True Love Knows No Boundaries

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford

If you are looking for a book that will restore your faith in the power of love to overcome barriers of hatred and mistrust, this is one you will not want to miss. Ford's writing style is low-key and fairly undramatic, but its spareness somehow works to convey the intensity of the character's emotions in a powerful way. I had a sense that Ford was holding back, intentionally not writing in the emotional style that we Americans are used to - after all, he was writing about two very reserved cultures. He does a good job in his writing of conveying how young people in the Japanese and Chinese cultures were expected to respect and obey their elders without question, and thus ended up stuffing a lot of their emotions inside.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is set in both the World War II era and in the mid-1990s, as an aging man looks back on his life and wonders what happened to his first love. As children on the verge of adolescence, Henry and Keiko are pulled between the enmity of their people (Henry is Chinese and Keiko is Japanese) and the alliance that develops between them as the only Asian kids at their school. Keiko is mercilessly mocked by the other students after Pearl Harbor. Since no one bothers to get to know Henry, they assume he is Japanese as well and are just as cruel to him. Henry and Keiko become friends as they defend each other from the taunts and occasional physical threats of their classmates.

Henry is heartbroken when Keiko's family is forced to move to an internment camp, and he keeps in touch with her for awhile. However, his controlling, Japan-hating father intervenes to put an end to the relationship. Both characters move on with their lives, but neither forgets the other.

I won't say any more about the plot, because I do not want to be a "spoiler." This is more than a typical romance novel - romance is certainly a part of it, as we see in the tender gestures that Henry and Keiko each make toward the other as they enter their teenage years. The novel also speaks a truth about the power of love beyond the initial giddy romantic feelings. Commitment and steadfastness are the factors that make love last, and the reader will be cheering for Henry and Keiko to find each other and find that happiness again.

Reverent Reader

All Viewpoints Present

Exile
by Richard North Patterson

If you pick up Exile and read the first couple of chapters, you may be tempted to write it off as an "airport thriller," the term my husband and I use for the types of books that used to be available in airports. Not the highest quality of material - something you could plow through on a long flight or an afternoon on the beach and then promptly forget. Really that is no longer true in airports - some of them have great bookstores, and I end up adding a couple to my carry-on while I am browsing and waiting for my plane. Having said that, Exile initially feels like literary junk food, and I thought I would tire of it long before I reached the end.

I still would not place Patterson in the ranks of the great prose magicians of our time, but his book has more depth than I initially gave it credit for. It is not one that I normally would have picked up, but it was recommended for our group that traveled to Israel. I took it with me to read on the plane (but I did not buy it in the airport! I got it used on Amazon.com for a penny!). Exile is about a nominally American Jewish lawyer and political hopeful (David) who is asked by his former lover Hana Arif (who happens to be Palestinian) to defend her when she is accused of assassinating the Israeli Prime Minister. The Prime Minister character clearly is modeled on Yitzhak Rabin - he is someone who is trying to find a way to peace in Israel, much to the chagrin of both Israeli and Palestinian extremists. The jurisdiction of the case is complicated by the detail that the murder takes place in San Francisco.

Much of the book unfolds like a typical detective/trial story, and those parts dragged a bit for me. The book's great strength is that it s clear that Patterson has done his homework. He delves deeply into the history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and develops believable characters who integrate all perspectives into the narrative in a very natural way. There was not much of the educational part of the story that was new to me, as I have read quite a bit about the Middle East, but Patterson's book would be a place for a beginner to start. Sometimes the academic works on Israel/Palestine take the human tragedy out of the picture and only focus on policy. Patterson was able to provide a lot of content while keeping a human face on both sides.

I found the ending of Exile unsatisfying, but maybe that is the point. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who may be interested in reading it, so I will just say that there were enough ambiguities left to make the reader wonder if the situation would ever be resolved in a satisfactory way. Kind of like Israel/Palestine and her ongoing struggle for security and justice.

