Review of A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

Austenalia, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

A Jane Austen Education

How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

by William Deresiewicz

The Penguin Press, New York, 2011. 255 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

I’m a huge Jane Austen fan. I wrote a paper on her my Sophomore year of college. I had lots of time in which to write the paper — so I read ALL her novels, and then wrote the paper staying up all night the night before it was due.

A Jane Austen Education is perhaps my favorite so far of nonfiction Jane Austen take-offs. William Deresiewicz was a graduate student of literature, and he writes about how things he learned from Jane Austen mirrored and informed his life as he became an adult. He’s not afraid to pull out lessons that he needed to learn, and there’s a lovely combination of personal observations and stories with ideas and examples from the novels.

Here’s how he begins:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

He goes through all the novels, matching them up to different periods of his life. There’s lots and lots of good stuff here. He has studied all the novels and studied Jane Austen’s life, so he has plenty of information to convey, and along the way, he comes up with some profound insights and self-deprecating humor. I’ll include at least one paragraph from the chapter on each novel, but there’s a lot more where this comes from.

From Emma:

There was one more thing about my life that had to change, now that I’d read Emma: my relationships with the people around me. Once I started to see myself for the first time, I started seeing them for the first time, too. I began to notice and care about what they might be experiencing, and they began to develop the depth and richness of literary characters. I could almost feel along with their feelings now, as we talked, feel the contours of them as they tried to express them to me. Instead of a boring blur, the life around me now was sharp and important. Everything was interesting, everything was meaningful, every conversation held potential revelations. It was like having my ears turned on for the first time. Suddenly the world seemed fuller and more spacious than I had ever imagined it could be, a house with a thousand rooms that now lay open to explore.

From Pride and Prejudice:

But Austen, it turned out, did not see things that way. For her, growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct. And you don’t strengthen your character or improve your conduct by memorizing the names of Roman emperors (or American presidents) or learning how to do needlework (or calculus). You don’t do so, she believed, by developing self-confidence and self-esteem, either. If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance. For Austen, growing up means making mistakes.

From Northanger Abbey:

Catherine thought she saw things at Northanger Abbey that weren’t really there, but the novel, my professor explained, was not against imagination. Quite the opposite. It was against delusion, against projection, against thinking the same old thing again and again, whether it’s the idea that all balls are “very agreeable indeed” or that all old houses conceal dark secrets. True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilites, for life as well as art. Mrs. Allen and the rest of Austen’s dull adults were not ignorant or stupid so much as they were unimaginative. Nothing was ever going to change for them, because they couldn’t imagine that anything ever would.

From Mansfield Park:

How different this was, I realized, from the kinds of stories I had trained myself to tell my friend and his wife, those polished little anecdotes that had to have a laugh at every turn. “You shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” All about: no impatience, no competitiveness, no interruptions, no need to worry about being entertaining, no having to watch your listeners’ eyes glaze over while they thought about what they were going to say when you finally stopped talking already. Did Edmund really care about her brothers and sisters? Probably not. But he cared about her, and she cared about them, and that was enough for him. To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories — entering into their feelings, validating their experiences — is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.

From Persuasion:

Putting your friend’s welfare before your own: that was Austen’s idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you’re wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that notion, because it flew so strongly in the face of what we believe about friendship today. True friendship, we think, means unconditional acceptance and support. The true friend validates your feelings, takes your side in every argument, helps you feel good about yourself at all times, and never, ever judges you. But Austen didn’t believe that. For her, being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can’t ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things. In fact, they can sometimes be diametrically opposed. True friends do not shield you from your mistakes, they tell you about them: even at the risk of losing your friendship — which means, even at the risk of being unhappy themselves.

From Sense and Sensibility:

If love begins in friendship, I was now able to see, it has to adhere to the principles of friendship as Austen understood them. The lover’s highest role, like the friend’s, is to help you to become a better person: push you, if necessary, even at the risk of wounded feelings. Austen’s lovers challenged each other: to be less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate — not only toward each other but to everyone around them. Love, I saw, for Austen — and what a change this was from the days of my rebellious youth — is an agent not of subversion, but of socialization. Lovers aren’t supposed to goad each other toward extremes of transgression, the way that Marianne and Willoughby did; they’re supposed to teach each other the value of behaving with propriety and decorum, show each other that society’s expectations are worthy, after all, of respect. Love, for Austen, is not about remaining forever young. It’s about becoming an adult.

