Well, it seems I took the summer off from my blog. I didn't mean to, it just somehow happened. So I'll give you a quick update on what I've been reading this summer. I'd love to hear what you've been reading too!
At the very beginning of the summer, the Fab 5 Book Club met to talk about Olive Kitteridge by Elisabeth Strout. That book is full of sadness and horrible events, stars a crabby, rather unlikeable protagonist, and is so wonderfully developed that you can't help but keep reading and even liking it! Olive is a main character like no other, her life told in bits and pieces by a string of characters from her hometown in Maine, and Strout is such a great writer that you can empathize with this person you would not necessarily want to know in real life.
We also took in I Am Number Four, a young adult sci-fi/fantasy novel about aliens come to earth by a conglomeration of writers under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore. It's a fast-paced, fun read that grabs you from the beginning and also falls prey to a number of moments that seem engineered to grab the attention of a teen reader. Good looking alien male lead? Check. Gorgeous, perfect girlfriend? Check. A book-long chase sequence? Check. New kid not fitting in with a school bully? You guessed it, Check. The language was needlessly rough. Yet there is something catchy, charming about it. The movie didn't live up to the book. Now the sequel is out, and I've heard it's better than the first. And the original was good enough that 2 of the 4 of us had trouble sleeping because they were kind of freaked out.
The Neland Ave Church Women's Book Club contemplated Coop by Michael Perry. I love Michael Perry, which you may know from earlier posts. I read his book Population: 485 a year or two ago, and then I heard him speak (twice) at Calvin College at the last Festival of Faith and Writing. A down home intellectual, he effortlessly moves from farm life to mechanics to fatherhood to the writing life to philosophy to art to small-town Wisconsin to cooking and on and on. Lovely. So, back to the Neland Book Club and Coop. In Coop, the recently-married 40ish Perry is newly living on his mother-in-law's former farm, attempting with his wife to begin a more self-sustaining life. Raising chickens, in particular, is a major goal. They garden and get pigs and get chickens and rear 2 daughters. In the meantime he also considers the way that he was raised--his parents' endless love, religious beliefs and faithful patience for a string of foster children and adoptive children. It's lovely and gritty and real and touching.
And then just recently the Fab 5 got together to discuss Truck: A Love Story, also by Michael Perry. (If you are sensing a common thread here, namely me, you may just be on to something). Truck backs up a bit to the year that Perry meets the wife he so tenderly describes in Coop. He is intent on restoring the 50s-era International pickup truck he's had for 20 years, which can only actually happen due to the talent of his brother-in-law Mark. Again, Perry is hilarious and earthy and gentle. Did I mention how much I love his work?
Enough. Also on the summer's checklist was the book Soul Searching, by Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton. I was really under the gun with this one. I volunteered to lead the discussion for the Neland women, and with a 3 week camping trip I thought I'd have plenty of time to dig into it. The camping trip was great, but about a week in we had the misfortune of noticing that our youngest child was scratching her head in earnest at the Grand Canyon. Turned out she had head lice. I spent the rest of my free should-have-been-reading time picking through her hair, which satisfied neither of us but rectified the situation. And so I had to speed-read the book when I got home, something I am not very good at doing.
Actually, this is a really interesting book, a sociological study of the spiritual lives of teens in the early 2000s. I have to admit that due to time restraints I had to skip the chapter directed specifically to parents and youth workers in the Catholic Church. But the overall gist of the book is that young people are interested in spiritual things, are willing to go along with what their parents believe, and for the most part have adopted a "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism". In other words, their religion serves them as a tool to make them feel better, happier, rather than asking them to serve a God who loves them sacrificially and asks the same of them. This has major implications for churches that want to train up a child in the way that he/she should go. If you don't want to take the time to read the whole book, you could get a good bit of it from the Conclusion section. I'm not much of a sociologist, but I'm interested to read through the follow-up book now.
As we toured the Southwest United States, my husband showed me up--he actually finished a book, and it was even relevant to the places we were visiting. He read How the West Was Won by Louis L'amour. His review: "It was okay, but nothing special." Son Andrew read a book called Colorado Ghost Stories, which he truly loved.