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Just Wait

The Meaning Is in the Waiting
by Paula Gooder

As we move through Advent, I have been making an effort to be intentional about how I observe the season this year. My problem is that I preach and believe a message of "slow down, contemplate, listen for the voice of the Spirit, make room in your heart for the birth of Christ," but those words get crowded out in my own life by the busyness of this time at work. There are extra worship services to be planned (and extra bulletins to be written and printed), special activities, and usually some pastoral care situations that are made all the more intense by their juxtaposition with the season of merriment.

Then there are the personal, family activities - decorating the tree and the house, the baking, shopping, wrapping, etc. The issue is, I love all these parts of the season. For four weeks a year, I am a Christmas junkie. I WANT to have time for prayer and writing and reflecting, but so often find that these disciplines get crowded out by the activity. The season of waiting becomes the season of hurry up. I can do my best to do all these things with a calm and unhurried spirit, and that does help. But, that only gets us so far - at some point it becomes too much, and Advent has passed in a blur and we wonder where it went. We might be "ready" for Christmas in that our gifts are wrapped and delivered and the festive food is prepared, but we are not spiritually prepared. I am sure I am not the only one with this problem.

So this year I'm doing things a little differently. I have dropped a couple of major holiday season projects and am trying to focus on mental and spiritual preparation. The Meaning is in the Waiting is helping me with this. Gooder's book looks at waiting as a spiritual discipline, and reminds us why we need to wait for Jesus' birth, contemplating its meaning, before we jump into the celebrations. She looks at the waiting that took place in the lives of Abraham, the Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, and Mary. The book is strengthened by her extensive knowledge of not just the Bible, but also of biblical history. Gooder ties the threads of this common theme of waiting together in an articulate and meaningful way.

The Meaning Is in the Waiting is a great resource for Advent, and I find it is helping me keep my own "freneticness" at bay. I have already used it in one of my Advent sermons, and have some ideas for ways that some of Gooder's more poetic passages could be woven into a liturgy for our Advent wreath lighting next year. Read this one if you are seeking to deepen your Advent experience this year.

The book's title comes from a poem by R.S. Thomas titled "Kneeling." Google it. You'll be glad you did.

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Feelings...Nothing More than Feelings

The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World
by Dominique Moisi

First of all, my title for this post is hyperbolic. Of course geopolitics is about more than how people "feel" about each other, but Moisi makes a strong case for the truth that we ignore the emotions of a people at our peril. To think that people and nations form and break relationships with each other only on the basis of policy, culture, and economics does not tell the whole story. Human beings are creatures of emotion, and (whether we realize it or not), our attitudes toward other nations or large groups of people who are different from us are affected by our most visceral feelings and emotional reactions. Individuals at the highest levels of diplomacy, as well as ordinary people living in a diverse society, would do well to remember the importance of emotion in our interactions with each other.

Moisi focuses on three emotions that are prevalent in our world today: hope, fear, and humiliation. He writes that "the reason I have chosen these three emotions is that they are closely linked to the notion of confidence, which is the defining factor in how nations and people address the challenges they face as well as how they relate to one another." He looks at different nations with a preponderance of one of these emotions and describes how that particular emotion is affecting their political, economic, and diplomatic behaviors. Two countries that are experiencing a great deal of hope at this point are India and China, largely because they are becoming much more significant players on the worldwide economic scene. Many countries in the Islamic world, including Iran and Pakistan and Afghanistan, have experienced such humiliation in recent decades that their relations with "first world" countries are clouded by these experiences. Surprisingly for some, the United States, Japan, and France are countries that are fearful at this time, as they face having to share the prime spots on the world stage with more ascendant nations.

