Reading Jesus

Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels
Mary Gordon (2009, Anchor Books)

It would hardly seem that we needed another book about the Bible: hundreds, of one sort or another, must be published every year. Mary Gordon’s Reading Jesus is relatively modest in scope and ambition, but Gordon’s voice is lucid, and her point of view strikes me as trustworthy. She is marking out a path between the cut-and-paste Enlightenment gospel of Thomas Jefferson, who excised all that was miraculous in search of a perfect system of ethics, and the hellfire-and-brimstone certainties of contemporary Evangelical preachers.

She shows a fitting respect for the impulses that drive those preachers and their followers. “I am striving for a tone and diction that neither shouts nor threatens, a diction that neither promises falsely, nor underestimates the power of fear, or supposes that, with right thinking, it can be brought under control. Above all, I have no interest in making a doctrinal point, no desire to convert.” If her readers are interested in reading, that will be sufficient.

She confines her attention to the Gospels because, as a writer, she is more interested in narrative than the theological contentions of the Epistles; and because, as a Christian, she takes the life of Jesus to be the most compelling narrative. Calling the figure of Jesus elusive, ungraspable, yet irresistible, she selects stories that show just how inexplicable he is.

She is not weighing in as a scholar of religious or scriptural matters, but as a student and teacher of literature. She uses five English translations, discriminating among them by their power in English, rather than by any consideration of other translation issues. I think she’s justified in focusing instead on the experience that readers and listeners are having as they encounter these stories, “if only because most of the people in the world who have read the Bible have not had access to this scholarship.”

And what do you have, if you have only the texts? Stories of a strangeness that invites wrestling, at least. Contradictions, paradoxes, outrageous claims. Considering that these narratives were composed a generation or more after the events they describe, and were not solidly canonized for another three centuries, how did some of these details persist? Gordon inquires about details like the fig tree Jesus withers in a fit of pique (Matthew and Mark), or the young man who runs away without his clothes in the fourteenth chapter of Mark.

Inquiry at this level, of course, leaves us with more questions than answers. Gordon’s questions are passionate and honest, and, as I see it, they get to the heart of the difficulties, contradictions, and stumbling blocks we find all through the Gospels. Facing these, wrestling with them, she arrives at a place not of Truth, but of possibility.

I’m glad to go there with her. Thanks be to God.

CTR
March 2011

Not Even Wrong:

Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism
Paul Collins (2004, Bloomsbury)

In Paul Collins's latest book, Paul and Jennifer move back to Oregon (from Wales, where they were living in his Sixpence House) and take two-year-old Morgan for a check-up. He's a normal, healthy, toddler, they think, with a few unusual abilities--he can start up a computer and make it play games, and he can read books, the fatter and more abstruse the better. But, as the doctor notes, he never says, "Mommy" or "Can I have some popcorn?"; he doesn't make eye contact. To Collins, it's a bafflement: "How can it be that we left our house an hour ago with a healthy toddler, and returned with a disabled one?"

By trade a historian, Collins has a parallel story to tell. He has been nursing a fascination with Peter the Wild Boy, brought to England from the forests of Hanover by order of George I. Peter was smart enough to survive on wild foods, but had little use for language, or the ways of men. He was famous in his time, attracting the attention of Swift, Defoe, and Linnaeus; he was a prism for emerging ideas of what it was to be human.

If, as seems likely, Peter was what we would now term autistic, he represents a case study in how the disabilities of autism are, at the same time, hyperabilities. Collins investigates other strange but creative characters, including Alan Turing and the nerds of Microsoft. "Other animals are social, but only humans are capable of abstract logic. The autistic outhuman the humans, and we can scarcely recognize the result." Which still leaves the problem of communicating, of getting along in the social world. Imagine your whole life as a sort of Turing test, in which you have to use reason to process social information that most people can grasp without a second thought.

Paul and Jennifer, with some expert help, make overtures to Morgan using written language. There's a lovely Helen Keller moment when Morgan first answers a binary question from Paul, as he'd been doing with his computer games. It's a huge step in the right direction, as is the class Morgan is finally old enough for, at three and a half, with other kids like him. "There is no awkwardness among them: they are equals. It's as if we have brought a seal to the ocean and watched him shuffle awkwardly off the land to glide effortlessly through the waves, finally within the world he was made for all along."

