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.

A Different Look at the Holocaust: Sarah's Key

Julia Jarmond is an American journalist, living in Paris and married to a Frenchman. She is assigned to write about the 60th commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv. Never heard of it? Neither had the Fab 5. Nor many others, according to Sarah's Key, a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay..

On July 16, 1942, French police, on orders from the Gestapo, rounded up 10,000 Jewish people, including children, from the Paris area. They were brought to the Velodrome d'Hiver, an indoor stadium, where they were held for six days while more and more people were packed in. Terrible heat, little food and no facilities made it unbearable. From there they were shipped out to camps, eventually ending at Auschwitz.

Julia learns about this atrocity, but at the same time she learns the story of one of those individuals--Sarah, a young girl who suffered an extra tragedy when she was taken from her home during the roundup. Julia is dealing with personal problems of her own, and Sarah's story makes her look at everything in her life in a new light.

This book does a great job of introducing us to the event itself, to the people who suffered through it, and to both the profound effect on survivors as well as the wish to ignore or forget the event on the part of those who watched it happen.

None of us could stand Julia's husband. If an American had written this, we'd assume she doesn't really like French people, but she is, in fact, French. Having Julia be an American, always on the outside regardless of how long she'd been in France, was a nice parallel to how Jewish people may have experienced the cultures they lived in during World War II.

Some of us found it frustrating that the novel flips back and forth from Sarah's story to Julia's modern-day life. Just when we'd get into one, we'd switch back to the other. However, we wonder if we could stand to read Sarah's story straight through--it's just so sad. Julia's story gave us a way to enter the story, some distraction, and a taste of the way France looked at the event 60 years later. And Julia faces some questions about the value of life in her own world as well as in history.

Whenever we read these stories, we can't help but wonder what we'd do if faced with the decision to put ourselves at risk for someone else. Would we endanger our children to hide someone? We'd like to think we are brave enough, but it's hard to be sure.

Are things like this happening now? There are, to some extent, similarities in what America did with Japanese internment camps and Native American reservations--people of a certain ethnicity taken from their homes and put into prescribed areas with little or no resources. It's possible to look at detention centers for illegal immigrants in the same way--basically, they are imprisoned indefinitely and, according to some reports, treated poorly. It happens where we can't see it, has nothing to do with us, and is therefore not our problem.

Sarah's Key is a good, sad novel that manages to keep the reader while telling an "old" tale and giving a fresh perspective on it. Never forget.

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.

Off the Reservation

Three weeks ago the Fab 5 Book Club took a road trip, leaving our little Dutch lives to enjoy the different vibe of Cincinnati. It's taken me at least this long to recover enough to write about it! Pretty much we ate our way through the town--three of the original Fab 5 lived in Cincinnati for quite a few years together before we came together. They had lots of favorite places to revisit--Graeter's for ice cream, Skyline Chili, the Grand Finale and more. Sonya claimed she was in a food coma for days. But oh how sweet it was.

We looked out over the city from Carew Tower. We toured neighborhoods like Over the Rhine while listening to, well, Over the Rhine. We all coveted mightily at a most awesome architectural antiques store. We stopped in to see Union Station, where in the bathroom we overheard a young boy, after commenting on the state of his mother's rear end, wondered loudly to his mother why a particular portion of his private anatomy is always sticky, a question answered immediately with a burst of laughter from everyone in the bathroom. So it was a pretty full weekend of entertainment.

We combined this inaugural road trip with our book club discussion of Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie. In this novel, Thomas Builds-A-Fire and two of his fellow Spokane form a band. At first they perform covers of famous songs, but eventually Thomas writes his own for the band. The success that they achieve is not welcomed by the rest of their tribe. Along the way two white women join their band briefly, and later two women from another tribe join. Each bring their own complications.

We spent some time regretting the fact that we really know very little about Native American culture. The magical realism in the book can sometimes be hard for us to wrap our minds around, and we want to know how much is the author's style and how much of it is cultural. The novelist gives prominence to the importance of dreams and what they tell the dreamer. Sometimes it was hard to separate the dream from the reality in the story, which seems quite intentional, since they are meant to be so closely related.