I'm about 2/3rds of the way through a sort of modern Gothic novel called The Distant Hours by Kate Morton. It's about a woman who is trying to figure out the connection between her mother and the family who lives in an old estate, the same family and estate her mother joined as a child during World War II when the children of London were evacuated to the country. I keep picking it up, then having to put it down to read something else. Someday I may even finish it. I like it.
A very different read this summer was the book On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner. I read this in preparation for a fiction workshop that I attended in June. If I had read this book before signing up for the fiction class, I probably would've ended my fiction career right then. Gardner's book is full of good information on the reason for writing, characterization and other practical things, but his description of who the novelist is left me shaking in my boots, sure that there's no chance I could fit into that category! Then I spent a wonderful week having the novelist Bret Lott lead my class through our manuscripts and about 5 million useful tips for writing. We'll see if I ever have the guts to return to my manuscript.
So it's been a great summer, and now back to real life. Maybe I'll be more faithful to my blog again. We'll see.
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Take This Bread: Feeding the Good Shepherd's Sheep
Where to start with this book? The Neland ladies met to talk about Take This Bread two months ago, I finished it a month ago, and it's taken me this long to write about it. That's not due to a lack of interest on my part. There is so much in this book that I had to chew on, one piece at a time (no pun intended).
Sara Miles is a left-wing, lesbian journalist who was raised in an intentionally secular home by parents who both grew up as mission kids. Sara is also a Christian, quite possibly a follower of Christ like none you have met before.
Food had always been an important part of her life, including experiences like sharing food with poor revolutionaries in Central America in the 70s and working in a restaurant.
One day, on a whim, Sara entered St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco. She sat through the church service, observing, until it came time for communion. St. Gregory's has open communion, and Sara took it. The experience was completely unexpected, and it changed her life.
Sara became a member of St. Gregory's, and soon she organized a food pantry at the church. The pantry began to attract 200 people or more on any given Friday. Her experience led her into a lot of "church" issues, namely that being part of a church congregation means being in communion with people you don't necessarily like, trust, or even want to be associated with. God lives inside of people we don't even like! Sara has a particular love for the different, the broken, the needy; she sees that truly, that's who we all are at the foot of the cross.
Annetta, our leader for the night, shared with us that she has been to St. Gregory's for worship. She reports that it is a lovely place with beautiful music, a wonderful experience. This book club meeting was very well attended, and most people loved the book even if they didn't agree with everything in it.
This meeting reminded me of a discussion we had a few years back after reading Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies. We all loved hearing Anne speak at Calvin and reading her book. She's so funny, alive, self-deprecating, and joyous. Then we wondered what would happen if she walked into Neland. She wouldn't be "like us." Same goes for Sara Miles, in some ways. Would we be welcoming? We'd like to think so.
Personally, I have been recognizing several things about my spiritual life and worship experience which this book illuminates. I am craving diversity of community in my church body--diversity of skin color, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, educational status, any and all of it. I am inspired by people who are seeing Christianity as a holistic identity--I don't just think like a Christian, I am Christian in body and soul. Which means that a more physical, incarnational experience is important to me. And so Sara's description of the patchwork nature of the food pantry, as well as the pantry's ability to feed people in both body and soul, really hit home for me. I'm still fumbling my way through trying to figure out what this all means to my day-to-day life.
If you think you might have a dim view of a Sara Miles when she walks into your church, be assured that she may take a dim view of your church as well. Several passages about the kinds of attitudes or arguments or bottlenecks or inertia that hamper ministry hit painfully close to home. If you have been in a traditional church for any length of time, something in this book is likely to offend or hit you wrong. But the basic principle, that Jesus asks us to "feed his sheep," is irrefutable. And Sara, while disdaining doctrine, has a good handle on both Scripture and the life of Christ.
She points out that we should specialize in the "undeserving poor," since that's exactly what we all are. So while you might feel you should take it with a grain of salt, you should definitely Take This Bread.
