A place called home

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison is one our greatest living writers. Her novels combine lyrical prose with haunting stories of African-American life in different historical periods. She reveals both the horrors and the joys people experience at the frayed edges of life and death.

Home, her 10^th novel, is short, really a novella. Its use of symbols make it seem almost an allegory as it explores the meaning of “home.” Yet it retains the bite of realism with its detail about life for blacks in 1950s America.

Frank Money is a veteran of the Korean War suffering from what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder, “the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault.” He has frequent flashbacks of the deaths of two army buddies from his hometown of Lotus, Georgia. The book opens with Frank in a psych hospital after being arrested by police. He escapes and stops at AME Zion Church, where Reverend Locke takes him in and helps him on his way to Chicago through a series of contacts, like the Underground Railroad.

Money, Lotus, Zion, Locke all carry multiple meanings and tell us to look beneath the surface of the story as it explores the meaning of home. That word often carries a cozy, safe resonance for people, but for Frank, Lotus was not such a place. His family moved there after being forced under threat of death by men “both hooded and not” to leave their home in Texas on foot, along with 14 other families. In Lotus, “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield,” Frank tries to protect his younger sister Cee from their mean grandmother, while their parents work themselves to death.

Now Frank is back in his homeland, America, where he faces racist attacks and must be on constant alert, much like on the battlefields of Korea. He receives a letter telling him Cee is in trouble. “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry,” it says.

Morrison intersperses her chapters, which offer not only Frank’s but Cee’s and even the grandmother’s points of view, with short asides, almost like hallucinations, of Frank addressing the omniscient author.

We learn that Cee, who fled Lotus at 14 with a man who married her, then left her in Atlanta, survives, moving from job to job. She ends up working for a wealthy white doctor who does experiments related to eugenics. His experiments on Cee’s womb leave her near death, and the house’s black housekeeper writes Frank.

He arrives and takes Cee back to Lotus. Though filled with dramatic tension, the story has the feel of a Greek myth. In Lotus, a place of lethargy (a la the lotus eaters in Homer), he takes her to a woman known for healing. She takes in Cee and calls on other women in the community to help. They use natural remedies to help her body and their wisdom to heal her spirit.

Morrison is a master of capturing a community’s folk wisdom (see her early novel Sula). She writes: “The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping.” The women tell Cee, whose grandmother treated her like dirt: “You good enough for Jesus. That’s all you need to know.”

These women practice what their mothers taught them “during that period that rich people called the Depression and they called life.” They’ve learned that “mourning was helpful but God was better and they did not want to meet their Maker and have to explain a wasteful life.”

Cee returns to Frank, who takes her to a place where as a child he had seen horses. Later, a horrible incident took place there, one that parallels an experience of his from Korea. Up to now, the novel has sometimes bordered on cliché, and parts have felt didactic, but at the end, Morrison draws together her themes with some powerful images that bring some redemption to the meaning of home, which up to then had been anything but safe or peaceful for Frank and Cee.

And this story set long ago resonates in powerful ways with readers in a different era and helps us all explore what can make our homeland a true home.

Questioning assumptions

Every year I choose my five top books of the year. I believe I've already read one of my top five for 2012.  When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $24, 202 pages) collects 10 incisive essays on an array of topics, though common themes thread their way throughout, including education, religion and the nature of humanity. (Robinson is also an outstanding novelist; her novels Gilead and Home have appeared on previous top five lists of mine.)

When I read a book for review (and I've reviewed this book for the Wichita Eagle), I underline passages that strike me with their insight, the beauty of their language or their troublesome nature. Typically, by the end of my reading I’ve underlined a dozen or two passages at most. My copy of this book, however, is filled with such markings. There are few spreads without something underlined.

Such a plethora of insights and apt sentences make it difficult to do justice to the book. Any quotation will represent a small sample of what could be quoted.

In the book’s first essay, “Freedom of Thought,” Robinson notes what will become evident throughout the book, that she tries to free herself of constraints and not simply accept the standard approaches to certain areas of knowledge. She writes that the tendency of much of what she took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics and cultural history “was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.”

Over and over, Robinson questions the assumptions made by so-called scholars that see human nature as simplistic, reductionist. She points out that often “the most important aspect of a controversy is not the area of disagreement but the hardening of agreement, the tacit granting on all sides of assumptions that ought not to be granted on any side.” One example, she notes, is “the treatment of the physical as a distinct category antithetical to the spiritual.”

She writes, “We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.” Then, adopting her role as a teacher of fiction writing, she adds, “Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.”

She challenges assumptions about religion or ancient peoples (“The Babylonians used quadratic equations.”) and points out the limits of science. She concludes that essay thus: “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.”

