate enough to hear her speak at the 2006 Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing. It occurred to me then that I had never, ever before heard a woman speak with such grace, intellectual authority and cultural acumen. I was mesmerized.

I took notes. “Books have potency,” she said, quoting Milton’s Areopagitica. Books can show you your own soul. Reading a novel is a solitary experience akin to prayer and meditation. In our culture, she continued, there is a loss of respect for that kind of inwardness. Our culture has become “decadently rationalistic.” She reflected on the legacy of an old copy of King Lear that she read under the blankets when it was past her bedtime. It had, she said, “an honourable weariness about it, having passed through innumerable hands.” Books, she asserted, have brought more freedom into the world than perhaps we were even able to handle.

In all the reviews I’ve read of Robinson’s Home, not one writer has quite zeroed in on what captivated me about this novel. So, I guess I have to write about it myself. Please insert a smiley face, here, as together we wryly enjoy the chutzpah of that sentence.

Robinson’s deliberate application of homemaking as a metaphor for the work that God does is subtle, original and affirming. I adore the fact that the main character, a woman who has come home in quiet disgrace after a grievous relationship with a married man, is called, absurdly and triumphantly, Glory. As she tends first to her ailing father, Rev. Boughton, succumbing to infirmity and age, and then also to her recovering alcoholic brother Jack, Glory is the centre of this home, doing all the background tasks that women do, sweeping, making coffee, doing laundry, trying to restore the garden.

She worries and prays and cares for these two men without bringing up her own heartbreak. Repeatedly she sets aside her own tiredness, frustration and sorrow to reach out and salve their wounds… her brother’s “inaccessible strangeness,” her father’s need for comfort and  dignity in his dying. Glory “was wary indeed of certain thoughts, certain memories, because her father could not bear her unhappiness.” Through her sensitivity to their pain, through the ministrations of her hands in the home, we witness and touch the cost of caring.

Glory, with a career in teaching and Masters degree in Literature, muses at one point that she might have chosen the ministry had she been a man. But “she seemed always to have known that, to their father’s mind, the world’s great work was the business of men …. Women were creatures of a second rank, however pious, however beloved, however honored.” With the gravest and gentlest kind of irony, it becomes apparent Glory is a messianic maid, her lowly service in the home blessing the two troubled men, providing anointed fragments of grace and peace to them.

Robinson’s adept descriptions wrap the house and its furnishings, the yard, and the outbuildings with sacredness. The oak tree in the front yard “makes rubble of the pavement at its foot” and flings “imponderable branches out over the road.” The “torsion in its body made it look like a giant dervish to them.” That tree, older than the neighbourhood or town, becomes more than itself, hinting at that “other” tree of religious ecstasy. The homely objects and familiar trappings of the house become vessels for something greater – human and even divine love. Glory ponders the character of the house, with its “staunch” and “brokenhearted” presence. She consciously puts aside wistful visions of someday having her own home or her own children. She commits to preserving this home and what it represents, its rootedness and its tender way of tying down belonging to a concrete place, for the future, for Jack’s son.

Glory does what she can for those she loves. She bakes pies and scrubs the stains out of Jack’s shirt. It’s the transcendence in the daily mundane sacrifices that are required to run a home that gets me choked up. The daily setting aside of self for the elderly and hurting. Christ-likeness in dusting and peeling potatoes. I look at my mom and the thousands of women like her who had fewer choices than I did, who for generations did what they could with all they had, often not very much, to minister to their families in the home. Marilynne Robinson’s book is good news for them.

Marilynne Robinson

Some reading I’ve been doing…

Not that long ago, I finished reading Walter Brueggemann’s book, Journey to the Common Good, one of my Calvin College Bookstore purchases on my GR road trip with my good friend, Diane Plug. I keep wishing I had time to blog about it more comprehensively. I’ll read the book again, but it left me very unsettled. I found his discussion of Exodus, Jeremiah and Isaiah very much driven by an economic interpretation and his comparisons of the temple’s destruction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 rather forced.
 
