One syllabus of my life...

I recently accepted a Facebook challenge: "One book a day, for seven days, which has had an effect on you. No details, just the cover." 

Such a challenge can nearly kill me because I always have something more I want to say, but mostly I played by the rules. I chose 7 books from my library shelves, arranged them on my library table in the order in which I had read them, took a photo of each, and posted. After the fact, I realized that in some sense, this list was one possible syllabus of The Life I Read.

I had been tagged for the challenge my the daughter of my dearest high school friend. When Sarah and I were together, our conversations usually began, "What are you reading and what have you learned."  Our primary shared interest was science but there were multiple intersections and crossroads. She read a lot more art and music than I did; I spent more time with poetry and philosophy/theology. Our tastes in fiction/literature were very different but we were both working our way through the recommended reading list for college prep and it really helped to bounce our ideas of each other.

In Sarah's memory, I wanted the first book to be one that we had read and discussed. So I dug deep into the past for Book 1: Albert Schweitzer's autobiography, Out of My Life and Thought, originally published in 1931. Sarah and I read it circa 1965. I have revisited it several times over the years and I bought the 2009 version pictured. 

"I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics." 

- Albert Schweitzer

Book 1

What effect did this book have on me? At a time when I was very unsure if I believed in God at all, it made me consider faith and belief from a different perspective.  I learned that meaningful faith required a lot more than the mental assent to a list of beliefs or even a series of regularly practiced rites and worship. Meaningful faith demanded a day-in-day-out practice (like playing any musical instrument well) and was grounded not only (or possibly not at all) in Scripture but in caring for others.  

Meaningful faith required sacrifices of time, of thought, of talent, of work, of engagement with people and cultures that were not my own, and finally of life itself.

"We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness." - Albert Schweitzer

Book 3

I found myself revisiting Schweitzer's life and thought when I was introduced to Dorothy Day  whose autobiography is titled,  The Long Loneliness.  

"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community." - Dorothy Day

I read Day for many years in bits and pieces as she was quoted by others who shared her devotion to "the care of the least of these," her hands-on care of the poor and displaced, and her social activism.  At first I considered her difficult, strange, and radical but I have come to see that meaningful faith is radical. I've done much of my reading of Dorothy Day digitally but her Selected Writings is part of my print library. 

"I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only by their actions." - Dorothy Day

Book 4

There was a time when Rachel Carson's Silent Spring would have been on my list. It echoes Schweitzer's "Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace." 

Rachel Carson writes beautifully and her work is the bedrock of the environmental movement. "In Nature, nothing exists alone." - Rachel Carson  As much as I love it, I do not have a copy of Silent Spring in my print library so I turned to Annie Dillard. 

I was introduced to Dillard as part of a course on environmental writers but her work is so much more. She has taught me more about seeing the profound in the prosaic, the eternal in the passing moment than any other prose writer. Her books are both environmental and theological in tone and outlook.  I posted both Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the lesser known Teaching a Stone to Talk, Expeditions and Encounters. 

"The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance." - Annie Dillard

Book 7

The seventh book I posted was W. Caleb McDaniel's Sweet Taste of Liberty. A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America. It's an unusual choice for me for a couple of reasons: (1) it's history, very readable history but not a genre I dive deeply into and, frankly, I most likely would not have read it if it had not been written by a friend and (2) it's recently published and I read it within the past year. Ordinarily I allow a book to ferment a bit more before it becomes something that has had an affect on me. 

This book tells the story of one woman and her fight for freedom and justice, justice that is defined as restitution. It gives a particular face to a pervasive problem. 

This book popped onto my reading list at just the right moment when I am seeing more clearly how slavery has always been the Achilles heel of American Democracy. I thought we had fought and won the battle with the Civil Rights Movement and all we needed was some time to bring about "liberty and justice for all." 

I see now that was wishful thinking. Seeing the cost of slavery detailed in one life makes it easier for me to extrapolate to the costs still carried by the black communities today.  

Because I read McDaniel's book, I revisit Dorothy Day's radical social activism which is grounded in radical Christian practice. 

