crookedshore

I’ve been planning my summer reading for some time now, expecting to have time during recuperation to read more than is usual. So I was delighted to discover that 2 of my favourite writers were publishing new novels in May/June, one of them is Leif Enger. His first novel, six years ago, was Peace Like a River which impacted me profoundly - a beautitful novel of grace and justice, with a stunning conclusion.

So Brave is the difficult second novel and I think Enger is conscious of this in the plot line. The winsome narrator is Monte Becket, a writer in Minnesota in 1915 who was a surprise runaway success with a story he wrote. On a promise for a second, he tries to concoct a story from his imagination but consistently falls short. Given that one of the storylines rejected is very similar to the plot of Peace Like A River, I guess we can assume there is some autobiographical element to So Brave.

The story unfolds in a journey south with a companion with an unknown past named Glendon Hale, pursued by a relentless and brutal former Pinkerton detective Charles Siringo. (Siringo’s brutality and indestructability reminded me of “No Country for Old Men’).

I chime with Enger’s view of the world. The story is a bit of a romp, a tale of derring-do and the type of old fashioned yarn that is perhaps quite rare these days. There’s no real mystery in the ending, you can see it coming from afar, but the book satisfies for all that. There’s a funny conversation on literary criticism between Beckett and a policeman named Royal Davies. Writers do their readers no favours he says, by letting them believe that life is adventure. Becket, and I guess we may say Enger, writes in response:

I take issue with Royal, much as I came to like him; violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is.”

One writer in particular is the subject of conversation the imaginary BS Ample, who shuns romanticism in favour of pragmatic realism. Is there a joke in his name?

It’s not that Enger shuns darkness in the novel, both Siringo and young man Hood Roberts display capricious and cold violence. He also allows for the chance tragedies of accident and weather. But through it all grace shines.

Lying in the bed in hospital, where I read this book, the surprising appearances of grace are what caused me to close the book several times and reflect on what I had read. Early in the book, Becket apprentices himself to Hale who is building a boat. Hale works from plans in his head, feeling the lines of the boat emerge beneath his fingers as he planes the wood. Becket remarks on the graceful lines of the boat uncovered by Hale’s loving work. Hale remarks,

They are decent lines..you can see the sheer now, the curve. A line only gets grace when it curves, you know.

With that line I was sold on this book. I guess the curve my life has taken over the last year was unexpected. Previous there had been a reasonably unbroken, straight line in which God had been transparently good to me and my family. My health had never been the line I expected to bend from true. But here I was in hospital. And here was a sentence which gave me hope. The possibility of beauty emerging from the line as it bends under pressure.

But doesn’t break.

Late in the book, Hales asks Becket to baptise him in the river as a form of insurance policy. Becket, who struggles with faith reluctantly agrees and finds himself standing in the middle of the cold river, terrified by the creatures swimming round him and brushing against his legs, confused by the task he must now fulfil, to immerse Hale in the river and say a prayer over him.

The river ran around us. It was an absurd situation for an ambivalent fellow like myself - numb to the eyeballs, dispensing a grace I couldn’t even describe.

Well, the river has run round my family and me in recent months. Its force has bent us all out of shape at times, and moved us in directions and to places we never really expected. But there is grace here to be dispensed. Indeed, there is grace being dispensed. Grace we struggle to describe.

But for which we are grateful.

A science fiction novel featuring Jesuits in outer space. I mean, what’s not to like?

Seriously though, this is a fascinating novel that is part adventure tale, part philosophical reflection part theodicy.

When Jimmy Quinn discovers a radio transmission from the region of Alpha Centauri it sparks a chase by the Jesuits to muster a team to travel to meet these new children of God. They go, as they have always gone, for the greater glory of God. The story unfolds then in two timezones…the here and now of 2059, when the broken Fr Emilio Sandoz finds a form of healing in his telling of the story. And the ‘then’, on the planet among the ‘aliens’ in the new world. If echoes of ‘The Mission’ are heard this is deliberate I’m sure.

The story is also about the discovery of faith, the loss of faith and it’s rediscovery. It is about the possibility of sustaining faith in the face of the inexplicable and the downright cruel. It is about the place of celibacy and love in relationship with God. It is about the mystery of God in the midst of horrendous suffering.

Basically though I found it an extended meditation on the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:29-31

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

To believe in God is to believe in his good and perfect will, even when it is unbelievable. He even cares for sparrows which are worth no more than half a penny.  And whilst I am comforted by this idea, there is a shadow side in which the sparrow falls.

