Eucatastrophe Reader

"They sought to make the revival permanent.”

Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England REVIEW

Stephen Marini’s book covers a fascinating period of time and subject, the emergence of non-conformity in one of the world’s most intentionally conformative societies, New England in decades before the First Great Awakening. From the time the Puritans had first landed, they had endeavored to maintain a uniform and disciplined communal life, often at the expense of individuality (of thought, of family structure, of dress, of religion, of politics, etc.)

Part one of the book was of most interest to me as it focused on radical evangelical movements to emerge from the Whitefield and Edwards revivals (and splinter group revivals). What came before Whitfield was generally a religious sensibility that did not allow for a great deal of certainty. One spoke of their salvation as a “reasonable hope” and instead of certainty, offered “evidence of grace.” The radical evangelicals offered a more addictive cocktail of certainty begat of experience. Whitefield thus opened up a Pandora’s box of more ecstatic experience than he himself may have cared for. If certainty was possible, and if experience was the way to it, who dared stand in the way of people’s experience? ”By the logic of the New Birth, hysterical spasms, glossolalia, trances, and the like became symptoms of spiritual transformation.” Whitefield’s revivals opened the door to a more charismatic and Pentecostal style that appealed to many formally bored with the stodgy flat-affect of Puritan ministerial culture. The young were particularly enamored of it. As they would be centuries later with Elvis and the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

What’s more, Whitefield had a natural capacity of theatrics that went well beyond what someone else could achieve with mere education. He was his own sound system, light show, strobe light, and spotlight. He did not analyze text so much as dramatize it. He did not explain God. He stood in God’s place and appealed to his listeners as if he were God. His radical converts called it “preaching in the Spirit” and in time, they would have nothing but. By this means, congregations all along the seaboard and interior were split into “Old Lights” and “New Lights” and out of the New Light movement, a further fractalization took place that allowed for and encouraged those who even New light ministers could begin to get uncomfortable with. Of these, “the most extreme was James Davenport.” His message demanded extremism and emotionalism, as though someone had put Whitefield on speed. Davenport exhausted people into conversion, emotionally and physically. The focus of his most intense evangelism was the town of New London, Connecticut. March 6, 1743 was the day when most people believe the dam broke when he demanded that people gather up all the symbols of their worldliness to be burned in a fire (wigs, gowns, jewelry, theological books suspected of too much intellectualism, etc.)

Though he would soon mellow, Davenport’s followers gained a sense of what was possible and the arch of his influence would ricochet on into the founding of entire towns and churches in the Vermont frontier some 20 years later. “Between 1745 and 1770, nearly one hundred congregations separated from the established church, about one quarter of all organized parishes.” These churches were called “Strict” or “separatist” churches and eventually, they would attempt to form a denomination of their own when it became apparent that there were advantages for doing so.

These churches took on several characteristics that did not bode well for their long-term stability. They were heavily reliant upon radical conversion and a belief in a subsequent perfectionism. They demanded public conversion stories as a ticket of membership. They tested their own members and devoted themselves to strict observance of Biblical codes of ethics. They generally believed that saints could always know who other saints were (or were not) and the battles that this would eventually lead to were innumerable. These churches, says Marini, “sought to make the revival permanent.”

Eventually, the Baptists “carried off” most of the “Separates” (as is the case in my family) but they took traces of the divine fire with them and many sought to find pockets of the frontier that would still be open to their raw emotive approach to religion. For many of the radicals, their best course of action involved moving to the new settlements where more educated and professional clerics were too timid to go. Places like Bennington, Vt. And Middletown, Vt were not unattractive for these reasons. From 1770 to 1776, the population of Vermont doubled. The number skyrocketed to 85,416 by 1790. By 1820, that number had grown to 235,754. The sheer numbers meant that social cohesion was in serious doubt from the moment a second homesteader started cutting down trees. Settlement was no easy process and often the creation of a funded town church was delayed. In that environment, self-educated and self-ordained ministers could find purchase. And so they did. In Vermont, the formation of a legal church followed, on average, some fifteen years after the town was founded. This was precisely the period where, in towns like Middletown, someone like Ithimar Hibbard or Nathaniel Wood could gain a hold on control of a movement for founding a church.

Marini writes:

“ Separates were also active in the New Light stir, though without the benefit of fixed institutions. The leaders of the Separate revival were rural exhorters Joseph Marshall, David Avery, and Ithimar Hibbard, who itinerated widely in the Green Mountains and Connecticut Valley. But Separate revivalism was often a lay enterprise conducted in isolated conditions among friendship circles.”

This was certainly true of Hibbard in Wood in Middletown as their families were interconnected.

The radicalism itself made organization and sustainability difficult. Separate organizational structures could almost be clan-like and patriarchal in comparison. They resembled the tribal leadership of an Abraham more than the institutional leadership of a Jonathan Edwards. Marini notes that the Baptists were more equipped to lead sustained multi-generational movements of New Light evangelicalism. “In 1778, Caleb Blood, an elder from Marlow, NH began making inroads into Vermont. Sylvanus Haynes, Middletown’s first Baptist minister would be one of his disciples. A slew of churches arose almost spontaneously in Shaftsbury Vermont where Sylvanus first arrived and began his ministry. Soon clerically educated ministers would have induced him to move further into the wilderness for congregants and so it is that he found his way to Middletown and started the revival that my own family bears the marks of so many generations later.

Question for Comment: Where did the mix of emotionalism and intellectualism come from in your own spirituality? If you have one.

