A Girl Walks Into a Book

A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women's Work
Miranda K. Pennington (Seal Press, 2017)

     Even though my own acquaintance with the works of the Brontë sisters is slight, and unlikely to get better, reading about Miranda Pennington reading them is delightful. A Girl Walks Into a Book is a fine example of a genre I love: it combines historical insights about the lives of the authors with plot summaries and critiques of the books, and a memoir of Pennington's life as she encounters and rereads them. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) and Wuthering Heights (Emily) do not lose their strangeness and individuality under Pennington's scrutiny, yet she can take some lessons from them for twenty-first century life. 
 
     Not that the lessons come easily: "I do wish I could have filed away the most urgent lesson of Wuthering Heights: be honest with yourself if the person you want to marry is still obviously entangled with someone else." The romantic adventures Pennington shares call up in me a certain horrified fascination–how can so many bad choices come to a good end? But really, it's all about growth. When her father gave Jane Eyre to the absurdly bookish grade-schooler, he threw her a lifeline that would support her for decades. "At school,...I felt like a freak, awkward, dorky, and out of place, always spoiling for a fight. But inside, in the pages of Jane Eyre, I found sanctuary. And even when something unpleasant happened, I consoled myself that it gave me something else in common with Jane."

      Just as much to the point, as the book progresses, she has something in common with Charlotte Brontë. Both face the problem of supporting themselves in a world that is not exactly panting for what they have to say. Charlotte's early biographers contributed to myth-making that emphasized how far from the centers of culture she lived, and depicted an overnight success. As usual, that just means that all the work that led up to it fades into the shadows. The Brontë children wrote stories and created worlds among themselves; when Charlotte sent her publishers detailed instructions about the design of her books, she was not entirely new to the issues at hand, having made her own small books of her family's stories as a teenager.

     After Charlotte, Pennington admires the under-sung Anne Brontë. Her Agnes Grey includes little of the wildness of her sisters' better known work; its plot, about a governess who eventually marries a clergyman, is downright conventional. But the voice of Agnes, and her sharp views of her sometimes feckless employers, shows how much Anne was learning in her own situations, where she must have felt like the proverbial fly on the wall. Pennington says, "Truth in fiction never makes it weaker, but anchors it, unlike lying in non-fiction, which is like robbing a tree of its roots."

     Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's entry in the three-headed publishing sensation that Charlotte had begun, brings out Pennington's witty side. Of the second generation produced by Cathy and Heathcliff, she says, "They live as happily ever after as a pair of borderline inbred teenagers with seriously dysfunctional parents and an alarmingly small social circle could be expected to." And this lovely bit: "Retelling it all is Nelly Dean, a maidservant with an impeccable memory and the rare ability to survive for the duration of the book."

     The same might be said of the Brontës themselves, who originally numbered six. Their mother died when they were small, and her sister moved in to help raise them. The oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were mortally sickened by unhealthy conditions at the school they attended, dying a few months apart. The sole brother, Branwell, was perhaps an even greater tragedy: he was crushed by the pressure of not finding his way in the world, with three unmarried sisters sure to fall to his care. When he came home after losing a tutoring job, he went downhill by way of alcohol and opium to his death. Charlotte is the only one who survives to marry, a Mr. Nicholls, whose main attraction may have been that he was a clerical associate of her father's. Indeed, he remained in residence with Mr. Brontë after Charlotte died in turn. 
 
     But she certainly made a mark in the world, both in her own work and in supporting and promoting her sisters'. Though Pennington is, in a way, a tugboat alongside the Queen Mary, the smaller vessel has an important function. I have a much better idea of what I might like to sample of the various film and television adaptations, the biographical material, and, conceivably, the novels themselves. You never know.

Almost Everything

Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2018)


As she neared the age of 61, Anne Lamott determined to write down some things she knows about hope and despair, for the benefit of the children in her life, and anybody else who may be "both exuberant and worried." That is, by turns, any of us may feel the pull of the edge of the cliff; we think the unthinkable, or at least the unspeakable, all the time. Lamott's gift is to speak what's unspeakable, in a matter-of-fact style that, to some of us, comes as a great relief.