Now, undoubtedly, my knowledge of all the Austen novels contributed to my enjoyment of this book, but I have little doubt that it would also encourage people to read the novels who haven’t before. All in all, it’s a wonderful contribution to Austenalia, a delightful, thoughtful, even scholarly contribution, and from a male perspective, as a nice contrast to so many others. I highly recommend that Jane Austen fans read this book.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/jane_austen_education.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, which I got at an ALA conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Help Thanks Wow, by Anne Lamott

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Help
Thanks
Wow

The Three Essential Prayers

by Anne Lamott

Riverhead Books (Penguin), 2012. 102 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 Other Nonfiction

I’ve always loved Anne Lamott’s down-to-earth spirit, and this book’s title says it all. If you think about it, isn’t it true: Help. Thanks. Wow. Those are indeed the three essential prayers.

She has a chapter for each prayer, with funny and insightful observations. Then there’s a chapter at the end titled “Amen.” Her observations move me, inspire me, make me laugh, and encourage me to pray.

I’ll include some bits from her “Prelude” chapter:

Some of us have cavernous vibrations inside us when we communicate with God. Others are more rational and less messy in our spiritual sense of reality, in our petitions and gratitude and expressions of pain or anger or desolation or praise. Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.

Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true. We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape.

I’ll post more from this book on Sonderquotes, because it’s full of nuggets that uplift and inspire me.

Why am I saying so much? Put simply, my reaction when I finish a book by Anne Lamott is: Wow.

riverheadbooks.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/help_thanks_wow.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Writing 0

The War of Art

Winning the Inner Creative Battle

by Steven Pressfield

Rugged Land, NY, 2002. 165 pages.

Well, I’m reviewing this book partly to figure out what I think about it. There’s a whole lot I agree with, and a whole lot I don’t agree with.

You’ll understand what he’s getting at right at the start of the book:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Now I’ve got an automatic resistance to the whole idea that if you want to create something positive, You Will Face Resistance. I don’t like the whole mystique of the Suffering Artist or Tortured Writer. In fact, I loved Jane Yolen’s book on writing Take Joy! because it said what I believe — that if you don’t enjoy the process of writing, you probably shouldn’t do it.

But I can see that sometimes we don’t do the things we want to do if we think we should do them. Actually, I began reading a book that talked about tricking yourself around that tendency. It was called The Art of Procrastination, and I didn’t get around to reading it before it was due back at the library!

So I’m not sure if I want to see Resistance as this big bad force that you will inevitably encounter. But I have to admit that the book does have some excellent tips on getting around whatever Resistance you do encounter. So does that mean I admit I do encounter some?

And in a lot of ways, he’s saying the same thing as Jane Yolen does, just in a different way. Here’s a short chapter I just turned to:

RESISTANCE AND BEING A STAR

Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

But later he says that signing up to be an artist is signing up to be miserable, because war is hell. I don’t think I agree with that!

The second section, though, is about habits of a professional as opposed to habits of an amateur. That whole section was excellent.

I liked the chapter about how we’re all Pros already in one area: Our jobs. In our jobs, we do all these things that define us as professionals:

1. We show up every day.
2. We show up no matter what.
3. We stay on the job all day.
4. We are committed over the long haul.
5. The stakes for us are high and real.
6. We accept remuneration for our labor.
7. We do not overidentify with our jobs.
8. We master the technique of our jobs.
9. We have a sense of humor about our jobs.
10. We receive praise or blame in the real world.

The third and final section gets into more mystical things and is a little less practical. But one excellent concept it contains is the idea of having a territorial orientation as opposed to a hierarchal orientation. You don’t have to be above others to be good at what you do. The value of art lies in its existence, not in where it falls in some ranking.

On the last page of the book, you’ll find these words:

Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don’t do it. . . .

