The Evolution of God

The Evolution of God
Robert Wright (2009; Little, Brown and Company)

    “The Evolution of God.” Even with no subtitle, that’s a title of high promise, combining as it does two topics I’d almost always like to know more about. The book falls short on the promise in several ways, but I enjoyed it.

    In the first place, there’s just so much to say. After a quick tour through shamanistic religions, Robert Wright takes up the early histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, because they all have to do with the points he is trying to make. Combining all this with a dash of evolutionary psychology in a mere four hundred and eighty pages means that he has to sketch the history with a broad brush. (Of course, the additional sixty-five pages of notes and bibliography should more than satisfy those hungry for details.)

    Another shortcoming is the way Wright’s tone is set at the level of popular economic jargon. At times, he’s flippant, if expressively so: “(Deuteronomy alone celebrates the utter ‘destruction’ and ‘dispossession’ of infidel cities again and again, and the book of Joshua also takes a festive attitude toward urban mayhem.)” But if an expression like ‘non-zero-sumness’ makes your teeth hurt, you’ll have some difficulty here.

    Wright actually means something specific and useful by that expression; he wrote a whole other book about it. That is, people tend to be contentious if one side’s gain has to equal the other side’s loss, but if the sum of gains and losses is greater than zero, there may be advantages available to both sides through cooperation. Thus does self-interest drive altruism; and this, Wright says, is the great evolutionary engine of moral progress.

     Self-interest also drove the Abrahamic religions in the days of their founding. The Hebrew bible, the New Testament, and the Koran exhibit dramatic shifts between peaceful, globally harmonious messages about God, and texts that show his wrathful side. Wright shows how often these turns coincide with the needs of the group at the time of writing (or rewriting.) “This doesn’t mean they were consciously dishonest. It just means that memory is a funny thing – as is the process by which people decide whose memories have the ring of truth.”

    Wright is well aware that what he’s describing is not God’s evolution, as such, but rather the evolution of human ideas and conceptions of God. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Whether we’re right or wrong about whether God ‘really’ ‘exists’, there are discernible facts about the history of our religions. One of the most important of these is that there’s an arrow of moral development: that it’s meaningful to talk about ‘better’ and ‘worse’ in how we treat each other. Wright says, “Built-in features of history, emanating from the basic logic of cultural evolution, give humankind a choice between progressing morally and paying a price for failing to.”

    This is true both individually and socially. Again, how could it be otherwise? “Social salvation may or may not be at hand, depending on the extent to which individual people, in working out their own salvations, expand their moral imaginations and hence expand the circle of moral consideration.” In a global society, can we see that we’re all in the same boat? We should hope, and work, for religion that abets that process, rather than standing in its way.

Tuning the Rig

Tuning the Rig: a Journey to the Arctic
Harvey Oxenhorn (1990, Harper & Row)

    In the first place, as promised, Tuning the Rig is a journey to the Arctic. The tall ship Regina Maris set out in the summer of 1981 on a nine-week expedition from Boston, sailing down East past Maine, beyond Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, to the waters west of Greenland. The ship’s mission is research on hump-back whales and their habitat. This entails everything from photographing the whale’s flukes to identify individual animals, to seining up the krill and plankton they eat, to measuring the salinity of the water.

    There’s plenty of anthropology to study as well: how Greenland has been affected socially and politically by being part of Denmark; what happens when fishing as a livelihood is disrupted and there’s nothing to do but drink; how many ghost villages dot the shoreline of Newfoundland. Even in summer, the environment is harsh, yet people have come to the arctic for centuries to harvest whales, shipping oil, meat, and bones to Europe and beyond.

    Regina Maris seems a fragile vessel in which to meet ice, fog, and gale force winds. Though grand in scope when seen from the shore, 144 feet long with three seven-story high masts, she is nearly seventy-five years old. She creaks, and she leaks. The three mates, the bosun, and the engineer are constantly renewing her decks, hull, lines and sails. Together with the captain, the cook, and three professional deck hands, they also have charge of sixteen students who double as crew, and four research scientists, who are termed ‘idlers’ because they don’t have sailing duties.

    Harvey Oxenhorn is an odd man out among the crew; a decade older than most of the students, he has gone aboard as a sort of writer in residence, at least in his own mind; but in no time, he is far too busy living the life of a seaman to have much leisure to write about it. He chafes at this, and at all the sundry annoyances of living with 29 strangers in tight, damp quarters. There’s no getting away from the personalities, and the necessary hierarchy feels completely strange to someone who’s been teaching and doing research in literature all his adult life.