She's also more willing than most people to talk plainly about the miraculous side of life, that things don't always get worse; that in the blackest, bleakest night, love has been a penlight. She's talking about the kind of big truth whose opposite is also true: "Every day we're in the grip of the impossible conundrum: the truth that it's over in a blink, and we may be near the end, and that we have to live as if it's going to be okay, no matter what."


We also get, as you expect if you know Lamott, a bunch of stories in which her own demons come to the fore, especially her tendency to think she can fix the people around her. "The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control." It can't be easy to be her relative, or her friend.


How like life, though - it's not always easy to be anyone's relative, or friend. Relationships are always going to affect who we turn out to be, for better and for worse. "Families are hard partly because of expectations, that the people in them are supposed to mesh, and expectations are resentments under construction." The roles we take on in families offer us both constraint and comfort; they keep us safe while they make us crazy.


If you don't already know and like Anne Lamott, this is not the book to start with. Go back to her novel Crooked Little Heart, or Bird by Bird, her delightful book on writing. She's also been mining this current territory of thoughts on faith for a while now, and may be running out of new things to say.

And yet – and yet – the old things are still worth saying, and hearing. Anything that gives us the courage to face how tough things are can plant a seed of hope, which skimming through life in denial is never going to do. "There is the absolute hopelessness we face that everyone we love will die, even our newborn granddaughter, even as we trust and know that love will give rise to growth, miracles, and resurrection."

The Blood of Emmett Till

The Blood of Emmett Till
Timothy B. Tyson (Simon and Schuster, 2017)
   In a story with as many actors and events as the civil rights movement, there are many possible ways to divide the world into 'before' and 'after', but it's fair to consider the death of Emmett Till a major one. The tale begins in 1955, in a Mississippi where black people simply did not vote or serve on juries, and where they could be harassed or killed with near-perfect impunity. "In the decades before the civil rights era, racial killings in remote corners of the Deep South frequently went unreported by the national or even the local press."

   Rumbling threats from Washington about school integration had spurred the rise of White Citizen's Councils, the professionally educated, daylight-facing counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan. If the KKK didn't burn you out or shoot at you, the Citizen's Council could cost you your livelihood - there was nothing for it, either way, but the next train north to Chicago.

   Chicago, of course, had serious limitations as an escape valve, being heavily segregated and economically unfair in its own right. Blacks could vote, and compete for industrial jobs with immigrants from Europe, but they lived in segregated enclaves, often amid a network of kinfolk from back home in the South. Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Bradley, was doing nothing unusual sending her son with her uncle on a train to Mississippi, there to enjoy his cousins' company, and help with Moses Wright's twenty-five acre cotton crop.

   The teenagers had enough free time to go fishing, or down to the store in Money, three miles away, for cold drinks. On the fateful Wednesday in late August, Emmett was alone with Carolyn Bryant, the young woman who was tending the store, for only a minute or two. Later, in court, she would testify that he grabbed her by the waist while uttering obscenities, but her lawyer's earliest notes describe his behavior as 'insulting' her, with no mention of physical contact.

   Even though he grew up in the North, fourteen-year-old Emmett surely knew the rules about dealing with white people, but he was an outgoing boy who liked making people laugh. There were no other witnesses, and the details had long since slipped Carolyn Bryant's mind when she spoke with Timothy Tyson fifty years later, but she told him something obvious: "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."

   That Saturday night, Bryant's husband, Roy, and his older brother, J. W. Milan, were up late playing cards and drinking. At two in the morning, they showed up at Moses Wright's house, where he and his wife and the six teen-age boys were asleep. The white men took Till away, beat the living daylights out of him, shot him in the head, tied a weight around his neck with barbed wire, and dropped him in the Tallahatchee River.