The sadness of life on the reservation--commodity foods, hunger, poverty, mass alcoholism, unemployment and violence--come to a crescendo at the end of the book. It's not happy. And the even harder-to-understand part of it is the reluctance of the fellow Spokane to rejoice when someone from their reservation has a chance to excel. Because excelling seems to be equivalent to rejecting their history and their people.

These themes came up in young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, also by Sherman Alexie. The novels are very similar, but I think that Diary is the more entertaining, better crafted of the two.

One thing I really like about Reservation Blues is that the author used the music to further his theme. In the beginning, when they form their band, they only performed covers of music that was written by other people from other cultures in other struggles. What people expected from them was their "Indian" music, a performance taken out of context, sort of like going to an "authentic luau" at the Quality Inn on Maui.

When Thomas begins to write his own songs, he is creating his own music, influenced by his culture and other music cultures, but bringing them into the modern state of his own experience. I think the author sees that as the same situation that the reservation faces. They can perform to the caricature of their history that is expected by the outside world, they can abandon their own history to adopt someone else's culture, or they can take the best of both worlds to create something meaningful for themselves.

One odd association I had while reading this was the character of Big Mom. She is a puzzling character, possibly deity, possibly human, certainly powerful in a limited way. I read one blog that said she symbolized Time, which is an interesting way to interpret it. At the risk of alienating both friends and foes of the loved and hated book The Shack, Big Mom sort of reminded me of "Papa," the black woman who represented God the Father. Big, caring, irreverent, nurturing. I find it interesting that two such radically different books would come up with a character who has so much in common.

One place where you could find both of those books and so many more is Half Price Books. We do not have one of these lovely institutions here in Grand Rapids, though the Fab 5 are considering opening a store ourselves. We made the pilgrimage to two different Half Price Books while in Cincinnati, much to my dear husband's chagrin. Heavenly places. And I even scored a paperback copy of Alexie's book of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which includes many of the characters from Reservation Blues and was the basis for the movie Smoke Signals. I hope to see it soon.

Well, this Big Mom needs to get moving. I know that I do not personify Time, or good use of it, and I have a mountain of chores to attend to. But first, lunch with my mom and sister.

Quite a Year

Of course 1968 was, as the subtitle puts it, "The Year that Rocked the World"--that was the year my husband and I were born. Turns out that's not the only earth-shaking thing that happened that year.

In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were shot. 14,954 U.S. citizens were killed in action in Vietnam. Many more Ibo and other minorities died of starvation in the Biafra/Nigeria civil war. (And if you want to read a wonderful, sad novel about that, read Half of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.) Soviet tanks invaded Prague, ending some of Czechoslovakia's early democratic reforms. Protests broke out all over the world. Fidel Castro was becoming a hero to American New Left. And American anti-war demonstrators, wounded by police, sought refuge in the lobby of the Conrad Hilton hotel in Chicago during riots at the Democratic national convention.

Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968, recounts the seismic shifts that were occuring throughout that year. This is not my usual reading material! I listened to the audiobook version, which is likely the only way I would ever finish it. Even so, the sheer number of names and places reminded me of my less favorite high school history classes (not you, Mrs. McBride!), when dates and places would numb my mind, and I'd resort to painting pictures with Wite-Out in an effort to stay awake.

However, here my interest was held enough that I actually learned some things. It helped that the narrator was a British man with fun pronunciations, such as saying "massages" for "messages." And there were several times that Kurlansky quoted from others and caught me up short, such as Robert F. Kennedy's suggestion that a growing economy is not always the answer. "Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Also, this quote from Albert Camus: "Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery."

1968, according to the author, was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau ushered in the era of leaders chosen for style over substance.

It was the year that the image of the heroic war was tarnished, and America saw the brutal reality of Vietnam, courtesy of live television footage. Interestingly, this led to a sharp change in the way war movies were made--audiences were no longer to be fooled by bloodless warfare. Audiences demanded more realism, which led to the alteration of the level of violence allowed in movies.

As I listened to Kurlansky's words about the young protestors, it fascinated me that the Baby Boomers, a generation that fought so many different fights for rights and idealism, eventually spawned what is now being called Generation Me for its purported narcissism. How did one generation go from working so hard for world change to rearing children who are famous for self-absorption?

This book will give readers a good basis for understanding what occured in the 60s and beyond. Unfortunately for Brian and me, it is apparent from this book that our births did not rock the world. But isn't it pretty to think so?

