Bookmarks

Christian Century, Sept 22, 1999 by John M. Buchanan, Victoria Rebeck, Trudy Bush, Dean Peerman

As we settle into our every-week publishing schedule, some CENTURY editors review some of the books that absorbed their attention over the summer.

John Buchanan:

Summer offers a precious opportunity to turn to the books that have accumulated on my desk throughout the year. My routine is to begin in the morning with a Psalm and a poem or two, read slowly out loud. The poems this past summer were from a recently published collection, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Berry loves the stuff of human life and writes about friendship, farming, marriage, his mother and father and his wonderful observations of nature during his walks on his Kentucky farm.

Then I turn to the stack that has collected for 12 months. I began by working through Marcus Borg's The God We Never Knew. Borg is a Jesus scholar and a member of the Jesus Seminar. I had met Borg and his friend and colleague, N. T. Wright, this year, when they had engaged in a sharp and lively dialogue, so I was interested to know more about how he thinks about the basic issues of faith. I found Borg's early experience to be remarkably similar to my own, particularly his childhood concept of a God "out there" and of the Christian faith as a set of ideas to be believed and roles to be followed in order to get to heaven. Borg mounts a strong argument for why our personal image of God matters, and he helpfully categorizes the familiar biblical and popular images--from the concept of God as monarch to Anne Lamott's "high school principal unhappily leafing through our records."

I was intrigued by Borg's presentation of panentheism--everything is in God--as a theological model that encompasses biblical and personal experiences of the sacred. I particularly like Borg's call to the church to be in the word as the "community and leaven of compassion."

Two very different books followed: Reynold Price's small volume Letters To a Man in the Fire: Does God Exist and Does He Care?, and Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. Price's book is in the form of a letter to a young medical student terminally ill with cancer. It was first presented as the Jacob and Lewis Rudin Lecture at Auburn Theological Seminary. Price, who has written eloquently about his own experience with cancer in A Whole New Life, believes "that God loves his creation, whatever his kind of love means for you and me." For Price, that love includes the mystery of suffering, which he faces with courage and honesty.

For the Time Being is one of the most unusual books I have ever read. Although it received mixed reviews, I was captivated by it. Like Price, Dillard writes about God, the church, mystery and suffering. In this book she dazzles the reader with crisp anecdotes and vignettes in the form of a "nonfiction first-person narrative"; recurring scenes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's paleontological work in China; the lives of the Hasidic Jews of Eastern Europe; the history of sand and cloud formations; accounts of human birth defects; and the story of modern Israel. Throughout, Dillard asks the same questions Price poses: Does God cause human suffering? Does God care? Does God exist? Dillard is a questioner, an honest seeker. I like the book so much that I am doing something I rarely do--rereading it.

As the summer ends, I'm still working my way through Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace. Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School and a regular contributor to this magazine, tackles the urgent human dilemmas of alienation, hostility, exclusiveness and tribalism, drawing on his own experience in Croatia during the recent war.

Finally, for sheer fun, I read David Halberstam's Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, a world which, until last year, was a source of pride and joy for Chicagoans, now suffering the pathos of having all five of its professional teams with losing records.

Victoria Rebeck:

Thousands--me included--have found inspiration in Roberta Bondi's personal spiritual exploration as chronicled in Memories of God and In Ordinary Time. I testify that page 22 of In Ordinary Time changed my relationship with God. In fact, it gave me a relationship with God, whereas before we had at best a distanced acquaintance.

A Place to Pray continues in the same genre, as Bondi, professor of church history at Candler School of Theology, applies wisdom from the Desert Mothers and Fathers to her own life. This time Bondi starts not with her experience but with the Lord's Prayer, in .which she finds nourishment for her spiritual growth.

The Lord's Prayer can seem problematic. Do its terms "father" and "kingdom" establish a patriarchal deity? When one asks "thy will be done," is one ascribing capriciousness to God? Must one accept all happenstance as God's will? Using an epistolary format, Bondi converses with a "friend" struggling with these and other concerns.

Bondi's frankness and honesty make her a healing force. For example, in the section about "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us," she describes a painful conflict with her husband that occurred at a common transition point, the departure of a child to college. I found breathtaking her description of the confusion, fear and defensiveness she felt when her husband told her that he could no longer play one of his accustomed roles in their relationship. She, too, knew that their lives and relationship had changed, but was afraid that acknowledging this would destroy the familiar equilibrium of their marriage. Fortunately, they were committed to talking and listening to each other. Time proved that truth would not ruin their relationship.