“Henry had been a good master"

The Known World Review

Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World bears a title full of irony. The novel is set in Virginia in the decades before the Civil War and hosts a broad set of characters who are all playing out their ethical lives in an environment that has firmly accepted the racial and economic premises of a slave system. On the wall of the local sheriff’s office, a godly man who refuses to own a slave (though he will accept one as a wedding gift), is a map of “the known world.” Edward Jones describes the map in the following paragraphs:

A Russian who claimed to be a descendant of Waldseemuller had passed through the town and Skiffington had bought the map from him. He wanted it as a present for Winifred but she thought it too hideous to be in her house. Heading the legend were the words “The Known World.” Skiffington suspected the Russian, a man with a white beard down to his stomach, was a Jew but he could not tell a Jew from any other white man.

“I get you better,” Broussard said. “I get you better map, and more map of today. Map of today, how the world out together today, not yesterday, not long ago.” The Russian had told Skiffington that it was the first time the word America had ever been put on a map. The land of North America on the map was smaller than it was in actuality, and where Florida should have been, there was nothing. South America seemed the right size, but it alone of the two continents was called “America.” North America went nameless.

“I’m happy with what I got,” Skiffington said.”

It is fair to say that what is true of Sheriff Skiffington’s map of the world is true of everyone in the novel’s moral map of the world. That map, also provided to them by Jews (the writers of the Bible) makes plenty of moral room for slavery. Indeed, the local ministers we are introduced to in the novel endorse and uphold it as part of a divine order. The characters of the novel (and there are many) navigate their lives using a flawed map and seem unwilling to accept the idea that they should upgrade to something better.

They are “happy with what they got,” even though they are not. It is fair to say that no one in this novel is happy. Navigating through life with their ancient unrevised moral map is literally killing them all.

One can imagine an omniscient God, knowing what the shape of the continents are, in reality, shaking His head as he watches the knuckleheaded human cartographers so badly represent the world they think they know as “the known world.” But what does that God do as He watches millions of people buy into and navigate through their daily lives in a slave-besotted economic system as though what is “known” must be true? The author of The Known World plays that role of the omniscient observer though he is often critical of God (or at least of the God of Virginia slavocrats). For, like the stage manager in Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town, he knows all. The voice of the narrator of the novel can, and does, tell you about his characters’ motives. He tells you about their pasts and about their futures, sometimes distant futures. He tells you how they are, unbeknownst to themselves, connected. What he knows goes well beyond what might be predicted. He sees where people eventually wind up as clearly as he sees what they are doing.

What he is doing by telling this story in this way is hard to say but the theme seems clear to me. He is making the case that like Sheriff Skiffington, we all live out our lives in the context of a defective moral map that we lean on far too much for our own good. We all live our lives in the presence of a divine being who we may have gotten completely wrong. We would all be wise to take Broussard’s offer and get an upgrade.

Here is an example of the way the novel relentlessly describes people living life in a world with a defective moral map.

“The very day Elias was bought by Henry some white people had talked about building a permanent structure for the slave market—that was the year it rained every spring day the market was held, and many white people caught colds as a result. One woman died of pneumonia. But God was generous with his blessings the following fall and each day was perfect for buying and selling slaves and not a soul said anything about constructing a permanent place, so fine was the roof God himself had provided for the market.”

“Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn’t fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?”

Not even Elias can imagine a world where God disapproved of the entire system.

Everywhere in the novel, you see people incorporating their theology of slavery into their decisions.

 “The few black slave owners had begun to believe that their own salvation would flow down to their slaves: if they themselves went to church and led exemplary lives, then God would bless them and what they owned. And one day they would go to heaven and so would their slaves.”

Sheriff Skiffington sees himself as an upholder of the law and a decent man. He has come to oppose slavery personally but, professionally, he is sees it as his God given duty to uphold and protect the system. And then his cousin gives him a slave for a wedding present. “Skiffington asked his wife, “Are you and me not good people?”

“We will not own slaves,” Skiffington promised God, and he promised each morning he went to his knees to pray. Though everyone in the county saw Minerva the wedding present as their property, the Skiffingtons did not feel that they owned her, not in the way whites and a few blacks owned slaves. Minerva was not free, but only in the way a child in a family is not free. In fact, in Philadelphia years later, as she paid for all those posters with Minerva’s picture on them, Winifred Skiffington was to think only one thing—“I must get my daughter back. I must get my daughter back.”

It is as if you can see people who begin to doubt that they may be righteous consult their tattered moral map of the known world and say to themselves “No! See here! We have not lost our way! The map says so!”

Take the following passage about the practice of mutilating slaves as punishment for running away.

“A white man had cut off the ear of his ‘habitual runaway,’ and the slave had bled to death. No one could understand what had happened—people had been cutting off ears or parts of ears for more than two centuries. In the seventeenth century throughout the Virginia colony even white indentured servants had had their ears cut off. But somehow the luck of the Amherst County man had run out and his $515 slave had died from the loss of blood. A few white people wanted him indicted for manslaughter, but the grand jury declined, finding that the man had suffered enough with the loss of his property.”

“People were spooked by what happened to the slave who bled to death, began to believe that even after two hundred years of doing it there might yet be a real science to cutting off ears, just as there was to hobbling a slave and butchering hogs in the fall.”

From then on, they determine to have all ears that needed to be cut off, cut off by a Cherokee Indian who specialized in the procedure. This of course seemed consistent with the moral map they followed as it was a map that allowed people to mutilate their “property” but not to kill them.

Jones allows for the moral ignorance to move from one race to another and back. He does not dignify the notion that the moral maps of the slave are somehow always superior to that of the white slave owners. Plantation owners can be philanderers and so can slaves. There are bad men and good men. Slaves who lie and whites who lie. Henry, a former slave who has been bought out of bondage by his parents, begins to make a stake for himself by buying slaves and he justifies it with the logic of the man who had owned him.