Sara Miles is a left-wing, lesbian journalist who was raised in an intentionally secular home by parents who both grew up as mission kids. Sara is also a Christian, quite possibly a follower of Christ like none you have met before.
Food had always been an important part of her life, including experiences like sharing food with poor revolutionaries in Central America in the 70s and working in a restaurant.
One day, on a whim, Sara entered St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco. She sat through the church service, observing, until it came time for communion. St. Gregory's has open communion, and Sara took it. The experience was completely unexpected, and it changed her life.
Sara became a member of St. Gregory's, and soon she organized a food pantry at the church. The pantry began to attract 200 people or more on any given Friday. Her experience led her into a lot of "church" issues, namely that being part of a church congregation means being in communion with people you don't necessarily like, trust, or even want to be associated with. God lives inside of people we don't even like! Sara has a particular love for the different, the broken, the needy; she sees that truly, that's who we all are at the foot of the cross.
Annetta, our leader for the night, shared with us that she has been to St. Gregory's for worship. She reports that it is a lovely place with beautiful music, a wonderful experience. This book club meeting was very well attended, and most people loved the book even if they didn't agree with everything in it.
This meeting reminded me of a discussion we had a few years back after reading Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies. We all loved hearing Anne speak at Calvin and reading her book. She's so funny, alive, self-deprecating, and joyous. Then we wondered what would happen if she walked into Neland. She wouldn't be "like us." Same goes for Sara Miles, in some ways. Would we be welcoming? We'd like to think so.
Personally, I have been recognizing several things about my spiritual life and worship experience which this book illuminates. I am craving diversity of community in my church body--diversity of skin color, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, educational status, any and all of it. I am inspired by people who are seeing Christianity as a holistic identity--I don't just think like a Christian, I am Christian in body and soul. Which means that a more physical, incarnational experience is important to me. And so Sara's description of the patchwork nature of the food pantry, as well as the pantry's ability to feed people in both body and soul, really hit home for me. I'm still fumbling my way through trying to figure out what this all means to my day-to-day life.
If you think you might have a dim view of a Sara Miles when she walks into your church, be assured that she may take a dim view of your church as well. Several passages about the kinds of attitudes or arguments or bottlenecks or inertia that hamper ministry hit painfully close to home. If you have been in a traditional church for any length of time, something in this book is likely to offend or hit you wrong. But the basic principle, that Jesus asks us to "feed his sheep," is irrefutable. And Sara, while disdaining doctrine, has a good handle on both Scripture and the life of Christ.
She points out that we should specialize in the "undeserving poor," since that's exactly what we all are. So while you might feel you should take it with a grain of salt, you should definitely Take This Bread.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Getting Graphic with the Church Ladies
Okay, we're not like that Church Lady. But the Neland Book Club is a groups of ladies from my church. And this week we took the giant leap into reading a graphic novel together. This month's title was Blankets by Craig Thompson, a book which is easy to mistake for memoir, but is officially "an illustrated novel." Some were a bit unsure about reading it, and one stalwart decided she wouldn't, feeling that the whole point of reading a book is to imagine it. But more about that later.
Jenny Williams, who teaches a college class on the graphic novel, lent us her expertise tonight. Blankets is one of the books she always teaches in that class. Blankets is about a young man who has grown up in a fundamentalist Christian home, isolated and lonely in a culture that discourages his natural artistic talent. He falls in love with a kindred spirit at a Christian winter camp during high school, and he goes to visit her. Their relationship opens a new lens on his life and his talent.
While the character in the novel, named Craig Thompson like the author and with many similarities to the author, does not embrace the church, this book would give any Christian pause, begging the question of what they or their church is communicating to the young people within. This young man experiences sexual abuse at the hands of a babysitter, harsh discipline from his parents, and bullying from his classmates. His faith offered him a future security, but nothing to help him in his current earthly life.
Jenny's students always have a strong response to this book. Many identify with the small-town experience or the feeling of isolation at the Christian camp. They express their disappointment at the end result of the character's experience and mourn the fact that he was not in a good church situation. She said that students are always disappointed to find out that this is not absolutely true to his life story--that there are fictional aspects to the novel.