He’s a well-known scholar and I usually like reading stuff that challenges me, but this book made me exceptionally uncomfortable. His analysis of the extent of social justice concerns in the OT is good… and it’s much broader than I had previously ever realized. On the other hand, I felt like “my” OT was being hijacked. His negativity about the priests and criticism of the “regimentations of holiness” instituted by the priests left me confused. I had always been led to believe that the levels of the temple (from outer courts to the Holy of Holies) were commanded by God and had their spiritual functions. He maintains that these divisions were indicative of a “wrong” desire to differentiate people into castes and classes (like Egypt). He is critical of the wealth that Solomon pours into the temple as evidence of materialism and a love for gold and power (again, like Egypt). I always thought that the luxury materials were used to honour God. I’d always been led into OT stories and books through a “moral” door… God’s chosen people versus the pagan nations, the faithful versus the unfaithful. The lens was always spiritual, rather than economic. Not to suggest that the “moral” lens was necessarily the correct one, either. As I grow older, I sense how that lens conveniently ignores the social justice verses and the earthiness and physicality of OT stories. 
 
The good thing is that it made me grapple again (as did Sarah Miles’s book Jesus Freak) with the extent to which our own agendas and traditions drive our reading of Scripture. I will probably tackle the book once more… this may not be a fair reading. Just my first impressions…  
 

After my disenchantment the Walter Brueggemann book (some of which I still think might be related to the fact that I don’t really want to hear his message about economic justice), I’ve come across a wonderful book on culture by Andy Crouch called Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. I’ve been delighted with how many new things I’m learning. This is a great book for anyone who is interested in the intersection of Christianity and culture.

Crouch has a chapter on why God chose Israel (because she was the least of the nations) and why he plunked her in a place of central geographic importance (Canaan) to be a witness to the cultures roundabout. The smallness and peculiarity of Israel as a chosen people was intentionally tested by the location of the Promised Land in the midst of cosmopolitan cultural currents. Israel was in the very eye of the cultural hurricane of the day, not in some safe remote location. Some of this I had dimly grasped before, but the emphasis was always on Israel’s faithfulness spiritually. Crouch does a good job of expanding this to a cultural witness as well, that Israel had to model culture that was God-directed and God-informed, not just a religious or spiritual direction that was different than her neighbours.

 

Crouch does an awesome job of calling Christians to do more than condemn, critique or absorb culture, but to create new culture that is honest, genuine and reflective of thoughtful Christian convictions.

 

I’m very pumped by this book. Where Brueggemann’s book made me feel he was stretching the biblical text to fit an external kind of economic overlay that he was invested in, Crouch’s book is making me feel like “Yes, that’s substantiated by the text. How didn’t I see that before?” or “Wow. That’s cool. That fits with what I’ve always understood but takes it a step further into a broader context!”

 

I’ve got post-it notes all through the book. 🙂

 

 

Book Review: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

 (originally published in Christian Courier, January 24, 2011)

Initially I was disappointed in Donald Miller’s new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. His first successful book, Blue Like Jazz (2003), a New York Times bestseller, was delightfully honest and funny. His follow-up book, Searching For God Knows What (2004) was similarly honest, humorous and literate. In comparison, A Million Miles in A Thousand Years struck me as dumbed-down. Simpler prose, fewer literary references, a quieter wit.

It’s a good thing I read the book twice, because my first impression wasn’t really fair. In his characteristic no-holds-barred way, Miller applies the elements of story as a rubric to test the credibility of his faith. A film producer has made him an offer. He wants to make a movie about Donald’s life. Says Miller, “I was going to tell him I needed a couple of weeks to consider the idea, but then he said how much he’d pay me, so I told him I’d do it.” In working with the filmmakers, Donald discovers that his life is boring. He learns that character transformation is the point of a story, but also the point of life itself. He concludes that his own life’s story has stalled along the way. Despite renown as an author, he is forced to confront “the absent glory of a life that could have been.”

Donald attends the funeral of his uncle and begins to unravel what’s missing. His uncle, who had devoted his life to helping young men in trouble, had lived a life beyond himself: “his life was like the roots of a tree that went miles around its trunk and came up in my cousins, in their faces and their voices and their character. I didn’t think you could kill a tree that big.”

Spurred by the movie project, Donald undertakes some “inciting incidents” in his own life to notch up his own story. Conquering his deep-seated reluctance and dread, he re-connects with the father who abandoned him. He hikes the physically-challenging pilgrimage route up Maachu Pichu in Peru and reflects on how pain develops character. The many Incas who gave their lives to build the city infused it with an even greater grandeur than it would have had without such tremendous sacrifice: “The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than if we’d showed up at the ending a different way. It made me think about the hard lives so many people have had, the sacrifices they’d endured, and how those people will see heaven differently from those of us who have had easier lives.”