    He’s not very good at the sailing, either, especially the parts that take place up in the rigging, sometimes eighty feet off the deck. All this climbing is hard enough at anchor, and in a twenty-knot gale, it scares Oxenhorn stiff, particularly when you need at least one hand to haul in the sail and tie the knots. Throw in a freezing rain, and the dark of night, and the fatigue of never getting to sleep more than four or five hours at a time, and it seems downright impossible.

    Tuning the Rig is beautiful in many ways, but what made it stick in my mind for two decades is the transformation of Oxenhorn himself, into someone who belongs, who values interdependence and sees connections deeply. The senior crew coach and coax him through episodes of protest and bad temper; they put up with him till he learns to put up with everybody. Here’s how he recognizes that change:

    “When I first came on board, I thought that the whole world owed me. I was ready to make music, damn it. I was disappointed, angry that so little in my life would stay in tune. But tonight, as I barely heard the sounds we made before they were blown astern, I understood such disappointment to be arrogance.

    “It is arrogance to expect that our life always be music. It is false pride to demand to know the score. Harmony, like a following breeze at sea, is the exception. In a world where most things wind up broken or lost, our lot is to tack and tune.”

    Amen, amen.


Email edition, August 1 2013

Take This Bread

Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Sara Miles (2007, Ballantine Books)

    I don’t know exactly what makes cooks such good writers. Maybe it’s their well-developed attention to sensory detail; perhaps a facility with sequences, relationships, and balance; maybe just a habit of hard work, staying with something till it’s right, and then sending it out. Sara Miles is that kind of cook, and that kind of writer.

    Take This Bread is a spiritual memoir about how Miles came to run a wildly successful food pantry in a San Francisco church. She had, it turns out, been preparing the ingredients of food and economic justice all her life. Her parents adopted atheism in reaction to their own parents’ lifelong ministry and mission work; they raised Sara and her brother and sister “with boundless love, liberal politics, and secular morals.” It was a model upbringing of its kind, full of books, music, art, and good cooking, and entirely free from religious stories.

    Miles spent part of her young adulthood traveling and studying in Mexico, cutting her teeth as a writer and activist. Because those activities paid poorly, she also acquired restaurant skills in New York restaurants. Hard, hot, sweaty work, but satisfying: “I learned from watching customers that the rituals of even the plainest or most cynically prepared dinner could carry unconscious messages of love and comfort.”

    She had a chance to go back to Latin America, doing research in Nicaragua for a human rights organization. As the U.S. waged covert war on the revolutionary government, she organized trips for American citizens to help on farms in the threatened areas. Living and working together was essential political education, and, potentially, the volunteers could protect the peasants from attack; “Dead Americans were going to be more of a problem for Washington than dead Nicaraguans.”

    Miles was dedicated, fearless, and a little ruthless. She spent six years in various war zones, always looking on the margins for the real consequences of policies and ideologies. “Writing about and living in such war absorbed me totally.... Some of it, I think, was about the simple adrenaline thrill of danger and a guilty but real happiness about coming out alive.” This experience belonged to each person, but also to all of them: “We all had bodies that could suffer and be killed; we all had hearts that could stop beating in an instant.” Everywhere and always, people shared food with her, no matter how little they had.

    In time, Miles fell in love with another journalist; in 1988, she became pregnant, as matters in El Salvador went from bad to worse. The couple moved to San Francisco, where they split up, sharing the care of Katie, and each acquired a same-sex partner. Miles was still writing and militating, now about the AIDS epidemic, but her life became safer and more predictable, even domestic.

    Then one day in 1999, she walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal church, out of simple curiosity, and was given bread and wine, in a Eucharist open to all. The connection between the smell, taste, and feel of the bread and wine, and the name of Jesus, opened a  door in Miles that she hadn’t even suspected was there. “I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind.”

    She didn’t have much context for this experience. In the U.S., she knew practically nobody who went to church; her friends were “cynical, hilarious, and overeducated, with years of therapy and contemporary literature behind them, and I was afraid to mention that I was slipping off to church and singing about Jesus on Sundays insteand of sleeping late, cooking brunch, and reading the New York Times Book Review as I’d been raised to do.”

    She soon discovered that St. Gregory’s was an outlier; both the space and liturgy were designed to make worship as physical, as incarnational, as possible. Chanting, moving, eating, and drinking were offered as better ways of apprehending the Holy than talking or thinking. Not that Miles didn’t read–she spent her first year around St. Gregory’s catching up on the Bible, and on the vexed history of Christianity, Anglicanism, and the Episcopal church. 