   But his feet and legs floated, and he was found by a young man who was out fishing. Though the kidnapping occurred in Leflore County, Tallahatchee County's Sheriff H. C. Strider claimed jurisdiction; he would soon tell reporters that he suspected the NAACP of planting a body and making up a story. (A ring Till was wearing, which had belonged to his father, made the identification certain.) Milan and Bryant were indicted on September 7, and went to trial on September 20th. "This left little time for a proper investigation," says Tyson, " which was the point."

   Meanwhile, however, Emmett's body had been shipped to Chicago, by a funeral home outside of Sheriff Strider's jurisdiction; and though a deal had supposedly been made to keep the coffin sealed, Emmett's mother Mamie had it opened, and allowed photographs to be published in Jet, a national magazine for Negro readers. Together with the enormous crowds that came to view the mutilated body, this meant tremendous outside interest in the trial, which drew national television cameras, and international reporters, as well as the ever-essential black press. "The very sight of white and black reporters greeting one another and exchanging notes in a friendly manner shocked the Sumner crowd. Therein was some of the trial's actual drama, for if almost everyone involved could predict the trial's verdict, few could predict its consequences."

   Under all this scrutiny, the conduct of the trial itself appeared to be fair, but no Mississippi jury was going to convict a white man for killing a black boy who had insulted his wife. In less than a week, Milan and Bryant were acquitted.

    "In 1956 the U.S. Information Agency surveyed European disdain for American race relations and found the Till case the 'prevalent' concern, though it would soon be weighed alongside mob violence at the University of Alabama and in Little Rock." White Mississippians would blame the NAACP and 'communists', which to them might as well have been the same thing, for making them look bad.

    The real question, I always think, is not 'Were there communists supporting black civil rights?' but 'Where were the Americans? Where were the Christians?' Of course, that's thinking from 'After.' The light that shone on this murder, after all the others that happened in darkness, would shine on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Improvement Association; it would shine on lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides; and it shines on the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, among so many others.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

Robert Pirsig (1974)

 
         I recently inquired of my social media friends what impression they had of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a strange sort of novel published by Robert Pirsig in 1974. Was it A) a life-changing classic; B) a period piece; C) a hipster cliche; or D), an impenetrable mess? "All of the above" was a popular answer, and some people said that their views might have changed over time.

    I belong to the first group. My adolescent life was lit up by the book's approach to certain burning questions of the day: What's the right balance between living in your head and in the world? Why is originality both praised and feared? Do we need anyone to tell us what is Good? Pirsig has some humane answers, albeit delivered by the sort of mad genius uncle that the adults tend to write off as a flake.

   Of those who remember throwing it across the room in frustration, one complaint was that they could not find the plot. Is it even a novel, in the first place? The author's note says it's all true, so you could call it a lightly fictionalized memoir. The surface plot goes like this: A man rides a motorcycle, with his son on the back, from Minnesota to California, talking to himself the whole way.

    But, mercy, such talk! The narrator describes it as a Chautauqua, which is to say, the long-winded nineteenth-century equivalent of today's TED talks. The subject matter is summed up in the subtitle, 'an inquiry into values.' That lends credence to the 'pretentious hipster cliche' theory, especially considering that he is undertaking to talk about not only Zen Buddhism, but Poincaré, Kant, and Plato.

    At the same time, though, he is talking about the reality all around him: the weather, the terrain, how his motorcycle is running. On this reading, I noticed how neatly the metaphysical journey is mapped onto the geographical journey, attaining a majestic altitude over the Continental Divide. No matter how lofty his thoughts, sunshine is still hot and rain is still wet.

    The narrator's personal history is emerging, too, involving mental illness and an episode of electroshock treatment. When he's told “You have a new personality now,” that raises more questions than it answers. The old personality, dubbed 'Phaedrus', is a ghost worthy of the German Romantics, or Henry James. This is ironic, because the man we meet is Classic all the way, a passionate devotee of the Church of Reason. That's why he's so good at the naming of parts, conceptually dissecting his motorcycle into parts and systems. In the Chautauqua, he turns these tools of analysis on logic itself. What he really wants to know is, what is the relationship between the True and the Good?

