Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew's Blog, page 21

Breathing Space by Heidi Neumark

For the past few weeks I've been living in the South Bronx with Heidi Neumark--and loving it. BREATHING SPACE tells the story of personal transformation wrought by church on pastor and communal transformation wrought on a church by this extraordinary leader. Neumark's theology is solid, and inspirational. While at times I wearied of scriptural references, I appreciate what she accomplished with so many Bible passages: A translation of our foundational scriptural stories into a contemporary setting. Neumark breathes life into these old stories, and it's a life that's shockingly redemptive.

What challenges me most reading Neumark's stories is her profound compassion for all of humanity, especially those living in the depths of poverty. Poverty itself doesn't scare me, but many factors associated with it--drug and alcohol addiction, violence, abuse--terrify me. When I encounter people who suffer from them, I turn away. Neumark doesn't. Her faith in resurrection is extraordinary, and likely the key to her ministry's success.

I have two complaints about this book--first, that it needed a strong editing hand (75 fewer pages would have done wonders for strengthening Neumark's message), and second, the tiny typeface was ill-chosen. I almost put the book down because I couldn't read it. Woe to the designer who chooses an unreadable font!

The Moonflower Vine, by Jetta Carleton

Those of you who follow my reviews know I'm EXTREMELY unhappy about contemporary fiction. The vast majority of books published in the last twenty years seem... loveless, self-conscious, and lacking any moral exploration. So I'm thrilled when I'm proven wrong.

I was browsing the bookstore up at St. John's University and found this gem, a successful novel that had gone out of print and was resurrected by Jane Smiley. Thank you, Jane. THE MOONFLOWER VINE by Jetta Carleton is what publishers would call a "quiet" novel--and then not publish today. But it's gorgeous. It traces the ethical dilemmas of each member of the Soames, a Missouri farm family, especially as they try to reconcile their passions with their faith. The descriptions of the natural world are delightful. This is a book suffused with love--love for place, for family (however confining and confounding), and especially for a moral, heartfelt relationship with the world, hard as it is to find.

Here are a few of my favorite passages. They're all comments on Christianity, which provides the cultural and moral compass for the Soames, but is by no means left unchallenged by Carleton.

"We ate our supper in the yard that night. As we gathered at the table, my father said, "Bless this food, O Lord, to its intended use... Bless our loved ones, wherever they may be, and grant, O Lord, that we may follow in the paths of righteousness..." What he meant was that he was grateful for the good smells and sounds of the summer evening, for the star impaled on the lightning rod, for fresh tomatoes from his garden. But he would have felt it pagan to state his pleasure in such plain terms. He said it in his own way, and no doubt the Lord can translate; He must have a lot of it to do in a day's work." 31

"Nowadays, perfectly respectable people went to shows on Sunday, they went dancing and played cards; lots of girls even smoked--and it didn't mean they were going to hell. Hell had shifted its location; it was farther away than people used to think." 259

Writing--The Sacred Art by Rami Shapiro and Aaron Shapiro

I was excited to find a book on writing as a spiritual practice written from a Jewish perspective. As it turns out, the book draws from a wide range of faith traditions for inspiration and reflection. The exercises are good and would facilitate both spiritual growth and improvements in your writing, although how the latter happens isn't spelled out. The overall emphasis of the book (moving beyond self to Self--relinquishing the ego) I found a bit strange. That's not to say I don't think it valuable; I just believe that spiritual growth always entails seeing the self in a broader human context--community, faith, history, tradition--and that writing necessarily connects us beyond the individual to others and the Other. So: Good exercises, odd theory.Writing-the sacred art Beyond the Page to Spiritual Practice

An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Barbara Brown Taylor is our twenty-first century Henri Nouwen. I'm immensely grateful for AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD, for its elegant, lively prose, yes, but mostly for its practical application of a big-hearted faith. In the prologue, Taylor writes, "What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them." This is a profoundly feminine perspective, and profoundly Christian. Later she writes that we don't want more ABOUT God, we want MORE GOD. I love how clearly she articulates the earthly practices by which more God comes into the world, staying rooted in exquisite theology and translating these beliefs for the mundane moments of our days.

This book models for me how powerful spiritual and theological reflections can become when they are grounded in personal narrative. Taylor's every abstract pronouncement about God has its origins in her own experience. The bridge she constructs between life and faith is then strong enough for me to cross as well.

I am happy for practices that bring me back to my body, where the operative categories are not “bad” and “good” but “dead” and “alive.”
--Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, 47




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The Liar's Club

I've just reread THE LIAR'S CLUB as part of a creative nonfiction class--it stands up well to a second look. Karr is a deft, gritty narrator who milks drama from even the smallest moments and portrays true drama without sensationalizing it. For memoir writers looking for models, Karr is an excellent teacher. She doesn't shy from depicting the dark, even horrific, qualities of her parents and still manages to make us love them as much as she does. She explores the fickle nature of memory without letting her exploration detract from the story itself. Her structural choices--a beginning that flashes forward to the middle and then three chronological chunks in time--show writers how well-selected memories can function well together without any need for the author to account for missing years. Most of all, she shows us how a powerful personality can infuse every word and thus delight the reader.