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

Now, as I’m writing this review, I’m in the middle of reading a book called Too Good to Ignore which says the whole “Find your passion” teaching is dangerous. Reading it is making me look at The War of Art with different eyes.

But I don’t think Steven Pressfield is telling readers to find their passion and quit their jobs and go follow it. He’s talking to people who know they have creative pursuits inside them that aren’t getting out. He’s giving them tips to fool and get around their own Resistance or maybe fight it head on and win.

stevenpressfield.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Some Assembly Required, by Anne Lamott, with Sam Lamott

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Parenting, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Some Assembly Required

A Journal of My Son’s First Son

by Anne Lamott
with Sam Lamott

Riverhead Books, New York, 2012. 272 pages.
Starred Review

I so love Anne Lamott’s writing! She is honest and writes with humor about the failings and foibles we all have. Along the way, a deep faith shines through and a desire to be compassionate to everyone — though she is not afraid to tell us where she is not compassionate at all.

In many ways, Anne Lamott paves the way for me. She’s a little older than me, and her first son was born a year after mine. However, she has become a grandmother before me. In this book, she looks at the beautiful experience of being a grandmother and all the difficulties of letting her son be a father without undue interference from her.

There are some beautiful passages about Jax, the miraculous and wonderful grandbaby:

After I was sure he was sleeping soundly, I touched the flush of his cheeks in that light brown skin and traced those bold eyebrows. Of course, like all babies, he wakes up with a startle, slightly groping and low-level graspy, but with no sense of a time bomb about to go off. The beauty of the curve of his head — how it rests in the crook of his elbow — almost makes me want to flog myself, out of a desperate, unbearable love. All grandparents I’ve mentioned this to have felt this. He’s a Fibonacci spiral, like a nautilus shell — one of those patterns in mathematical expression with a twisting eternal perfection.

Or when she tells Jax the Secret of Life:

Dear Jax: Yesterday was your first Thanksgiving, and it is time for me to impart to you the secret of life. You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained everything important to the other kids. They said: “Look, you’re human, you’re going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.” And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don’t know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.

But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren’t there the day the instructions were passed out.

I know exactly one other thing that I hope will be useful: that when electrical things stop working properly, ninety percent of the time you can fix them by unplugging the cord for two or three minutes. I’m sure there is a useful metaphor here.

I love the way Sam talks about his son:

It used to be kind of an accident that he could get his feet to his mouth, but now it’s a tool in his movements. He grabs his feet to shift his weight forward, and to sit or roll. Now it’s a lever, to use. He’ll use his feet as a lever, as handles. He’s discovered, “Wow, they’re attached to me. They have weight to them.” It’s evolutionary, and it caught me by surprise because the foot phone seemed like a phase, but it was evolution — him starting the movement process, of rolling over, and rocking forward inch by inch, like someone with no arms. Now you can’t take your eyes off him for a second. He’ll go from being on his back to being on his stomach, with an arm trapped beneath him, and hurt himself. Now if you look away, he can get hurt.

But my favorite is where Anne Lamott reflects about Jesus:

I would say that my deepest spiritual understanding is that God also sees and forgives my smallest detail, even my flickery, prickly, damaged, jealous, vain self, and sees how I get self-righteous and feel either like trash, often, or superior, and like such a scaredy-cat, and God still understands exactly what that feels like. Because God had the experience of being people, through Jesus.

Jesus had his good days and bad days and stomach viruses. Not to mention that on top of it all, he had a mom who had bad days and good days of her own. She’s like me and Amy, like all of us; she would have been as hormonal, too. And she must have been jealous sometimes of the people Jesus chose to spend time with instead of her. Jealousy is such a toxic virus. “Who are these people? And what do they have that I don’t have?” It’s pretty easy to be deeply selfish when it comes to sharing your child. Even Mary must have been like: “Back off! He’s mine.“

Anne Lamott makes the particular experience of being a grandmother a universal experience that we can all share with her.

riverheadbooks.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/some_assembly_required.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of The Dance, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Musings, Nonfiction Review 0

The Dance

Moving to the Rhythms of Your True Self

by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. 184 pages.

This book is definitely on the New Agey side, but it does offer some wisdom and inspiration. I like thinking of life as a Dance, and that’s the image used throughout the book.