A year ago, I'm not sure I would have seen (perhaps I wouldn't have even tried to see) a case for reparations. Having read this book, I gave full consideration to and endorse without reservation Pete Buttigieg's Douglass Plan for restorative justice. If you want to know about it here is the link:  https://peteforamerica.com/policies/douglass-plan/

Book 2

So what other books were on the list?

Voyage of the Dawntreader. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis which shows how bravery, even in the very small, is powerful and effective in the battle between good and evil.  Reckless, radical faith is often needed and that is an idea that both Schweitzer and Day would have honored.

Book 6

All such lists of books always call me to post one of my favorite theologians which means not only C.S. Lewis but these days whatever has recently come from the pen of either  Walter Brueggemann  or N. T. Wright. I went with this N.T. Wright because it is a very clear statement of how and why no one political party owns the Bible. This book is one of the many that has helped me formalize my insistence that I am neither Evangelical nor Fundamentalist and it is my Christian calling not to be.

Book 5

The remaining selection is from my Evelyn Whitaker Library because it's my project and never far from my heart. I can never pass up a chance to make others aware of the wonderful writings of "the author of Tip Cat" who published anonymously.  Laddie was one of her first published works and tells of the story of a successful London doctor and his loving  mother and his failure to care for her. Over 20 years later Whitaker published another story reversing the gender. A woman nurse of exceptional ability and potential is called home to care for her aged and abusive father. Together the books present a deft contrast between gender roles and societal expectations.  

Reading: C. S. Lewis on prayer

Reflections on the dialog...

SEASONS, my women reading theology group, selected Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer by C. S. Lewis. I had the book on my shelf, highlighted from two previous readings and put off rereading until this week.  I was in for a bit of a shock. Lewis and his imaginary friend Malcolm--an undergraduate with C.S. Lewis, exchanging “interminable letters on the Republic and classical metres, and what was then the “new” psychology!” and now continuing their correspondence on the subject of prayer--are far better read than I. Lewis drops  a lot of names and builds his sentences of countless literary references. Many of the people he mentions are intellectuals, philosophers, believers who wrestle with God or fight against “religion” as idolatry. While I recognized most of the names, I was not as familiar with their thought as I needed to be to fully comprehend Lewis's dialog.

I think Lewis intended this book not only as a treatise on prayer but also as a dialogue with his contemporary theologians on the issues of the day.
In particular Letters to Malcolm addresses Alec Vidler’s Soundings and Bishop of Woolwich John Robinson’s Honest to God.

I began making notes in the margin of my book. Then I decided to create a cheat sheet to share with SEASONS. I worked through the first six chapters. Then I found that someone else had already done so. Wasted effort? No! I have decided that I might want to read Pascal. I discovered a woman novelist, Rose Macauley, to see if I want to read; since she's 20th Century it may be a long well before she climbs to the top of the book stack. Simone Wiel looks very interesting.

This link is to a chapter-by-chapter listing of notes by Arend Smildes which I think the reader will find helpful.

http://www.lewisiana.nl/malcolmquotes/index.htm

The notes I made before I decided not to reinvent the wheel follow:

 

Chapter 1 (sets the scene. This is a “Socratic dialogue”)

 p.3        Republic            by Plato           429 – 347 B.C.           Greek

student of Socrates; founder of the Academy of Athens; the founding philosopher of Western thought.                Quotes:
“Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
“The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.”
“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”
“Nothing beautiful without struggle.”

Chapter 2

 p. 9       Imitation (of Christ)    by Thomas a Kempis 1418 – 1427   German Catholic

priest, monk, hand wrote 2 copies of the Bible (10 volumes)   Quotes:
“If God were our one and only desire we would not be so easily upset when our opinions do not find outside acceptance.”
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
“A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.”
“As long as you live, you will be subject to change, whether you will it or not - now glad, now sorrowful; now pleased, now displeased; now devout, now undevout; now vigorous, now slothful; now gloomy, now merry. But a wise man who is well taught in spiritual labor stands unshaken in all such things, and heeds little what he feels, or from what side the wind of instability blows.”
“Jesus has now many lovers of the heavenly kingdom but few bearers of His cross.”
“Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.”
“The Lord bestows his blessings there, where he finds the vessels empty.”