“How could anyone, white or not white, think that he could hold on to his land and servants and his future if he thought himself no higher than what he owned? The gods, the changeable gods, hated a man with so much, but they hated more a man who did not appreciate how high they had pulled him up from the dust.”

When Henry tells his father Augustus Townsend that he has purchased a slave, Augustus rebukes him and hits him with a cane.

“Don’t you know the wrong of that, Henry?” Augustus said.

“Nobody never told me the wrong of that.”

“Why should anybody haveta teach you the wrong, son?” Augustus said. “Ain’t you got eyes to see it without me tellin you?”

Augustus said quietly, “I promised myself when I got this little bit of land that I would never suffer a slaveowner to set foot on it. Never.” He put his hand momentarily to his mouth and then tugged at his beard. “Of all the human beins on God’s earth I never once thought the first slaveowner I would tell to leave my place would be my own child. I never thought it would be you. Why did we ever buy you offa Robbins if you gon do this? Why trouble ourselves with you bein free, Henry? You could not have hurt me more if you had cut off my arms and my legs.” Augustus walked out the room to the front door, meaning for Henry to follow. Mildred sat back down but soon stood up again.

“Papa, I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to. I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do. Papa, wait. . . . ”

“I ain’t done nothin that any white man wouldn’t do. I ain’t broke no law. I ain’t. You listen here.” 

One of the characters will later explain to an interviewer asking about black people who owned slaves that it was inappropriate to apply a morality foreign to the times. “We not a single one of us Negroes would have done what we were not allowed to do.” She says. The moral map of Virginia allowed people to own people. Would it not be an injustice to restrict that ownership to one race?

After Henry dies, his wife, Caldonia, contemplates the morality of the system that her husband left her (her “legacy”)

“Henry had been a good master, his widow decided, as good as they come. Yes, he sometimes had to ration the food he gave them. But that was not his fault-had God sent down more food, Henry would certainly have given it to them. Henry was only the middleman in that particular transaction. Yes, he had to have some slaves beaten, but those were the ones who would not do what was right and proper. Spare the rod…, the Bible warned. Her husband had done the best he could, and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact.”

The influence of the moral map with its God-approved slave system infects everything and every thought of everyone in the story, black, white, or in between. “The God of that Bible, being who he was, never gave a slave a good day without wanting something big in return,” one character says. “Could the cord of a man born into slavery ever be cut forever and completely, even if he had been free for some years?” asks Skiffington, “Was he not doomed by virtue of the color of his skin? “

In the novel’s concluding lines, the author makes it clear that even the best of people will suffer from the effects of an outdated moral map. When the Skiffington’s “daughter” Minerva runs away, Mrs. Skiffington tries in every way she can to reunite with her.  

“The poster reproduced that portion of the photograph that contained Minerva. But at the bottom of the posters, like some kind of afterthought, in words much smaller than everything else on the poster, was the line “Will Answer To The Name Minnie.” And so Minerva did not see Winifred Skiffington again for a very long time.”

“It was the “Will Answer To,” of course, that had done it. Winifred had meant no bad thing by the words. With what little money she had, she hired a printer–an enlightened white immigrant from Savannah, Georgia–to make up the posters and put them up all about Philadelphia, “where any eye could see,” she had instructed the printer. She had meant only love with all the words, for she loved Minerva more than she loved any other human being in the world. But John Skiffington’s widow had been fifteen years in the South, in Manchester County, Virginia, and people down there just talked that way. She and the printer from Savannah would have told anyone that they didn’t mean any harm by it.

A passage from the book provides us with a suggestion that we would all do well to heed. If I can be so bold as to say it, I think Edward Jones may be telling us that we might all be well served to consult that moral map of our own conscience rather than the moral map the culture gives us.

“In Fern Elston’s class one day when Caldonia was ten, Calvin, her brother, had punched another child on the arm and the boy cried. “I didn’t hit him all that hard, Mrs. Elston. I hit him with a soft lick, a baby lick. I didn’t hurt him.” Fern had come up to Calvin and slapped him and shook him by the shoulders until Calvin cried. “Why are you crying, Calvin? I just gave you a baby lick.” When both boys had stopped crying, Fern said gently to Calvin, “The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.”

Question for Comment: The following passage talks about people who get morally lost.

“Elias could see Celeste standing in their cabin doorway, waiting for him. He needed Celeste now. He needed Celeste to tell him right and point him toward home. How had he come to forget just where he was in the world?”

How do you figure out where you are in the moral world? How do you determine whether something is right simply because it aligns with what your present culture says is right? Who helps you find your way when you are lost?

“Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.”

The Book of Forgiving REVIEW

Bishop Desmond Tutu is a hard man to argue with when he talks about the need to forgive people and be forgiven. Its hard to say to a man like that “You don’t know what has happened to me.”

For me, it was a book whose ideas I could not disagree with but whose applications I could not do. Desmond and Mpho Tutu argue that forgiveness is not weakness. It is not a subversion of justice. It is not forgetting. And it is not easy. They call their approach to forgiveness a fourfold path (how very Buddhist). It involves telling the story, then naming the hurt, then granting forgiveness, and finally either renewing or releasing the relationship.