    It makes sense that the book caught hold as a cult classic among the young people who were also reading Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Pirsig argues through the long-running contention between the Classic and the Romantic, the Hip and the Square, and he shows how they might benefit from learning to appreciate each other. Notwithstanding the quirks of the vehicle, the passion of the argument still resonates.

Draft No. 4

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

John McPhee (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017)

John McPhee's New Yorker pieces are always interesting, even when his subjects might sound unpromising. He's far more interested in geology than I am, as well as the natural world in general. Who else could have got a whole book out of oranges? But in Draft No. 4, he comes to a topic I'm deeply interested in: how does he do it? McPhee has been teaching the writing of narrative non-fiction at Princeton for many years. In these essays, which have themselves appeared in the New Yorker, he both shares his own idiosyncratic processes and lays out some broadly applicable principles.

Some of what is peculiar to McPhee has to do with the tools he's had access to. He started with typewritten slips of paper laid out on a table and grouped by topic. When he switched to using a computer, he found a piece of data-manipulation software that he's now effectively the last user of; he has the inventor's phone number. The essay on structure presents some rather abstruse diagrams that McPhee used to wrangle various stories into shape, including a couple of tours de force where he devised the structure before he even knew what the subject was. This is not recommended for amateurs.

But there's plenty of useful advice, which acknowledges that, while we can't all be John McPhee, neither can he be us. On taking notes: "Use a voice recorder but maybe not as a first choice–more like a relief pitcher. Whatever you do, don't rely on memory." In fact, it may be to your advantage that someone you're interviewing is aware of it: "Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license." When your subject is aware of you as an audience, "You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit....If you don't seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it."

When you've done your research, you're going to need a starting point. It's not a time to be too cute: "A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is absolute to what follows." A sound lead points the way through your structure. What kind of structure? "A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there." What to include? "It's an utterly subjective situation. I include what interests me and exclude what doesn't interest me. That may be a crude tool but it's the only one I have."

This is all a lot of work, and unquestionably daunting. "To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn't matter that something you've done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you." The point of doing (at least) four drafts is that the first draft may be a mess, but it can only be improved if it exists. If you're lucky, you're not completely alone. "Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first draft stage than at the end of the publishing process. Writers come in two principal categories–those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure–and they can all use help." Lucky for us, both The New Yorker and Farrar Straus and Giroux still employ editors, and long may they reign.

And here's the peroration, with which I couldn't agree more: "When am I done? I just know. I'm lucky that way. What I know is that I can't do any better; someone else might do better, but that's all I can do; so I call it done."

Email edition, August 3, 2018

Crash Course

Any Good Books

July 2018

Crash Course: Essays from where writing and life collide

Robin Black (2016, Engine Books)

   Robin Black got a late start as a writer. In her twenties and thirties, she was raising three children, in the complicated circumstances that are commonplace these days. The opening essays in this book talk about what else was going on psychologically, how desperately she wanted to be a writer, and how angry she was that she was standing in her own way. "I no longer want the record sanitized, this story of mine, replete as it is with good fortune, to be recast as only a happy narrative, or as one in which everything fell into place with no damage done. You can't be that frustrated for so long, nor that filled with self-loathing, then emerge without sustaining injury."

   Crash Course is a book of essays about those injuries, and what Black learned from them about writing. She has written it at just the right moment, when she's still in sympathy with the difficulties she faced, but not overwhelmingly embarrassed about them. She's clear-eyed and careful about self-pity: " 'No Whining' makes a fine motto, but there's value nonetheless to understanding why this pursuit feels so difficult at times, why the writer's existence can be so isolating, and even so frightening; and there's value to exploring whether it's possible to restructure one's perspective to make it less so." Indeed, as it turns out, uncertainty is probably the key to creativity. The writer writes to find out, which means she starts out not knowing, which is bound to be uncomfortable. "And certainty? It closes doors. Ends discussions. Shuts other people out."

