I think this observation is true:
“Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose — a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.” –Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Image and a story of costly grace
A friend of mine, Jill Noel Kandel, has an essay in the current issue of Image (issue 58), "Asking for Salt." With many years compressed into less than 4000 words, this is the story of Kandel helping her son learn to read. By the time you finish reading it, however, you find it has expanded within that space to become a universal story about expectation, acceptance, love, and costly grace. It's an amazing piece. Here's the online link:
http://imagejournal.org/page/news/kandel-essay
While you're on the Image site, take a look at the "Good Letters" blog, where a team of contributors post something new each weekday about the relationship between art and faith.
Gated Florida community + scandal + mystery = great summer read
Kudos to high school friend and Civitan-sister Nicole (N. M.) Kelby for a great read: Murder at the Bad Girl's Bar and Grill. I finished it over the fourth of July weekend, laying on a hammock on a shady bluff overlooking a Minnesota lake, but for the past several days it had transported me to the gated community on Florida's Gulf Coast where scandal and murder fuel "black humor that sizzles."
Ever since I read my first Nancy Drew I've loved mysteries. This one delivered a delightfully entertaining and satisfying mystery, but more. I saw Nicole at a reading here in Minneapolis and she said that after 9/11 she felt her readers needed more fun in their lives and so her writing took a shift. Yes, Murder at BGBG delivers fun, but more. She also said she wants her work to be more than a fluffy read, but for it to mean something, to do some good. After hearing Nicole say that and while reading the book I was reminded of a quote I love by Louise Bogan: "In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart."
With the help of a wacky cast of characters some of the lost heart that Kelby helps restore with this work is a reminder of joy and beauty in the midst of tragedy and danger. Joy and sorrow travel together, and often sorrow is easier to see. Through symbol and narrative, however, Kelby highlights the sure presence of joy. In some instances, the joy is surprisingly beautiful. I say surprisingly because I just didn't expect the scenes of beauty that seemed to come out of nowhere. I didn't expect my eyes to suddenly tear up as rose petals fell from a plane or to hold my breath as a Santa Lucia procession wound towards the beach at sunrise. Laying on the hammock, turning the last page, I didn't want the story to end.
The shape of a life
How does a person decide which book to remove first from a stack to open and begin to read? It seems as if I should be able to provide a rational defense for an ordered choice involving an investment of hours of time, but absent the need to read a certain book to complete a project, I admit the volume is picked by movement of whim or gut or ease of access.
From among the books I brought back from Calvin, I first chose Jacobs' book (Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life). Don’t ask me why. Jacobs writes about many things, including the importance of the individual vs ecclesiastical narrative, the role of Protestant theology in the individual narrative and conversion as sight to see such narrative, the conveying of wisdom as an essential, or at least historical, component of storytelling, and the primal place of hope in narrative of the Christian life. All of it has set me thinking and could feed a blog for weeks were I a blogger that posts more often than my current once per month frequency.
I’ll pick one thing: life genre.
Jacobs writes about how there are different genres of life, just like genres of writing or genres of speech. By genre of life he means the shape of a life, the connection between the inner and outer life. He didn’t name life genres, as if we could quickly categorize ourselves like “ENTF“ or ”Autumn“ or ”Sanguine.“ But rather he suggests that there are similarities among certain people, across time, in the shapes of their lives and in the way they connect their inner and outer lives. These similarities take some imagination to perceive because time and culture cause these traits to be manifest in different ways. For example, a person with the inner life a medieval saint born in 1100 would look quite different than a person with the inner life of a medieval saint born in 1900, or 2008.
This suggests a compelling thought exercise.
I wonder now about role models and how at times I’ve thought historical role models may be less than helpful because clearly a person can’t superimpose one’s life on another from a different time and place and find a match or derive an action plan. I think of some historical figures I feel a resonance with but could never justify labeling them as my ”role models“ because of how badly my figure would line up with theirs, and even how little I really know about them.
Jacobs’ insight here gives me a huge imaginative boost, however. That person I think of from centuries ago or decades ago--how would that inner life of mind and soul look like today? (No, we’re not talking reincarnation.) Is this a life shape that feels a fit? Does it people my imagination with a communion of saints so to speak, providing camaraderie and insight as to why I do what I do or as to what is possible to do?
More importantly, does it help me see people in another light? Take for example the ”check-out girl“ at my local grocery store who is cool and calm even on Thanksgiving Day, who remembers to tell me they now have the product I couldn’t find last time I was in, who is a single mother managing to survive on that job in this economy. What shape is her life and what saint or heroine or queen might have been just like her had they been born into her time and place?
"The beauty of the world...
