Readers Guild

Marilynne Robinson Discusses Gilead on NPR

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Listen to the NPR interview with Gilead author, Marilynne Robinson before your guild meets in September.

Central NY Readers Guild on Dark Water

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

A Review of Robert Clark’s Dark Water

for the IAM Reader’s Guild – July 2010

By Tamara J. Murphy

Four years ago in June, a whirry Chinook air-lifted the six members of my family and our spotted Jack Russell Terrier off the football field in the center of our town to the safe and dry hills above our valley, above the chugging river waters invading the homes and businesses of our little community. Our home, sitting fortuitously on an almost invisible topographical rise, was dry like a mown oasis on the shore of brown seepage.

The experience formed the grid for my reading of Robert Clark’s historical primer on the -floods in Florence. It is the middle of summer, after all, Clark’s 324 pages can not exactly be classified as a “beach read”, and only two of us in the Endicott guild read the book. We still met, but around my family dinner table, instead. Since my husband and children shared the same remembrance of the sweaty labor of mucking out a town, I figured they’d be willing to listen to our summary of the book. We garnered their attention by retelling the personal vignettes of the flood victims: Azelide doomed in her wheelchair and the heroic Father Boretti, Father Cocci and the floating monks. Another hot topic around the dinner table? Conspiracy theories and slow media coverage. The suburban river valley of Conklin, NY had the same complaints in 2006 as the erudite Florentines on the banks of the Arno River. Unlike Florence, we had a town supervisor who won awards for her response to the sepia-colored stench covering her town.

The topic with the most response, but the least amount of conversation? In floodwaters, do you save a life or a priceless work of art? No questions here. One son tried to help the rest of us see the full picture, “One work of art from a master could equal the stories of many lives.” Didn’t matter. We agreed no piece of art was worth that of even the littlest Marina Ripari, God rest her soul.

Over grilled chicken and spinach salad cut fresh from the garden, the family quizzed us. Would you read more of this kind of writing? Perhaps our metaphors were influenced by the setting, “I wouldn’t make a steady diet of it, no.” The truth is that Clark has done the world an invaluable favor, chronicling the bad deeds of the Arno River. The heroic and painstaking rescue of the literature and paintings belonging to the history of Men. But as a personal read? It seemed that the flood of information surrounding the 1965 disaster in Florence overwhelmed the author and, occasionally, left us – his readers – to muck out his intentions. Was it a history of a people? A threatened era? A literary wreath of valor to the decades-long work of art restoration crews? An attempt to champion the lesser known Masters of the Renaissance? The author’s intentions seemed to meander a bit around the curves and bends of so many points of view, leaving this reader floating up the river about 100 pages back.

Still, I am glad to know the soggy story of Florence. During the week I was reading the book, I happened to overhear a conversation between my parents about the day that JFK was shot. Their memories intensified in the telling. I asked them, “Do you remember the news of the flooding in Florence a couple of years later?”

“Florence, Italy?”

For no other reason, Robert Clark has done a good service to humanity.

Central NY Readers Guild on The Violent Bear it Away

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

“Last fall I received a letter from a student who said she would be ‘graciously appreciative’ if I would tell her ‘just what enlightenment’ I expected her to get from each of my stories…I wrote her back to forget the enlightenment and just try to enjoy them.”

-- Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

Mid-way through our discussion of O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, I was reminded of this surprisingly blithe statement made by the revered storyteller. Really? Just enjoy the stories and skip the quest for enlightenment? If I had the chance to quip back, I’d be tempted to say “Enjoy what, Ms. O’Connor?”

As a group, the Endicott, NY Readers Guild agreed that the novel was easy-to-read in the sense that the plot kept moving forward – even as it flashed backward -- taking us with it without too much distraction. We cared about what happened next – all the way to the last heartbreaking page. But enjoy? Like anything else any of us had read by this author, The Violent is littered with tragedy upon tragedy: abandonment, abuse, acridity.

This is not to say, however, that we all shared the same views on the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil”, O’Connor’s stated primary subject in her writing. A couple of us saw it in the conviction of the elder Tarwater’s dogged conviction to live life as a prophet and to save all who came under his care, come hell or high water. I confess that this is a perspective that never even occurred to me the first time I read the book last year. Only the discipline of re-reading the story in community helped me to understand a different way of seeing O’Connor’s iconically outrageous characters. (Studying the characteristics of Southern Gothic literature at some point in my life might also have been helpful in this regard!)