Interestingly, since this book is highly autobiographical, Jenny also let us know that Thompson did not tell his family that he was writing this book and, in fact, let them know by sending them a copy when it was published.
We discussed the title: what blankets are in the book? There is a blanket that Raina, his newfound girlfriend, makes for him, which is the obvious choice. Then there are the blankets that he and his brother fight over and play amidst when they share a bed as children. There are blankets of snow throughout the book. Blank spaces abound. And given the different uses of a blanket--warming, covering, hiding, suffocating--there are many dimensions to the image. Christianity is a sort of blanket as well--his parents use it as security and comfort; Craig finds it to be something that hides what's really there and suffocates him. Interestingly, in real life, he still has the quilt that his girlfriend made him.
An interesting aspect of the book, which helps explain why he feels so isolated from his parents' faith, is the complete divorce that he feels between Christian spirituality and the physical world. The physical world is dismissed as unworthy of celebration and attention. Why did God create our bodies, nature, a physical earth if it is meaningless? It's an easy trap for Christians to fall into.
I would not give Blankets to just anyone--I think given the questioning of faith and the sexual abuse in the novel, I wouldn't give it to anyone under 16. And sexuality, as part of the physical world that has been cut off from his life, plays a prominent role. Jenny and her students have discussed what the difference is between reading a story and seeing the images of them in a graphic novel. For some, images last longer in their minds, while others have very vivid images from reading text. This goes to discernment for what is important for each individual reader.
Which leads me back to our wonderful friend who is not interested in graphic novels. She doesn't want everything imagined for her. However, the art in a graphic novel is part of the storytelling. The minimal text is informed by the art in a completely different way than illustrations function in traditional texts.
Blankets is a poignant look at one person's experience. It is filled with both sadness and beauty. Craig Thompson will be at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin next April. I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say, and I pray that the experience of Festival will be a blessing to him. I'm also looking forward to reading more graphic novels. The art gives an added value to the experience, giving some variety to the always-enjoyable time spent reading.
Jenny Williams, who teaches a college class on the graphic novel, lent us her expertise tonight. Blankets is one of the books she always teaches in that class. Blankets is about a young man who has grown up in a fundamentalist Christian home, isolated and lonely in a culture that discourages his natural artistic talent. He falls in love with a kindred spirit at a Christian winter camp during high school, and he goes to visit her. Their relationship opens a new lens on his life and his talent.
While the character in the novel, named Craig Thompson like the author and with many similarities to the author, does not embrace the church, this book would give any Christian pause, begging the question of what they or their church is communicating to the young people within. This young man experiences sexual abuse at the hands of a babysitter, harsh discipline from his parents, and bullying from his classmates. His faith offered him a future security, but nothing to help him in his current earthly life.
Jenny's students always have a strong response to this book. Many identify with the small-town experience or the feeling of isolation at the Christian camp. They express their disappointment at the end result of the character's experience and mourn the fact that he was not in a good church situation. She said that students are always disappointed to find out that this is not absolutely true to his life story--that there are fictional aspects to the novel.
Interestingly, since this book is highly autobiographical, Jenny also let us know that Thompson did not tell his family that he was writing this book and, in fact, let them know by sending them a copy when it was published.
We discussed the title: what blankets are in the book? There is a blanket that Raina, his newfound girlfriend, makes for him, which is the obvious choice. Then there are the blankets that he and his brother fight over and play amidst when they share a bed as children. There are blankets of snow throughout the book. Blank spaces abound. And given the different uses of a blanket--warming, covering, hiding, suffocating--there are many dimensions to the image. Christianity is a sort of blanket as well--his parents use it as security and comfort; Craig finds it to be something that hides what's really there and suffocates him. Interestingly, in real life, he still has the quilt that his girlfriend made him.