Eventually, with fifteen other individuals, Donald takes on a 3000 mile cross-country bike marathon in support of fresh water wells for Africa. This, too, becomes another chapter in plotting a more intentional and better story for himself. He falls in love and experiences a heart-wrenching breakup. He walks beside a friend who loses his wife to cancer. At the conclusion of his “story,” Donald inaugurates an ambitious urban outreach program for fatherless children called The Mentoring Project.

Miller’s candour won me over once again. Targeting his postmodern peers, Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years embeds a solid Christian perspective ever-so-casually into a non-doctrinaire conversation. But his conclusions speak to me, too, the not-so-modern baby boomer. “If I have a hope,” he writes, “it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as if to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you. That doesn’t sound so different, after all, from one of my favourite T.S.Eliot quotes: “The Lord who created must wish us to create / And employ our creation again in His service / Which is already his service in creating.” (Choruses from ‘the Rock’).

Book Review: This Ramshackle Tabernacle

This Ramshackle Tabernacle     By Samuel Thomas Martin

(published in Christian Courier, November 8, 2010)

Here’s a word of advice. Don’t read this book while on vacation in Cape Cod, scenic cottage country of the rich and famous. These linked stories by Samuel Thomas Martin kept forcing me to look elsewhere – at the ragged lives of the sexually abused, the drug-addicted, and the throwaways. They haunted me as I cruised Hyannis Harbour and viewed the Kennedy compound through binoculars.

Martin’s characters also come from cottage country, northern Ontario, but they are not rich or famous. Some are Christian, some are not. And some are the outcast, neighbours you see only if you steel yourself not to turn your face away, scabby lepers living banished lives among us.

Doug, a failed camp counsellor, wears his rage openly, but tucks his shame away. Drug addict Harold commits murder. Ben leBou stabs his abusive father. Upon his release from prison, he gets mauled by a grizzly, survives, sort of, and finally, calling out to God, tries to shoot himself in an agony of multiplied pain.

After you blink to reduce the intensity of this magnified focus on the sordid and horrific, you begin to discern that a heart of glory glimmers in the midst of all this darkness. God dwells here. Just as he did in the Old Testament, lodged in a portable temple among a stiff-necked and stubborn people, God has pitched his tent with these tainted characters from the Muskokas. His holiness is a tarp hanging over Doug and Harold and Ben whether they know it or not.

This camouflaged God, “shrouding himself in the tent of darkness, veiling his approach with dark rain clouds,” (Ps. 18:11) has not abandoned his creatures. He is a hunter, tracking and claiming his own. In the guise of perky lifeguard, Krysta, he offers Doug a redemptive gift of hope. God is also cloaked in the matronly neighbour who grandly welcomes a misfit kid with a black eye into her home as “Mr. Harold Witaker.” Years later, no one cares to know his name. On the street he is “guy,” “dude” and “princess.” Moments before he bashes in the head of the only other person who addresses him by his real name, Harold sees a great blue “God’s Eye” stained glass window. Its sad gaze pierces him, but he is finally seen and known once more. The baptism of tenderness he experienced as a child splashing around in the lake with a woman named Vicky has been confirmed.   

The organic wholeness of these stories is shaped by this deft crafting of relationships and imagery. Ben does not suffer alone. God is in the devotionals that he uses to roll smokes. God is in the room: “The unfinished walls warped and sagging like the damp nylon walls of a tent in the rain.” Divine immanence tabernacles with him even in his despair. Such dovetailed details lend a patient hand-rubbed lustre to the book. It is decidedly not, as I heard Angela Antle say in a CBC interview with Martin, “sort of a lazy man’s novel.”  

In Shekinah, the defiant Ziggy, who crosses himself and gives God the finger in the same gesture, mutters, “Show yourself then.” In The Killing Tree, his nephew Bill had also asked for a sign. They are granted their wish. Ziggy and Bill are visited with a bewildering glimpse of resurrection glory in the powerful prayer of their friend Dan, “the old prophet who dwells in the wrinkled tabernacle of his eighty-five-year old body.”  What’s left is whether they will believe this “lacerating certainty of a miracle.”