I think I’ll simply give you some examples of quotations from the book that touched me. If these sound uplifting to you, you’ll find more encouragement where these came from.

First, here’s a quotation that’s also on the cover:

The question is not why are we so infrequently the people we really want to be. The question is why do we so infrequently want to be the people we really are.

Some other quotations from different parts of the book:

Finding and voicing our soul’s longing is not enough. Our ability to live in a way that is consistent with our longing — our ability to dance — is dependent upon what we believe we must do. If our intention is to change who we essentially are, we will fail. If our intention is to become who we essentially are, we cannot help but live true to the deepest longings of our soul.

Despite the fact that endless trying isn’t working, it’s what I know. It’s hard to believe that I can be enough as I am. I want to be more — more compassionate, more present, more conscious and aware, more loved and loving, more intimate with myself and the world. I want to know how to be different — better — than I am. Even though I have failed to consistently live my deepest desires and am exhausted by the endless effort to become who I think I will have to be to live these desires, I resist letting go of the trying. I trust my ability to work hard. I have no experience with or faith in my ability to simply be.

As compassionate beings, we have the ability to hold all aspects of ourselves and the world in our hearts, including those aspects that are annoying, dangerous, malicious, and just downright unlikable. But we have to be willing to do the work of finding out how to do this, honestly observing our own internal and external actions and reactions and learning from each instance how to expand our ability to live the compassion we are.

Think of all the places where you separate yourself from others, distinguishing between “us” and “them.” The minute we do this we are building our sense of self, not on what we truly are, but on trying to feel better than others because we fear we are not enough. I watch myself do this all the time. And if I watch with honesty and compassion, I find a way to make being right an unnecessary prerequisite for being happy.

Lately, when I do my daily practice I find myself praying to live gracefully. I have a very particular feeling in my body when I remember or imagine a graceful day. It is a day without rush, a day where I am not suffering over things not being any differenct than they are, a day when I take a breath and accept those things I cannot change, like long lineups in the bank or traffic jams or the weather. It’s a day when I rest easy in a mysterious knowing that there is enough — enough time and money and energy and heart in the world and in my life, a day when I know that I am enough. It is a day when I am simply present with myself and all that is around me. It is a day of being truly happy, of feeling graceful — comfortable in my own skin and life. . . .

To dance, to move gracefully, to receive the grace-filled moments everyday, we have to know that we are worthy not because of our hard work or our suffering or our eagerness to be other than we are; we are worthy by our very nature — the same nature that creates and sustains all that is. When we know this we are able to answer the question “Are you willing to be happy?” with a quiet but confident, “Yes.”

A life where there is love is often messy. Life without love is neater, but neatness is really preferable only in bathrooms and written reports. Dancing alone is often easier and certainly less complicated than dancing with someone else, but there is nothing quite so satisfying as creating even one moment of real beauty moving gracefully with another. Perhaps to find this beauty more often, these moments of moving in exquisite alignment with each other and with the music that guides us, we need to let go of our ideas of what the dance should look like and let the messiness of love guide us.

It is life that teaches us about our incredible capacity to be compassionate, to be with what is, to love ourselves and each other and the world. And for most of us, most of the time it does not happen in the grand causes and revolutionary changes. It happens in the small things, in our human struggles in relationship. As we learn to trust our essentially compassionate nature and our capacity to love, we do not have to guard against this love; we know we can keep the boundaries that help us live side by side, and we know that we truly never stop loving, however silently, those we once loved out loud. And we are renewed by the wonder of how love carries us beyond where we thought we could go.

Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.

Letting go necessitates being with the fear that comes when we become aware that all that we love in the world — our very life itself — is impermanent. It can bring tremendous relief and rest to let go where we are trying to hold on, trying to keep the same those things which by their very nature are constantly changing. This does not mean loving life and the world any less fiercely. Loving well and living fully are not the same as holding on.

And finally:

You cannot speed up your efforts to create a life that is slower paced any more than you can successfully fight for peace.

