A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue and The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings. - A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories - The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium - Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue - The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings - book review

Commonweal, June 1, 2002 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories
Nancy Mairs
Beacon, $23, 195 pp.

The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians
at the Time of the New Millennium
Charles W. Sennott
Public Affairs Press, $30, 479 pp.

Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue
William A. Dryness
Baker Books, $21.99, 188 pp.

The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings
Edited by Bruno Barnhart
Templegate, $29.95, 496 pp.

I doubt that Nancy Mairs, best known for her 1994 book Ordinary Time (Beacon Press), would like to be called a "spiritual writer" but she does belong to that select world of writers, mainly women, who are Christian observers of the world around them, and possessed of the eye and ear of transcendent faith. They tend to be sharper, more penetrating, less sentimental and pietistic than many who claim a spot in the academic niche of spirituality. I have in mind Catholic authors like Sara Maitland and Patricia Hampl and Protestants like Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott.

Mairs describes herself as "a cripple, a Catholic grounded in liberation theology; a daughter, wife, sister, and mother; a depressive; a feminist." The unwelcome guest of the title is death--not death as a mass phenomenon, but death closely observed as Mairs loses her mother and stepfather, meditates on the death-row prisoners in her state of Arizona with whom she corresponds; thinks of the death of the other (in the case, a string of pets); and the murder of a foster son. It is a mark of the sharpness of her eye and intellect that these long narratives are neither maudlin nor self-dramatizing. I was struck by her chapter on condemned prisoners. She has no sentimental illusions about them, but contests their deaths: "We may--must--remove them from our midst and help them atone in whatever natural span they have left. Their deaths do not belong to us."

Mairs's choice of subject is not accidental: she attempted suicide some years ago in a fit of depression. She still flirts with this troubling guest as she loses control over her body from multiple sclerosis, which has left her wheelchair-bound. She continues to hold on, with the love of a husband who has had his own brush with cancer, of her family, and her wonderfully named faith community, Christ in the Desert. Her persistence is not stoic but gritty; it comes from faith tempered by experience and a clear eye.

A few years ago I met Mairs and her husband in Tucson. I will not forget her wonderful, extravagant hat and her love of good talk. I had already read Ordinary Time with admiration; she was at the time working on her perceptively titled book about life as a disabled person, Waist-High in the World. This book is every bit as good as the previous two. Is she a spiritual writer? You'd better believe it.

Some bare facts explain why Charles Sennott, once Middle East bureau chief of the Boston Globe, wrote this book. Greater Palestine (present-day Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank) was 20 percent Christian a century ago; today the figure is 2 percent. Jordan had a Christian minority of 13 percent in 1900, 6 percent in 1961, and 2 percent today. There are similar statistics for the historic Armenian quarter in Jerusalem and the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt. A recent study of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem shows that 50 percent of the Christians there think about leaving the country. In 1967 the Christian villagers of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, owned or controlled thirteen square kilometers of land. By 2000, as a result of Israeli confiscation (for "security" reasons) or hidden land deals, the area had shrunk to less than a third that size.

Christian tourists who visit the Holy Land each year almost never consider that the Arab population includes Christians. The fundamentalists and zealous Evangelicals who give unstinting support to the state of Israel, for theological reasons, ignore the native population or regard it, as one of them told me a few years ago, as "half-pagan gnostics." The outer fringe of that group finds common cause with extremist Jewish groups who want to reclaim the Temple Mount where the Muslim Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque sit. Those groups that do try to aid Palestinian Christians only add to the perception that the Christians are "Westerners," and hence un-Islamic, an idea which creates its own problems. The Vatican-sponsored Bethlehem University, opened at the urging of Pope Paul VI to stem the tide of Christian departures, is now 75 percent Muslim, and its students want a mosque.

The fear is that the ancient Christian presence in the Holy Land will dwindle to museum status. Sennott addresses this problem. He shows that the hemorrhage of Christians from the area has three components. First, many Arab Christians are well educated, have connections in the West (emigration began long before the birth of the state of Israel), and a sense of near despair at their condition. The other components are: the repressive attitude of the Israeli government toward the Arab population, and the rise of militant Islam, with its increasing tendency to lump the Arab Christian population among the infidels. Such militancy is found in many Palestinian Muslims. (This situation also faces the Copts in Egypt.)