The central and necessary moment is the moment when you can see yourself in the person who has done you wrong. When you can understand how human you both are. “Forgiveness is about understanding that everyone of us is both inherently good and inherently flawed” the Bishop says. “We are able to forgive because we are able to recognize our shared humanity.” “If we look at any perpetrator, we can discover a story that tells us something about what led up to that person causing harm” he continues, “It is good to remember that we can just as easily be the ones who have done the hurting and the breaking. . . . It is this knowledge of my own frailty that helps me find my compassion, my empathy, my similarity, and my forgiveness for the frailty and cruelty of others.”

But if you lack this ability to imagine doing what they did? Or cannot imagine doing it without saying you were sorry at least? What does one do when the person who stole your “pearl of great price” says that Jesus blessed the theft? What does one do when the person who crushed your heart did so ten minutes after telling you they would care for it always? What does one do when they remain willfully blind to doing anything?

 The book insists that the process requires that you tell your story and document the harm done. “When we lock our stories inside us, the original injury is compounded” say the authors. The harm may have been a singular harm or it may be ongoing. We can “grieve as much for what might have been as for what was.” Which causes me to wonder, what if grief for what might have been never ends?

According to Lilly Tomlin, “Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.”

I seem to lack this ability.

Question for Comment: Bishop Tutu says that “We are all more than the worst thing we have done in our lives.” If this is true, and it is, what does it mean for the situations in your own life where some forgiveness is needed?

“Your stories can only keep you company for so long.”

News of the World REVIEW

Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels the backroads of Texas reading the news to people so isolated they are hungry for it. People gather and put dimes in a bucket to hear Jefferson read from a collection of newspapers that he curates and synthesizes for them. And then, he comes across a wrecked wagon and an orphaned child – a young girl who has been living with the Kiowa since her family was killed by them when she was an infant. She has no knowledge of English and no family to speak of any more. All she has is some official papers that indicate that she was the child of German immigrants and that she has family in Castorville, Texas.

Jefferson and Johanna thus begin an adventure of epic and danger-laden proportions as Jefferson attempts to return her to what semblance of family she may have. He, a Civil War veteran of the confederacy with war trauma who lost his wife while serving. She, a traumatized child lost in the woods violently removed from her biological family and then from her Kiowa family and then again violently from the courier who the army had hired to return her to her kin.

One can tell that the film is all about how to move on from devastating loss. The theme emerges as Johanna tries to recover from her losses, Jefferson tries to recover from his losses, and the South tries to recover from its losses. “Your stories can only keep you company for so long,” one of Jefferson’s acquaintances tells him.  “I guess we both have demons to face going down this road” Jefferson says to his new charge in a moment when she clearly begins to remember the attack that took her family from this world. “Going back is not good. Need to put it behind you. Move forward. Stay on that line and don’t look back.” “No,” she says in Kiowa, “to move forward you must remember.”

I suspect that her point is that one cannot partake of the present when one’s soul is stuck in some un-resolved, unsettled, or un-cauterized wound.   

To tell you how Jefferson and Johanna find their way out of there traumas is what this story is all about. A story that kept me company one Spring evening in May.

Question for Comment: Do you have something left unresolved that keeps to from experiencing life as it unfolds in the present?

“I know you want her back, kid."

Chemical Hearts REVIEW.

What exactly happens to your body and brain when your heart gets broken?

Chemical Hearts (the movie) Our Chemical Hearts (YA Novel) tries to explain it in a story of two high school students dealing with their own broken hearts.

The author of Our Chemical Hearts takes the approach that the thing we experience as love, like the thing we experience as heartbreak, is a chemical thing. It has its basis in the way that our brain sends in a shipment of chemicals to give us a feeling of euphoria when it believes the time has come to pair up. And then when the object of our affection leaves, it doubles down on what it wants by sending in tanker trucks of other pain and stress inducing chemicals to drag us back to “the chosen one”. It is the biggest, cruelest, insufferable chemical transference imaginable and it literally can throw you right off a mountain top feeling of exhilaration to the bottom of a high jagged cliff. It is joy to desolation.

Like yesterday. I was putting my boot on in anticipation of a lovely dinner at my sister’s and all of a sudden, my calf and ankle convulsed into what I can unequivocally assert was the worst cramp pain I have felt in my life. It immobilized me and had me writhing on the ground in agony. The main character, Henry Page (played by Austin Adams), has an older sister who is a nurse who explains it all to him in the book this way:

“I know you want her back, kid. And I know that people saying things like 'there are plenty more fish in the sea' is only going to make you hurt more. And I could tell you all about the science of what your brain is going through right now. How it's processing a pain as intense as hitting a nerve in your tooth, but it can't find a source for that pain, so you kind of feel it everywhere. I could tell you that when you fall for someone, the bits of your brain that light up are the same as when you're hungry or thirsty. And I could tell you that when the person you love leaves you, you starve for them, you crave them, Heartbreak is a science, like love. So trust me when I say this: you're wounded right now, but you'll heal.”

I wonder if we should all take out heartbreak insurance.

“Your brain runs hot, the cogs inside your mind jarring together until all the oil of your thoughts is burned away. The fire spreads to your chest, where it chars your lungs and turns your heart to embers. And right when you think the flames have burned away everything but your skeleton, the spark skips from your bones to immolate not only your flesh, but your entire life.”

As the book closes, Henry reflects on what he has learned or is learning about his senior year encounter with a broken heart.

“I can’t lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterward what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn’t love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn’t want you and you will find a million. Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn’t showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available, because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive. Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary.”