   That uncertainty means that Black starts every story not knowing if it will work. She also doesn't always know when she'll know it's not working: she worked on her first novel for four years. She felt she didn't have time to fail at her first novel, since she was in her forties–but three drafts later, she had to admit defeat, and the time was 'wasted' after all. Being a writer means accepting that the one piece out of ten that gets to publication shares a process with the nine that didn't. "We are all struggling here. We are all making false starts, falling in and out of love with our own words, facing hard truths about something we have labored on for what seems like an eternity. And we are haunted by the belief that it's a whole lot easier for everyone else."

   That could be true, but it's probably not. Everyone else is also feeling competitive, envious, and discouraged, in between bouts of inspiration. Some days we can live in that enviable state where only the work itself matters; other days, the rejection letters represent the verdict of Literature. By the end of the book, Black sounds calmer and wiser than when she began, even though her narrative voice is otherwise occupied lately. I don't think it's because she's achieved Success, exactly, but because she trusts that, when she has something she needs to say, she'll be able to say it.

Living with a Wild God

Any Good Books

June, 2018

Living with a Wild God: A Non-believer's Search for the Truth about Everything

Barbara Ehrenreich (Twelve, 2014)

When Barbara Ehrenreich was a girl, she was not religious. Her bent, both personally and by family tradition, was toward radical rationalism; this book, a not-quite-memoir, could have been titled "I Was a Teen-Age Solipsist." In Living with a Wild God, Ehrenreich revisits her journals from that time, which she'd kept through four decades and a dozen or so moves, "because," she says, "if I have any core identity, any central theme that has survived all the apparent changes of subject, the secret of it lies with her."

As an adult, Ehrenreich is a writer and an activist, always on the side of the economically down-trodden, and this, she comes by honestly: her family emerged from Butte, Montana, a mining and smelting town in the middle of Big Sky country. Her father got out of the mines by pursuing the study of metallurgy, and then parleyed his good looks and ability to hold his liquor into a series of upwardly mobile management jobs. This entailed repeatedly uprooting his family, through Pittsburgh and various spots in New York and Massachusetts, before their arrival in Southern California.

The family's tradition of hard-headed atheism also sprang from Butte. "I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons." So when the fourteen-year-olds around her were going through religious training, Barbara was on her own with the Big Questions, like 'why are we here?' and 'why do we die?' She was also wrestling with a secret. Starting about a year before the journal begins, she had begun to have moments of direct experience, unmitigated by words or thoughts. 

 

The nearest name for this seems to be 'dissociation'; Ehrenreich satisfied herself that it was neither a religious experience nor a sign of insanity. In what was probably a very good decision, she almost never discussed her episodes with others: the more accurate her description, the more it would have made her sound insane. The unpredictability of her episodes was worrisome, and made avoiding the psychedelic drugs of the day the obvious choice: "For some of us, at some times, participation on the dullest, lowest-common-denominator version of 'reality' is not compromise or a defeat; it is an accomplishment." 

 

Having devoted her college years to the study of chemistry and physics, Ehrenreich went on to graduate school in New York. It was there, in 1965, that the larger world, at last, broke in on her ruminations. The war in Southeast Asia changed everything, as reports trickled back of atrocities in the jungle. "...now that I had begun to love the protective armor of solipsism, there was less to shield me from accounts of bayonets cutting through the bellies of pregnant Vietnamese women or napalm-dispensing helicopters swooping down over children. Once the imagination learns how to construct an image of another person's subjectivity–however sloppy and improvised that image may be–it's hard to get it to stop." 

 

She never quite gets to the answers her teenage self was looking for; life got in the way. She got married and had children; she continued to find things out and write things down, producing nearly two dozen books to date. So the answer to sixteen-year-old Barbara's question to her future self, "What have you learned since you wrote this?" is missing some things that girl would have liked to know. Neuroscience would have been very interesting to her, and philosophy as well. What she did learn, though, about engagement with the world, matters a lot: we are members of a species, in a network of life. Other people are real, and their suffering matters.

Slow Medicine

Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing

Victoria Sweet (2017, Riverhead Books)

We last heard from Victoria Sweet, M.D., in her 2012 book God's Hotel, about the charity hospital in San Francisco where she had practiced Slow Medicine for some twenty years. She has continued to meditate on what makes 'the practice of medicine' distinct from 'the delivery of health care'; not surprisingly, the latter suffers in the comparison. She's doing her part to help the pendulum to swing the other way, so that sick people can be healed as well as cured.