An interesting aspect of the book, which helps explain why he feels so isolated from his parents' faith, is the complete divorce that he feels between Christian spirituality and the physical world. The physical world is dismissed as unworthy of celebration and attention. Why did God create our bodies, nature, a physical earth if it is meaningless? It's an easy trap for Christians to fall into.
I would not give Blankets to just anyone--I think given the questioning of faith and the sexual abuse in the novel, I wouldn't give it to anyone under 16. And sexuality, as part of the physical world that has been cut off from his life, plays a prominent role. Jenny and her students have discussed what the difference is between reading a story and seeing the images of them in a graphic novel. For some, images last longer in their minds, while others have very vivid images from reading text. This goes to discernment for what is important for each individual reader.
Which leads me back to our wonderful friend who is not interested in graphic novels. She doesn't want everything imagined for her. However, the art in a graphic novel is part of the storytelling. The minimal text is informed by the art in a completely different way than illustrations function in traditional texts.
Blankets is a poignant look at one person's experience. It is filled with both sadness and beauty. Craig Thompson will be at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin next April. I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say, and I pray that the experience of Festival will be a blessing to him. I'm also looking forward to reading more graphic novels. The art gives an added value to the experience, giving some variety to the always-enjoyable time spent reading.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Lighting up a Dark Path
The Fab 5 convened today for a second meeting about the book Lit. We met last week to choose books for the next 6 months (oh happy day!) and to talk about Lit, but since 3 of us had not yet finished, we postponed the Lit discussion until lunch this week. More on our book selection later.
Mary Karr's newest memoir, Lit, follows her descent into alcoholism, then her rescue by a God she disbelieved, resented and tenuously relied upon in the absence of any other prospects. Readers experience Karr as she was at each stage of the book--she does an excellent job of giving us a look at the workings of her heart, her head and her mouth through each part of the journey.
Her story is not a pretty one, and she hasn't whitewashed it for us now. I've read her memoir, Cherry, which deals with her adolescence, and the same could be said for it. This is a woman who has been damaged in so many ways, from early childhood on, that it's amazing she has survived to this point, let alone become a successful writer and professor.
Don't read this book if you are looking for a nice, uplifting and inspirational story that wraps up neatly. And don't read this book if you can't abide vulgar language--there is plenty of it.
Mary Karr is very honest about who she was, who she wanted to be, and how she got so far off track. She writes with darkness and sarcasm, with beauty and humor. The humor is the saving grace of it when she's writing about awful things. Such as when her recently sober mother fell off the wagon just in time to be high for Mary's rehearsal dinner. Mother looked at Mary's soon-to-be father-in-law, a WASPy moneyed New Englander, and "offered to paint Mr. Whitbread in the nude and quote fix anything you need fixed close quote." Her mother is a character beyond belief in Karr's memoirs, and a big part of both the agony and the crazy humor of her life.
Barbara brought up the story of Karr's first AA meeting, where she listens to a gentrified woman explaining how she hid her bottle of vodka in a turkey carcass in the freezer so that her family wouldn't find it. One night "she couldn't midwife the bottle out, so she just upended the whole bird, guzzling out of it. She says, And that was my moment of clarity, thinking, Other people just don't drink like this." How often do you find humor in someone's fight to be sober, humor that does not diminish the seriousness of the fight itself?
Karr's gift to the reader is her honesty, particularly about her spiritual journey. She describes her struggle with belief, describing each time that a different point of her own opposition to her own fledgling faith gave way. God reeled her in kicking and screaming. Good friends and advisers kept her moving forward in spite of her own resistance. Sonya pointed out that Karr's AA friends were never judgmental; they just spoke the truth as they saw it and didn't let her off the hook. And they pushed her to begin praying, which changed everything for her, much as she hated it.
None of us have read her first memoir, The Liar's' Club, and some of the references to her childhood made us curious. Nancy really wants to know what happened in Colorado. Sort of like the attraction one would have to a train wreck, Barbara says.
Lit is the story of a woman who found God when she didn't really want to, a sinner like the rest of us who had hit rock bottom and had no other way to go. Turned out she wanted to find him after all.
