Category Archives: spirituality

God in pursuit

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In the late 90s, I went on something of a Graham Greene reading spree — because his books are good, but also in sympathy with our son, who had to read ten books by one author for a high school class and had chosen Greene. Recently, I’ve had the yen to re-read some of those books, and when two writers mentioned The End of the Affair in a Valentine’s poll of “Romantic readings”, I decided now was the time, for one at least, and that’s the one I returned to.

I had forgotten most of it, I confess, since my first reading in 1998, except for a lingering sense of the dark, rainy, brooding Common in London upon which the story opens in 1946. But, gradually it came back, and all the wonder and surprise of it too, for if it’s “one of the best novels ever written about love,” in Pasha Malla’s words, it’s probably also one of the most unconventional. Maurice Bendrix has had an affair with the married Sarah Miles, which she ends abruptly and without explanation. Turns out that the rival, whom the embittered Bendrix wishes to find out and ruin if he can, is [Spoiler Alert] none other than God.

Narrator Bendrix insists from the beginning that this is a story of hatred, though he doesn’t do much better at hatred than love. (He’s got a lame leg, which reminds of Jacob, another compromised fighter-of-God.) This is a book that explores the great passions of life, which include love, hatred, and jealousy, but also fear and faith. It’s such a pleasure, though the word feels too sweet for what I mean, to wrestle with faith along with writers like Greene and Flannery O’Connor, who let it in, full tilt, always at the service of their marvellous style, but never simplistically or unambiguously.

There’s a strange mystical turn to things in The End of the Affair, but I better not give anything else away, except for one fragment that caught at me, from a letter Sarah Miles writes the lover she’s left (though never stopped loving).

But what’s the good, Maurice? [Sarah wrote] I believe there’s a God — I believe the whole bag of tricks, there’s nothing I don’t believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I’d believe just the same. I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell into love…[because of something unexpected that happened]… I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left.

This might not pass as a testimony of faith in many of our churches (too irrational), but she’s getting at a truth we might pause to remember, and that’s the strength of God’s pursuit of us: relentless, faithful, and not always welcome either. We need to remember this when we begin to think it’s all about us reaching Godward to touch and worship, as I suppose many of us will Sunday (tomorrow) morning. In fact, we’re just as often wrestlers or runners-away, keeping company with Jacob, Hagar, and Paul (and Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix), and we just may be — finally wearied — undone or outrun.

Take This Bread

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A memoir that begins with walking into a church at age 46, eating a piece of bread and sipping some wine, and then becomes – because that moment “changed everything” – the story of a San Francisco food pantry doesn’t really sound all that compelling, does it? It didn’t to me, at least, but the book was recommended, so I bought it, and read it. And lo and behold, Take This Bread by Sara Miles (Ballantine 2007) turned out to be very compelling indeed.

Miles had led, to that point of the first swallow, “a thoroughly secular life,” raised, in fact, in an environment quite hostile to the church. But there was something about those pieces of bread, about “eating Jesus,” that brought her to faith and kept her there. And once she was at the table, she had to follow its implications.

All that grounded me were those pieces of bread….It was the materiality of Christianity that fascinated me, the compelling story of incarnation in the grungiest details, the promise that words and flesh were deeply, deeply connected.

Take this Bread has a fresh, honest, contemporary feel to it akin to the work of Anne Lamott (whose praise graces its cover) and Lit author Mary Karr. Sara Miles insists on talking about and acting as if Jesus matters, startling those who prefer a more sophisticated version of faith. But she doesn’t play it fundamentalist or pious either. She’s a lesbian and makes no apology for that, or for her relentless quest to feed the hungry, whoever they may be; her church, St. Gregory’s, believed “in the absolute religious value of welcoming people who didn’t belong” and Miles will take this seriously, as she will the Gospels.

Inevitably, of course, there’s conflict over the untidiness and impositions a food pantry in a church will create, but Miles persists: with the congregation, and with the pantry. She realizes, “I was not going to get to have dinner, eternally, with people just like me.” She also knows that “[w]hen you let the wrong people in, the promise of change could finally come true.”

I recommend Take this Bread for its narrative, and for its challenging and nourishing ideas. (Miles has a second book out, Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, which made the list of annual recommends from Christian Century.) And here, for a parting taste, is the prayer she wrote for the food pantry, which would make a good table grace for any of us:

O God of abundance, you feed us every day. Rise in us now, make us into your bread, that we may share your gifts with a hungry world, and join in love with all people, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Alone, but connected

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Most avid readers don’t need much by way of motivation for what they do. Still, In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics (University of Alberta Press, 2009), a thoughtful meditation on reading by Daniel Coleman, professor of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., provides good reasons to keep reading.

Coleman considers what’s going on in the practice of reading, and posits it as both countercultural and spiritually beneficial.

He doesn’t present a romanticized view of reading, however. People can be damaged by it (even by the “Good Book”). And, he says, “readers can be insufferable.” But what’s both countercultural and spiritual about reading is its slowness, its emphasis on critical alertness, and its way of humility. “The desire to read emphasizes a basic generosity toward the Other that is the condition of all language.”

One of the strongest arguments Coleman makes is that reading, although private and solitary, actually brings us outward toward others.

…reading does a painful and positive thing at once. It creates the isolated individual who extracts herself from the group, but that isolation is not as alienated as it looks, for reading is also a connection to others, an imaginative connection to the writers and to other readers by means of the tracks the writer has left on the page.

Coleman discusses the “right posture” of reading (charity, as per Augustine), how we encounter the “absent Other” in reading, and reading’s “wide-ranging social and political effects.” The latter are especially emphasized by stories from Ethiopia and the context of slavery in which people gain literacy for the first time.

In summary of this aspect of reading, he says,

[R]eading is a process that simultaneously individualizes us by placing the words on the page between us and the world and connects us by drawing us out of ourselves through imaginative projection toward the thoughts and experiences of others. At one and the same time, reading is a technology of alienation and a maker of new community…. For reading can give us a role to play, a direction for our energies, a way to channel our spiritual hunger that takes us into the social and political worlds in which we live.

I believe he’s right.