Morgan's parents still have their work cut out figuring out what he needs, and how to keep him safe; they have to plan to have him living with them for the rest of their lives; but they know what they need to know about not pounding their square peg into a round hole, and it's going to be all right. Thanks be to God.

CTR

Shakespeare Wrote for Money; A Visit from the Goon Squad; Juliet, Naked

Shakespeare Wrote for Money
Nick Hornby (2008, Believer Books)

A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan (2010, Alfred A. Knopf)

Juliet, Naked
Nick Hornby (2009, Riverhead Books)

I’m just catching up with Nick Hornby’s third collection of the book reviews he wrote for the Believer magazine. I was sad to learn that it would be the last for the time being, as he turned his attention to other projects, (including his own fiction, which is certainly some consolation.) Like the two earlier volumes, Shakespeare Wrote for Money is a pleasure on several levels.
One is his down-to-earth attitude, his transparency. As Sarah Vowell puts it in her introduction, “The fact that his Books Bought list is so often so different from his Books Read list makes his portrait of a real reader the most accurate I have ever seen. The hope! The guilt! The quest for shelving!” Sound like anybody you know?
By the same token, I like Hornby’s taste, and his stalwart rejection of boring books. He doesn’t care for pretension, literary or otherwise, and if he doesn’t want to read about people who drink wine and talk about Sartre, he reserves the right not to. “This is entirely unreasonable of me, I accept that. But prejudice has to be an important part of our decision-making process when it comes to reading; otherwise we would become overwhelmed.”

I have to wonder what Hornby would say about A Visit from the Goon Squad. My view of Jennifer Egan’s book is colored by my prejudice against books that don’t commit to being either novels or short stories. Sections (chapters?) of this book appeared in the New Yorker as short stories; they are reasonably successful as such. But the beauty of a short story is that if you don’t like the characters, you can put the book down and be finished with them, and here, they keep coming around again, with none of their flaws fixed. In fact, no, wait, here they are as teenagers, even more messed up than they will be a few pages ago.
All this cleverness is a risky undertaking. Should the reader really need to take notes and make charts to see if two characters have met yet? Am I meant to wonder if the chapter with the extended footnotes is an homage to Nicholson Baker or a ripoff of David Foster Wallace? Is the mother’s query – in the chapter consisting entirely of Powerpoint slides– “Why not try writing for a change?” meant to be self-referential?*

Nick Hornby’s novel Juliet, Naked is much more to my taste. Like Egan’s book, it concerns itself with popular music and modern electronic communications, but, because Hornby confines himself to a single story, I found it much easier to grasp and to enjoy.
It’s not hard to picture the characters: a singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe whose disappearance from performing and writing has become a provocative mystery, to a devoted few, including his biggest fan, Duncan, and Duncan’s disaffected girlfriend, Annie. For a few bucks, Crowe permits the re-release of pre-production versions of his greatest album, rousing a debate among his internet fanbase. When Annie, in England, puts up a review that counters Duncan’s, and Crowe replies to her from his seclusion in Pennsylvania, they’re both offered a way to move on in their lives.
Crowe isn’t actually invisible, but the old Tucker Crowe, the one who drank too much, fell in love too easily, and wrote agonizing songs about it, tends to render him mute: “The fact is, some of these myths are so colorful that they have deterred me from re-entering the world; it seems to me that people were having more fun with me gone than they could ever have if I was around.”
That doesn’t include his ex-wives and his first four children, who might have liked to have him around, but they also would have liked him to find something to do with himself. He’s redeemed himself, to a degree, by being the primary parent of his youngest son, Jackson, but Jackson’s mother, Cat, reasonably concludes that that isn’t enough.
“A few months back, he’d called Cat on the eye-rolling, asked her for some suggestions. After some deliberation, she announced that she thought he should be a singer-songwriter, but one who actually sang and wrote songs.” Or words to that effect, but it’s going to be a little difficult, after a career hiatus that makes Tucker feel like he’s been sitting around in airport lounges for about twenty years, somehow never getting on a plane.
Annie has begun to feel the same way about her own life, washed up in Gooleness, one of England’s less exciting seaside towns, playing second fiddle to Duncan’s obsession with Tucker Crowe. She knows she can’t get the fifteen years back, but “...somehow Juliet, Naked – or her feelings about it, anyway – had woken her from a deep sleep: she wanted things.”
So Nick Hornby doesn’t have to tell Jennifer Egan that there’s a way to talk about what life in the internet age is like without disappearing completely down the rabbit hole: his book can show her.