"Too Much Happiness"--Well, Not So Much

About a week and a half ago, the Neland women tackled Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. It's taken me until now to actually finish the book and then re-read some of it to figure out what I really thought!

Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer of formidable skill. She is amazing. But this book is not full of "too much happiness." Most of the short stories are built around sad or disturbing events and people. As one member of our group said, "I don't like any of these characters!"

So, the idea of the book being "good" or "not good" became a bit more complex.

One of Munro's strengths that we agreed on was her ability to draw you into the story. No matter how weird or sad the story will become, she first has you identifying completely with the character. You can recognize things about yourself. So that by the time the weirdness sets in, you can only wonder how you would react in such circumstances. As our leader, also named Alice, put it, Munro has a pretty clear picture of total depravity. And she has a pretty good understanding of how we deceive ourselves into believing that what we choose to do only makes sense, is really the only choice we had. One truly bizarre story, "Wenlock Edge," ends with the main character watching college students making their way across campus. "On their way to deeds they didn't know they had in them."

So this isn't light fiction. One interview that our Alice read explained that Munro does not like fiction to be called "escape fiction"--she does not want to be read as an escape. Mission accomplished. No one would confuse her short stories with a good beach read. And don't go to these stories for a sense of redemption. Only a couple of them have seeds of hope planted in them, and even those come only after you've spent a good portion of the story expecting the worst to happen.

She draws very distinct characters and settings, and like Chekhov, who wrote that "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it," she gives subtle clues to careful readers (or re-readers) that are brought to fruition at the end of the story.

The stories in this book are set in Canada, mostly in the rural sort of area that Munro herself lives in, with one big exception. The last story is drawn from the true story of Sophia Kovalevsky, a Russian novelist and mathematician in the last part of the 19th century. This story has a Russian feel to it as well--lots of characters with multiple names, cold weather, long train rides, and lack of freedom of the female characters in comparison to the men are evocative of Anna Karenina. Sophia is recognized as a brilliant mathematician, but she finds it almost impossible to be hired by universities because she is a woman. We talked about the fact that the story is called "Too Much Happiness." And even more so the irony that this is also the title given to this collection.

Our discussions showed that people read for very individual reasons. Some read for that escape, some for inspiration, some for the enjoyment of a redemptive story, and some solely for the chance to read well-crafted work. One of the benefits of being in this book club is that we are pushed to try things we might not pick up otherwise, and we learn from the different reactions that each of us have. I think that Alice Munro may have won some admirers this month, but maybe not so many fans.

Why do you read?

Gary Schmidt's "Okay For Now"

Doug Swieteck, we hardly knew ye. The class clown in The Wednesday Wars has the starring role in Gary Schmidt's latest book, Okay For Now, due out April 18. This book is wonderful.

Doug still loves baseball and the New York Yankees. Holling Hoodhood even makes a cameo appearance. However, Doug's story is very different from Holling's. At the start of this novel, Doug's less-than-perfect father decides (regardless of the rest of the family's wishes) that it's time to pull up stakes from Long Island and start over in a small mill town in upstate New York.

The town of Marysville does not welcome Doug Swieteck and his family with open arms. And Doug has other problems. His mom is worried about his oldest brother, Lucas, who is in Vietnam. His new gym teacher and principal have it out for him. And the librarian isn't so fond of him either.

This novel will be very accessible to middle school readers. Doug's thought patterns follow his colloquial speech patterns, and you experience each event with him. The story and Schmidt's writing is compelling. Doug's abusive father, jeering high school brother and sad, but beautiful mother come alive to the reader, and they do not become caricatures. Each character has motives and problems of their own.

Doug is struggling to decide just exactly who he is, even as different members of the community try to decide that for him. But Doug isn't the only star here; Schmidt weaves in art composition lessons via Audubon's birds, Vietnam veterans, a budding romance and, of all things, Jane Eyre. And, of course, baseball. 

Okay for Now is both entertaining and soulful, and anyone who is or has been a middle schooler will appreciate Doug's situation. Keep the Kleenex handy. And I suggest that you read it as soon as you can. On that note, Gary will be signing books at a release party on April 8 at 6:30 at our very own Pooh's Corner (sorry, out-of-towners!). Put it on your calendar now!