That's not to say that she does not give due respect to the modern methods of medicine. She tells one remarkable story of saving a man's life because she had simple surgical instruments with her on a hike through Nepal. Blood tests and imaging systems will always have their place as extensions of the physician's senses. Intensive care units can keep a body ticking over, sometimes longer than makes any sense.

Parts of Slow Medicine put me in mind of Perri Klass, whose memoir of a medical education was memorably titled A Not Entirely Benign Procedure. Sweet's progress through med school, internship, and residency had what seems to me an unusual number of detours, all of them fruitful. Her original intention was to become a Jungian analyst, hoping to meet the most interesting philosophical questions. "Medicine asked the wrong questions –What is causing that ear pain?–practical questions, not deep and interesting questions. But it did have answers, and I preferred answers to questions."

But she's quite open-minded about where she gets answers. Chinese medicine's model of the body bears little relation to what she learned at medical school, but in some circumstances it seemed to work better. She also became interested enough in the teachings of Hildegard of Bingen to acquire a second doctorate, in medical history. But also, always, Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, its 2,600 pages well-thumbed.

And always, first, the physical examination, meeting the patient with sight and sound and touch. Given time to examine a patient and read carefully through his record, the doctor can build a story about what's wrong, run tests to be sure, and make a plan to treat it. Essential to the plan is a judgement about what is urgent to treat, and what can be left to watchful waiting. Sweet's study of Hildegard suggests that the patient has the same drive for life and growth that a plant in a garden has, which the doctor/gardener needs to seek out and make way for. "I found myself practicing a kind of Fast Medicine and Slow Medicine together–at many different levels. At the level of actual time, of course, but even more, at the level of style. Mechanic and gardener. Focused and diffuse. The parts and the whole."

In addition to Klass, this book resonates within the tradition of Oliver Sacks, Jerome Groopman, and Atul Gawande. On some level, Sweet loves her patients. "I liked watching them improve, reconstitute, heal. Day by day, their minds clearing, their limbs strengthening, their wounds reconstituting. Not everyone got well, but almost everyone got better, and it was the same pleasure as watching a film go backward. The pieces of the broken vase coming together, jumping back up on the table, the spilled water collecting and running back inside, the tossed flowers righting themselves and reassembling until the vase of flowers is whole again."

The tools of modern medicine are impressive, and sometimes life-saving, but that doesn't mean that our bodies are machines. It's not too much to hope that our doctors will be craftsmen, or gardeners, and not just mechanics.

May 2018

Beginner's Grace

Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer into Your Life

Kate Braestrup (Free Press, 2010)

    There's something scandalous about prayer. Even for people who go to church, the thought of having a personal prayer life is challenging. We build our own stumbling blocks: imagining that our prayers have to be fresh, original and perfect; or knowing them so well we can't hear their inner life any more. Most seriously, I think, trying to pray means sitting face to face with the fact that we aren't as self-sufficient as we like to imagine. We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can take nothing from it, but in between, we are going to pretend to have this thing covered.

    In her capacity as a chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, Kate Braestrup meets people in need of prayer, even if they have gone years without thinking about it. Or, if they have thought of it, it's been with reluctance, or indeed resistance. "I'm too busy. I'm uncomfortable. All the people I know who pray are real jerks, and I don't want to be one of them. I have bad memories of abusive religious figures. I wouldn't know who I was praying to. I don't know what to say."

 

    So, if we imagine prayer in our own lives, we may not feel that we know when or how to pray, to whom, or to what end. Braestrup's Beginner's Grace proposes answers to these questions. She gives examples from assorted traditions, along with some simple, direct prayers of her own devising. Like Anne Lamott's Help, Thanks, Wow, which came out two years later, it also points out the places where our hearts lead the way, and we're praying without quite knowing it.