In “Austerity as Ideology,” she applies this failure to see the mystery in humanity to current views of economics. She note that “market economics … has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens.” She also shows that “America has never been an especially capitalist country.” Meanwhile, “our wealth is finally neither more nor less than human well-being.”

In the title essay, we get a glimpse of what has already become evident: the wide and extensive range of Robinson’s reading. We also gain some insights into her fiction. She writes, “In a way Housekeeping [her first novel] is meant as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood.” Remarking on her study of Latin in high school, she notes that her “style is considerably more indebted to Cicero than to Hemingway.”

She discusses her growing up in the West (Idaho) and the kind of individualism that often inheres there. However, she writes, “there is no inevitable conflict between individualism as an ideal and a very positive interest in the good of society.”

In “The Fate of Ideas: Moses,” Robinson defends the integrity of the Old Testament against critics who want to write it off. She pulls no punches in her interaction with Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, calling it a “dumbed-down pseudo-syncretism.” She calls some of the thinking behind such criticism “the flip side of fundamentalism” and concludes with: “Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic [Jesus] invokes comes straight from Moses.”

In spite of these punchy quotes, Robinson’s style is more formal and florid, more—as she writes—Cicero than Hemingway. And she often includes a smile if not a laugh. For example: “I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.”

She questions accepted opinion and helps us think through its implications and its reasonableness. In “Cosmology,” her concluding essay, she takes on scientism and atheism: “The difference between theism and the new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology.” 

If you read When I Was a Child, be ready to have certain assumptions challenged and think through important issues while enjoying a master of prose.

Zombie nation

Now that The Walking Dead has resumed its second season, let's look at our nation's fascination with zombies.
Back in 1961, when Rod Argent formed the British rock group The Zombies, it was a fairly exotic name. There were some zombie films (White Zombie, cited as the first, came out in 1932), but they had a small cult following. By the time "She's Not There" and "Time of the Season" had come out, Night of the Living Dead, George Romero's classic zombie film and the first of his series, was out, and many more followed.
Now zombies are all the rage. The Walking Dead is hugely popular on TV. And on the bookshelves you'll find such mashups as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Even literary fiction has gotten into the act. Last fall, Zone One by Colson Whitehead, an acclaimed novelist, came out.

What gives? Why this obsession with zombies?
You can easily overanalyze it. Part of it is simply an interest in good stories, or in the genre of scary stories. I remember sitting on our front porch in the evening and telling ghost stories or what came to be known as urban legends, like the man with the hook for a hand. We like to feel scared but safe.
And the zombie films, for one, have evolved into other genres, using comedy and romance to tell their stories of the living dead. Films such as Shaun of the Dead, Braindead and Zombieland have captured our interest.
The Walking Dead and Zone One fall under the heading zombie apocalypse, in which an infestation of some kind has infected most of the population, and a few survivors try to fight off the zombies who want to feed on them.
Interest in this kind of story may reflect a need to escape real fears by imagining a worse one. We live in uncertain times, facing economic, environmental, political and spiritual problems that seem insurmountable. Let's get absorbed in a story that shows us concrete fears that we can face vicariously through the survivors trying to fight off the zombies. There's an appeal in that.
In his American Soundings column in the Feb. 8 issue of The Christian Century (christiancentury.org), Rodney Clapp writes about this obsession with zombies. He writes about "how crowded our world and lives have become." He says that "the multitudinous daily contacts we have with people via television, radio, e-mail and the Internet" can feel like we're being attacked by zombies. Although real people are behind all these contacts, they are concealed. 
He goes on to look at how our politics have moved toward demonization and dehumanization of one's opponents. And zombies, of course, are the ultimate dehumanized demon. 
Then there's the fear of widespread disease, such as depicted in last year's Contagion, a good film, by the way.
Whatever the reason for our interest in zombies, we do carry within us many fears. And these fears affect how we act, how we respond to others. They increase our mistrust of our environment and diminish our enjoyment of life. Our fears, often unacknowledged, can have a dehumanizing effect on us. Facing them honestly is one important step. Another is offering them to our Creator, who embraces us with an unconditional love that casts out all fear.
So enjoy your zombie apocalypses, but don't let the bite of fear infect you.

The possessed

No, this is not about Dostoevsky's novel, also called The Devils or The Demons in other translations. Instead, I'll share some thoughts from reading Luke Timothy Johnson's book Sharing Possessions: What Faith Demands (Eerdmans).