Moisi ends his book with some hopeful ideas for what can be done to repair tense and fractured relationships in the world. Because he is French, he can offer advice to the United States (at least to some of us) without having his own patriotism questioned. It helps, I think, if we can at least be aware that emotions are a factor in all relationships, from the simplest (dealing with the fewest number of people) to the most complex (those between cultures and/or nations). I also would love to see a study done on the tie-ins between spirituality and emotion, because these two are so interconnected that one surely must influence the other in ways that we are only beginning to grasp.

I close with a quote from the book that makes a great deal of sense to me: "The interdependent, integrated world in which we live is simply too difficult to grasp and understand fully. It is a question of both quantity and quality: We humans have never been simultaneously so numerous, so diverse, and so varied in our lifestyles, values, and circumstances. It is tempting to try to escape such complexity by simply choosing to ignore it. Hence the appeal of fundamentalist religions and extreme ideologies, both of which reduce the world's complexity to the simplicity of slogans, catchphrases, and inflexible commands." God help us all, and may we teach our children to move from fear of "the other" to tolerance and even love and respect.

Reverent Reader

That Old Russo Magic

That Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo

This guy just does it over and over again. I was first enchanted by his book Nobody's Fool in the early 1990s, and have read everything he has written since. He is just a wonderful writer, with observations about the human condition that are dead on. His comic scenes are hilarious without being slapstick, and his tragic ones can bring you to tears.

At its most basic level, That Old Cape Magic takes us into the heart and mind of a lonely little boy who feels like a stranger in his own household. As a grown man (the story is told largely through flashbacks), he grapples with the alienation he felt (and continues to feel) from his parents, while at the same time longing to understand them and feel connected in some way. The story also is about the roads not taken and the regrets that we may have in hindsight while at the same time gaining an appreciation for the gifts and graces that HAVE occurred due to the roads that we DID take. It is about a marriage that is faltering and (for a change) two people who care enough to patch it up.

The story also is indicative of the power of place in one's spiritual and emotional well-being, but also how we have to make an effort to cultivate our own well being even when we are not in our "best" geographic place. The main character (Griffin) is the child of parents who had an awful marriage, one characterized by infidelity, constant cutting remarks towards each other, and eventually divorce. Both of these people are truly morally and spiritually bankrupt. The only place where this couple felt happy together was on Cape Cod. Griffin looked forward to their summer visits there as the best times of his childhood. Later, of course, he came to realize that even the beach visits were plagued by his parents' problems. While it is true that they loved the Cape, they also wouldn't let themselves be happy anywhere else. Even their love for the Cape was clouded by their bitterness that they could not afford to buy their own home there and live there permanently.

That Old Cape Magic does not have the emotional impact of Empire Falls or the gut-splitting humor of Straight Man, but it is a wonderful book just the same. It is more understated than some of Russo's work, but takes us inside the sorrows and joys, regrets and thanksgivings, that people develop when they have decided to go the distance together. If you are a Russo fan, read it - you won't be disappointed. If you are not, this latest of his novels is a good place to start.

Reverent Reader

Who Are We?

One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life, a Story of Race and Family Secrets
by Bliss Broyard

The author of this book was interviewed on NPR a couple of years ago, and I was immediately interested in her story. Bliss Broyard's father was a nationally known literary critic, Anatole Broyard. Shortly before he died in the early 1990s, Bliss and her brother learned that her father was not of Italian descent, as he had always claimed. It turned out that he was part black, that his family was descended from New Orleans Creoles. His heritage was mixed, and her extended family turned out to be a diverse bunch with skin tones as varied as the proverbial rainbow. Bliss Broyard was not upset about her father's race, but she was bothered that he had hidden this truth from his children. One Drop is the story of her tracing her family history, meeting many of her father's relatives, and discovering more of her own identity in the process.