    At the heart of it all, because Miles was who she is, was the part of the Bible where Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep.’ She joined the group of people in robes who helped hand out the Eucharist, facing the hard truth about the fact that it’s meant for everybody: “I was not going to get to sit by myself and think loftily about how much Jesus loved me in particular. I was not going to get to have dinner, eternally, with people just like me. I was going to get communion, whether I wanted it or not, with people I didn’t necessarily like. People I didn’t choose.”

    Miles came up with a way to make the Eucharistic circle even bigger, with groceries from the San Francisco Food Bank instead of bread and wine. Housing was (and is) so expensive in the Bay area that working people and people on pensions kept roofs over their heads at the expense of groceries – while, come to find out, grocery stores and Big Food have an embarrassing surplus of unprofitable food.

    The idea of a regular food pantry made waves inside the parish, naturally. Everybody had reasons why it couldn’t work, or would be too hard: the expense, the likelihood of volunteer burnout, and the mess and danger of inviting the down and out into the beautiful sanctuary space (with its gorgeous custom carved altar.) What would the neighbors say?

    But Miles used the organizing and political skills she’d been honing all her life, taking in all the objections, meeting them with whatever combination of sincerity and manipulation seemed appropriate, carried by her conviction that feeding people was simply the right thing to do. People started coming: a few dozen at first, but pretty soon by the hundred. “The pantry wasn’t hushed and pious; it was loud and holy. As the whores and cripples, widows and foreigners and thieves and little children gathered outside, it took on an almost biblical atmosphere.”

     Some of the people who needed the program turned out to be willing and able to volunteer for it, as a matter of dignity and of gratitude transformed, in God’s familiar alchemy, into generosity. Completing a circle, Miles also rolled up her sleeves and started cooking lunch before each Friday’s food pantry service; the body of Christ sat down to a meal together before opening up to feed the flocks.

    Though Miles didn’t lose all of her cynical resistance, it’s clearly the Gospel that gave her the courage to keep on with all this, even as it convicted her of every temptation to separate herself from Christ’s body: she was every bit as hungry, lonely, angry, and scared as any of them. It’s all there: the impatience with church people who don’t think this is the important thing to be doing; the conflict on the home front when all this church work takes her away from Martha and Katie’s lives; the impossibility of loving people who take groceries away and sell them, or get aggressive when the line is too long.   

    Just as clearly, it’s Divine Providence that brings Miles the volunteers; the wonderful people at the central food pantry; the philanthropist who discovers her work, and helps her plant pantries in other areas; an excellent spiritual director; and the priest who moves from Texas to join the St. Gregory’s staff, and help her cook the lunch.

    Take This Bread puts to shame all the conversation about doctrine and polity we sometimes waste our days with. If Jesus is real, we need to invite him to supper.


Any Good Books
July 2013

The Supper of the Lamb

Any Good Books
June 2013

The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection
Robert Farrar Capon (2002, Modern Library, with introductions by Ruth Reichl and Deborah Madison; originally published 1969)

    The Supper of the Lambs has been back in print for a decade, which makes it a rarity among books from 1969; Ruth Reichl, editor of the Modern Library Food series, dubbed it a classic, and its continuing sales bear her out. I don’t think that information, however, will properly prepare you for just how rare and strange a book it is.

    The ostensible structure is straightforward: on one leg of lamb, feed eight people four meals; but the diversions, divagations, wanderings and meanderings between first and last comprise a distinctive view of the world. Capon works small, inviting us to spend an hour with an onion, meeting its dryness and its pungent wetness, its very creatureliness. (“You must firmly resist the temptation to feel silly.”) And he works large, befitting his status as an Episcopal priest: “Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful.”

    Beyond recipes, of which there is a rich but idiosyncratic selection, there’s a solid foundation of technique. He knows the secrets of the wok; how to treat butter to make puff pastry come out right; how to make stock, and what to do with it. Beyond technique, in turn, lies philosophy: “The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers–amateurs–it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have.”

    Capon waxes prophetic about the proliferation of ‘tin fiddles’, by which he means things that take over the marketplace despite being markedly inferior versions of what they purport to be: electric knives, gravy from a jar, and margarine, to name a few. In this sense, the book has aged remarkably well. We may not skim cream from the top of our milk these days, or set out ashtrays at dinner, but we have more and more low-calorie fake foods all the time.