The other main character of the story is Grace Town. She is dealing with the death of her former boyfriend in an automobile accident that she partially caused. In the course of the movie/novel, she tries to “move on” but she too is unable to buckle her brain’s chemistry (and the grief it can inflict on a person who has lost a deep love) into some sort of emotional car seat. Grace may be the object of Henry’s desire and affection and love but she is tied to a now-dead love of her life in a way that leaves her cruelly in need of connection and unable to offer it. She tells Henry,

“I can’t put into words what it is to love someone like that. Or lose someone like that. Which is part of the reason why I don’t write anymore. Because words fail. A lot of people they don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone, but I knew. I knew. I knew every day that we were together that what we had was extraordinary. And I was so afraid, every day, that I would lose him, lose them all. I used to worry so much about his safety, worry that they’d finally get sick of dealing with my messed-up family, but they never did. And I used to question how two people could be so lucky. How could the universe justify bringing us together when we were only nine? How could it ever be fair that what everyone was looking for was handed to us on a silver platter when we were too young to even know that we wanted it?”

Henry comes to understand that sometimes you can love people who are unavailable to you.

“The love Grace had described,” Henry says, “was the kind that transcended time and space. In any universe, in any life, it would always be them and I would always be the after. The lesser. . . .  I somehow knew, in that moment, that Grace Town was a jagged piece of glass that I'd cut myself on again and again if I let myself get involved with her. That the way forward would be pockmarked by sadness and grief and jealousy.”

Chemical Hearts is a movie/book that I can put into my “Thomas Hardy file.” It ends realistically. It leaves you hoping that these two young people do eventually find a way to “move on.”

Question for Comment: What do you think causes us to suddenly “latch on” to someone? What is the secret to unlatching?

Something I Cannot Say

The Things We Cannot Say REVIEW

In the spirit of Kate Morton (an author I have reviewed several times lately), the author of The Things We Cannot Say, Kelly Rimmer, has written another story about the search for a parent’s past - a story about Alice, a woman who has been sent on a mission to uncover the story of her grandmother and what happened to her during the Nazi oppression of Poland in the 1940’s. Alice’s dying grandmother cannot speak (due to a stroke). But she has a story that she has never been able to tell. As fortune would have it, Alice also has an eight-year-old son with autism who also cannot speak. And, as we begin to discover, there are many issues about which Alice and her husband, Wade, cannot speak. Apparently, the assembling of so many things that cannot be said makes for a good story.

This particular novel involves the telling of two stories. One is the story of Alice and her quest to uncover her grandmother’s secrets and the other is the story of a young couple in war-torn Poland, Alina and Tomasz. Figuring out how the two stories connect is what keeps you reading.

Both stories are told in alternating chapters and both weave in the theme of secret telling and secret keeping. “No one ever wants to talk about it,” Emilia says of the way that her family keeps her from knowing what is actually happening in the world as the Nazi’s take over her country. “Everyone is so angry with me when I talk about it. Why do they want to pretend it’s not happening? Why can’t we talk about it?” Her request for more information receives the following response:

 “It’s just our way, Emilia. . . . Sometimes, talking about things makes them seem more real. Do you understand that?”

“I do. But I feel better when I talk about it. I want to understand.”

Decades later, an old woman who only speaks Polish and who’s ability to speak English has been crippled by stroke realizes that she must be open to having a long held secret uncovered if she is ever to find out what happened to her own life all those decades before.

One of the central themes of the book is well expressed in the paragraph below:

“I'm suddenly thinking again about Babcia [Polish word for Gramma]and Pa's inability to share their stories from their lives here, and wondering about all the things they surely must have seen and experienced that will never know about now, no matter how the trip goes. What happens when stories like theirs are lost? What happens when there is no one left to pass your experience on to, or you just can’t bring yourself to share it? Just once when I asked my grandmother about the war, instead of her telling me ‘that was a terrible time, I don’t want to talk about it,’ I wish she’d been able to say something more. Anything more. Maybe if she could have shared some of her story, I could have learned from it, I could have taught my children from it – we could have built a better world from the hard lessons she surely learned.”

Alice decides to fly to Poland to get answers. “It's too late for Babcia to tell me her story.” She insists, 

“It's too late for me to understand all of the moments big and small that led to the family I have in America now . . . But it is not too late for me to plant my feet hard against this carpet and to give this bewildering mystery absolutely everything I have."

It is a powerful story of love in a time of war. I should not wish to give the plot away but I will say this: I think it would be a precious gift to anyone’s life to eventually find out before it is all over “what happened?” and specifically, to find out what happened to a great love. By the time the novel concludes, Alice is able to reflect on all of her grandmother’s painful secrets and she is able to say:

“I'm grateful that she entrusted me to uncover a little of her story, because I can't help but feel that in finding her past, I found a lost piece of myself too.”

Question for Comment: Have you ever found out “what happened and why it happened” many years after something important in your life happened? In this novel, there are characters who believe that the past should be left where it is and others who decide to go and find out answers to such questions. Are those who go to uncover the past always right to do so? Or are they often wrong?

“There’s a providence that watches over the deserving.”

The Count of Monte Cristo REVIEW

The theme of Alexander Dumas’ epic novel seems to be stated in the following quote from the novel.

“There’s a providence that watches over the deserving.” -M. Morell (Ch 1)

The converse is also true that God does not forget the deeds of the unjust either. Since this is so, the proper attitude to have toward any injustice inflicted on you according to Dumas is to “wait and hope” but if you can find a cave full of gold, then maybe you should regard yourself as an well-funded, divinely appointed, avenging angel.  