...is the mouth of a labyrinth.”
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
The guide for last Saturday’s tour of labyrinths in the northwest corner of where I live told us there are more public labyrinths in this metropolitan area than in any other in the world. I was surprised to hear that because I’ve never come across even one. Where were they, tucked away behind hedges or walls or lying so level with the ground that a person might pass them every day and not see their paths rising up ever so slightly above the lawn or pressed down below? The team of tour guide and bus driver showed us.
Here’s a labyrinth hiding in a sandbox.
Idea saturated and book laden
Calvin College hosted the 2008 Festival of Faith and Writing on April 16-18 and I was one of the 2000+ attendees. Spending a couple minutes on Google should link you up to many fine reviews of the conference and of specific presentations. Personally, I recommend the reviews on Life In the Slow Lane as a good place to start. I’ll not reinvent the wheel here and so will take a different tack, because I don’t want to let the event go wholly undocumented on this site.
At this conference, the exchange of ideas is so massive--as evidenced by the multitude of presentations to choose from and the stacks of books and periodicals in the exhibit hall--it is amost paralyzing. Like a tourist in New York City, one could never hope to sample all the offerings. It must be sufficient to absorb the overall milieu and pick a few paths to explore at closer range.
The milieu to be absorbed was one of reading, writing, thinking, and studying. Despite the fact that multiple presenting authors made a point of saying their work and life were about the heart/soul and not the mind, no one translates life--personal or universal--onto the page with integrity without generous application of mental power. And self-discipline. The joy was in seeing such an outpouring of work, from multiple faith traditions, that was an organic product of mind and heart/soul. I came home with a fresh supply of role models.
A major tenant of modern literary writing is ‘no ideas but in things,’ but I find ideas/concepts in and of themselves exciting. Here are some ideas or snippets of ideas from various presentations that I brought home like souvenirs: the deep and necessary connection between prayer and writing (Mary Karr); what makes writing moral? (Mary Gordon); confession alone does not equal truth (Leslie Leyland Fields); living and finding meaning in life is to bear the burden of mystery (Elizabeth Strout); whether or not your dreams come true, God is God (Uwem Akpa); stillness, silence, waiting (Haven Kimmel); "narrative theology" in the lives of the many instead of the headlines of the few (Krista Tippett).
I also came home with five new books, all but one purchased from the Eighth Day Books table: Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett; She Got Up Off the Couch, Haven Kimmel; Outlands, Robert Finch; Thirty Days, Paul Mariani; and Looking Before and After, Alan Jacobs.
The conference’s website offers links to author websites, lists of publications, and other resources.
Bookstore tourism
This weekend I was in Chicago, the city that dyes its river green for St. Patrick’s Day. They tossed the dye in a few days early this year due to the Vatican’s worldwide request that celebrations take place on the weekend rather than during Holy Week. Besides stopping on Michigan Avenue next to the Wrigley Building to peer down into the river, thick and shiny like “Lucky Charm Green” poured from a can of Benjamin Moore, my husband, son, and I stopped at a few other city sites, maybe not as eye-popping but certainly equally or more gratifying.
In Wicker Park, we stopped at Myopic Books, one of Chicago’s oldest and largest used bookstores and one of my son’s favorites. Three floors of little alleys and aisles and cubbies formed by wooden shelves. The upstairs had a great reading room in front of a large window overlooking North Milwaukee Avenue, with wooden tables set up like an old library where you could hunker down and read and read. While we were there a man had fallen asleep at one of the tables and eventually an employee came and gently awakened him, telling him they were ready to settle on the books he’d brought in to sell. In an abbreviated form of bookstore tourism, I love finding places like this in cities I visit.
Online virtual bookstores are great when you know the book you want and you just want to get it without too much fuss. But that convenience can never match the serendipity or grace that allows real books to jump off real shelves as if someone is tossing them right to you, matching a present need, use, desire, or interest, or anticipating one yet to come. A used bookstore has the added benefit of extending that pool of books to find--or that find you--into the netherworld of out-of-print books and other books that for whatever reason can’t command a place on a trade bookstore shelf.
Of course I bought some books, including a book of essays on Georgia O’Keeffe, one on pseudonyms of Christ in the modern novel, one by Alfred Kazin on writers and God, a book for my father (“The Introspective Engineer”), and if he’s reading this he’ll know about the book before I even give it to him, a book on transcendence and the gospel of John, another by de Chardin with a great title, “The Divine Milieu”, and a book about an unnamed topic, which I’m going to set aside as a resource for a future essay. None of the above had I looked for or even heard of, but suddenly there they were and they were for me. Lucky, lucky.