   Some of the 'whens' and 'hows' present themselves in the most ordinary ways. "Offering thanks for a meal is familiar, mannerly, and sensible, so much so that you might overlook the other helpful attribute of mealtime. It occurs with considerable regularity, once, twice, or three times a day, and because even forgetful and preoccupied people generally remember to eat, saying grace before supper doesn't require nearly as much self-discipline as carving out a distinct time for spiritual activity from days that are already overbooked."

    We part from our loved ones on a regular basis, and we could probably remember to say, or think, "God go with you till we meet again," or words to that effect. Like the physical threshold of our household, the passing into the night's sleep represents a change of state worthy to be noticed: "Because we don't know what the night will bring, because we will not necessarily remember what the night has held, bedtime is, as it has always been, a time that lends itself to prayer."

    How to pray? Braestrup has good words, but she sees beyond them. On a night when you can see a thousand stars, words may be superfluous. If the officers of the Warden Service are searching for your child in the woods, "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God" may be all you have, but you'll have it deeply. The God who 'makes me lie down in green pastures' may bring me to my knees, or, like a novice nun, to complete prostration; or he may permit me to hold the hand of a friend in a hospital bed.

    To whom? Braestrup is a Unitarian Universalist, so she is philosophically as well as temperamentally unlikely to try to persuade people of The One Right Way. But she'll take her stand here: "I believe all human souls are called to become as loving as they possibly can be, given the limitations that time and luck will inevitably impose. Love is the point, the purpose, and the ultimate value; it is consciousness and empathy, alpha and omega, beginning and end. God is love."

    And what's it all for? My favorite part of this book may be Braestrup's fitness instructor informing her cheerfully "that the logic of physical fitness is not teleological but tautological. This means that the goal of exercise is to enable you to exercise more." While we live, there is no 'last' workout, no final state of fitness. That's true of prayer, too. "There will be no moment–in this life, anyway–when I will be able to say, 'That's it! I've prayed, and the prayers have paid off: I'm a fully conscious, totally grateful, and unstintingly generous person. I can just start stuffing myself as soon as the plate hits the table.'" That's such a gloriously silly way of reminding us that life is made up of habits and practices, and we are always works in progress.

    That being the case, we always have an option for courage. Prayer feels risky, vulnerable - that's because it is. To pray is to stand, for that moment, in need: grateful for riches you didn't make, incomplete, imperfect, mortal. Like all those squats and crunches, we can expect it to feel like work, at least sometimes. "Doubt, frustration, and plain hard work are inevitable and more or less permanent features of a spiritual life. How could it be otherwise? No word, book, story, scent, or pretty statue can mask for long the essential pathos of the human being struggling to extract transcendent meaning from her merely human life."

Nonetheless, we persist. Alleluia! Amen.

Any Good Books

April 1, 2018

 

Still

Still: Notes on a mid-faith crisis

Lauren F. Winner (Harper Collins, 2012)

    In 2003, Lauren Winner published a well-received memoir, Girl Meets God, about becoming a Christian. The conversion narrative is a well-established form, which has a natural narrative shape. What happens afterward may be a little harder to fit into a story line. In Winner's case, the glory road she set out on has headed into a desert; she's wondering what this blank wall is in her path, and whether she should turn back. Still is a memoir, in part, but also a series of meditations on being stuck and being still. The chapters are shorter than traditional essays, in a loose weave that makes poetic connections easier to see.

    In the years after Winner's earlier book, her mother died of cancer, and she entered a marriage that ended after five years. The troubles in her marriage separated her from her previous easy practice of prayer, for reasons she's not proud of. Ending it seemed like a shameful failure, even as it seemed like an utter necessity. Doubting her marriage, she also doubted herself, and her relationship with God. "My faith bristled; it brittled; it snapped, like a bone, like a pot too long in the kiln." 

 

    With her faith in pieces like so many dry bones, Winner finds some consolation in the poetry of W. S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, and Emily Dickinson, who speak to her about the gaps in the world. Sometimes you can't tell whether God is in those places, or not anywhere at all. Being stuck, being still, means really having to face the latter possibility. 