Just as human beings suffer and die, whose hairs are numbered by God.

This is a compelling novel, even though it is probably a hundred or so pages too long. And it’s a further reminder that fiction which considers the things of faith doesn’t have to come sweetly wrapped in saccharine with a nice tidy ending.

Thanks Olibhear for the recommendation.

I’m going to be off-line for an indeterminate period, laid up in the Mater Clinic in Dublin undergoing heart surgery (as one does!). So rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I would trawl through the archives for some posts I like, or which got a particular reaction from my reader!

This one was posted originally on 17 January 2007.

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I’m going to be off-line for an indeterminate period, laid up in the Mater Clinic in Dublin undergoing heart surgery (as one does!). So rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I would trawl through the archives for some posts I like, or which got a particular reaction from my reader!

This one was posted originally on 2 October 2007.

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What options did Martha have, when Jesus arrived, other than to prepare some food? (Luke 10:38-42)

The casual application of this story worries me a little.

It seems to me that in a culture of hospitality it is imperative that strangers/visitors are welcomed with food and shelter (38/39). To do otherwise is shaming, not just for the family concerned, but also for the whole village. Anyone acting in such a way would be shunned.

This is the cultural norm. This is ‘how we do things around here.’ Martha is being true to the expectations of her community and to her upbringing.(40)

So, what if Martha DID choose Mary’s way? She would be bringing shame on the whole community. She would be throwing over generations of tradition and good practice. She would be breaking ranks.

She would be slapping her community in the face, telling them there are more important things.

And something else disturbing. Jesus commends Mary and colludes in the humiliation of Martha. “Mary has chosen the better thing..” (42)

So.

Is this story REALLY about spending more time with Jesus in preference to rushing about?

Or is it first of all about examining the culture and practices which we accept as given? Is it also about finding a space for outsider voices which serve to highlight to us the dead hand of tradition that constrains us and holds us in thrall? Does it invite us to consider the things we have grown far to familiar with and which may be deadening us to the subversive call of Jesus? Is it about identifying the barriers to following in the Jesus Way?

I’m going to be off-line for an indeterminate period, laid up in the Mater Clinic in Dublin undergoing heart surgery (as one does!). So rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I would trawl through the archives for some posts I like, or which got a particular reaction from my reader!

This one was posted originally on 9 August 2007.

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I’m going to be off-line for an indeterminate period, laid up in the Mater Clinic in Dublin undergoing heart surgery (as one does!). So rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I would trawl through the archives for some posts I like, or which got a particular reaction from my reader!

This one was posted originally on 31 October 2006.

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My daughter told me that her cousin’s dog had eaten the New Testament. I watched her face and observed her eyes and knew she saw the funny side of it as I did and we laughed together.

The buzzard turned lazily, languidly, then fell to earth close to a gathering of wheel-shaped hay bales, before turning up at the last moment disappearing over a hedge.

I lay on his bed, side by side with my young son, his head nestled in the angle between my shoulder and my ear. My thumb stroked his hand as he drifted towards sleep. And I saw that one day, in my later years, the scene could be reversed, and he would stroke the thin skin of my old man’s hand as he nurses me to a more profound sleep.

It was late afternoon. The sun was setting directly to the left of me, casting a long, prone shadow of forty feet or more over a ploughed field. It promptly sprang to attention at the sudden appearance of a hedge.

We sat together, a brown ring inside the cup indicating my coffee was almost done and we talked long and deeply of the collected wisdom of a city florist of his acquaintance.

My wife phoned me, and spoke excitedly of how she wanted me to be the first call with her new phone. I smiled affectionately.

A friend walks around the corner who ordinarily shouldn’t be here. I stop him with a hand on his shoulder, we talk and smile, then linger over coffee and conversation till time beat us.

These are the things I have noticed this week.

And it struck me that there is sufficient in each day to sustain a person if she or he has eyes to see.

In the first chapter of the book of Genesis, as God moved through his work, the one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that as each period passed God noticed it. There was time to pay attention. To remark on how good it was.

Later, on a journey through the desert God fed his people with miraculous food called manna. It required faith to gather it each day and to believe there was enough. Enough to sustain them that day, and to gather it afresh the next, not horded or stored.

Today, TIME is our manna. Given in quantities that are enough for the day. And tomorrow it will be given again, fresh. Time in which we have the opportunity to notice and pay attention. To believe that even in the midst of apparent barrenness there is sufficient.

I’m back with a renewed heart. Surgery went well and recovery was very quick.