One of our readers opted out of the evening, letting me know that the story “depressed her too much.” I understood where she was coming from. Expecting more of the same from the group discussion, I tried to do my homework. For the sake of full disclosure, I must confess that O’Connor’s work frustrates me. The writing is brilliant, sharp, wickedly witty. For example, my favorite character description, possibly of all time, is written by this author: "His grandfather had been a ... circuit preacher, a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger." (from Wise Blood) But, in the totality of her writing, there seems no light, no grace, no softness; therefore, in my feeble understanding, no redemption. This seems to conflict with my lofty expectations for a writer committed to her faith, as Flannery O’Connor persuasively asserts. A conflict not unlike another well-known name in the fields of art and faith.

Hoping to gain insight with what I assumed to be a stupendously simplistic error in my thinking, I emailed several of my brainy friends with this question:

“I completely understand (and agree with) the viewpoint the assessment that the body of work by Thomas Kinkade does not tell the truth because he wishes only to paint Eden and never paint the Fall. This excludes themes not only of depravity and fallenness, but also -- and, perhaps, worse -- themes of grace and redemption…. What I'm struggling with is that it feels to me that Flannery O'Connor's body of work does the same thing but from the opposite direction. I’m stumped.”

Once again I was reminded of the value of reading in community. This is the way we sharpen ourselves and each other in the way we view the world around us.

Among several helpful replies, this one from Mako Fujimura:

A good comparison to bring these two diametrically opposed expressions!

Another angle to look at it is to see what Kinkade does (successfully) as creating a market surrounding his art, i.e., he is driven to create an entrepreneurial business around his art, and that is how he defines his success (not whether his art is good and enduring or not; his art is defined by how many people buy them). I am not saying that marketing art is bad; but such the market driven work will be limited by the demands of people's tastes, rather than the artist's vision. Flannery did not care at all about the market, and she saw her writings in the stream of art/theology that stems back to Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and Shakespeare. She wrestled with not just art, but life itself; knowing that she will have a short life with her lupus condition. So her vision is a millennium vision, whereas Kinkade's vision is 5-10 years (at most). They define art and success differently. Kinkade paints (or have his assistants paint) to make money; O'Connor wrote to face death head on, and her writings, in my opinion, have the aroma of the Resurrection.

O'Connor's work is hard hitting and violent; it does provoke and even transgress against our notion of what religion is. In many ways, she is merely pointing out the violence that is submerged in culture, denied by religion: and by doing so she points to grace, as you say, much more powerfully than Kinkade's paintings.

Perhaps, like Ms. O’Connor’s characters, Rayber and Tarwater, it’s all a matter of knowing how to deal with our passions. In this light, we found ourselves uncomfortably challenged by the contrast of stark reason and insatiable passion. Not unlike the camel-hair-clad, locust-eating prophet, crying out in the wilderness for the violent to bear it away. What is this story we each are walking around in, with so much numb assent? Not Flannery O’Connor. Nor us either, if we allow ourselves to enjoy her work.

Things Fall Apart Resource from Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Need supplementary resource for this month's Reader's Guild selection? Check out this informative blog:
http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2006/03/things-fall-apart.html

June Reader's Guild Selection:

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Watch Chinua Achebe at the New York State Writers Institute lecture on his book Things Fall Apart.

Values That Should Not Be Forgotten

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter examines grief and hope, and how these feelings are rooted in a natural environment. Despite the tremendous hardships she endures, Hannah Coulter finds restoration in working the land and serving her community. Through Hannah’s narrative, Berry promotes dissipating agrarian values. Technology has overshadowed the visible position of the farmer, thus creating a disconnection place of origin. Berry attempts to capture the experience of a Southern woman through interaction with the land. Although the veneer has blemishes, he depicts the attitude and hard work necessary for survival. Hannah Coulter and her family depend upon the harvest of the land. She connects to the land, her family, her community, and her faith. The various areas of her life converge, providing a sense of wholeness. Through Hannah, we learn the earth and caring for each other should not be forgotten.

May Reader's Guild Selection: Till We Have Faces

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Looking for a thought-provoking lecture on the May book selection?