    His advice, characteristically bracing and sensible, is to leave off worrying about calories, but occasionally to take a break from eating altogether. “Should a true man wish to lose weight, let him fast. Let him sit down to nothing but coffee and conversation, if religion or reason bid him do so; only let him not try to eat his cake without having it.” (That use of ‘man’ is something Capon caught himself at, and let stand on purpose: “We are all true men–or women–here.”)

    Ranging as it does from roasts to broth, from formal dinner parties to cures for hangovers and heartburn, The Supper of the Lamb comes to a theological point: “Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; God who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding ‘Good!’ over his own concoctions.”

    Amen, and hallelujah.

Email edition, June 2013

Poser: My life in twenty-three yoga poses

Poser: My life in twenty-three yoga poses
Claire Dederer (2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

    As a snapshot, or time capsule, of late-twentieth-century perfectionist motherhood, you could hardly do better than Claire Dederer’s memoir, Poser. Women who turned to family life after spending their twenties building careers or exercising wanderlust turned to it with a daunting fervor for everything natural and wholesome. “Nursing, at least where we lived in Seattle, was a strange combination of enthusiast’s hobby and moral mandate.” And it didn’t stop there. You had to use cloth diapers, buy wooden toys from Europe, make baby food from scratch.

    “These were the rules: Get your thousand words written, cook your organic dinner, call your parents, good, good, good all the time.” If you are wondering whether such a mother ever found the whole business a little overwhelming--yes, Dederer did. “Or maybe I was the only one with the terror. Maybe I was the only one who, grinding steamed organic carrots in the baby-food mill, felt as if turning the mill’s little handle was keeping something awful from happening.”

    Yoga was all part of the equation, partly because Claire threw her back out nursing Lucy, her glowingly healthy eleven-month-old baby, and partly because it seemed like something that people did who had it all figured out: “Maybe if I appeared to be serene, I would stop with the existentialist dread, the likes of which I had not felt since my overcoat-wearin’ teenage days.”

    It was consuming, having a baby and going to yoga twice a week, and getting some writing done, while her husband, Bruce, tried to write full-time to support the three of them. Claire went for walks with friends-- ”They were all part-time workers with interesting, creative, exhausting jobs. They all wore cute corduroy pants and hipsterish hoodies covered with spit-up.” And she managed the visits of her parents; she had three, inconveniently enough; her mother and father, who are still married, and her mother’s longtime boyfriend, a tugboat captain.

    This is the book’s introduction to another time capsule, from 1973, when Claire was six, and her mother entered an extended period of hippie exploration, involving (mostly) leaving her husband, and hanging out with woodcarvers and embroiderers. “That was the kind of profession people had in those days, professions that belonged in fairy tales.” It was also the kind of childhood people had in those days, adventurous and unmoored, in a way that made Claire cling to the books she was always reading, where the characters were not always reinventing themselves, and in which a Mom remained just a Mom.

    So Claire worked very hard at being a Mom; she had a second baby, a boy called Willie, by a second C-section; and she kept a cheerful front of denial about her husband’s withdrawal and depression. Her busyness, her perfectionism, and her drive to live, on a writer’s income, like the wealthy Seattleites around them, left Bruce feeling overworked and isolated. One day in a yoga class, with her foot behind her head, she noticed that she was deeply unhappy, and that her cheerful pretense was making it worse. “I was trapped in a misery of expectations, as if in a blizzard. I was afraid that if I stopped, if I said ‘Something is wrong here,’ my family would fall apart. After all, that is what families do.”

    Claire and Bruce, by a stroke of well-deserved good fortune, found a way to run away from home and start over again without splitting up: they moved to Boulder, Colorado, on a journalism fellowship that Bruce won. Boulder turned out to be a great place  for them, with hiking trails, more sunshine than the Pacific Northwest, and a whole new level of yoga classes in the bargain.

    The move was just the push they needed toward putting their own family first, and figuring how to be the kind of grown-ups they really wanted to be. It freed Claire from some of the anxiety that she inhaled in her old neighborhood, and gave her a fresh, inward-looking perspective. “Now my family life was my family life, private, almost secret, a pile of bears in a den, writhing and furry and intimate. I had no public.”

    Poser is beautifully written, both in its prose and in its structure, which in addition to braiding together the stories of Claire’s life as a wife and mother, and her life as a child, actually talks about yoga in a comprehensible way, and shows us what changed in Claire’s understanding and practice. On the mat, and in her life, she was able to give up a whole lot of expectations about how things have to be Good, and see that they really are good already. Or, at least, real, and that’s good enough.



Any Good Books
May 2013 email edition