This is a second edition of a book first published in 1981, if that matters. Johnson teaches New Testament and Christian origins at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and he's written many books.
For those of you not really into theology, forgive me (that's a theological category, by the way). I'll try to be succinct.
Johnson tackles the thorny question of how we connect being a Christian and the way we own and use things. And when he talks about possessions, he doesn't limit this to money or material things. He includes our bodies, which, he writes, "are symbols because they reveal, make manifest, our inner emotional states and attitudes."
What he calls "the real mystery concerning possessions" is "how they relate to our sense of identity and worth as human beings." The problem we face is when we confuse being and having.
In these days of lamenting the huge inequalities in our society (a subject of a future blog), of the 1% and the 99%, it's easy for some to equate wealth with evil or idolatry and poverty with goodness and purity. All of us, no matter our wealth, are subject to the idolatry of equating what we have with who we are or of being selfish.
And Johnson points out how society affects the way possessions are perceived. He offers the example of how taking candy from a baby used to be a symbol of the greatest offense. But "in some sugarphobic circles today it would be regarded as an act of highest virtue."
Certainly in America today, with our general standard of living, we view possessions in a different light from how a person in, say, Somalia, might view them.
The question Johnson asks that I'm interested in is to what extent our possessions possess us. This applies to the material things we "own" (a word that raises all kinds of questions), but it also has to do with things like physical health, education or relationships.
Later, Johnson gets to the subject in the title of his book, sharing possessions. He calls this the mandate and symbol of faith. He notes that how we view God determines our view of other people. In other words, "the way we perceive and respond to the ultimate reality gives shape to the way we perceive and respond to all other reality." The stance of idolatry is, The more I have the more I am. But if we are all equally naked before God at the level of existence, then we are equally loved by God and "equally clothed in the only worth that matters."
Johnson notes that the idolatry of equating ourselves with our possessions often comes out of fear. He points out that just before Jesus in Luke's Gospel says, "Sell your possessions and give alms" (12:33), he says, "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (12:32). 
If you read the Bible enough you'll see that it says much more about money and wealth than it does about sex or even prayer. And one of the things it says is that our possessions--whether that refers to the material things we own or to our health or education or relationships--is for sharing. In Jewish practice--as well as Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu, among other religions--almsgiving is encouraged.
We can share freely because we receive freely from God's abundant love and because what we own and later share does not determine who we are.
Am I free of being possessed by my possessions? Not at all. Just last month I discovered that a book I'd loaned out never got returned, and I don't remember who I loaned it to. (Memory is becoming a less reliable possession.) That this bothered me shows that I did not share very freely.
I also struggle with the temptation to equate my worth with my income, which is much reduced since I'm only employed half-time now.
My desire is to be possessed by God, not by what I think I own.

Hungry for sanity

Certainly I'd heard of Hunger Games, the book by Suzanne Collins and the first of a trilogy that includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay. But my son, who turned 29 today, told me about it and said I'd enjoy it. "It's a fast read." Well, relatively. I'm a slow reader.
He was right; it does keep you reading. One of the skills a writer of narrative wants to use is pacing, and this book has that.
For any who aren't familiar with the Hunger Games phenomenon, the first book came out in 2008. Collins says she got the idea when channel surfing and flipped between a reality show and footage of the Iraq War. The book is narrated by Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old girl who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the country of Panem, where North America is now. The country is ruled from a metropolis called the Capitol. Every year a boy and a girl aged 12-18 is chosen by lottery from each of 12 districts to take part in the Hunger Games, a televised competition in which the lone survivor of the 24 contestants wins.
Katniss, who is skilled as a hunter, takes her younger sister's place in the competition. She represents the moral voice of the novel. But the situation is so insane it's hard to imagine remaining moral at all.
The book is written as an engaging story, but it implies other messages, including a critique of violent entertainment. The tricky thing about that is it's using violent entertainment to speak against violent entertainment. Don't get me wrong; this can be done. But it is difficult. Some works have pulled it off well, such the movie Unforgiven.
I think Collins largely succeeds. And I may be even more convinced when I get around to reading the second and third volumes in the trilogy. Marty Troyer, whose blog is  blog.chron.com/thepeacepastor/, has written a longer and thoughtful analysis of Collins' critique of violence. 
As he points out, Collins is good at helping readers feel the effects of violence. It never seems gratuitous. And you can't help wondering, What would I do in such an insane situation?
We in this country are largely protected from such lethal situations, though soldiers and many in poor, crime-ridden areas face such dangers every day. For them, it's not a fictional fantasy but all too real.
With a movie version of Hunger Games coming out March 23, the popularity of the story will only increase. I hope it helps us think about the violence we've come to accept and the violent entertainment we consume so readily. I hope it makes us hungrier for a saner world where peace is sought and desired.

5 best books of 2011

Why only five? I certainly read more than that last year, closer to 50. But I'm limiting my choices to books published in 2011. And while I probably saw most of the better films of 2011, my list of top 10 is a little more reasonable than picking my top books. There are many more books published than films--and on a wider range of subjects. So this list is even more subjective than my list of films.
I reviewed all five of these, three in the Wichita Eagle and two in The Mennonite. I'll excerpt from those reviews to give some flavor of why I liked them. Most of the books I review for the Eagle are fiction, while the ones I review for The Mennonite are usually from Christian publishers. The five are in no particular order, though I've listed the two novels first.


