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Wednesday, 11 August 2010 02:58 |
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 Godric has been on my "to read" list for some time. It didn't come off of the list for a while because while there were plenty of things that sounded enticing (for example: I like Buechner, have a penchant for medieval tales, and the book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in the early eighties) everyone I'd heard talk about the book also mentioned it was really hard to get into and the dialect was hard to get through. I decided to give it a chapter or two and see if it grabbed me, and it did. The style definitely took some getting used to and I had to sail on past a word occasionally while guessing at its meaning based on context, but on the whole I found it very engaging and in many places poetic. Buechner bursts Godric out of the sterile shell you might find in Lives of the Saints and makes him real, with personality and roughed edges, as you might expect from someone who'd lived in as a hermit for most of the last 60 years of his life.
From Godric: "Why did we weep? I asked myself. We wept for all that grandeur gone. We wept for martyrs cruelly slain. We wept for Christ, who suffered death upon a tree and suffers still to see our suffering. But more than anything, I think, we wept for us, and so it ever is with tears. Whatever be their outward cause, within the chancel of the heart it's we ourselves for whom they finally fall." "As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last."
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Thursday, 22 July 2010 04:34 |
 Janel and I honeymooned in Quebec and I remember being curious about how a pervasive Catholic identity could crumble within one generation. La Guerre, Yes Sir! is a portrait of a small Quebec town during the Second World War which gives a perspective from a time when the church still had a much more prevalent connection to everyday life (at least ritually and in their cursing). In the book, various elements collide: Quebecois and "Maudits Anglais", parents and children, Protestant and Catholic, and so on. The humor of the book is soaked in religion, death, sex, and small-town community with the war always underneath everything.
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Monday, 19 July 2010 03:23 |
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 I read the Sparrow a number of months ago and now I've got the sequel queue'd up in my "to read" list. Thanks to David Dark, I've also downloaded a podcast of an interview with Mary Doria Russell for the next leg of my travels. The Sparrow is an interesting blend of sci-fi, anthropology, linguistics, and religion. I think this excerpt from the back cover is a good introduction:
After the first exquisite songs were intercepted by radio telescope, U.N. diplomats debated long and hard whether and why human resources should be expended in an attempt to reach the world that would become known as Rakhat. In the Rome offices of the Society of Jesus, the questions were not whether or why but how soon the mission could be attempted and whom to send.
The Jesuit scientists went to Rakhat to learn, not to proselytize. They went so that they might come to know and love God's other children. They went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration. They went for the greater glory of God.
They meant no harm.
As the last line makes pretty clear, things didn't go exactly according to plan. The mystery of what exactly happened on the mission is gradually unfolded but not fully revealed until the end of the book, when we learn of the events that have transformed Emilio Sandoz into a wretch of a man. I was particularly intrigued by Sandoz's experience of God throughout and his disappointment and sense of betrayal as the mission deteriorates. In the meantime, the book goes into fascinating detail about life on Rakhat, alternating narratives from before and during the mission with those from after Sandoz's return to Earth.
Recommended reading.
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Friday, 16 July 2010 06:55 |
 To say that our world has been altered since our daughter Caritas died nine months ago would be an understatement. I see that in physical details like our two-year old continuing to reenact with dolls a baby in her tummy who is “so sick” and ends up dying, but also in my daily thoughts and feelings and in the way I view God and the world around us. Janel and I wrote reflections in the days after Cara's death, and I also wanted to trace the contours of my thoughts to mark six months. It's taken me a few months more to expand upon the notes that I jotted then.
In a strange way, I end up with more questions but my faith feels stronger on a fundamental level. A friend of mine coined the phrase "faith-infused agnostic" and that term has grown on me in a lot of ways. It reminds me of Meister Eckhart's famous prayer that God would rid him of God. Our perceptions of God are always incomplete, and trying to force God into terms we can understand can become a form of idolatry.1 It seems that humility dictates that we acknowledge our own fallibility and finitude with respect to a God that cannot be contained by any concept within our grasp. At the same time, I can't help but continue to wrestle with the events of my life, the kind of world we live in, and God’s role in both.
Many of the issues I find myself mulling are not unique to me – most of them have been asked since ancient times and none of them have definitive answers. Knowing this reminds me that I shouldn't be surprised that I haven't solved life’s most profound mysteries, and I suspect that my thoughts may continue to change over time.
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Read more...
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Tuesday, 13 July 2010 15:53 |
  "This is life: noisy, dirty, dangerous. And it's the best we get in this fast-paced, hard-nosed, crazy-making world. But is there more than chaos, commotion and calamity? Is there some majesty even in the dust?
In this unique compilation of journey notes, new author Krista Finch asks these questions, speaking honestly about herself and the world around her. With curiosity and passion, she digs into ordinary moments for the truth about awakening and reawakening. Brokenness and beauty. Ruins and restoration. And what she keeps finding in the clumps and clods is nothing short of glory."
I was interested in this book based on the jacket copy above. I found it to be a mostly pleasant read but I wish it had delved deeper into the noise and the dirt. Most of the chapters were completely rooted in the day-to-day of a middle-class life rather than anything particularly dangerous or chaotic or calamitous. I was hoping to read someone's exploration of where the majesty and glory is in a world where babies get brain tumors, earthquakes destroy lives and oil spills ruin ecosystems and livelihoods. This book was more about "[digging] into ordinary moments" and the more serious issues were occasionally added as asides without deeper exploration.
She refers to the book as a "compilation of journey notes" and I think that is a fair description. Each chapter is generally only one or two pages, relating an experience or thought that she had, followed by a short conclusion she had reached after the fact. At times this felt too moralistic, but made for light and usually interesting reading. It was easy to read a chapter or two even when I didn't have a lot of time to devote to it. In some ways it felt like a blog that you could tuck in a pocket and pull out whenever you wanted (for those of us without fancy phones and gadgets, that is still a novelty).
As a designer, I appreciated the work that went into the book, and its small size felt comfortable to hold (design was by Sharp Seven, who've done a lot of interesting work on a lot of great projects, including Jesus for President and Conspire Magazine). And as an independent writer myself, I applaud Krista and her husband for their courage in stepping out and braving the world of publishing. They've even set up a publishing company called Swerve Press. If she continues in this vein, I'll be interested to see what her future projects bring to the table.
Links:
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book.
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Monday, 12 July 2010 18:25 |
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 As I packed for our in-process move, I found a scrap of paper from years ago, with this quote written on it. Something must have struck me about it then, and it strikes me again now. It's from Buechner's Telling the Truth:
The absence of God is not just an idea to conjure with, an emptiness for the preacher to try to furnish, like a house, with chair and sofa, heat and light, to make it livable. It is the tears that Jesus wept over Lazarus and the sweat he sweated in the garden and the cry he choked out when his tongue filled his mouth like a gag.
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Just as sacramental theology speaks of a doctrine of the Real Presence, maybe it should speak also of a doctrine of the Real Absence because absence can be sacramental, too, a door left open, a chamber of the heart kept ready and waiting."
Related: Living in God's absence: Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?
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