The title is misleading as it isn't his god that Keller is describing as prodigal (tho that would have made for an interesting book on its own), rather this is an in depth analysis of the story of the prodigal son, which Keller considers the central story of Xtianity. I found his arguments that both the elder and younger sons were prodigal and "lost" to their father's/god's love interesting -- the younger son in the obvious way of running wild and not obeying the rules and the older son in the much less obvious way of obeying the rules only in order get benefits for himself. In Keller's view, obedience must be motivated solely by love and joy to count -- if you're obeying out of fear or to get promised rewards or to use it as leverage, it not only doesn't count with his god but counts against you. That in Keller's opinion is the true teaching of the prodigal son.
So far, so good. I could see that interpretation but then Keller went on into theories about how Jesus was the unmentioned 2nd older brother who sacrificed himself to save the younger brother, and how the crucifiction made all things better for those who accepted Jesus as their supernatural savior and all that etc. The point at which Keller veered from philosophy into the supernatural was where it all fell apart -- mistaking shaky premises for valid theories, and unproven (and unprovable) theories for fact backed up by evidence (that didn't need to be presented). The last third of the book is all preaching to the choir and can be skipped without fear of missing something significant.
The Reason for God, I'm rather sorry to say, is starting out even less promising. The subtitle is "belief in an Age of Skepticism" and is meant to provide reasons why belief in the supernatural in general and the Xtian supernatural in particular is rational -- I just finished chapter one and all it offered was the usual "the faithless have faith too!" nonsense, accompanied by weak justifications for why Xtianity should therefore be allowed to run rampant. Not the way Keller said it of course, but that's what it comes down to. I'm afraid this book starts out geared towards those who accept the supernatural and goes from there. He does use a pair of atheists turned Xtians as examples but gives no insight into what changed their minds. They apparently just decided, after much reading, that "Xtianity cannot be refuted". Tells me exactly nothing. I'm going to finish this book -- Keller is a glib writer so it's an easy read -- but I'm fighting disappointment already.
At tea today my stepmother gave me a wonderful little book, published in 1928, titled Fourteen Great Detective Stories. It was one of her dad's books and she thought I would like it, and I do, almost as much for its age as for the subject matter. Altho the binding is a little delicate in places, the book is still in one piece, remarkable in these days when a book can fall apart during the first reading.
I did very much enjoy Arnaldur Indridason's Hypothermia, an Icelandic detective thriller that pulled together a modern murder along with three old mysteries, while leaving a few intriguing threads loose. The main misdeed is the possible murder of a wealthy young woman by her broke husband and his girlfriend, which may have also been a non-murder but incredibly despicable encouragement to suicide of someone distracted by despair. Indridason's a cool, crisp writer and excellent storyteller and, while I'm finding Icelandic names worse than French or Japanese names to pronouce (I read aloud), it is also a satisfying challenge. I look forward to his second book, Operation Napoleon.
From Habits, Differences and the Light that Abides
In the shapliness of life, habit plays its sovereign role. The religious literally wear it. Most people take action by habit in small things more often than in important things, for it's the simple matters that get done readily, while the more somber and interesting, taking more effort and being more complex, often must wait for another day. Thus, we could improve ourselves quite well by habit, by its judicious assistance, but it's more likely that habits rule us.
From Comfort
I woke in the night and heard the rain. No more sleep then, at least for a while, so wholeheartedly did I lie and listen. For doesn't the rain descend to us importantly? What have we, in the whole theater of our inventiveness -- all five continents of it -- so wonderful as this machinery of the wild world: water falling out of the sky!
[OK, overblown, but I do love the rain myself and few things make me feel more content or folded in invisible arms than listening to rainfall at night. I can only listen for a few minutes, tho, before falling deeply asleep.]
From Home
The constancy of the physical world, with its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, . . .
[Now, that's just pretty as well as true, at least for me. Time spent in the physical world does seem to improve my personal nature.]
It is the intimate, never the general, that is teacherly. The idea of love is not love. The idea of ocean is neither salt nor sand; the face of the seal cannot rise from the idea to stare at you, to astond your heart. Time must grow thick and merry with incident, before thought can begin.
[Quite the tonic after too much navel gazing.]
This last bit also comes from the Habits . . . essay, but it's a longish bit and I may ramble a bit afterwards so I tucked it away at the end for convenience:
Men and women of faith who pray -- that is, who come to a certain assigned place, at definite times, and are not abashed to go down on their knees -- will not tarry for the cup of coffee or the newsbreak or the end of the movie when the moment arrives. The habit, then, has become their life. What some might call the restrictions of the daily office they find to be an opportunity to foster the inner life. The hours are appointed and named; they are the Lord's. Life's fretfulness is transcended. The different and the novel are sweet, but regularity and repetition are also teachers. Divine attentiveness cannot be kept casually, or visited only in season, like Venice or Switzerland. Or, perhaps it can, but then how attentive is it? And if you have no ceremony, no habits, which may be opulent or may be simple but are exact and rigorous and familiar, how can you reach toward the actuality of faith, or even a moral life, except vaguely?