Sam Martin’s stories are not for everyone. Although the first and last story bookend the whole with hope, not every reader will recognize the salvific embrace of the structure. The violent conflicts and raw language are intended to be disturbing. The edginess of a story like Becoming Maria, for example, where a sexually confused teen meets Jesus as her lover in a dream, is a risky business that will hinder the acceptance of this book in some Christian circles.

 I, too, tend to prefer a safe, inoffensive neighbourhood, my own sanctified Cape Cod, where no one confronts me with abuse, sexual aberration, stark raving loneliness, or naked human need. But God’s heart is bigger. He resides with the fallen. He summons me out into the streets and into the wilderness, to believe with Dan “that not one bird is shot from the sky that God doesn’t know about.” These stories invite me look my neighbour in the eye, and see God looking back at me.

Click here to see the CC page with a photo of the book jacket and the author:

Ramshackle_Tabernacle_review

How Long A Victim?

(Published by Christian Courier, July 26, 2010, NO.2893)

Reprinted here with permission.

A random pile-up of conversations, events, articles, and books nudged me into thinking about this timely question.

It began with an online dialogue about gender justice in the church. I came across a powerful historical anecdote to buttress my egalitarian argument. My source (Women, Authority & The Bible, Alvera Mickelsen, ed.) described a Scottish woman who delivered twins in the sixteenth century. Somehow it was discovered that she had ingested a pain-killing herb during her labour. Of course, this was against God’s law. The Bible said women must suffer in childbirth. Eufame, suspected of being a witch for her unwillingness to rely solely on God, was burned at the stake for her transgression.

But I was discussing women in the church, today, in the 21^st century. Those with whom I was disagreeing might hold to a different interpretation of Scripture, but they are undoubtedly respectful and kind to women. It seemed unfair and inflammatory of me to suggest they were somehow aligned with the extremism of witch-hunters. And, truthfully, I didn’t want to cast myself in the role of a victim like Eufame, either. I didn’t use the material I had sourced.

Then on June 11, 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized on behalf of Canada to the First Nations people who were harmed by their treatment in residential schools. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to inform Canadians about the injustices that occurred and to function as a catalyst towards improved relations. The first event was held in Winnipeg on June 15, 2010.

My husband was vocal in his frustration about this dredging up of the past. His objection paralleled, to some degree, how I felt about the story of Eufame. Was it fair to hold one another accountable today for wrongs committed by past generations? The concept of a corporate responsibility for past injustices is one that he resists. It’s futile to paste current cultural understandings to the past, he thinks. Revisionist salve. A political placebo that nurtures a “martyr complex” and prevents an individual or people from moving forward.  He’s not the only one who thinks that way. Mindelle Jacobs, whose column appeared in the July 13^th Sarnia Observer, reported on a paper produced by the Institute on Governance which argues exactly the same viewpoint: “Aboriginals were historically mistreated but they have to move on, warns Graham. Seeing yourself as a victim is counterproductive, he says.”

While getting my car serviced today, I read the July issue of Macleans. Author Joseph Boyden, in “The Hurting,” relates his highly personal and bleak investigation into high youth suicide rates, unresolved hurt, and lingering cultural post-traumatic stress among First Nations people that he traces, in part, to residential schools. If a national apology and round-table discussion can create an environment where healing can begin, that deserves my support, I thought. It certainly fits within the compassionate framework of my Christian faith. 

CC reported in its July 12^th issue on the World Commission of Reformed Churches that met in Grand Rapids last month. The WCRC issued an apology on June 26^th for the role churches have played in the abuse of indigenous peoples. Charles Honey, religion writer for The Grand Rapids Press who attended the event, was deeply moved : “The powwow and worship service at Ah-Nab-Awen Park offered a remarkable moment unlike any I have seen in this city. As I sang “Amazing Grace” with the faithful gathered at the shining river, I felt the presence of the American Indians who once fished there, as well as the shared faith of those singing. There was hurt in the history, but healing in the hymn. And, perhaps, hope for a better way.”

It struck me that the dilemma of How long a victim? has universal applicability. I remembered reading about the Holocaust and the belief that it is the responsibility of the next generation to hold the memories of the concentration camp survivors “in trust”. The article appeared in the May 8^th  Sarnia Observer. Goldie Morgentaler, a University of Lethbridge prof, and daughter of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, was the speaker at a memorial event marking the 67^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “As time passes, it takes with it the personal memory of personal experience. The result is that we who have not lived through this ordeal must, however unwillingly, become its historians.” She also pointed out that, not only is it increasingly difficult for successive generations to make sense of the Holocaust the further removed they are from its historical context, but, as the Holocaust becomes fodder for entertainment in movies like Inglourious Basterds, it also becomes increasingly difficult for the non-historian to distinguish between fact and fiction. She spells out the duty of the next generation: “To be a child of survivors is to have congress with ghosts — to be overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility … an obligation to never let the dead be forgotten (and) to defend their honour, their names, their humanity (and) their valour.”