Here's a sample:

Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don't mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in.

Oh--one last thing I admire about this book. Karr tells such a good story I often found myself wondering whether she was pushing memoir's boundaries by making up details. But her title, her great admiration for her father's capacity to lie, and the layers of behavioral lying she explores with her family make lying a unifying theme of the book. And so I'm willing to forgive her for stretching the truth. In fact, I suspect by stretching the truth she's written a truer story.

Scent of God by Beryl Singleton Bissell

The Scent of God: A Memoir by Beryl Singleton Bissell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Here is a beautiful read! Beryl Singleton Bissell manages to tell the story of leaving a contemplative order after many difficult years with great kindess. While her experiences are hard, especially her struggles with anorexia and the theology of self-deprivation that supported it, she weaves the stories with compassionate reflections. These and the present-tense, second-person interludes that invite the reader to experience the monastic hours with her create a container bigger than the monastery--a world-view able to find continuity in the sacred both in and outside monastery walls. And the outside world is no piece of cake; her relationship with a priest is fraught with conflict, great love, and eventually loss. So the reverence and love of life that frames this story is remarkable. This book feels like a witness to love's mysteries.



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Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Tracy Kidder is a genius. MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS is a journalistic portrait of Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health and an extraordinary advocate for the Haitian poor. I admire how Kidder includes just enough of his own sense of intrigue--what makes this guy tick?--and discomfort--how come Farmer makes him feel inadequate?--to hook the reader in what feels like a personal story but in fact is largely biography. This book is a good example of literary journalism.

Farmer is strongly influenced by liberation theology, but he's brought these principles to bear on the field of medicine, especially the treatment of TB. I found many aspects of his work personally challenging. He remains a doctor dedicated to seeing individual patients, even if this entails 10-hour treks through the central plateau of Haiti, as he grows in prominence and eventually comes to influence national health care systems around the globe. Kidder implies that this groundedness in doctoring individuals is the key to his success. The more he advocates for quality care for individuals, the more Farmer gets into political trouble. Once again, radical love even on a small scale rattles those in power. His story has challenged me to keep my feet firmly planted in the dirty particulars of working with ordinary people while at the same time bringing the insights of this work out to influence a larger sphere. We have a mandate to correct economic and social injustices, Farmer says. How can I take up this mantel as a writer? I've a lot to think about.



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An Unquenchable Thirst

I have utmost regard for Mary Johnson. The theology she stakes her life on--a divine presence who invites humans into fullness--isn't so remarkable in isolation, but when set against the theology of Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, it becomes radically rebellious. Mother Teresa's a modern-day saint; we hold her in such high esteem, we find it difficult to imagine how very human she was. I admire the courage Mary had to muster in order to claim a God of unfolding love over the God of rules within Mother Teresa's order.

AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST traces Mary's twenty years in the order in terrific (sometimes excruciating) detail. I disliked myself at times while reading this book; I was turning pages to get the dirt on Mother Teresa more than to follow Mary's journey. Perhaps this wasn't my fault. I frequently wished Mary would abandon the close narration of events for a more reflective stance. I wanted to know what she thinks and feels about these events NOW. For example, there's one scene where she confronts her superior for hitting children in their care that occurs not far from scenes of the nuns using the "discipline," meaning flagellating themselves and cinching chains around their arms. I wanted a narrator to draw connections between the two forms of physical punishment and the theology implicit in both. Without this meaning-making, the book reads like a thriller.

Nonetheless, I'm glad to have read it. Few contemporary authors portray the spiritual life with such honesty and accuracy.

A Reader's Manifesto

A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose by B.R. Myers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Of course I enjoy reading a well-written screed against contemporary fiction; I like anyone who agrees with me that the emperor has no clothes. Myers focuses all of his criticism on style, however; "these folks can't write!" he exclaims over and over. The examples he gives (from Proulx, Guterson, DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy) are in fact terrible. It's refreshing to have this named in print. All the same, I wish he would have spent equal time offering examples (from past or contemporary writers) of model sentences. I'd appreciate some effort to uplift the state of literature rather than just bad-mouth it.



What I'm waiting for is a screed that names contemporary fiction's inability to address the human condition in ways that illuminate it or uplift it. And offers corrective suggestions.



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Confession, by Leo Tolstoy

A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm so excited to discover this little window into Tolstoy's faith! How have I missed it? I love his commonsensical approach to faith: Start from bare experience; pay attention to what works--that is, what gives meaning to life--and from there draw conclusions about the nature of God and the place of the church. Faith is a response to the questions of life (64), not a social construct or a proscribed creed. I wish more writers laid bare their inner struggles with such clarity.

"But I do want to understand in order that I might be brought to the inevitably incomprehensible; I want all that is incomprehensible to be such not because the demands of the intellect are not sound (they are sound, and apart from them I understand nothing) but because I perceive the limits of the intellect. I want to understand, so that any instance of the incomprehensible occurs as a necessity of reason and not as an obligation to believe."
--Tolstoy, Confession, 91




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