I find the thought of ceremony and such being required for a moral life very odd. I don't see the connection at all and do not feel that Oliver explained it in her essay. Of course, it may not have been her intention to, it may have been a throw-away comment on her part, but for me it struck a distracting off-note.
Gone Baby Gone, by Dennis Lehane. This guy has definitely won a place in my heart as favorite detective mystery writer, a spot too long vacant after Tony Hillerman's death and Charlie Huston's ending the Joe Pitt series. This is the book that was made into a movie that, in my opinion, too few people saw. Directed by Ben Affleck (who I believe has found his true artistic niche) and starring his brother Casey, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris, it was a tense, gripping and incredibly affecting thriller, particularly the final scene which, while quietly rendered, really hit me between the eyes. But back to the book. In addition to having all the qualities of the movie there was Lehane's wonderful writing, character development and the continuing evolution of relationships between and among the characters.
The plot, for those who have neither read the book nor seen the movie, involves a pair of blue collar Boston detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, who are now romantically as well as professionally involved. They get pulled into a case involving a missing girl, her concerned aunt and uncle and zoned out mother. The case takes many twists and turns, a few dead ends (some of them literal) and a surprise conclusion that, when I saw the movie years ago, I did not see coming. The book has an additional treat of two minor characters that did not make it into the movie but that bookend the novel in a very satisfying way, making up for some of the horrors in the middle of the story. This is, I will say, a very difficult story to read if you have any sensitivity about child abuse at all, and how many of us do not? Still, this is a good story, well told and unless you know that this is a button you should not go near I do recommend both it and the movie.
After Henry, by Joan Didion. This is a collection of essays taken from the New York Times and New York Review of Books and covers politics and social troubles in Washington California and New York. I didn't care much for the Washington pieces, tho the review of various books written about the Reagans was interesting. Naturally I gravitated toward essays about my home state, California, and was very taken with Girl of the Golden West, about Patricia Hearst, which examines both Hearst's experience and the public's varied reaction to it. I remember myself how sympathetic people initially were, then condemning after she joined the SLA and then simply confused about how to feel during her trial. She was simply not a compelling victim, some found various of her kidnappers easier to relate to or at least more pitiable. The problem, as Didion points out, is that Hearst was good at telling us how it happened, but not why. Why was what everyone was avid to know, but all Hearst had to offer up were the practicalities of survival in a surreal situation. As Didion put it:
. . . it was also the point at which she was most specifically the child of a certain culture. Here is the single personal note in an emigrant diary kept by a relative of mine, William Kilgore, the journal of an overland crossing to Sacramento in 1850: "This is one of the trying mornings for me, as I now have to leave my family, or back out. Suffice it to say, we started." Suffice it to say. Don't examine your feelings, they're no help at all. Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. . . . This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why.
Hard tho it can be to imagine now, in an age of endless self-reflection and a cliched California heritage of fruits and nuts, there was another California heritage at one time and it was much tougher and tighter lipped. I'm just old enough to remember it, and to have come of age during its fading.
The New York section has only one essay, the long and weirdly named Sentimental Journeys, about the Central Park jogger. As usual, Didion has a more involved and complicated take on that than most people do, and an against-the-grain view on not naming rape victims in the newspaper. Well worth reading, but frustrating and unsettling, just as the original reports and trial were.
Now onto my failures. I have once again tried, and failed, to read A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin. I'm sorry, normally I eat this kind of thing up but I just don't care for Martin's writing style. He's not as bad as Anne Rice, but there's still way too much purple going on for my taste except, interestingly enough, in the case of the Tyrion character. Unfortunately, better writing for one character isn't going to carry me thru even a single book, much less a lenghy series.
Califia's Daughters, by Leigh Richards (a pen name for mystery writer Laurie R. King) is also normally the kind of thing I eat up -- near future dystopia where the male sex has been almost eliminated and/or rendered largely infertile, leaving society to stumble along with mostly women and a diminishing number of children. Yes, I get off on the irony of it all, but this time I just couldn't get into it. I'm not really sure why, usually I like King's writing, but this story just struck me too dull to stick with. Sorry, Laurie.
There was another bookish lad in the town, John Collins by name, with whom I was intimately acquainted. We sometimes disputed, and very fond we were of argument, and very desirous of confuting one another, which disputatious turn, by the way, is apt to become a very bad habit, making people often extremely disagreeable in company by the contradiction that is necessary to bring it into practice; and thence, besides souring and spoiling the conversation, is productive of disgusts and, perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship. I had caught it by reading my father's books of dispute about religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinborough.