The most interesting parts of One Drop to me were the explorations of the Broyard family's past - she had to do a lot of detective work to figure out the complicated history of the family and how her father got the coloration that was ambiguous enough to allow him to "pass." Broyard also effectively explores the phenomenon of passing - when a "black" person slips unnoticed into the "white" world, usually leaving behind friends and family. Anatole Broyard effectively cut himself off from his entire extended family and had only sporadic, clandestine contact with his family of origin. In making the decision to cross over, he effectively deprived his children of the gift of family. Bliss Broyard's examinations of race relations in America, especially before the Civil Rights movement, cover ground that has been covered many times before. The information is no less wrenching, but it was not new to me. The book's great strength is its exploration of how much race plays into a person's identity. Broyard also effectively raises the question of how much we can ever really know about another person, if that person chooses to hide major pieces of who they are, be it race, sexual orientation, or any other piece of our makeup as a human being.

Her scrutiny of her father's public and private lives in many ways left his daughter with more questions. If he was Creole, didn't that make her part Creole as well? Was it too late to embrace that part of her heritage? How could she do so without seeming like a poser? She also learned that a number of her father's close friends and colleagues had known about his racial identity, and it troubled her that he had felt freer to share that part of himself with them but not his children. Some of One Drop got a little tedious, but overall I thought it was a thoughtful, touching, honest look at the question "Who are we?"

Clearly, Anatole Broyard was a complicated person, and his struggles with racial identity were likely all the more stressful because during his lifetime he was a well known public persona. But anyone could face these questions - how much of who we are is our ethnic background? What exactly IS race when the lines are so blurry that some people cross them several times during their lifetime? Will we reach a time when race is not even a factor in someone's identity because we are all so mixed? Would it be a good thing or a bad thing for us all to be so racially intertwined that we do not have a sense of distinct groups anymore? I do not have answers to these questions, but I am grateful to Bliss Broyard for raising them.

One of Bliss's aunts, when Bliss was struggling with the question of who she was, responded "You're Bliss. That's it. That's all." I would disagree - that is not all there is to it. In the midst of all these ambiguities and questions about who we are, we can all take comfort in WHOSE we are. We all belong to God, and I pray the day will come when we treat each other as such, so people like Anatole Broyard do not feel they have to hide.

Reverent Reader

Contemplating Gratitude

Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life
by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn

This is a simple, easy to read book that will put you right in the mood for thanksgiving - and not just the fourth Thursday of November, but all the time. Sleeping with Bread is a look at an old spiritual practice known as the examen. The examen is a discipline wherein people share with each other in an intentional way the things for which they are most thankful, as well as the things for which they are NOT thankful. The idea of the examen is to help us keep track of the parts of life that are enriching and renewing and strengthening, and also the parts that are draining and wearying. If we can identify what it is that truly gives us life (and what does not), ideally we can focus more on those parts and not allow the draining parts to take over our day. The examen can help us set priorities and make choices.

Sleeping with Bread is yet another one of the books that I read in preparation for my Israel trip, and I practiced it on the trip by writing my gratitudes (and sometimes my ingratitudes) into my journal. I have continued to practice it in writing since my return. At some point I would like to practice it orally with my family, or perhaps some other small group. Journaling is a good spiritual discipline, but something tells me that the examen works best when articulated out loud. Our family (without knowing it) has often done an informal version of the examen at the dinner table, when we all check in and share highs and lows from our day. As our children get older, though, I would like for them to get into the habit of daily spiritual practice. I did not have much of a contemplative life growing up, something that is not really anyone's fault (certainly not my family or church), I just did not know how rich the interior life could be. I would like to model a life of prayer and reverence and gratitude for my kids, while at the same time leaving them room to develop their own ways of relating to God. Probably a dilemma faced by countless parents!

Sleeping with Bread is a simple but profound discussion of a simple but profound practice. I can see it being used in small group ministries in congregations, or as a family devotional practice. Its focus on thankfulness and expressing gratitude make it a worthwhile book to read to prepare for the secular holiday of Thanksgiving or the upcoming church season of Advent.

Happy Thanksgiving, reading friends! I am thankful for each and every one of you.