One last note--after weeding out many books we would like to read, we came up with the following list for the next 6 months:
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
Sarah's Key by Tatiana deRosnay
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
Won't you read with us?
Mary Karr's newest memoir, Lit, follows her descent into alcoholism, then her rescue by a God she disbelieved, resented and tenuously relied upon in the absence of any other prospects. Readers experience Karr as she was at each stage of the book--she does an excellent job of giving us a look at the workings of her heart, her head and her mouth through each part of the journey.
Her story is not a pretty one, and she hasn't whitewashed it for us now. I've read her memoir, Cherry, which deals with her adolescence, and the same could be said for it. This is a woman who has been damaged in so many ways, from early childhood on, that it's amazing she has survived to this point, let alone become a successful writer and professor.
Don't read this book if you are looking for a nice, uplifting and inspirational story that wraps up neatly. And don't read this book if you can't abide vulgar language--there is plenty of it.
Mary Karr is very honest about who she was, who she wanted to be, and how she got so far off track. She writes with darkness and sarcasm, with beauty and humor. The humor is the saving grace of it when she's writing about awful things. Such as when her recently sober mother fell off the wagon just in time to be high for Mary's rehearsal dinner. Mother looked at Mary's soon-to-be father-in-law, a WASPy moneyed New Englander, and "offered to paint Mr. Whitbread in the nude and quote fix anything you need fixed close quote." Her mother is a character beyond belief in Karr's memoirs, and a big part of both the agony and the crazy humor of her life.
Barbara brought up the story of Karr's first AA meeting, where she listens to a gentrified woman explaining how she hid her bottle of vodka in a turkey carcass in the freezer so that her family wouldn't find it. One night "she couldn't midwife the bottle out, so she just upended the whole bird, guzzling out of it. She says, And that was my moment of clarity, thinking, Other people just don't drink like this." How often do you find humor in someone's fight to be sober, humor that does not diminish the seriousness of the fight itself?
Karr's gift to the reader is her honesty, particularly about her spiritual journey. She describes her struggle with belief, describing each time that a different point of her own opposition to her own fledgling faith gave way. God reeled her in kicking and screaming. Good friends and advisers kept her moving forward in spite of her own resistance. Sonya pointed out that Karr's AA friends were never judgmental; they just spoke the truth as they saw it and didn't let her off the hook. And they pushed her to begin praying, which changed everything for her, much as she hated it.
None of us have read her first memoir, The Liar's' Club, and some of the references to her childhood made us curious. Nancy really wants to know what happened in Colorado. Sort of like the attraction one would have to a train wreck, Barbara says.
Lit is the story of a woman who found God when she didn't really want to, a sinner like the rest of us who had hit rock bottom and had no other way to go. Turned out she wanted to find him after all.
One last note--after weeding out many books we would like to read, we came up with the following list for the next 6 months:
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
Sarah's Key by Tatiana deRosnay
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
Won't you read with us?
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Part-Time Indian, Full-Time Fun
Oh, this was a good one. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The title says it all. This is an autobiographical novel written by a Native American man who grew up on a reservation but went to high school at a very white town outside of the reservation. The Neland Women's Book Club faced it head on.
As a boy, Junior is a smart runt reminiscent of Owen Meany from John Irving's novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Intelligent, basketball-playing, stuttering, lisping, small and prone to seizures, Junior does not fit in. His best friend, Rowdy, is a big kid who is abused by his father and protective of the smaller, picked-on Junior.
During his first week of high school, one of Junior's teachers pulls him aside and tells him he MUST get off the reservation. Junior's extremely poor parents somehow scrape together the tuition to send Junior to Reardan, where he is the lone Spokane at the school.
This is a book about a young man straddling two cultures, as the title suggests. He sees the pros and cons of both sides, and the author tells truth about both cultures. The novel is full of humor and reality. Any teen who has felt like the odd man out will relate to the character. Parents will be a bit concerned about the all-too-honest treatment of a 14-year-old boy's life--the kind of vulgar humor and curiosity about sexuality that is likely the hallmark of that stage of a boy's life.
