The Dregs…

“If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line — starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led – make of that what you will.”

From Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

I must confess. I was not able to make it through the book, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I read exactly 326 pages and couldn’t stomach the thought of reading the remaining 80.

I had heard that Wicked was a hard-hitting piece of fiction that took to task western social and political systems and examined the subtleties of evil. But mostly, I found it boring – even wickedly boring. I was expecting it to be engaging fiction like The Wizard of Oz upon which the characters of Wicked are based, or even The Lord of the Rings which occasionally becomes a bit dry but on the whole is a good yarn. Not so with Wicked. The plot drags, the characters are so-so, and it seems preachy some of the time. (Try George Orwell if you want fiction with a point.) I cannot recommend Wicked, especially to those of you who wish to leave Oz in Oz and Kansas in the middle of the lower 48 states. The enchantment of the magical land becomes a tedious exercise in the discipline of finishing what you start. And as I’ve already said, I didn’t.

Has anyone out there read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? It wasn’t anything like the post-apocalyptic fiction I thought it would be.  It haunted me as I read. The book was bleak yet hopeful, skeletal yet fleshy. It took me about 40 pages (they go by very quickly) to get into the book, but once in, I was hooked. I wish that I had had someone to discuss it with while I was reading and would like to discuss it now with anyone who has read it.  Comments anyone?

Currently, I’m reading a book called Gift From the Sea, written in the 50’s by author, Anne Morrow Lindburgh. Many of her thoughts about life and being a woman are surprisingly relevant. Here is a quote that resonated with me:

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pull — woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.

This reminds me that life has been complicated and messy for women far longer than twenty years ago, when I became one myself.

Over the last week or so, I’ve read What is the What by Dave Eggers and The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds. Both are worth reading. The first is the story of one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan. It is a fascinating, gripping, and enlightening novelized account (but mostly true, if that makes sense) of Valentino Achak Deng. I became more aware of the horror that children caught in wars face around the world and found his website, valentinoachakdeng.com, very helpful. I have added a link to World Vision as a result of our book club’s discussion of this issue (see the blogroll links) and my desire to be an advocate and encourage advocacy in the small ways that we can do so.

The second book, The Rapture of Canaan, is a quick read about a quirky fundamentalist, pentecostal congregation in the south and the challenges and changes they face when two of their youth conceive a child out of wedlock. It has some very humorous moments. My favorite is when the vast majority of the congregation thinks that the rapture has occurred and that all but their leader have been left behind. (I won’t spoil the rest if you’re planning to read it.) But on the whole, it is a poignant tale with a harrowing and, finally, redemptive end.

Now I will finally finish Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism and move onto selections from The Historical Jesus in Recent Research.

Here’s another quote I like from Dorothy Sayer’s Mind of the Maker.  It has to do with God’s revelation of himself to humankind.  It is at the same time humorous and thoughtful.

It was said, sneeringly, by someone that if a clam could conceive of God, it would conceive of Him in the shape of a great, big clam.  Naturally.  And if God has revealed Himself to clams, it could be only under conditions of perfect clamhood, since any other manifestation would be wholly irrelevant to clam nature.  By incarnation, the creator says in effect:  “See! this is what my eternal Idea looks like in terms of my own creation; this is my manhood, this is my clamhood, this is my characterhood in a volume of created characters.

Here’s a quote I ljust read in The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers:

“The necessary condition for assessing the value of creeds is that we should fully understand that they claim to be, not idealistic fancies, not arbitrary codes, not abstractions irrelevant to human life and thought, but statements of fact about the universe as we know it.”

I just finished reading This Incomplete One, a collection of sermons written by various authors for the funerals of children and the very young. Many of them were written by ministers who lost their own children to death. The various occasions of death include babies who died early or in the womb, young people who died under the influence of substances or who committed suicide, and those that lost their lives to accident and illness. None of them speak “easy” words of comfort. They deal honestly with the reality of death and the questions that push into our minds when tragedy occurs.

Here are some of my favorite authors in the collection: John Claypool, who wrote about his 10-year-old daughter after she died of cancer; Willian Sloane Coffin Jr. (I am NOT making up this name!), who preached for his son who drove his car off a bridge under the influence of alcohol in a storm; and Karl Barth, who wrote a sermon after his son died as a result of a mountain-climbing accident. Barth speaks beautifully about standing on the edge of the “now” of this life and the “then” of the life to come. I quoted from his sermon in an earlier post (The Now and the Then). Claypool writes about what makes a miracle, how God intervenes to help us, and how his sustaining presence (often in others) is as much a miracle as the instantaneous healing of the diseased.

One of my favorite bits was from Coffin who wrote that “[when] a nice-looking middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches… saw me she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, “I just don’t understand the will of God.” He blew up at her saying, “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of ‘frosties’ too many? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road, and no guardrail separating the road and Boston Harbor?” For him, the consolation lay in knowing that it was not God’s will that his son perish in this manner. Later, he continues by recounting the words of the Psalmist and Jesus, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” admitting that real grief is bleak and lonely beyond thinking. Yet at the end, he continues to “seek consolation in that love which never dies, and find peace in the dazzling grace that always is.”

I was moved by this outstanding collection of sermons and highly recommend it to all, especially to those who feel that sunday school answers do not fill the void that true tragedy leaves behind.

Here is a thought-provoking quote from Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope:

“Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.”

This is a great way of understanding the extreme right and left both in politics and, I think, within the church. Perhaps this is one reason I rail against extremes in both arenas.