I'm hoping to find out later in the autobiography exactly what Edinburgh did to Franklin.
There was this bit, for instance, at the end of Trout Lilies, about the poet as a young girl spending hours in a meadow:
All I know is, there was a light that lingered, for hours,
under her eyelids -- that made a difference
when she went back to a difficult house, at the end of the day.
I can remember, when I lived with my mother, spending as much time out of the house as I could, often in vacant lots which was the closest a city girl could get to a meadow. But those lots had tall grasses and weeds, butterflies and ants and beetles and the occasional mouse or lizard, and it was enough to put a light under my eyelids that lasted after I went home, where I needed to keep my eyes closed -- metaphorically or literally -- as much as possible.
And then there is this snippet from Snow Geese, that brings back less fraught memories:
. . . I
held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us . . .
When I was about 10 or so, staying with relatives who had a small farm, I was standing outside one day staring up at the sky which was a pure turquoise blue. I didn't notice the crow until it flew right in front of my face, apparently only inches from my nose. It was so close that its raised wing almost blotted out the sky, except for triangles of blue showing between glossy black spread feathers. I got such a good look because it seemed that time froze at that point, letting me look as long as I wanted to at those feathers and the sky behind them. I know when the moment ended, the bird was long gone. It never occured to me that I might have caused that to happen by holding my breath.
The only other poem I got something out of (none of the poems did anything for me as a whole) was Daisies, with these lines:
. . . What do I know.
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; . . .
. . . I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch --
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.
I think that has pretty much been my outlook on things since I was born, tho I would have never put it quite that way.
I picked Red Bird first because this was the collection Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for -- at least I think it is. In any case, I found a number of poems I enjoyed in fragments and a few I enjoyed as a whole.
There is, for instance, this which I think is stanza 4 for Sometimes:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
I wonder if Oliver reads Chet Raymo, or if he reads her, because that's almost exactly Raymo's definition of a natural prayer.
I identified particularly with this snippet from Night and the River:
. . . I could not tell
which fit me
more comfortably, the power,
or the powerlessness,
neither would have me
entirely; I was divided,
consumed,
by sympathy,
pity, admiration.
The poem is about a bear and a fish but it describes the way I feel about life in general. I feel much more awkward about it than Oliver does.
Oliver also talks a lot, often in the standard complaining style of the post-hippie, neo-Avatar earthling, about cities, civilization and progress, etc, which can get tiresome when I consider how unwilling I'd be to go back to the old days but there are these reminders which strike me as worth pinning up somewhere:
from Boundaries,
Someday we'll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is this green world.
and this, which is an entire poem:
Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes
That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?
Oliver mentions recently coming to faith in one of her poems, which accounts for more mention of god than I've seen before when coming across her work in a magazine or book. Not a problem for me, tho I do prefer this poem which is in her older, more nature-oriented style:
I am the one
I am the one
who took your hand
when you offered it to me.
I am the pledge of emptiness
that turned around.
Even the trees smiled.
Always I was the bird
that flew off through the branches.
Now
I am the cat
with feathers
under its tongue.
It may be just me, that that sounds like something to recite at a wedding.
- Location:United States, California, Long Beach
- Mood:
thoughtful
I love cooking shows (Nadia G's Bitchin' Kitchen, Two Fat Ladies, and No Reservations are all recommended), movies about cooking (Big Night is a must see), cooking blogs (altho she doesn't update often, Power to the Bauer is a gem) and, of course, books about food and cooking.
Wizenberg's book is the one I've felt most confortable with as she is refreshingly free of neurosis and positively low-strung. And I recognize the sort of life she's living, the choices she makes and her endearing fondness for vegetarians. She's a food-based soul mate.
Now, this book I mined mostly for dishes that looked easy enough for me to try and I did find several -- a nearly flourless chocolate cake she made for her wedding, coconut macaroons (I've always wanted a really good recipe for them), red cabbage salad and butternut soup among them -- but there were a few other tidbits I'd like to share:
And you know that expression, "to spread like wildfire?" Well, at one point during the evening, Keaton told us about some bit of news she'd heard at the office, and about how, she said, "it spread like wildflowers!" Then she paused and wrinkled her brow, sensing that something was amiss, and we dissolved into howls. Spread like wildflowers. Isn't that great? It's so much better than wildfire, and yet still fitting.
Yes, that is great. If my increasingly sieve-like mind can manage to retain it, I'm going to use it.
The beauty of having routines and habits lies in letting my hands and feet think for me, and in giving my brain a break. My predilection for routine may make me a little boring, but it does keep my teeth nice and clean.
Preach on, sister. I am a great lover of predictable.