Still. This story is so full of honesty. What it is like to be left out. What it is like to have your wildest dream come true, even when there is a price to pay. And most of all, what do you do when you don't fit in at home or away? Alexie's story is at heart an immigrant story. Junior enters a strange new land. He is renamed Arnold (his given name, which no one at home has ever called him); he has to learn new ways and a new way of speaking. He has to learn the expectations and traditions of a completely new culture. At the same time, he must switch back to the reservation, a homeland loaded with its own expectations and alienation. Junior is looked at as a traitor, betraying his tribe.
This is the same sort of experience that many others experience--mission kids who switch between the "home culture" and the mission field, children of poverty who want to get higher education, or immigrants who come from poorer countries and somehow have to straddle the expectations of people back home and the realities of a whole new culture.
One part that was hard for us, as a church book club, to read was the short description of Junior's thoughts about Christianity and what it has done to Indian culture. He describes how the whites brought Christianity and intolerance; that the missionaries brought expectations of how the Indians should behave in all areas of life, which in turn made Indian culture less tolerant. Given that our denomination's mission agency was once called the Heathen Mission Board, and it originated in Native American missions, we don't have a lot of self-righteousness to stand on. We have been part of the problem in trying to make everyone look and act like white Europeans, even as we try to bring the news of all-encompassing love and forgiveness. So it behooves us to have some humility when we look at the not-so-lovely view of Christians in the book.
Thankfully this is a brief moment in the novel. Like the rest of the book, it is honest.
I ended up listening to this one on CD because all the library print versions were out. In some ways this was wonderful, as it was read by the author, and I completely enjoyed his cadence and personality. On the other hand, the actual book has great illustrations that illuminate the story, and I will probably re-skim this book just to see the illustrations.
In fact, I fully expect to buy a copy of this book in spite of the fact that I've already listened to it. I look forward to sharing it with my son. I'll also be looking for more work by Sherman Alexie.
As a boy, Junior is a smart runt reminiscent of Owen Meany from John Irving's novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Intelligent, basketball-playing, stuttering, lisping, small and prone to seizures, Junior does not fit in. His best friend, Rowdy, is a big kid who is abused by his father and protective of the smaller, picked-on Junior.
During his first week of high school, one of Junior's teachers pulls him aside and tells him he MUST get off the reservation. Junior's extremely poor parents somehow scrape together the tuition to send Junior to Reardan, where he is the lone Spokane at the school.
This is a book about a young man straddling two cultures, as the title suggests. He sees the pros and cons of both sides, and the author tells truth about both cultures. The novel is full of humor and reality. Any teen who has felt like the odd man out will relate to the character. Parents will be a bit concerned about the all-too-honest treatment of a 14-year-old boy's life--the kind of vulgar humor and curiosity about sexuality that is likely the hallmark of that stage of a boy's life.
Still. This story is so full of honesty. What it is like to be left out. What it is like to have your wildest dream come true, even when there is a price to pay. And most of all, what do you do when you don't fit in at home or away? Alexie's story is at heart an immigrant story. Junior enters a strange new land. He is renamed Arnold (his given name, which no one at home has ever called him); he has to learn new ways and a new way of speaking. He has to learn the expectations and traditions of a completely new culture. At the same time, he must switch back to the reservation, a homeland loaded with its own expectations and alienation. Junior is looked at as a traitor, betraying his tribe.
This is the same sort of experience that many others experience--mission kids who switch between the "home culture" and the mission field, children of poverty who want to get higher education, or immigrants who come from poorer countries and somehow have to straddle the expectations of people back home and the realities of a whole new culture.
One part that was hard for us, as a church book club, to read was the short description of Junior's thoughts about Christianity and what it has done to Indian culture. He describes how the whites brought Christianity and intolerance; that the missionaries brought expectations of how the Indians should behave in all areas of life, which in turn made Indian culture less tolerant. Given that our denomination's mission agency was once called the Heathen Mission Board, and it originated in Native American missions, we don't have a lot of self-righteousness to stand on. We have been part of the problem in trying to make everyone look and act like white Europeans, even as we try to bring the news of all-encompassing love and forgiveness. So it behooves us to have some humility when we look at the not-so-lovely view of Christians in the book.