 

    Winner sometimes fills the gaps with bouts of anxiety, and sometimes with overthinking, naturally enough. Most pernicious, perhaps, is a feeling of boredom with the whole Christian project. It's a shocking thought, after she's occupied so much of her adult life with religion. "Even to my own ear, my complaint of boredom sounds tinny and childish. The complaint seems to partake of the very banality boredom tries to name. Boredom sounds petulant: a demand to be entertained, to be amused."

    Yet–still–she goes to church. It seems, if nothing else, a good place to contemplate God's absence as the serious matter it is. The Eucharist and the laying on of hands are still real gifts of hospitality and healing. From the soothing dullness of the Psalms, a flash of prayer breaks through: "'Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted,' and the words still me–there at Morning Prayer, those words are my words; they are the most straightforward expression of anything I might ever have to say to God, or to myself." It's only a flash, not repeatable the next morning, but it's a hopeful promise.

    This is a lovely thing about church, the way it admits doubt and desolation as a part of life worth mentioning on a regular basis. Nothing human is alien to the Psalter, or to the church year. Winner marks the path back to trusting in God within the church's path through Lent. In the fullness of time, faithfulness becomes a path to faith. After Winner's struggle with loss, failure, and restlessness, this sounds like a triumph: "On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see."

Amen, and hallelujah.

Tell Me More

Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

Kelly Corrigan (Random House, 2018)

Kelly Corrigan is a memoirist of exceptional candor. Like her earlier book, The Middle Place (see http://anygoodbooks-mixedreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Kelly%20Corrigan) Tell Me More is full of hangovers, quarrels, and tantrums, narrated in a humane and friendly voice. More important, it's full of family love and deep friendships, and wisdom as a work in progress. We meet her at fifty, having lost her father and a close friend to cancer in the preceding year. It's all too much, some days: "...in the time it takes to get the mail, I can slide from sanguine and full of purpose to pissed off and fuming."

There's healing magic in the title essay, though. She gets instruction, and practice, in letting conversations happen at the length they need to, rather than leaping in to solve her daughters' problems. It's a great skill at deathbeds, too. The chance to have your regrets heard and absolved may be the ultimate comfort.

Because of her own past as a cancer patient, Corrigan is sensitive to bad comfort. When she had cancer, she says, "Every conversation fell into the same pattern. Cancer was The Enemy, treatment was A Journey, and I was A Hero whose responsibility was to weather the shipwrecks and beat back the sea monsters, returning from the odyssey changed and better." She understands these conversations as defensive, as a striving for meaning where none may be. Life is messier than that, though; bravery may have nothing to do with it. Learning to say 'I don't know' leaves things open, for better and for worse.

The kids at Camp Kesem have seen the worst: they have parents who have had, or died of, cancer. Corrigan visits the Camp to hang out with people who need respite from being That Kid Whose Mom Died. As one of the counselors says, "It's all-consuming because everyone is reacting to it. It's driving everyone's behavior–your coaches, your teachers, your mailman. It's super isolating. But not here." The kids (and counselors) are not Saints, there's not Heroes, but they know something about the times when there's not much more to say than "I know."

The knowledge that other people hold for us is one of the things we really need in life. Corrigan's father was her great cheerleader through false starts, dead ends, mistakes, and misdeeds. Their relationship was a fifty-year skein of compassion and forgiveness. With his bluff encouragement, she kept getting up and trying again every time she messed up. It's like a bar mitzvah, where a kid feels seen and heard in a new way, and expands into the feeling.

"The mentors and rabbis, the grannies on the bema, are certain about things we can't yet believe: that listening is huge, that there's might in the act of committing yourself to a cause, that trying again is both all we can do and our great enabling power. They see clearly that we weren't wrong; our aim was. They knew that we are good enough, as we are, with not much more than our hopeful, honorable intent to keep at it. They tell us, over and over, until we can hear it."

Tell Me More is a book you could read in an evening, but it also might be chewed over for a year, especially if you're having one of those times when events and emotions take up more than the time you have.

Emailed Feb 1, 2018