The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (Random House, 2011, $25)
This is a remarkable debut. Obreht, named in 2010 to The New Yorker’s list of the 20 best writers under 40, was actually the youngest of that group at age 25. Her novel combines a deftness of storytelling and a skill for language with an uncanny wisdom about the ways people deal with suffering and death. In this absorbing novel, Obreht has drawn an array of colorful yet believable characters and explored the ways, as she told an interviewer, “people create and embellish stories to cope with moments of great strife.” She does not name the Balkan country in the novel, but her fiction says more about the effects of war on her homeland than most histories or newspaper accounts.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, $18)
Johnson is one of our finest writers. His characters are usually not the high and mighty but the down-and-out, sometimes marginalized individuals who struggle to communicate their deeper longings or their encounters with the transcendent. A poet, he infuses his narratives with images that sparkle and even jolt but never overwhelm the reader. His newest work is a novella that covers a large swath of American history in a succinct narrative of set scenes. The book follows the life of one Robert Grainier, who is born in 1886, as near as he can figure, and dies in 1963, spending all his life in the American Northwest.

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass, 2011, $19.95)
Rohr calls for the need for “(1) a strong tolerance for ambiguity, (2) an ability to allow, forgive and contain a certain degree of anxiety and (3) a willingness to not know and not even need to know.” These characteristics fit what Rohr labels “the second half of life.” This does not have to do with chronological age but spiritual maturity. In the first half, “we are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them—both immature responses.” Our churches, he writes, often keep people in the first half and don’t call for real transformation. What he calls “falling” is a letting go, a surrender to the mercy of God. This is difficult because “the human ego prefers anything … to falling or changing or dying.” But those who fall experience God’s “great outpouring.”

Justice in Love by Nicholas Wolterstorff (Eerdmans, 2011, $35)
This book addresses an important topic for Christians. While many oppose justice and love, Wolterstorff, an eminent Christian philosopher, shows that these two concepts, when understood properly, are perfectly compatible. “Doing justice is an example of love,” he writes. Wolterstorff is thorough in his argument yet uses easy-to-follow examples to illustrate his points. This is not an easy read, but it is worth the effort.

Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism by John Updike (Knopf, 2011, $40, 501 pages)
John Updike, who died in January 2009, is one of the 20th century’s greatest American writers. He was prolific and multitalented, authoring more than 60 books, including novels, short stories, poems and criticism. He is also, I confess, one of my favorite writers. This posthumous book of essays and criticism was put together and edited by Christopher Carduff at the request of Martha Updike, the author’s wife and literary executor. Yet, writes Carduff in his Foreword, “the notion of such a volume … was on Updike’s mind during the weeks before his death.” Higher Gossip is not for everyone. But for those who enjoy the writing of John Updike or who enjoy good writing period, this is a treasure that can be dipped into at leisure. But be warned, once you enter its pages, it may be difficult to tear yourself away.

Lessons from Dickens on my ipod

I like to walk, and when I do I often listen to my ipod. For the last year or so, I've been listening either to lectures or to recorded books I've downloaded. The other day I was listening to a lecture on Bleak House, a long (900-some-page) novel by Dickens--one of his best, if you choose to tackle it. The lecture was by Arnold Weinstein of the Teaching Company (see www.thegreatcourses.com) and part of a series of lectures called Classic Novels.
Weinstein was making the point that one of Dickens' themes is how the world around us affects us--actually pollutes us--whether or not we are aware of it. One character in the novel is Jo, a poor crossing-sweeper who is nearly invisible to most of the people around him. Yet he has the power to affect other characters. Weinstein points to a story by the radical British journalist Richard Carlile (1790-1843) about a woman who goes to Edinburgh, Scottland, and pleads to passersby, "Help me. I'm your sister." Everyone says, "You're not my sister." But in the end, she dies and infects everyone with typhus. So they were connected to her and affected (infected) by her without being aware of it.
As I said in my first blog, we are all affected by the culture around us, the media we swim in, whether or not we are aware of it. The Bible says this: "Don't be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God's will is--what is good and pleasing and mature." (Romans 12:2 in the new Common English Bible)
This verse has been used by some to bludgeon people with the message, Don't be conformed to the world, as if that's a simple thing to understand. The problem is that those "patterns" are difficult to see. But maybe a good starting point is to acknowledge that we are being conformed by forces we can't even see. Then we can try to be transformed--not an easy task.
I'm thinking that transformation is a lifelong task that involves lots of grace. And I imagine certain spiritual practices might help us in that, such as prayer, service, being in community with others seeking to be transformed.
What do you think?