 p. 10     Letters               Rose Macauley 1881 – 1958       English         Secularist & Anglican

her letters were published in 3 volumes in 1958. Her 26 novels (Towers of Trebizond 1956 semi-autobiographical) often have religious themes; Christianity is treated satirically in early works. An ardent secularist, she had a long (1918-1941) secret affair with Irish novelist Gerald O’Donavan. She returned to the Anglican communion in 1953.  Quotes:
“It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.”
“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”
“Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.”
“It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.”
 

p. 11      Blaise Pascal 1628 -1662         French               Augustinian Catholic (Jansenism)

“On 23 November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He carried this note sewn into his coat. A servant discovered it only by chance after his death. After this experience he began writing the Lettres Provinciales and the Pensees.  Quotes from Pensees:

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadow for those who don't.”
“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”
“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Chapter 3

p. 14     “Manichchaeian” used figuratively as a synonym for “dualist” and suggests, somewhat disparagingly, that this world view simplistically reduces the world to a struggle between Good and Evil. Originally a major Gnostic religion founded by Iranian/Persian Mani, 216 – 276 A.D., Lewis refers not to the original but to the Histoire Critique de Manichee by Isaac de Beausobre, 1659 – 1738.        French Protestant explores the history of heresy and orthodoxy, concludes “God… eternally active and creative”

p. 15     John A.T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich      1919 – 1983              English Anglican Liberal author of Honest to God (1963), Robinson attempted to reconcile the disparate theologies of Tillich and Bonhoeffer. For more information see this article by N. T. Wright:  http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Doubts_About_Doubt.htm

Quotes:
"For it is in making himself nothing, in his utter self-surrender to others in love, that [Jesus] discloses and lays bare the Ground of man's being as Love".
"For assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love".
“…the sacrament which forms the heart of Christian worship is… the assertion of ‘the “beyond” in the midst of our life’, the holy in the common. The Holy Communion is the point at which the common, the communal, becomes the carrier of the unconditional, as the Christ makes himself known in the breaking and sharing of bread.”

Chapter 4

p. 21     Martin Buber 1878 – 1965          Austrian Isarali Jew        Zionist author of               Ich und Du (I and Thou) “dialogical community… dialogical relationships”        Quotes:

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
“Solitude is the place of purification.”
“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”

Chapter 5

p. 28     Juvenal 127 A.D              Roman poet “bread and circuses”

              “enormous prayers which heaven in vengeance grants”

 Chapter 6

 

p. 29     Alexander Vidler 1899 – 1991    English   Anglican priest, publisher, “new” theology              editor of Theology to which C.S. Lewis contributed, scholor of F.D. Marice

edited Soundings, collection of essays on Christian theology and the sciences. Quote:
"We are all sure that there is a way ahead, else we should not have taken up our pens. We have been less disconcerted by our differences than surprised by our concurrencies."

 F. D. Maurice 1805 – 1872             English   Christian socialist,

Proponet of women’s education, Unitarian family, ordained Anglican, deprived of Cambridge professorships for “unsound theology”  Quotes:
"The Bible," we are told sometimes, "gives us such a beautiful picture of what we should be." Nonsense! It gives us no picture at all. It reveals to us a fact: it tells us what we really are; it says, This is the form in which God created you, to which He has restored you; this is the work which the Eternal Son, the God of Truth and Love, is continually carrying on within you.
“The desire for unity has haunted me all my life through; I have never been able to substitute any desire for that, or to accept any of the different schemes for satisfaction of that men have desired.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906 – 1945             German             Lutheran              anti-Nazi
             Christianity in a secular world.               Quotes:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
“A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.”
“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”
“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.....We must not.....assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.”

 p. 30    John Newman 1801 – 1890           English    Anglican convert to Catholicism, Cardinal,  leader of the Oxford Movement... Quotes:

”We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”
“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

 Simone Wiel 1909 – 1943 French               agnostic Jew, philosopher  Scholar of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Greek & Egyptian mystery religions. Sometimes described as a "Christian mystic, she baptized late in her life into the Roman Catholic communion by Thomas Merton.      Quotes:

 “All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
“It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. ”

 I collected most of the quotes by googling an author's name and selected the goodreads quotation link that popped up. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes

 

And another resource for reading C. S. Lewis:

http://www.cslewis.org/resources/studyguides/Study%20Guide%20-%20Letters%20to%20Malcolm.pdf

"with a little help from my friends"

• Blogging.  I started this blog because I felt like a stalker reading the blogs of some of the younger women at church.  I wanted to share my life with them as they shared theirs with me.  If I had known what I was doing when I first started,  I might have chosen WordPress rather than Blogger.  I knew I would be posting about my reading but I didn't know that my blog would prove interesting to a different audience than I originally thought.  WordPress is a more "academic" choice, I think, but I've found Blogger to be easy to use and I like its Google tie-in.   I don't post often enough; once a week would be about right for my blog. I think of things to post; I just don't sit down and do it; I'd rather read.  Even my husband of 40 years has discovered things he didn't know about me in my blog.  Because it's in some sense a shared journal, I say things that I never mention otherwise.  I follow several blogs of people I don't know. 

One of my favorite blogs is written by the man who fills Hugh Latimer's pulpit.  Malcolm Guite offers a mix of theology, literature, poetry, and music, especially classic rock.  I've become a great fan of his poetry and of his lovely voice reading it.  His November 4th blog is about The Inklings "exploring the thesis that far from being backward-looking, reactionary or escapist, the Inklings were fully and prophetically engaged with the main streams of modernity, that they foresaw the coming crisis of meaning in the materialist West, and in particular the attendant crises of violence and environmental degradation. I have tried to explain the way they forged a coherent alternative vision, which called for us to reintegrate Imagination and Reason as ways of knowing truth and relating to one another and the world." http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/blog/ 

• Facebook.  What a great way to stay in touch with friends and family and because of fb I didn't lose contacts that might have been lost after the huge computer disaster last January.  I  enjoy short visits with many of my cousins and now know who their kids and grandkids are and what they look like.  I enjoy updates on nieces and nephews.  Being back in touch with so many of my friends from South Plains and Floydada High School is so much fun--what wonderful, interesting people they are!  I treasure all "my kids" from Sunday School that have friended (what a word!) me--I usually wait for them to invite me because I really don't want to be too nosy.  As some age-related health limitations limit some of my abilities to minister, it's wonderful that I can be aware of their needs for prayer and encouragement.  Facebook kept me in touch with Peter Whitaker who has been a superb resource for biographical information about Evelyn Whitaker.  Publishing facebook links to my blog and to my website increased my traffic.  http://www.evelynwhitakerlibrary.org/id59.html

•  I was disappointed that one of the facebook revisions removed what I thought was my link catalog.  I have just started using Pinterest's pin board and I think it might work for some purposes.  I like the boards that I can collect; I like the visual links which make scanning my boards easy.  I'll have to play around with it a bit to see if it really does answer my needs.   Is there some other alternative?   I find that I collect links the way I collect books.  Of course that's what the Favorites bar is designed to do, I think, but for some reason things just get buried and forgotten there.  Often I save groups of related links  by opening a Word file then I copy & paste the links and add comment into the .docx.  For me that functions somewhat the old index card files that used to write college papers but I keep thinking there has to be something better.  Even if that "something" isn't Pinterest, I'm enjoying yet another time sink. http://pinterest.com/KCummingsPipes/

• I think I want my own personal version of  Arts & Letters Daily.  I first found this website by clicking a link on a friend's blog.  It's a good way to stay informed and to discover things I might miss.  http://www.aldaily.com/

• Library Thing is an on-line catalog for my library and provides the side bars for my blog.  It is also now the sole beneficiary of any associates income from clicks of the Amazon links in my blog.  I also enjoy the ratings and reviews of my fellow readers. I've written a few of these myself.  I'm always behind here because I just cannot teach the books to catalog themselves.   The first 50 books are free so you can give this tool a thorough test drive and I considered their life-time membership a great bargain.  http://www.librarything.com/profile/KCummingsPipes