I could never be accused of being an Orange man on this annual 12th July celebration, but I walked today. The first walks of my new regime in an effort to get back in shape. Two Saturdays ago today, I rode 40 miles in awful weather. Today, I did two 20 minute walks. It’s an amazing thing.

My new valve is all of 25mm in diameter, and has reduced the workload on my heart. But the effort required to walk 20 mins today was extraordinary. 2 weeks ago 40 miles on the bike was easy and comfortable. Today, returning home and climbing the wee rise at the end of the street felt like ascending the Alpe! Something so small has such an amazing affect.

But this is the day I wanted to get to. The day when I could take step one on the road back to Alpe d’Huez next July, to mark the 1 year anniversary of the surgery. So it was doubly appropriate, to walk on 12th July, and to climb a hill.

I’m going to be off-line for an indeterminate period, laid up in the Mater Clinic in Dublin undergoing heart surgery (as one does!). So rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I would trawl through the archives for some posts I like, or which got a particular reaction from my reader!

This one was posted originally on 6 October 2006.

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I’m going to be off-line for an indeterminate period, laid up in the Mater Clinic in Dublin undergoing heart surgery (as one does!). So rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I would trawl through the archives for some posts I like, or which got a particular reaction from my reader!

This one was posted originally on 4 August 2006.

***********************

I’m going to be off-line for an indeterminate period, laid up in the Mater Clinic in Dublin undergoing heart surgery (as one does!). So rather than leave the blog dormant, I thought I would trawl through the archives for some posts I like, or which got a particular reaction from my reader!

This one was posted originally on 12 October 2007.

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Having studied theology formally for a total of about 5 years I guess I’ve been reasonably well educated in hermeneutics and the tools for good bible study. My bookshelves would even have a book or two of techniques. I’ve tried to understand how texts would have sounded to the original audience, and to make the imaginative jump to contemporary application. All that kinda stuff.

More recently I’ve become interested in how location of reading influences interpretation. What I want to do is understand how the physical location of the PLACE of reading influences our understanding. This came home to me in studies of the prophets in the OT. Read Zech 8:1-8 in a typical suburban home, with two cars in the drive, traffic calming measures in the wide streets outside, adequate street lighting in a reasonably secure community and images like old men and women leaning on walking sticks sitting in the streets watching the children playing (verses 4,5) will have a set of resonances.

Read those same prophetic images in an urban home, without a fenced garden, surrounded by shuttered business premises and boy racers flying up and down the dimly lit streets and a whole new set of resonances emerge. Read them in a packed bar, or a quiet restaurant and potentially something different again.

The WHERE of bible study matters.

Now a third thing. I’ve just finished reading Bob Ekblad’s ‘Reading the Bible with the Damned‘ (what a great title). He argues that the reading community also matters (obvious really). So his chapters move through the scriptures and he rehearses studies with different marginalised groups - reading the Psalms with the dispossessed, reading  Paul with illegals and so on.

Among the most challenging was his chapter ‘Following Jesus, the Good Coyote - reading Paul with undocumented immigrants’. Apparently ‘coyote’ is the term used to describe those operators who illegally smuggle Mexican migrants   across the border into the US. Having paid a fortune to these ‘coyotes’ these migrants are then translated from their place of poverty to the land of promise, where they have no right to be. Do you see where he is going. Jesus is the good coyote who smuggles us from this place of poverty to the place we have no right to be, nor do we merit it.

Ekblad writes:

“Reading Paul with undocumented immigrants, inmates, and ‘criminal aliens’ can clearly bring life to worn-out texts. Reading these Scripture passages in a way that holds onto the radical grace that infuses them requires faith and risk. Though I am fully aware of other texts that emphasise the importance of being subject to governing authorities (Rom 13:1-7) and of walking by the Spirit and not by flesh (Gal 5:16-26) I do not believe that people always need to be presented with the ‘whole picture’. Most people on the society’s margins assume the Scriptures are only about lists of dos and don’ts and calls to compliance. Reading with people whose social standing, family or origin, addictions, criminal history and other factors make compliance with civil laws or scriptural teachings impossible requires a deliberate reading for and acting by grace….Reading Paul with undocumented immigrants and inmates invites us to a radical reorientation away from total allegiance to the state, denominations, and other principalities with their laws and doctrines, towards a 100 percent following after the One crucified outside the camp. Baptism into Christ’s death as a lawbreaker is necessary if one is to effectively serve as a bearer of good news to ..any of today’s undocumented immigrants and outlaws.” (p195-196)

Place and people as critical interpretative tools.

Interesting that, isn’t it?