Lister to Peter Kreeft's commentary on C.S. Lewis's solution to evil, worked out in fiction. Kreeft also addresses the fascinating question "Why does God wear disguises?"

"Earth's Crammed With Heaven" - A review of The Supper of the Lamb

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

If a poem were picked to describe Robert Farrar Capon’s intentions for writing this book, it should be Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.”

The title itself is not misleading – The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection – speaks plainly its intention to take us beyond the pantry shelves and cupboards full of cookbooks, promising tasty dinners and happy times. Still, our group here in Endicott, NY was a little caught off guard, expecting recipes to inspire us as much as words and getting, instead, a complex plainness (“those who do not find me a snob will call me a boor”, p. 9) in the author’s approach to food, life and spirituality. What we thought would be an evening of recipe sampling became instead a collective scratching of the head – was it that we were intimidated by the old-timey baking methods or just not inspired enough to take the time?

Substitute onions for blackberries. Add the verb chopping for plucking and the poet has captured the entirety of Capon’s second chapter in one free-from verse. Capon entreats us to pay attention to the lowly root vegetable: “You think perhaps that it is a brownish yellow vegetable, basically spherical in shape, composed of fundamentally similar layers. All such prejudices should be abandoned. It is what it is, and your work here is to find it out.”

How could any one of us approach this ordinary task with blasphemous, willy-nilly chopping methods ever again? We’ve seen too much to go back. Are we really willing, though, to take the time and creative energy to approach lowly food items as an act of worship, as the author almost demands? We’ve been ruined for the ordinary. And we left money at the bookseller for the privilege.

Ironically, I finished reading the book while recovering from an emergency surgery that required I eat only clear liquids and bland food items. Others of the group were beginning Lenten fasts that limited sugar or meat or alcohol or caffeine. Really, though, what better time to discuss the “reflection” part of Capon’s title? The reflections, summed up in a more-prosaic fashion than Capon’s title or Browning’s poem could be the spirituality of ordinary stuff: “In a real world, nothing is infinitely bad. My bottle of bogus Kirsch bears witness that there is no bottomless pit in any earthly subject – that to be good or bad is not as much of an achievement as to be at all. Even the devil, insofar as he exists, is good. What he does wrong with this existence is all small compared with what God does right about him.” (p. 7)

From poet to prophet, Capon takes a Jeremiah approach to the cultural brainwashing we women have absorbed in our life-long enmity with the calorie (or, “little invisible spooks”, as dubbed by the author). I knew as soon as I heard it that he was right. I just needed the permission to think so. I grew up in the diet-obsessed 1980’s and remember meal after meal at my grandparents’ table – which had once been so generous in biscuit and gravy, bread, butter and tomato slice – where now home-cooking was served up with a side of shame for all that we allowed to enter our mouths. Hearty conversation was replaced with stingy dietary rules; Give us this day prayers were replaced with Father, forgive us, for we have sinned confessions after – and sometimes, during – each mouthful. All for the transgression of allowing a pat of butter on a glistening mound of mashed potato or a slice of frosted chocolate cake after a rousing song of Happy Birthday.

In my generation, shame became the secret ingredient in every recipe handed down from a long line of grandmothers and now Capon gives me permission to go old-school and return our dinner plates to their rightful place of festal, rather than ferial, eating. This is not to say that there is no place for exercise and fasting for our health, but there is also a time to eat and ne’er the twain shall meet. If I could go back to the table and offer to say grace, I would memorize this prayer from chapter three:

“O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat, and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men – to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve thee as thou hast blessed us – with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen.”

May it be so in all rooms and all relationships and all seasons of our lives. May it be so.

A Good Read for the Lent and Easter Season

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

When analyzing Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb, it is explicitly clear how he feels about food. For Capon, food is a way to connect to the divine. Every day items are propelled to the realm of extraordinary, not by our own doing, but by the creativity of the One who made us. Society is so accustomed to instant gratification that dexterous traditions are falling prey to the machine of convenience. Cookery, as Capon advocates, should form a deeper connection with God and the earth, and express the joy of creativity. As Capon states, "How much better a world it becomes when you see Him creating at all times and at every time; when you see that the preserving of the old in being is just as much creation as the bringing of the new out of nothing." God is concerned for our spiritual and physical well-beings, and that love and care is manifested in nature. His storehouse allows us to rejuvenate our whole person - mind, body, and soul.