With a book like this, much depends on if you read it when you most need it. Reading it didn’t rock my world, but it did warmly bless my life.

oriahmountaindreamer.com
harpercollins.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my personal copy of the book.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, by Anna Quindlen

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

Random House, New York, 2012. 182 pages.
Starred Review

Anna Quindlen is just a few years older than me. So I love reading her musings on turning 50, on aging, on being the mother of young adults. Because she tells me what’s to come. I feel for her, but I can tell myself that is still far in the future, but as I read, I begin to look forward to it.

Anna Quindlen wrote a “Life in the 30’s” column when she was in her 30’s. She wrote about everyday things, and people wrote back to her. In her foreword, “Life in the 50’s” she talks about those letters:

“I feel like I’m not alone,” some of those who wrote to me said, and that sentiment changed my life. That’s what’s so wonderful about reading, that books and poetry and essays make us feel as though we’re connected, as though the thoughts and feelings we believe are singular and sometimes nutty are shared by others, that we are all more alike than different. It’s the wonderful thing about writing, too. Sometimes I would think I was the only person alive concerned about some crazy cul-de-sac of human behavior. Then I would get the letters from readers and realize that that was not the case, that we were not alone, any of us.

I love Anna Quindlen’s outlook on aging. She makes it sound so much fun! And she makes me so ready for it.

Many of us have come to a surprising conclusion about this moment in our lives. No, it’s not that there are weird freckly spots on the back of our hands, although there are, or that construction guys don’t make smutty comments as we pass, although they don’t. It’s that we’ve done a pretty good job of becoming ourselves, and that this is, in so many ways, the time of our lives. As Carly Simon once sang, “These are the good old days.” Lots of candles, plenty of cake. I wouldn’t be twenty-five again on a bet, or even forty. And when I say this to a group of women at lunch, everyone around the table nods. many of us find ourselves exhilarated, galvanized, at the very least older and wiser.

So take a ride along with Anna Quindlen, a superb essayist, as she explores thoughts about life, aging, growing, learning, being a friend, and living well.

AtRandom.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Still, by Lauren F. Winner

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Still

Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

by Lauren F. Winner

HarperOne, 2012. 244 pages.

This is going to be one of those “reviews” that talks more about me than about the actual book. But it’s a book on musings about faith, and aren’t the best books of musings those that set off all kinds of thinking and musing in your own head? Many different things came together for me, and I need to write them out to get a grasp on them. In fact, in that I relate to the author herself. She says in the Author’s Q & A section at the back:

I’m sure a therapist somewhere could tell you why I do this, dissect my spiritual life on the page for readers. I like to think I’m called to do it. My own spiritual life owes so much to reading, to books; I like to imagine my own books help other people, that they are a debt offering, a gratitude offering. Also, frankly, it is a kind of writing I enjoy — it is “deep play” for me, this kind of writing. Still, I don’t think this book is really about me. If I’ve written it well, it isn’t about me. It’s about the questions: How does a spiritual life change? How do you enter that change?

First, I’ll talk a bit about what the book is. It’s a book of musings, and it’s also a book about middles. Mid-faith. Midlife. It’s a book about crises. Death. Divorce. And it’s a book about after crisis. Here’s another paragraph from that ending section:

I wanted to emphasize the subtle but hugely significant shift from depressed, intense crisis to pacific openness, from no sense of God to a new sense of God. From wrenched and wrecked to calm communion with a God I both know and don’t know. In part the structure was hard because what might be considered the real crisis point . . . is the prelude to the book. The spiritual unraveling, the alienation from God that I felt after my mother’s death and in the midst of my marriage — that is the backstory. Still opens at the tail end of that darkness. The book is not primarily a picture of the darkness. It is a picture of the end of the darkness, of the stumbling out of the darkness into something new.

Here’s what she says about it at the start of the book:

I was carried to the middle of my spiritual life by two particular events: my mother died, and I got married, and the marriage was an unhappy one. Had you asked me before — before my mother got sick, before I found myself to be a person thinking about divorce — I would have told you that these were precisely the circumstances in which one would be glad for religious faith. Faith, after all, is supposed to sustain you through hard times — and I’m sure for many people faith does just that. But it wasn’t so for me. In my case, as everything else was dying, my faith seemed to die, too. God had been there. God had been alive to me. And then, it seemed, nothing was alive — not even God.