The burden of carrying that past is the subject of Anne Michaels’ grimly lyrical book, Fugitive Pieces, nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Book Award last year. The novel explores, in elegantly lean and muscled prose, the lives of two men impacted by the Holocaust. Jakob, a child who witnesses the murder of his parents by the Nazis but manages a traumatic escape, is tormented the rest of his life by the fact that he doesn’t know what happened to his sister, Bella. His relentless research unearths Holocaust data that haunts him even further. He lives his life in the shadows, trapped in an emotional prison. Ben, representing the next generation, is the son of Holocaust survivors. His parents’ horrific experience brands him invisibly, a perplexed and wounded carrier of the uncompromising weight of their scarred history.

Interestingly, the redemption the men are finally granted stems from two different sources. Jakob is released from his living nightmare when he shares his tortured memories with someone who truly listens and empathizes: “She has heard everything – her heart an ear, her skin an ear. Michaela is crying for Bella.”  Saved by the loving Michaela who validates his agony and helps him carry his burdensome past, Jakob even achieves the nobility and grace to do the same for others. Ben marvels at his empathy: “You listened, not like a priest who listens for sin, but like a sinner, who listens for his own redemption. What a gift you had for making one feel clear, for making one feel – clean. As if talk could actually heal.” Ben, on the other hand, plummets into a confused grief as his marriage crumbles. His salvation begins when he recognizes, for the first time, that he has his own life to live. He sets aside his parents’ sorrow to acknowledge his own: “In my hotel room the night before I leave Greece, I know the elation of ordinary sorrow. At least my unhappiness is my own.”

Michaels’ book is masterful. She does not choose one approach over the other, but affirms both. Jakob’s healing comes from telling and being heard. Ben’s healing comes from jettisoning victimhood and taking up the challenge of saving his own marriage.

I offer up a third way to deal with a hurtful past. It won’t make the front page of my local paper. That’s because it’s God’s way. Too miraculous for some to believe. Not verifiable by accepted journalistic praxis. Miroslav Volf, Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale, an authentic voice, having experienced interrogation himself at the hands of communist Yugoslavian jailers, addresses this third way in a compelling talk he gave at the Crystal Cathedral (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmmI6rYjfIo). Volf says what we really long for is a new past, and God can give us that. “The God who makes all things new offers us an entirely new identity. He wipes out our past. He puts our sins behind his back where even he can’t see them.”

There’s a catch, though. We might like God to erase our sins and our painful past, but God offers the same deal to our enemies. He stands ready to forgive and forget the sins of those who have sinned against us, too. That’s the singular and sublime twist in his divine redemption story … mercy trumps justice for all who trust in Jesus, the Saviour “who on the cross a Victim for the world’s salvation bled.” And the afterword? God calls us to also forgive those who trespass against us. And if we fail? There is forgiveness for that, too.

Like a magician, the Alpha and Omega is poised to snap his fingers and make our past disappear. Like a servant, he holds out the spotless robe of his Son to clothe our present. Like a valet, he hurries ahead of us to prepare our future rooms in the mansion reserved for children and heirs. Paul says, ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17).  In those moments when the Spirit empowers us to glimpse ourselves in a mirror undistorted by sin and evil, unmarred by victimization or victimizing, our unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory. We are free to recognize Jesus in ourselves and others. As God-images we walk and talk and live a hope beyond time. We Christians are, ourselves, medicinal to the world. Amen, I answer myself. Let me live so.

Book Review

The Other Boleyn Girl  by Philippa Gregory (2001)

Don’t bother. Tarted-up Harlequin romance garbed in skimpy historical costume. I didn’t do an actual word count, but I think more text was devoted to the Boleyn sisters’ wardrobe than to Sir Thomas More, Archbishop Cranmer, or Cromwell. Henry VIII is a juvenile buffoon manipulated by his own lust. If you are looking for some quality reading that offers insight into Tudor England, this is not it. I feel dirty.  😦