Reverent Reader

Chickens Come Home to Roost

The House at Sugar Beach
by Helene Cooper

Given that several Liberians are members of my congregation, and that the former Liberian ambassador to the United States was a member of E.'s congregation (she passed away a couple of weeks ago after a battle with cancer), I was interested in this memoir as soon as it came out. The more I learn about the strife in Liberia during the last decades, the more I realize that the violence and hatred coulld have been prevented. The seeds were planted in the country's founding. Given that the free blacks and former slaves sent to (the place that became) Liberia were practically given permission by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to displace the indigenous Liberian people and to think of themselves as entitled elites, the country was set up to undergo civil war and ethnic tension for generations.

Helene Cooper is a member of the class of Liberians known as "Congo people" - she is a descendant of the American blacks who were sent there by the ACS to become the ruling class. She had a privileged childhood, and her family was very comfortable materially. The House at Sugar Beach tells the story of her childhood and early adolescence in Liberia, and her emergency move to the United States and separation from her mother that occurred when she was barely a teenager. Although Cooper is now a journalist and makes her home permanently in the US, she has never lost her ties to Liberia. She still grieves about the atrocities that took place during the nightmare years of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, the two military dictators who claimed that they were restoring power to the ethnic Liberians, but actually were corrupt monsters who would resort to awful violence to win and keep power for themselves.

What struck me about Cooper's memoir is her 20/20 hindsight about her own naivete as a child. She writes about how it never occurred to her that there was inherent injustice in the fact that her family lived in a beautiful home on the beach, and her parents owned property and had easy access to government jobs, while native Liberians were barely scratching out a living. The schools did not teach the privileged children about how many of their ancestors had moved in a century before and begun treating the native people with the same contempt that white Americans had heaped upon black Americans. When the class and racial tensions finally erupted in the 1980s, many of the "Congo people" had no clue what it was all about.
They too paid a price for an unfair system - some lost their lives, and many lost their homes and ties to their family and country.

I really don't blame Cooper for her cluelessness, and I admire her honesty in acknowledging it. We all have parts of our lives and our collective past that we would rather not think about. Society enables the privileged in our denial of history's tragedies (and our own complicity in those tragedies). Books like The House at Sugar Beach call us to examine our own lives and ask ourselves some hard questions. Upon whose back do we build our comfortable lives? What injustices are lying beneath the surface? Are there things we should see that we make an effort (conscious or unconscious) not to?

This is an engaging read that reminds us of the tragedy that befell Liberia, but also reminds us that we all had a hand in that terrible situation - Liberians did not just wake up one day and decide to start slaughtering each other. There is hope in the book, too - hope that the world can learn from what happened in Liberia take steps to prevent such a thing from happening again. There is a new day dawning there - most Liberians are excited about the democratic election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as their president. I hope US policymakers will support her efforts to restore Liberia to peace and economic viability.

Reverent Reader

Details, Major Details

The Source
by James Michener

This was yet another of the books that I read in preparation for my Israel trip (yes, I am aware that I am hideously behind on my blogging). The Source is a bit of a slog, but I ended up being really glad to have read it. It is the story of an archaeological tell, but so much more than that. Michener introduces us to the present day characters (well, sort of present day - the book was published in 1964), and a few artifacts that they find on a dig in Israel a short distance north of Jerusalem. Then, he takes us to the bottom of the tell and works us up through the 15 strata that the team has uncovered. He tells the story about the fictional town (Makor) at the time of each layer, and helps us see the way things developed in the cultural, religious, and intellectual evolution of the town and its inhabitants.

Michener must have employed a small army of researchers, because his historical novels are rich with minute detail. I randomly fact-checked a few things on the Internet, just to see how much the historical research could be trusted, and was pleased to find that he is amazingly accurate. The Source is not only a good read for the history to be found there, but also a reminder that there have been times in history when Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together peacefully, and there is reason to hope that it could happen again. Likewise, all three groups have been capable of outrageous brutality to one another at some point in history, and have no room to be self righteous when dealing with the other. Humanity's treatment of those who are different, as well as their horrific creativity in finding ways to hurt and kill each other, never fail to astound and sadden.