• Pandora.  When KUHF bought KTRU I was most upset.  The Rice radio station had only offered  "alternative" programming while refusing to air anything that I might care about (like Rice athletics or programming from the Shepherd School of Music or faculty interviews) so I was not a listener, especially since the weak signal is not well received at my house.  KUHF, on the other hand, was my radio station for classical music and their plans to move the classical  programming to 91.7 FM  was not a happy one for me.  So once again my young friends led me by example to Pandora and suggested stations to me.  I really appreciate MGB's suggestion of Harold Budd radio and with the add variety button I've got a great shuffle.    I think getting some music back into my day has helped with my depression which has been a real trial this year.
• http://www.pandora.com/#!/stations/play/601253876655993859

• Several interesting books and a couple or three good movies have first been called to my attention by younger friends.  Among these are: 

Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans previously blogged here
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
The Help by Kathryn Stockett previously blogged here
The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as interpreter of Israel's scripture. Richard B. Hays
Many, many children's literature titles and some wonderful lit crit. and reading lists for the courses I didn't take.  For these gifts I am most grateful,  to my goddaughter, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, and to my fellow blogger Victoria Ford Smith running with carrots.

Some of my friends:  Luci, Debra, Whitney, Martha, Me, Chelsie, Bobbie, Belinda, Brandy, Beverly

• The most important thing I've learned from my younger friends is the sheer joy of friendship and ministry.  Wedding and baby showers had become for me social obligation and Christian duty.  I have relearned what I once knew:   life is joyful and celebrations bring us together and let us share joy.  The time spent in planning/preparing (which I once thought  wasted or "over dosing on Martha Stewart" as I have often thought and sometimes said) is part of the celebration and joy and that time has helped me connect and deepen relationships with some of my younger friends. 

Evolving...

SEASONS (my women reading theology group at church) will meet on Saturday to discuss Evolving in Monkey Town:  How a girl who knew all the answers learned to ask the questions  by Rachel Held Evans.  (link to amazon to sample the book)  It's a book that would have been a huge help when I was a freshman in high school and first met Mr. Darwin and his theory.  Like the author, I found  science challenged my faith.  Unlike the author, I kept my own counsel--for decades I shared my doubts with only a very few trusted ones.

After a brief time of private atheism, I found that I just could not live if life--all life, my life--was random accident. The world is full of beauty and I can never quite shake the thought that beauty has a source and a purpose and that somehow beauty and truth are linked. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." So Keats and other nature poets formed my canon. For many years, I kept a journal that consisted of each day's one moment of supreme beauty and found myself feeling gratitude.  To whom?   Having been a doubting Christian, I became a doubtful atheist.  Beauty, gratitude and those second doubts led me step-by-step back to faith.  I came to think of God as "source and sustainer."

My mother, with whom I had shared some of my doubts, encouraged me to just read the Bible, and reach my own conclusions about what it said and what it meant.  She suggested I start with the  Psalms--more poetry.  The Writings of Hebrew Scripture--wisdom literature, the prophets, the song book of Israel--became my primary biblical text.  Most Psalms are not didactic but responsive--responsive to life situations, responsive to pain, responisve to injustice, responsive to a community, responsive to God.  The Psalms are not afraid to question God and I learned to be honest (with myself at least) about my doubts because a God who is "source and sustainer of all that has being" is certainly big enough to handle my questions.

Like Rachel Held Evans, I was troubled by all the great crowd of people, past and present, who could not believe because they had not heard.  "If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn't good news at all.  For most of the human race, it is terrible news."  p. 92  I was well-versed in the Girls Auxiliary of the Women's Missionary Union but it seemed "not right" that God would condemn those who had been born at the wrong place and the wrong time and it was unrealistic to expect that missionaries could reach across geography and cultures and centuries to preach to all people and offer them the Jesus choice.   If there is a God, God must be as merciful as  just, as gracious as  righteous.   "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end." [Lamentations 3:22-24; not all biblical poetry is found in Psalms.]