We begin the story with a young man beginning his adulthood with a peerless love and promising prospects. Dumas describes Edmond Dantes and his fiancé as “two lovers calm and joyous as if they were the very elect of heaven.” Yeah. That’s a sweet spot to be in in life. Edmond has just been appointed captain of a ship and Mercedes is as radiant a sweetheart as literature can describe. And here, jealousy conspires with unfortunate coincidence to put a dagger in the heart of their dreams. There is another aspirant who wants Dantes’ captaincy and another young man who wants Mercedes. They conspire to frame Edmond for a crime and, as the fates would have it, the person inspecting the evidence has personal cause to send Edmond to a God-forsaken cell in an isolated island prison. When it first begins to dawn on Dantes that he was betrayed, he hints to his prison - brother from a nearby cell, the Abbe Faria, that he would prefer not to know who it was of his acquaintances that did it, knowing that the knowledge would introduce an unquenchable hatred in him.

And it does.

His life, Dantes will later conclude after 14 years of solitary confinement, has a singular meaning henceforward: Justice. And God, he believes, has forged him into the very sword of His retribution by granting Dantes a fortune in hidden treasure after his escape. Imagine how long vengeance would burn if someone stole the love of your life, ended your career, and put you in in a dungeon for something you did not do. Imagine that your fiancé’ marries the bastard that betrayed you (she not knowing what he had done) and then your father dies of starvation as a result. Imagine the three people most responsible for your demise all go on to advance in their careers and fortunes. Imagine you then had a fortune and a conviction that it was to be used to exact revenge.  

And thus it is that the Count of Monte Cristo, as he now calls himself, sets out to inflict retribution on those responsible for his undeserved imprisonment. In his sights are the man who executed the plot and then married his beloved (Fernand Mondego), the man who came up with the scheme as a means of advancing himself to Edmond’s position (Danglars), the man who falsely condemned him in order to protect his own career (Rene de Villefort), the man who knew and said nothing (Gaspard Cadarousse), and possibly Mercedes herself if he comes to conclude that she was complicit.

It is impossible to read The Count of Monte Cristo without feeling for Dantes’ real and lacerating suffering – physical, emotional, and spiritual. The loss of his freedom, his purpose, his love, his reputation, his father, his dignity, and his faith in God bleeds out of every word of Dumas’ description of it.   

“Oh, you do not know what is seventeen months in prison!—seventeen ages rather, especially to a man who, like me, had arrived at the summit of his ambition—to a man, who, like me, was on the point of marrying a woman he adored, who saw an honorable career opened before him, and who loses all in an instant—who sees his prospects destroyed, and is ignorant of the fate of his affianced wife, and whether his aged father be still living! Seventeen months captivity to a sailor accustomed to the boundless ocean, is a worse punishment than human crime ever merited. “

In “this horrible place contained fifty cells,” we are told of the Chateau D’if, “inhabitants were designated by the numbers of their cell, and the unhappy young man was no longer called Edmond Dantes—he was now number 34.”

Dehumanized.

Dante prays for justice from his cell. A high cold star on a winter evening is what he receives in reply. The heavens are slate to him for 14 years.

“Yet in spite of his earnest prayers, Dantes remained a prisoner.”

“Rage supplanted religious fervor. Dantes uttered blasphemies that made his jailer recoil with horror, dashed himself furiously against the walls of his prison, wreaked his anger upon everything, and chiefly upon himself, so that the least thing,—a grain of sand, a straw, or a breath of air that annoyed him, led to paroxysms of fury.”

“He told himself that it was the enmity of man, and not the vengeance of heaven, that had thus plunged him into the deepest misery. He consigned his unknown persecutors to the most horrible tortures he could imagine, and found them all insufficient, because after torture came death, and after death, if not repose, at least the boon of unconsciousness.”

When he finally escapes and acquires the Abbe Faria’s vast treasure trove, he returns as justice incarnate. Methodically, he begins with Caderousse – seeking out information to confirm his suspicions before putting his plans for vengeance into action.

“You will have the goodness to furnish me with the address of both Fernand and Danglars, in order that I may execute Edmond’s last wishes,” he says to Caderousse, pretending to be a priest in search of Edmond’s friends so as to give them a financial gift. Caderousse tells Dantes of the way that Edmond was betrayed by these same friends and suggests that their enrichment over the past two decades is evidence that there is no just God in the universe.

“You are mistaken, my friend,” replies the Abbe [Edmond Dantes in disguise];

 “God may seem sometimes to forget for a time, while his justice reposes, but there always comes a moment when he remembers—and behold—a proof!”

Methodically and strategically and secretly, the Count of Monte Cristo inserts himself into the lives of his intended victims. His objectives do not involve some quick recompence. He intends to slaughter their lives piecemeal and make them suffer. Their businesses, their reputations, their finances, their families, are all objects of his murderous but calculating anger. And any mercy he might feel is “suppressed and killed” (as Henry V puts it in Shakespeare’s play by that name) by his eventual meeting with Mercedes who is every bit the lovliest woman imaginable.  

“Then,” said Mercedes, “I will lead the way.” Turning towards Monte Cristo, she added, “count, will you oblige me with your arm?” The count almost staggered at these simple words; then he fixed his eyes on Mercedes. It was only a momentary glance, but it seemed to the countess to have lasted for a century, so much was expressed in that one look.”

Dantes does his best to conceal his true identity from her but she sees through his artifices.

“In France eternal friendships are as rare as the custom of dividing bread and salt with one another” he says,

“But,” said the countess, breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on Monte Cristo, whose arm she convulsively pressed with both hands, “we are friends, are we not?”

The count became pale as death, the blood rushed to his heart, and then again rising, dyed his cheeks with crimson; his eyes swam like those of a man suddenly dazzled. “Certainly, we are friends,” he replied; “why should we not be?” The answer was so little like the one Mercedes desired, that she turned away to give vent to a sigh, which sounded more like a groan.”