Intuition and conversation persuade me that most of us arrive at a spiritual middle, probably we arrive at many middles, and there are many ways to get there. The events that brought me to the middle of my spiritual life were dramatic, they were interruptions, they were grief.

But grief and failure and drama are not the only paths to a spiritual middle. Sometimes a whole life of straightforward churchgoing takes you to a middle. Sometimes it is not about a conversion giving way, or the shock of God’s absence. Sometimes a life of wandering takes you to a middle. Sometimes you come to the middle quietly.

You may arrive at the spiritual middle exhausted, in agony, in what saints of the Christian tradition have called desolation.

Or your journey to the middle may be a little easier, a little calmer — it is not that God is absent — it is, rather, that your spiritual life seems to have faded, like fabric. Some days the fading doesn’t trouble you at all; other days, it seems a hollowing loss. You’re not as interested as you once were in attending to God. You no longer find it easy to make time for church, for prayer. . . .

This book is about the time when the things you thought you knew about the spiritual life turn out not to suffice for the life you are actually living. This book wants to know about that time, and then about the new ways you find, the new glory road that might not be a glory road after all but just an ordinary gravel byway, studded with the occasional bluet, the occasional mica chip.

So that should give you an idea what the book is about. If you’re the sort who likes spiritual musings (as I do) and books who make you think, there is much to enjoy here.

Now for the part about me. It began on a totally different topic. Our pastor’s been doing a series of sermons on politics, and last week he covered homosexuality.

Now I have to say that I was cringing at the very thought of these sermons. I’ve heard some very dogmatic sermons where I don’t think dogma is warranted. I don’t think the Bible is terribly clear on most political topics, and I definitely don’t think that one political party in America has the lock on the “Biblical view.” In fact, I really hate it when someone claims there is a “Biblical view” on most of these political topics.

But the pastor did a good job at doing his best to present two sides to each one of these topics. He never told us, “This is the Biblical view,” and presented different views on the Bible’s teaching on all of the topics, even when he had a clear leaning one way or the other. I appreciated that very much.

Part Two: Thinking about the sermon later, it occurred to me that it’s worlds easier to decide something’s sinful when it’s not something you’re tempted to do. For example, lying isn’t my weakness. My weakness is telling too much truth to too many people. So when my ex-husband lied, it was incredibly easy for me to think, “See! He has NO self-control!” But the fact is, I have no self-control when it comes to lying, because I need none. I’m just not really tempted in that direction.

Since homosexuals haven’t exactly been welcomed into the church, it’s so easy for those left to decide that homosexuality is sinful. We don’t have to look at the other sins that we actually are tempted toward.

Part Three: At Bible Study last night, one person asked what people at church thought of the sermon series. I mentioned a little bit about why I was so glad that two sides were presented. We talked about not being judgmental. Jesus told the woman caught in adultery, “Then neither do I condemn you.” But he also told her, “Go now, and leave your life of sin.” So he was not telling her adultery is fine.

I’d just been reading a novel where a gay person has to deal with a hate-filled Christian group. I said that Jesus started with love. But some in the group said that if you love someone, you are going to worry about them staying in sinful conduct.

Part Four: I was reading this book today, and this thought occurred to me: What if it isn’t sinful?

I know, this will seem pretty obvious to many of my readers. But it seems to me that was what the Pharisees were all about: Telling everyone exactly what was sinful and what was not. And Jesus challenged that dramatically, in many different ways.

What’s more — wait for it — I am not Jesus!

In Romans 14:4, it says, “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.” If I am sinning, I believe that God Himself is going to be working on me, right where I need to be worked on. Can’t I trust him to do that for others?

Then came Part Five. Lauren Winner says this about her divorce: “Among other things, divorcing has shaken up the assumptions I bring to reading scripture. In leaving my marriage, I was doing something that was simply not permissible, not in the way I have always interpreted scripture, and that is something I remain troubled by, confused by — it is not something about which I feel cavalier.”

Now, for someone who is divorced myself, I’m still awfully judgmental about divorce. Because I KNOW what my husband did is wrong! I was hurt by it!