For people of compassion the idea of almost universal condemnation to eternal torment is quite troubling.  For many it is the sticking point; my father was concerned for all the Native Americans and for the hypocrisy he found in the church.  Even more troubling are the Christians who "are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell." p. 113 My cousin is so troubled by what she learned as a child "from pretty Sunday school teachers who smelled like peppermint and let me call them by their first names"  p. 27, so offended by  unkind dogma, that she cannot even listen or seek the comfort that might be found in a more mature faith.

 I was very comforted by C.S. Lewis whom Rachel Held Evans quotes on p. 139:  "We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ.  We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him."  Even more comforting to me than Mere Christianity was the story from The Last Battle in the Chronicles of Narnia when the young warrior who has faithfully served Tash discovers himself in Aslan's country where he immediately loves the great lion who has always loved him. 

By the time I graduated from college, I had a very thorough understanding of Darwin's theory, as it had been first written and as it had been revised.  I understood science far better and had a fuller appreciation of its beauty.  Oddly, the more science I learned and the more open my mind, the easier it was to say with Charlotte Yonge:  "some when, some how, God..."   For me there is no conflict between science and faith but there is an almost constant conversation between them.  I understand that science itself is not "the truth" but an understanding of truth in constant evolution.

"By little and by little" [Dorothy Day] I found faith to believe... most of the time... and a few years of reading Zen taught me to think of Christian life as a practice.  Even when I feel no belief, I practice Christianity:  I meditate, I pray, I read the Bible, I assemble with the saints, I sing songs of thanksgiving, I devote myself to good works.

Like Rachel Held Evans, I learned that "obedience--with or without answers--was the only thing that could save me from this storm."  p. 106  

When I spend time studying the Bible and time reading books by serious biblical scholars, when I see new ways of understanding biblical text and the world around me, when I get to talk with others who are also asking questions, I find it easier to believe.  Among the more recent books that have evolved my faith is  N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope (previously blogged) which is also mentioned in Evolving in Monkey Town p.173.

Most of my doubts are now a faint and fading echo but, for me, faith is never simple.   I walk a somewhat rocky Way through a dark valley.  I am a believer and  a Christian.  I take biblical text seriously.  I am neither a Fundamentalist nor an Evangelical.    I believe in God and in Christ Jesus, Messiah,  who brings life from death.  I believe in "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."    Everything else is subject to change. 

"Evolution means letting go of our false fundamentals so that God can get into those shadowy places we're not sure we want" God "to be.  It means being okay with being wrong, okay with not having all the answers, okay with never being finished." p. 23

What I'm reading...

I intended to blog more often this year but...  I'd planned to blog on my birthday a week and a half ago and woke up sick.  The next day my computer didn't wake up at all.  The following Monday my husband became very ill.  It will be a long time before I've put all the pieces back together but everyone and every thing at least seems to be up and functioning more or less normally.

What I've been reading:

Fiction:

Conroy, Pat: The Prince of Tides. 1986.  Kindle.  I seldom read any best-selling book until it's been kicking around a few years.  "Popular" does not equal "time-tested" and there is so little time to read.  I also tend to avoid 20th Century male authors; their world view is often too depressing for me.  I knew I would love this book and I also knew I would hate it.  I loved the first half and hated the last half;  I prefer "elegy" to "nightmare."   Pat Conroy wrote a great novel in the tradition of the great Southern novel with the requisite beauty, quirky characters, and disfunction.  kindle location [kl] 859 "...you're southern to the bone, Savannah.  It don't wash out."  loc 1268 "The southern way?" she said.  "My mother's immortal phrase.  We laugh when the pain gets too much.  We laugh when the pity of human life gets too... pitiful. We laugh when there's nothing else to do."  "When do you weep... according to the southern way?" "After we laugh, Doctor.  Always.  Always after we laugh."  kl 3646 "...in the South.  Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence."  kl 3748 "I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position."   It has some wonderful descriptions of childhood and some painful ones:   kl 169 "Later when we spoke of our childhood, it seemed part elegy, part nightmare."  kl 1504 "There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory."  kl 3046 "There is no fixing a damaged childhood.  The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float."  It offers descriptions and commentary upon the 20th Century struggles against racism and those of feminism and environmentalism.   kl 201 "This has not been an easy century to endure."  Chapter 18 should be required reading.  I don't know that I've ever fully appreciated the role of a coach, despite having a couple in my family.  The descriptions of the North Carolina locale are heart-breakingly beautiful and made me want to go live on an island and fish. One of my favorite quotes is about reading:  kl 997 "You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read.  People that like to read are always a little fucked up."  There is, of course, a movie and it's a good one but the book is better.  I've decided to read some more Conroy: My Reading Life.  Doubleday, 2010.  Kindle.