Our group particularly enjoyed Capon's philosophy on food as being an every meal communion. When the Lord's Supper comes to mind, feelings of gratefulness and fulfillment are a natural part of the ceremony. Not only does food physically nourish our bodies, but it also reminds us that He has provided a memorial for His death and resurrection, and a fuel to continue His work. When we share food, we are giving of ourselves and making a connection with our guests. Fulfilling an essential need of humanity is a way to share Christ’s love. Intimacy, memory, and spirituality are closely affiliated with the cooking experience; preparing food initiates dialogue between us and the Father and our community.

This reading selection is appropriate for the Lent and Easter season, because the book serves to remind us of why we break bread and drink wine. A simple meal transforms into something sacred and becomes the foundation of our faith. Christ dined with the counter-culture, not with the socially acceptable, and built a bridge from a pantry.

A moving and disturbing book

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I was raised a lapsed Catholic-crammed full with the idea that I was going to heaven but absolutely no idea why. I was also taught to venerate the saints and statues I encountered but seldom set foot in a church to do so. This strange sort of religious upbringing replete with the ‘high five you’re a catholic’ attitude without the foundation or structure to give it form served to be a catalyst for me to become a seeker at a young age. I remember begging to go to parochial school with no success and later, when the opportunity presented itself, converted to a reformed idea of salvation in the office of my public high school’s guidance counselor. I often feel as a Christian I have somewhat of a split personality as it applies to certain understandings and this became extremely obvious in my reading of Silence.

1 and 2

A moving and disturbing book, Silence was not a difficult read. I found myself lost in the voice of the book-as though I was listening rather than reading. The characters of the book were vivid, maybe not in image but in psychology, and they have continued to stick with me even after putting the book away for a couple of weeks now. Kichijiro, as I interpret him, is reminiscent of the court jester. The part of the fool is so much of what he is about but I found him to serve as an example of human nature at its basest form. He represents so much of the failure of human character-the continuous cycle of sin/repentance, reform and relapse. I don’t really see him as a bad person or the literary villain but more as a pathetic reality.

3

The interaction of East and West in Silence is incomplete with both parties seeking the conversion of the other. The cultures bump up against each other but seldom truly merge. Even the conversion of the Japanese is discussed as being an incomplete, hybridized Christianity due in part to translational issues. The priests themselves undergo a transformation as they realign their expression/or lack of their faith and become themselves a hybrid.

4

I can say-without hesitation-that if I were asked to “trample on the fumie’, and most especially if it involved the sparing of others-I would do it. This gets into a delicate area for some and I mean no disrespect but it was an object-always had been and continues to be. The intimacy of my faith is such that I cannot imagine it being embodied by something-it is an indwelling of the Spirit within my life and therefor to ‘trample the fumie” would change nothing. I think this is the area where the dichotomy of my faith history caused the most conflict in my reading. I could understand the devotion to the idea but not to the object. Oddly, it was reading the next book for the guild that I came across a quote that added some clarity to my thoughts. On page 20 of Robert Cappon’s The Supper of the Lamb he says “Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make them un-important altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things”. Granted, these books are wildly different and address vastly different topics but this summation provided an immediate moment of recognition to my reaction in Silence to the ‘trampling’. Another thing I struggled with, much like the ‘fumie’, was the continual visualization of Christ and the idealized Warner Sallman-like image with “clear blue eyes” (pg 106). This autoclaved image of Christ was present throughout the book but evolves at the end when Rodruigues recalls trampling on the “fumie” and the immediate, yet inexplicable “joy” he felt. Though he didn’t understand it at that moment, he came to understand the full breadth of the presence of Christ in his life did not come from this imagery and his love for Christ was now truer than it had ever been.

5

The word silence appears numerous times throughout the book and represents many different forms. The silence of the people in order to protect themselves and the ones they loved. The silence of the martyr’s in an attempt to preserve their salvation as well as the perceived silence of God. The wake of silence left behind by so many unanswered questions of the faith continues to resound but in Silence it is Rodruigues’ dawning understanding, when he consents to hear Kichijiro’s confession at the end, that Christ had been there all along that allows him to find this ultimate truth.