Today, thinking about these issues regarding gay marriage, and thinking that I approve much more of someone who sticks with his gay partner for 30 years than someone who breaks his heterosexual marriage vows after 15 years — well, I realized that I’m awfully judgmental in certain areas myself.

What if I applied that same question to everyone who isn’t me? Even *gasp* my ex-husband?

What if it isn’t sinful?

And what if it isn’t my business even if it is? Shouldn’t I spend my real scrutiny on the activities and attitudes that take up my own time?

As you can see, this author of spiritual musings really got me thinking. She must have been doing something right.

laurenwinner.net
harperone.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of One Thousand Gifts, by Ann Voskamp

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review 0

One Thousand Gifts

Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

by Ann Voskamp

Zondervan, 2010. 237 pages.

This is a book about gratitude, a book about counting your blessings. A lot of it I felt was affirmation of what I already knew. I read it slowly, pausing when others had it on hold, so I had to turn it back in to the library for awhile, and also pausing when I’d put it in my pile to post a quotation on my Sonderquotes blog.

Basically, the author writes about how her life was transformed by looking around her and counting one thousand gifts in her life. And then she continued on.

Now, I have a blog, Sonderblessings, devoted to counting my blessings. But in some ways lately, I’d gotten a little off that. My health has been bad since my stroke last summer, and I’m feeling a little lack of focus lately. But when I read the last chapter, something resonated.

I particularly liked the poem she quoted from Teresa of Avila, and what Ann Voskamp said after quoting it:

“That’s His song! I rejoice in you. Come rejoice in Me. The song that plays the world awake, the song that fuels joy: Enjoy Me. Enjoy Me!

“Is there a greater way to love the Giver than to delight wildly in His gifts?”

This last chapter also references some themes that God had been speaking into my life lately. God loves us enough to sing over us. God talks of Himself as our Husband. (When I don’t have a husband any more, all the more reason to turn to God.)

You need to read the book for the full context, but I was delighted to find this section here:

“We fly into the light splitting back the dark. I press my cheek into the cold of the windowpane, wanting the whole of the erupting horizon. Happiness burns like a longing, and over the wing and the whir of the propellers, forty thousand feet over earth, I can hear Him, singing, waking the world. He’s singing that song! The one I really didn’t believe He sang! ‘He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs’ (Zephaniah 3:17).

“He sings love! In the air, over the world, I can see the song, the ardency of the notes pulsing in colors. The curve of the world burns ruby, a jewel prying open the day. And I can see in: Love is the face at the center of our universe. A sacred Smile; Holiness ready to die for intimacy. . . .

“I was afraid? I would have let fears that He wasn’t close, wasn’t passionately caring, wasn’t tenderly tending, keep me from seeing this sunrise bleeding love up over all the world? Now that would have been crazy! Look at that love that orchestrates red over water, that arranges light to play ocean in shimmering lines, that composes sky to gradate, scale of luminosity. And all for us — in this moment! He chose me — us! To be his bride! True, that’s the intellectual premise of the Christian life, but only as the gifts are attended, not as ends but as means to gaze into the heart of God, does the premise become personal, God’s choosing so utterly passionate. So utterly fulfilling.”

And the key to all of this? Counting the gifts God was giving to her. Noticing them. Listening, looking, and seeing God’s love and God’s generosity pouring down.

So Ann Voskamp has given me a focus for the year. Enjoy God. She’s shown that a simple idea like that can transform your life.

onethousandgifts.com
aholyexperience.com
zondervan.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Wilder Life, by Wendy McClure

Audiobooks, Biography, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Travel, True Stories 0

The Wilder Life

My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

by Wendy McClure

Performed by Teri Clark Linden

Brilliance Audio, 2011. 9 discs, 10 hours, 43 minutes.

This audiobook was a fun one to listen to while driving to work and back. It felt a little on the long side, but I handled that by giving myself breaks of a few days in between discs. The narrator sounded a little too much like a teenager to me, actually sounding a whole lot like Natalie Moore, who narrated Dairy Queen. However, I got used to her voice and rationalized that the author was indeed a lot younger than me, so it was okay.

The book is about Wendy McClure’s childhood passion for the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and her quest to revisit the world of the books by seeing all the Little House sites peppered over America.