“Thank you,” she said. And they walked on again. They went the whole length of the garden without uttering a word. “Sir,” suddenly exclaimed the countess, after their walk had continued ten minutes in silence, “is it true that you have seen so much, travelled so far, and suffered so deeply?”

“I have suffered deeply, madame,” answered Monte Cristo.

“But now you are happy?”

“Doubtless,” replied the count, “since no one hears me complain.”

“And your present happiness, has it softened your heart?”

“My present happiness equals my past misery,” said the count.“

““You have no sister—no son—no father?”

“I have no one.”

“How can you exist thus without any one to attach you to life?”

“It is not my fault, madame. At Malta, I loved a young girl, was on the point of marrying her, when war came and carried me away. I thought she loved me well enough to wait for me, and even to remain faithful to my memory. When I returned she was married. This is the history of most men who have passed twenty years of age. Perhaps my heart was weaker than the hearts of most men, and I suffered more than they would have done in my place; that is all.” The countess stopped for a moment, as if gasping for breath. “Yes,” she said, “and you have still preserved this love in your heart—one can only love once—and did you ever see her again?”

“. . . And have you forgiven her for all she has made you suffer?”

“Her,—yes.”

“But only her; do you then still hate those who separated you?”

“I hate them? Not at all; why should I?”

He is not honest with her about just how angry he is. Not even close. “Hate them?” Of course not.

Just because he intends to grind them all into fishbait doesn’t mean that he hates them, right?

Some chapters later, the Count of Monte Cristo has lured Mercedes and Fernand’s son Albert into challenging him to a duel. "What shall I do with Albert?” the count tells his confidante.

“As certainly, Maximilian, as I now press your hand, I shall kill him before ten o'clock to-morrow morning." Morrel, in his turn, took Monte Cristo's hand in both of his, and he shuddered to feel how cold and steady it was.

"Ah, Count," said he, "his father loves him so much!"

"Do not speak to me of that," said Monte Cristo, with the first movement of anger he had betrayed; "I will make him suffer."

And this is where the story gets most interesting. The Count begins to realize that his anger is an untrustworthy guide to delivering divine justice though it be an excellent motivator. He begins to realize that an attempt to inflict appropriate suffering on Fernand and Danglars and Caterousee leads to the inflicting of inappropriate suffering on their innocent and sometimes noble children. In his human ignorance and human frailty, he is unable to make the retribution clean, no matter how hard he tries it is impossible to sterilize vengeance. Justice for Fernand would lead to undeserved death for Albert and undeserved suffering for Mercedes who had no part in the plot and still loves him.

Meeting out justice without inflicting injustice is simply beyond human ability. It may be beyond God’s ability one might suggest.

The Count of Monte Cristo begins to doubt himself and his mission. And what then? For it has been the purpose of his life since his escape. When Mercedes confronts Dantes with the suffering he is inflicting, the Count responds with  an expression of his deep and abiding hatred for Fernand.

"Madame, you are mistaken, they are not misfortunes, -- it is a punishment. It is not I who strike M. de Morcerf; it is providence which punishes him."

"And why do you represent providence?" cried Mercedes. "Why do you remember when it forgets?”

That is the million-dollar question. Why do we remember the wrongs done to us when Providence seems to have forgotten?

Maybe it is because we believe that Providence has forgotten?

“The French did not avenge themselves on the traitor,” Dantes says of Fernand.

“The Spaniards did not shoot the traitor, Ali in his tomb left the traitor unpunished; but I, betrayed, sacrificed, buried, have risen from my tomb, by the grace of God, to punish that man. He sends me for that purpose, and here I am."

The poor woman's head and arms fell; her legs bent under her, and she fell on her knees. "Forgive, Edmond, forgive for my sake, who love you still!"

Is it possible to forgive someone not for the sake of the person who does not deserve it, but because of the mercy of someone else who we love who asks for that forgiveness?

That is the second million-dollar question. “Mercedes, I must revenge myself,” he replies.

“’For I suffered fourteen years, -- fourteen years I wept, I cursed; now I tell you, Mercedes, I must revenge myself.’ The count, fearing to yield to the entreaties of her he had so ardently loved, called his sufferings to the assistance of his hatred. ‘Revenge yourself, then, Edmond,’ cried the poor mother; ‘but let your vengeance fall on the culprits, -- on him, on me, but not on my son!’"

"It is written in the good book," says Monte Cristo,

"that the sins of the fathers shall fall upon their children to the third and fourth generation. Since God himself dictated those words to his prophet, why should I seek to make myself better than God?"

’Have you known what it is to have your father starve to death in your absence?’ cried Monte Cristo, thrusting his hands into his hair; ‘have you seen the woman you loved giving her hand to your rival, while you were perishing at the bottom of a dungeon?’

‘No,’ interrupted Mercedes, ‘but I have seen him whom I loved on the point of murdering my son.’ Mercedes uttered these words with such deep anguish, with an accent of such intense despair, that Monte Cristo could not restrain a sob. The lion was daunted; the avenger was conquered. ‘What do you ask of me?’ said he, -- ‘your son's life? Well, he shall live!’ Mercedes uttered a cry which made the tears start from Monte Cristo's eyes; but these tears disappeared almost instantaneously, for, doubtless, God had sent some angel to collect them -- far more precious were they in his eyes than the richest pearls of Guzerat and Ophir.”

It is a powerful moment. Dantes calls off the dogs of his own vengeance. His reward is the gratitude of Mercedes.

“Oh, I repeat it, Edmond; what you have just done is beautiful -- it is grand; it is sublime."