Happy New Year, friends, in case I didn’t say so last month. I hope you’re taking good care of yourself amid the ice and snow. What with one thing and another, 2011 is shaping up to be Interesting Times.
Cheers!

Carolyn


* The slide show chapter appears here:

http://jenniferegan.com/books

This version works much better (in color, and with a sound track) than the book’s 75-page black and white reproduction.
I’m told that the Kindle version of the book fails to reproduce it adequately--the irony gods are smiling.

Note, April 2011
A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Any Good Books -- February 2011

The Horse Boy

The Horse Boy: A Father’s Quest to Heal His Son
Rupert Isaacson (2009, Little, Brown and Company )

Rupert Isaacson is a travel writer; he met his wife in southern India (he’s British, she’s from California) and has traveled all over the world; he has close friends among the Kalahari Bushmen. He’s also a horseman who, as a young man, trained horses for a living. So when he and his wife, Kristin, had a son, he had high hopes of sharing a life of adventure with Rowan.
What he didn’t count on was Rowan being severely autistic. At five, he was not toilet trained, and he threw tantrums all day long; his parents had not been out together in years, because not even the most devoted grandmother could handle him safely.
Distant as he was from people, Rowan loved animals, and he made a deep connection with a neighbor’s horse, Betsy. She was unusually careful and patient with him; on Betsy’s back, Rowan was calm, and verbal, more than he ever was at home. The only other time he achieved that level of peacefulness was at a gathering of native healers, when Rupert’s African friends were on a visit to the US.
As Rupert and Kristin watched Rowan grow, and worried about how to get treatment for him, Rupert conceived a strange and powerful notion that Rowan needed to go where he could be treated by shamans, in a horse culture. Rupert made up his mind to take his son--who was difficult to take to the grocery store--to Mongolia, and thence to the border of Siberia, to see the shamans of the reindeer people. Kristin was understandably daunted by this prospect, but as Rupert raised the money (by getting an advance on this book) and signed up a video crew of three, the trip took on a reality for the whole family.
The Isaacsons didn’t really know what to expect from the journey; they were working out of Rupert’s deep, strong intuition. What actually happened was astonishing: Rowan made his first friend, lost toys without having hysterics, and (perhaps most thrilling for his parents) gained control of his bowels. He has not been cured, but he is healed.
I would dearly love to know more about the mechanics of Rowan’s transformation. Was it the hours on horseback in his father’s arms, the hours in the tent with his mother singing to him, some language in the touch of the shamans? The question is well beyond science, in its modern, techno-experimental sense--you can’t put an MRI on a moving horse, and you can’t send a hundred randomly chosen children to outer Mongolia, to see how many of them come back talking. That kind of science depends on reducible, reproducible events, and Rowan Isaacson is one of a kind.
To his credit, Rupert does not claim to have an answer to the question. He’s too skeptical to convert wholesale to the religion of the shamans, though praying to the spirits of certain places comes to seem natural. With all the hardships of the trip, his persistent question is this: “Was this all complete hocus-pocus? Was I a fool for even being here at all, dragging my family through...through what, exactly? Or were we exactly where we needed to be?”
The applicable study here, which Rupert Isaacson has done, is science in its natural form: deep, close observation of nature. That’s also, of course, what traditional healing traditions are all about. The Mongolian shamans have experiential insight into the storms in Rowan’s mind, and the unspoken language he shares with animals. If the drums and burning herbs that are the tools for expressing that insight seem primitive, it’s because they are primal.
The Horse Boy is a story of faith, too, in its natural form: loving perseverance. Intellectual assertions about belief weigh nothing compared to actually packing up your gear and getting on an airplane. Faith’s reward, fortuitously, is Rowan’s healing, but also new opportunities for hope. Through The Horse Boy Foundation, Rupert has started a farm to provide equine therapy for autistic children, and to train others in the work.
Rowan Isaacson is still autistic, but he has made contact with our world. Will he grow to become a translator between worlds, a shaman in his own right? I hope some day he’ll tell us what it’s like to be him.
CTR