The Source is based on the real tell of Megiddo, which we visited on our pilgrimage. Michener is very explicit about the conception and engineering of an elaborate water system that enabled the residents of Makor to have access to water from a well outside the city walls even when the city was under siege. At Megiddo, we got to see the real thing, and even walk to the bottom of the water tunnel. That was an amazing experience, and as I walked those steps I silently thanked James Michener and his team for bringing the site to life before I ever set foot in Israel.

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Amazing Man

Blood Brothers
by Elias Chacour

I had read this book about six years ago, but reread it just before my trip to Israel, when I found out that our pilgrimage group was going to get to meet Elias Chacour. Chacour's story is a real tribute to the power of faith to keep us from hating, and a source of hope for eventual reconciliation between Israeli Jews and Arabs. Chacour's family are Palestinian Christians who had lived in a Galilean village called Biram for several generations. In 1948, they were among the thousands of Palestinians who were thrown off their land when the state of Israel was formed. Chacour followed the beliefs and advice of his father, a simple Christian man who stuck wholeheartedly to his faith in the power of love and forgiveness. His father always said that Jews and Arabs were "blood brothers," because of their mutual ancestor Abraham. He (and now his son) maintain that they are called to love each other and live together in peace. Chacour has suffered at the hands of the Zionist movement, but nevertheless also recognizes the suffering of the Jewish people and wants for the two groups to find a way to live together in peace. He sees the humanity of his Jewish brothers and sisters, and is able to recall a time when they lived together in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. Against all odds, he sincerely believes this could happen again.

Blood Brothers is the story of Chacour's personal journey from refugee to peacemaker. He was fortunate enough to escape the refugee camps and be sent to an orphanage to study. He later went to Paris to prepare for the priesthood. It is a narrative of hope as well as realism. The original version of the book was published in 1984, but an updated version came out earlier in this decade (around 2003, I think). In light of some of the horrific events that have happened in the past 10 years, the book is worth reading again even if you read its original version. In the middle of all the demonizing of "the other" we must heed the voices of those who recognize the humanity of all people and who sincerely want all cultures and faiths to thrive. Dr. Chacour is one of these people.

A little over a week ago, our pilgrimage group met with Dr. Chacour at his school, the Mar Elias Educational Institute, in Ibillin. He founded the school to bring together Christian, Jewish, and Muslim children in hopes that they will grow up knowing and understanding one another and help bring an end to the tragic cycle of violence that has characterized Jewish/Muslim relations for so long. In addition, Chacour is an incredibly brilliant man - he speaks 11 languages fluently! In 1995, he was named Archbishop of Israel. He has become an internationally recognized voice for peace and justice. The two hours that he spent with us were among the most inspiring and hopeful of my adult life.

In spite of his accomplishments and renown, Dr. Chacour is a quiet and gracious man with a gentle sense of humor. With tremendous humility, he acted like he had all the time in the world to sit and talk with our group, when there are endless demands on his time. He is one of those persons who, when you are in his presence, you feel as if you are in the presence of grace itself. There were two things he said that especially stuck with me. One, when a member of his group asked him how he keeps "the fire" for peace going in his own heart, especially in the face of so much opposition and discouragement, he responded "I do not possess the fire. The fire possesses me." In other words, he cannot NOT continue to work, pray, and agitate for non-violence. Secondly, as he closed his remarks to us, he looked each of us in the eye and said "I believe in every one of you. I spend this time with you because I HAVE to believe that each one of you can make a difference in this world."

Wow. I hope he is right. I've thought a lot about that and will continue to pray that I find my own way to make the world a better place. We need more like this man.

Reverent Reader