Is that reward enough to compensate him for the loss of his desired retribution?

That is the third million-dollar question.

Dantes goes on to confront those who had so wounded him. But he takes no more revenge on them. He simply confronts them with the searing truth of what they did and makes them feel the gravity of their crimes. He still believes himself to be chosen by God for this work. But he is less sure that he knows just what the punishments should be.

“I was but an agent, led on by an invisible and offended Deity,” he says to Mercedes,

“who chose not to withhold the fatal blow that I was destined to hurl. I take that God to witness, at whose feet I have prostrated myself daily for the last ten years, that I would have sacrificed my life to you, and with my life the projects that were indissolubly linked with it. But—and I say it with some pride, Mercedes—God needed me, and I lived. Examine the past and the present, and endeavor to dive into futurity, and then say whether I am not a divine instrument.”

It is difficult to know if there is greater joy to be found in being merciful than in getting revenge. I cannot say that I have much experience with the later. It seems to me that Alexander Dumas book is about trying to find a difficult balance between the two.

I cannot say that I have found it. Or maybe even seriously looked.

Question for Comment: How do you determine when to demand restitution of revenge and when not to when you yourself are wounded by someone.

"You’re either sun burnt, sleep deprived, or seasick and after a few days there’s hallucinations."

Adrift REVIEW

“Got caught in a storm. Wound up stranded. Went through hard times. Managed to survive and get back home.” Sounds like the plot line to a gazillion movies from Robinson Crusoe to Swiss Family Robinson to Lord of the Flies to Castaway to Perfect Storm.  But I should like to say that the film Adrift is deeper than that. I found it to be as much about the process of embarking on a voyage of love as much as embarking on a voyage in a boat. We see the two main characters meet, become acquainted, fall in love, make a commitment, navigate differences, embark on a common mission, bond, work together, face a hardship, support each other in adversity, deal with pain and loss, grieve, and move on.

I recommend the movie to all those yet to successfully complete this journey. It helps if you like sailing. And if you are galeophobic, you need not fear that this movie will traumatize you as it turns out to be shark-free.

Question for Comment:  If you and the love of your life were stranded together on a motor-less, sail-less boat in the middle of the Pacific, how likely would it be that your relationship would survive as long as you did?

"I am not a man. But neither am I a wolf."

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle REVIEW

This film was surprisingly good and definitely worth the expenditure to make I think. It is not simply a different version of the exact same story told in previous versions. One misses listening to the bear Baghira singing “Bare Necessities” and King Louis riffing “I Wanna Be Like You” but the benefits of the retelling are worth it.

Mowgli, like Tarzan, is left behind by deceased parents and is raised in the wild. In Mowgli’s case, he is raised by wolves rather than gorillas, but the outcome is the same for both. As tarzan and Mowgli make their way into adulthood and try to find their place within their respective communities, they are “handicapped” by their advantages and disadvantages relative to their peers. They are not, as it were, bred for the environments they have been placed in. In Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle Mowgli the pre-teen desperately wants to be one of the wolf “brothers” and a contributor to his pack but he aspires to be a wolf in vain. He is, as his name indicates, a “man-cub” – a hyphenated member of an unhyphenated community. He neither belongs to the pack nor the village and feels himself unable to successfully assimilate into either.

If you are a person that belongs neither to the family, faith, or fortune that you were born into on the one hand or the folks, fireside, or fellowship you aspire to on the other, you will appreciate this movie and the suffering that poor Mowgli endures throughout.  In the end, it will be important that he has connections to both worlds. Those competing influences split him apart but fashion within him the tools he needs in the end. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s experience of being a poet working a chicken farm in New Hampshire and wondering if he could ever be either a good poet or a good chicken farmer while trying to be both and then eventually finding that the two “selves” could be assimilated into a life beneficial to both. (Poetry could pay for his farms. Farmers could supply the material for his poems).

Rudyard Kipling was born in India (no doubt not unlike Mowgli was basically “born” in the jungle). His mother, they say was a fascinating woman and “dullness and Mrs Kipling could not exist in the same room.” His parents referred to themselves as “Anglo-Indians” just as Mowgli is referred to a “man-cub.” Having had several cousins born in Africa, I can somewhat understand the sentiment. As someone raised in a strong “Brethren” denominational tradition who went off to study and work in more liberal universities, even more so. Kipling was sent home to England at the age of five to be “socialized” and returned to India at the age of 16 to be re-socialized again. It is no wonder that he creates a character in The Jungle Book who is so identity confused.

I will just say that the film and the actor who plays Mowgli capture the pain of the “bi-belonging” person to a tee. I think I just invented that word.

Question for Comment: Have you ever found yourself caught between two communities who both believed you were better off in the other?

To the Thawing Wind

To the Thawing Wind REVIEW

An ode is a poem written to an object that leads to some revelation. (See John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. People have written odes to belt sanders,  fish, and spoons. Robert Frost’s “Ode to the Thawing Wind” thus follows a long tradition dating back centuries.  

In the poem, Frost personifies a spring warm front and asks a favor of it. Or rather, two favors. The first favor involves bring Spring back to frozen nature and the second request is to drive the barricaded poet out into that nature.

To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go; Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Frost is asking for some outside force to intrude into his monastic isolation and force him from the contemplation of words to the experience of the thing itself. One could imagine a contemporary petition made in a similar vein to “unplug the blogger’s computer” or better yet, shut his electricity right off – or to set the novel-readers bookshelves on fire and drive him out into the world of living humans where he can participate in his own life’s plotline.

Question for Comment: What makes you make the effort to experience life rather than settle for watching it?