One last thing I wanted to mention: like every foodie writer I've ever read, she's spent time in that Mecca of cooking, France, and come away with a passion for the simple, very French treat of bread and chocolate -- that's French bread and very dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa). I happened to have both on hand, and after having heard so much about it so often, I decided to try it. Perhaps it needs melting (Wizenberg did suggest warming it a bit) but it did absolutely nothing for me. It wasn't bad at all, but to me those two items just made no sense together. Maybe one needs to be in France, something I can only dream about.
While roaming the grocery aisles, I noticed the book and magazine section had a rather large selection of Xtian books (they are so, so silenced and ignored in this society!) and two in particular caught my eye: The Reason for God, and The Prodigal God. When I noticed they were written by the same man, the Rev. Timothy Keller, and were both 25% off, I decided to pick them up.
I hadn't noticed, till I got them home, that one of them was blurbed by Rick Warren, so I hope I haven't made an inexpensive mistake. However, the back cover also compares him to C. S. Lewis, and I notice that the emphasis is on reasons to believe in god, not the idea that god can be proven.
Because, of course, such a thing can never be proven regardless of which god, myth or supernatural being one tries to make a case for. Matters of faith are by definition devoid of evidence, upon which proof depends and facts exist. I have no patience with religous who claim god can be proven, esp. those who also claim not to have to provide said proof. You've got nothing, admit it -- the conversation will go better if we're all honest.
I also don't believe, as some religious seem to, that one can choose to believe in the supernatural or at the very least in their version of god. I don't think anyone can choose what to believe any more that one can choose who to love or desire. We can only choose what we do, not what we feel.
And there's the only arguement the religious can honestly make -- is there a reason to act "as if" such a god exists, and "as if" it wants particular things from people? The general acceptance that a god is real and does have certain rules (which vary from believer to believer, tellingly enough) makes me constantly curious to understand their basis, and willing to read books that claim to explain it.
Tho to this point I've never not been disappointed. I've come across some very good reasons, but not ones that were based exclusively on god-belief. That seems to me the deciding factor -- that there is no other basis for something essential to human life and society other than accepting the possiblity of a god and acting accordingly.
- Mood:
contemplative
Vowell's interest in Hawaiian history was peaked in part by her own family history:
When I was spending time with those Hawaiians whose ancestors signed the petitions against annexation that were sent to Congress, I couldn't help but think back to the fruitless petition the Cherokee also sent to Congress to protest their removal. "Our only fortress is the justice of our cause," said the petition signed by my ancestors. Alas, having read the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, I know that a sturdier fortress than a just cause is an actual fortress.
I like that this book is not just a political history, but considers the customs, native history and strenghs and weaknesses of the Hawaiian people pre-whites, and the changes they made on their own without pressure from missionaries (tho not always without influence from them). There is, for instance, this interesting little tidbit:
In Hawaii, it was forbidden -- kapu -- for men and women to eat together. Women were also barred from eating certain foods, notably bananas because the sight of females consuming phallic fruit offended Hawaiian men.
It really was a different world. The missionaries who eventually came along to introduce Hawaiians to new and even odder kapu's are cut no slack:
That's what a mission is -- a bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong.
. . .
I spent enough time in churches when I was young to know that this has been standard Christian rhetoric for two thousand years. So routine that a reader who goes to Sunday school might just breeze past all the "subduing" and the "belongs" and the "possession" without even noticing it, not questioning the notion that Jesus holds title to the planet. But I can no longer read any faith's Napoleonic saber rattling without picturing smoking rubble on cable news.
Which is not to say that she has no sympathy for the missionaries sincere intentions, or the positive qualities of Christianity:
Merry Whitney's echo of Winthrop's sentiment, which was an echo of Paul's belief, is a crucial reminder of one of the finest principles of Christianity in general and New England's Congregational brand of Protestantism in particular. Scrape off every irritating trait that mars Mercy and her shipmates -- xenophobia, condescension, spiritual imperialism, and self-righteous disdain -- and they have an astonishing aptitude for kinship and public-inspired love.
. . .
Granted, the considerable downside of that region's neighborly disposition is an ill-mannered contempt for anyone who deviates from New England's austere aesthetic and narrow moral code. But that does not make their capacity for community any less beautiful.
Nor does she put the oneous for screwing with the Hawaiians totally on the missionaries heads, there's more than enough blame to go around here:
The Hawaiian people, with their ancient balance between spiritual beliefs and earthly pleasure, were suddenly freed of or in need of an official religion, depending on one's point of view, and about to entertain swarms of haole gate-crashers representing opposing sides of America's schizophrenic divide -- Bible-thumping prudes and sailors on leave. Imagine if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted the Values Voter Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously -- for forty years.
This is a very entertaining and lively book, and I found myself wishing from time to time that Vowell would "do" California as well, but then our history has been very deftly handled by native daughter Joan Didion and it seems greedy to ask for more.
Profile
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1)
ashen_light- ashen_light