Now, I’ll confess right up front that I never read the Little House books myself. I think I read the first one, Little House in the Big Woods, on the urging of Karen Iwata, my best friend in second and third grades, but I thought it was frightfully boring. Those pioneer books didn’t grab me. I remember I also gave up on Caddie Woodlawn.

However, when my sons were growing up, my husband read them all the Little House books, which he had read and loved when he was a child, and I listened in and found them not so bad at all. What’s more, we had visited the home in Missouri where Laura lived as an adult and wrote the books.

And I certainly know about loving childhood books! Some day, some day, I will visit Prince Edward Island, where Lucy Maud Montgomery set her books. Hmm. Maybe I should write a book about it when I do. Though at least Laura Ingalls Wilder had many, many home sites, so Wendy McClure did have a book-length story to tell.

I found the book all the more fascinating because right now I’m in the middle of researching my family history. I keep thinking of the old picture I saw of my grandma as a baby with her brothers in front of their sod house. I remember her telling me, “Just like Laura Ingalls Wilder!” She and my grandpa were actually born in Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma — so quite near the original Little House on the Prairie. What’s more, lots and lots of my ancestors were pioneers and farmers, moving steadily west, so the world of the Little House books is really quite close to the story of my own roots — and that made Wendy McClure’s visiting the home sites all the more interesting to me.

And I have to admit, Wendy McClure knows how to make the tale interesting. She tells about each place she visits, the people she sees, and what she felt to see them. She explores lots of her feelings about the books and about the places, many of which any book lover can easily relate to. She also throws in facts about Laura and her family, but sprinkles them nicely so we don’t get bored.

In short, I recommend this book for anyone who loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, or just anyone who loves going back to the children’s books they cherished as a child. The story doesn’t have a lot of tension or a driving plot, but that actually makes it nice listening for a commute. And, hey, anyone who gets a chance to do a Little House road trip, following the steps of Laura Ingalls Wilder (and Wendy McClure), will definitely want to have this for the ride.

www.terriclarkvoiceover.com

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Source: This review is based on a library audiobook from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Faith and Will, by Julia Cameron

Christian, Musings, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Faith and Will

Weathering the Storms in Our Spiritual Lives

by Julia Cameron

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York, 2009. 221 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 Other Nonfiction

A big huge thank you to my sister Becky for giving me this book. It was kind of funny: I had already checked it out and was posting quotations from it in Sonderquotes when she gave me a copy. It was good to own a copy, because I think I have pulled more quotations from it than any other book I’ve read since I started posting Sonderquotes. So I’ve taken a very long time reading it, with all the time it’s spent in my Sonderquotes queue, and it’s good the library copies were available to others during that time.

Julia Cameron begins the book this way:

“I would like to begin at the beginning, but I do not know what the beginning is anymore. I am a person at midlife. I am a believer who is trying one more time to believe. That is to say I am caught off guard by life and by feelings of emptiness.

“I want there to be more reassurance than I currently feel that we are on the right path. By ‘we’ I mean God and me. I have been trying consciously to work with God for twenty-five years now, and a great deal has been made of my life that I think has a lot of value — but I am one more time asking for something to be made of me and it that I myself can hold on to. Me. Personally. Not as some abstract but as a genuine comfort.

“I am a writer and a teacher — “worthy” things, but I am not feeling my worth in them right now. I must again come to some relationship to God that will enable me to pursue my career as an outward manifestation of inwardly held values. In other words, what needs mending here is probably not the outward form — I suspect that after a great deal of soul-searching I would still come back to being a writer and a teacher — but the inward connection. I must feel I am doing what God would have me do.”

What follows is a book of musings and meditations, talking about faith, guidance, and choices. There are no chapter divisions, so the book rambles a bit, but I found the rambling tracked well with my own thinking. She reassured me and encouraged me that God is good and God’s will for us is good, creative, and joyful.

I pulled lots (and am still pulling) and lots and lots of quotations from the book that resonated for me. Read through some of these on Sonderquotes, and you will get a good sense of whether this book would delight you as it has delighted me.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/faith_and_will.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a book given to me by my sister.