Victorian scholarship:

Adams, Maureen: Shaggy Muses.  The dogs who inspired Virginia Woolfe, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte. New York:  Ballantine Books, 2007. Kindle.  My friend, Cathey Roberts, recommended this book {she also mentioned a seminar on Creativity and Madness which riffs nicely with Conroy's book and brought a smile to DMP}and I immediately downloaded it and read it straight through without iterruption--one of the advantages of physical weakness and no computer is that one may read and read and read. kl 3361 Quoting Virginia Woolfe:  "Half the horrors of illness cease when one has a book or a dog or a cup of one's own at hand."   kl 4496 "Like many creative people, she [Emily Dickinson] depended on someone else to oversee the balance between having time alone against the need for connection with others to avoid being engulfed by the work."  Emily Dickinson and her friend Susan Gilbert, who married Emily's brother, "shared a hatred of housework, a love of literature, and an intense interest in religion."  Sounds a bit like me. 

My "intense interest in religion" groups six very different books:. 

I'm continuing the Annie Dillard Reader and have just finished the excerpts from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, perhaps my favorite work of mysticism.  kl 4236 "that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames." kl 4270 "An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.  He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn.  In a couple of years, what he will have learned is how to fake it..."  kl 4567 "But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.  The literature of illumination reveals this above all:  although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise...  I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam."  . 

I was asked to read an excerpt from For the Time Being during a Sunday worship--which I was too ill to read--and as a result I'm reading W. H. Auden's Collected Longer Poems which I haven't touched since my undergraduate course with Dr.  Monroe K Spears, Poetry of W.H. Auden: Disenchanted Island.  I have a much better appreciation of the modern poets now than I did in my youth. 

"Remembrance of the moment before last

Is like a yawning drug."

Several weeks ago, DMP and I went to see the new Narnia movie which has given us an excuse to re-run the movies and re-read the books.  I first read C.S. Lewis's literary scholarship (the dreaded and still dispised Milton semester with Alan Grob) and happened upon Voyage of the Dawntreader so I started the series in the middle.  It's always been my favorite and  one reason is that dear swashbuckling mouse Reepicheep reminds me so very much of DMP.  This story is also a commentary upon "reading the right books" and celebrates imagination rather than information.  A lesson that our universities might well learn before they slash the funding for humanities and libraries.

I continue my slow progress through Robert Alter's The Book of Psalms which is masterful and magnificent.  From the 39th Psalm:  "Let me know, O LORD, my end and what is the measure of my days.  I would know how fleeting I am... a nothing... mere breath.... For I am a sojourner with You, a new settler like all my fathers.  Look away from me, that I may catch my breath before I depart and am not." 

These psalm readings work really well with the book that is the companion of the Open Door class study of Genesis.  Walter Brueggemann's Land kl 231 "...any society is likely to treat its land in the same way it treats its women."  kl 307 "...land is never simply physical dirt but is always physical dirt freighted with social meanings derived from historical experience."  kl 485 "Biblical faith begins with the radical announcment of discontinuity that intends to initiate us into a new history of anticipation.... rooted in the speech of God..."

Blog note:  I will continue using the Amazon associate links and images in the text of the blog because Amazon usually allows readers to take a look inside or download a sample.  I've switched the sidebars to LibraryThing which lets me maintain an on-line catalog and collection lists.  They have the advantage of being readable on the Kindle.   http://www.librarything.com/home/KCummingsPipes 

I first saw the LibraryThing used in Catherine Pope's Victorian Geek blog: http://blog.catherinepope.co.uk/2011/01/an-eye-for-an-eye-by-anthony-trollope/ and clicked the link in one of sidebars.  The first 200 books is a free membership if you want to give it a try.