More information, and film clips:
http://www.horseboymovie.com/Book.php

The Religious Case Against Belief

The Religious Case Against Belief
James P. Carse (2008, Penguin Press)

Why is there a religious case against belief, and why is one needed? Doesn’t religion entail, or indeed consist of, a certain set of beliefs? Actually, not at all; in The Religious Case Against Belief, James Carse makes a philosophical case for disentangling the two concepts.
His definitions are not everybody’s: consider the recent spate of books that attempt to make a scientific case against religion, or, as Carse would have it, against belief. For instance, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith promotes the idea that (all) religion is a dangerous error of logic that could be cured by a universal commitment to factual reasoning. So far as I know, his reasoning has not converted anyone away from religion in the real world, and Carse explains why: “Belief systems are stunningly resistant to such correction, for the simple reason that deeply committed believers are not offering a variety of debatable proposals about the nature of the world. They see the world through their beliefs, not their beliefs from a worldly perspective.”

Belief (and here Carse is making the extreme case, caricaturing for effect) is the stuff of martyrdom, the sort of certainty one would kill or die for. He gives the example of Martin Luther under examination by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, in a confrontation that would lead to Luther’s excommunication. “These were two powerful men, facing each other across a line neither of them would cross. Charles remained untouched by the young monk’s teachings. The monk never retreated.” How could they have? 

This mutual intransigence was epoch-making in its own right, of course, but Carse is making a more abstract point. “Belief systems thrive in circumstances of collision. They are energized by their opposites.” Belief creates boundaries between what is believed and what is not. Subscribing to one belief system involves rejecting another, by definition. “They are joined in a kind of compact that freezes them to a stable self-understanding consisting of a reverse image of the other.”

But did either Luther or Charles have the last word about what Christianity is? No. Whatever Christianity is, it is larger and more durable any of the belief systems that have attempted to contain it, and Carse regards this as a mark of a true religion. Like the other religions with histories reaching back through millennia, Christianity has evolved and renewed itself continuously even as it has maintained a distinctive identity. Each religion has characteristic questions which demand answers as insistently as they resist them. Who is Jesus? Who is the Buddha? What does the Quran say, or the Torah? What they have in common, according to Carse: “After a lifetime spent meditating on and studying these questions one only begins to understand how elusive the answers are. Can we even imagine Muslims agreeing on what the Quran says? The point is that in each case, it is not a general ignorance but one that is acquired, one that is specific to each religion.”

Religion is an unfinished conversation, which attracts a community willing to keep talking. Now we can see why belief is so often conflated with religion: it’s endlessly tempting to adopt solutions to the large questions.“Mystery is difficult to live with, and for some even terrifying. It can often be of great comfort to hide our unknowing behind the veil of a well-articulated belief system. For this reason, the historic religions seem to be a particularly fertile source for absolutisms.” 

Fortunately, the historic religions are also fertile sources for the poetic imagination, which doesn’t just push at the walls of belief, but dissolves them. Inside any religion, at any time, poets and prophets may arise to challenge the boundaries set by belief. Inside any religion, the gathered community gives rise to cultural expressions of all kinds, and these, in turn, nourish community.

James Carse is a retired professor of religion, but he’s writing here as a philosopher. His logic is careful; his language is precise and a little dense. He’s also the author, as it turns out, of one of my favorite books of the nineteen-eighties, Finite and Infinite Games.* If the words ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ have been poisoned irrevocably for you, I commend the earlier work, which covers much the same ground, couched in different words. Subtitled “A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility,” it’s philosophy in jeans and a sweatshirt.

However you read him, Carse stands for living in relation to the horizon, free from our self-created boundaries. At boundaries, we meet only conflict; beyond the horizon, the unknown waits.

*1986, The Free Press

Email edition, December 2010