Thankfully this is a brief moment in the novel. Like the rest of the book, it is honest.
I ended up listening to this one on CD because all the library print versions were out. In some ways this was wonderful, as it was read by the author, and I completely enjoyed his cadence and personality. On the other hand, the actual book has great illustrations that illuminate the story, and I will probably re-skim this book just to see the illustrations.
In fact, I fully expect to buy a copy of this book in spite of the fact that I've already listened to it. I look forward to sharing it with my son. I'll also be looking for more work by Sherman Alexie.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Metallica, Coming Soon to a Church Near You
Pastor John Van Sloten preaches on many topics in his sermons. He is dedicated to looking for the way that God reveals himself through both the Bible and through his other "text," creation. While it's easy to imagine that we can find God in a forest or on a mountaintop, Van Sloten contends in his book The Day Metallica Came to Church that we can find God in culture, which is also his creation. Whatever people produce through the talents God has given them is also an extension of his creation. And he can reveal himself through that creation. In fact, he says that creation, including culture, helps to illuminate Scripture, not only the other way around.
The book starts with a challenge that Van Sloten received to preach a sermon on the music of Metallica. He took it seriously, and found that some of Metallica's angry lyrics echoed the anger at injustice that is found in the words of the prophet Jeremiah. Since then he has gone on to explore (and preach on) the ways he sees God in all of culture--movies, architecture, art--the list goes on and on. It sounds like this was not always a comfortable transition for his church.
As I finished reading this book at The Glen Workshop, a retreat for Christians interested in the arts, I found myself thinking that some of his theology is intuitive for artists. Christians who are searching to express beauty in their music, words, painting, and films often sense that they see God revealed in all sorts of creative work, even if the person doing the creating is not a Christian.
Van Sloten explains the theology behind this. It has a lot to do with common grace, a term many of us know but don't always think through. He says, "God's goodness surrounds all people. God's truthful light doesn't discriminate; it shines everywhere. And it's shining more brightly and consistently than we realize."
I'll admit I am not immediately attracted to theology books. This one particularly interests me because it examines the connections between God and the culture where I live, engage and create. These are the same connections that I find so exhilarating when I attend the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. Journals like Image, Ruminate and The Other Journal seek the same intersection. The book Through A Screen Darkly, by Christian film critic Jeffrey Overstreet, explores the same themes in film.
Take a look around you. Yes, God speaks to us in the wind and in the storm. He might also be speaking to you through that movie on Friday night.
The book starts with a challenge that Van Sloten received to preach a sermon on the music of Metallica. He took it seriously, and found that some of Metallica's angry lyrics echoed the anger at injustice that is found in the words of the prophet Jeremiah. Since then he has gone on to explore (and preach on) the ways he sees God in all of culture--movies, architecture, art--the list goes on and on. It sounds like this was not always a comfortable transition for his church.
As I finished reading this book at The Glen Workshop, a retreat for Christians interested in the arts, I found myself thinking that some of his theology is intuitive for artists. Christians who are searching to express beauty in their music, words, painting, and films often sense that they see God revealed in all sorts of creative work, even if the person doing the creating is not a Christian.
Van Sloten explains the theology behind this. It has a lot to do with common grace, a term many of us know but don't always think through. He says, "God's goodness surrounds all people. God's truthful light doesn't discriminate; it shines everywhere. And it's shining more brightly and consistently than we realize."
I'll admit I am not immediately attracted to theology books. This one particularly interests me because it examines the connections between God and the culture where I live, engage and create. These are the same connections that I find so exhilarating when I attend the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. Journals like Image, Ruminate and The Other Journal seek the same intersection. The book Through A Screen Darkly, by Christian film critic Jeffrey Overstreet, explores the same themes in film.
Take a look around you. Yes, God speaks to us in the wind and in the storm. He might also be speaking to you through that movie on Friday night.
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