Fear and love

Posted on December 1, 2010 by doradueck

I’m in Toronto for a week, enjoying the mild winter weather (relative to Winnipeg, I mean), but more importantly, making the acquaintance of our newest granddaughter and lending what assistance I can to the young family. While here, and travelling, I’ve been reading Scott Bader-Saye’s Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (Brazos, 2007). This book is the second in the “Take and Read” series I’m participating in, though I’ll have to miss the discussion of it, which happens to fall this evening.

No doubt about it, we live in a culture of fear. It’s a very relevant topic. It’s especially relevant to the arrival of the beautiful, dark-haired infant in this home. Bader-Saye says, “We had not yet begun to know fear until we had our first child.” There’s the much advice and the many claims of the “experts,” not to mention well-wishing relatives and friends, an array of warnings about what can happen to children — eating, sleeping, playing — and a marketplace that has made child safety “a lucrative industry in part because legitimate fears are artifically heightened and manipulated.” (And grandparents, who are supposed to be wise, are not immune to fear either; they’ve lived plenty long enough to know that even in the best of situations, bad stuff occasionally happens.)

Parenting is only one of the arenas of fear that Bader-Saye addresses. He notes that we are a more fearful culture today despite the fact that “the dangers are not objectively greater than in the past.” Fear is a “strong motivator,” he says, used to advantage by advertisers, the media, politicians,even the church. Fear is used for profit, to fill pews, to consolidate power. In each case, he says, “we are encouraged to fear the wrong things or to fear the right things in the wrong way.”

Bayer-Saye’s book provides a fine analysis of fear and how to acknowledge it while not being overcome by it. Fear itself is not necessarily wrong, he writes, but “disordered” or excessive fear is. Disordered fear tempts us to vices like cowardice and violence. It also inhibits virtuous actions such as hospitality, peacemaking, and generosity. (The last three chapters of the book are devoted to these courageous acts.) Fear tempts us to make safety/security our chief goal; to make it our idol.

Correctly understood, he says, fear is also a gift, for it is not unrelated to love. It exists “in the nexus of love and limitation.” How great our children’s — and their grandparents’ — love for this new child of theirs, but drifting along comes the shadow of fear. In its proper place, this will lead us all to care for her as well as we can. Yet all we do is done will be done with an awareness of our limitations and those of life itself, for “every new love contains,” as Augustine said, “the seeds of fresh sorrows.” (I think of Mary, at this Advent season, “pondering” all the strange things connected with her first child’s birth.) On first thought, we might think it better not to even risk such planting, but we do, because to risk and to love is so much better than fear. So much better! I look at our darling infant granddaughter sleeping in her carrier close to me and affirm this, in love and faith.

About “The Lost”

Posted on November 26, 2010 by doradueck

This week, I finished a remarkable book: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. A conversation with a friend who was reading it brought it to my attention; then I remembered the positive reviews it got when it was published in 2006.

Mendelsohn grew up entranced by his grandfather’s stories. He also heard, though usually in whispers, in Yiddish, and without any details, about his grandfather’s brother Shmiel, who stayed in the Ukrainian town of Bolechow instead of getting to Israel or America as others in the family, and who, along with his wife and four daughters, perished in the Holocaust. Eventually Mendelsohn began to seek for those details, and in the process of many years and much research, interviewing, and travel, was able to put together something of a story of who these six were and how they died.

Their tragic fates were the fates of six million Jews and others considered “undesirables” — death; this is a Holocaust book. But it’s much more. It’s Mendelsohn’s quest, complete with twists and turns, and his descriptions of it are multi-layered, and reflective. One tiny example: he notices that one of the elderly people he interviews always uses the word “perished” to described what happened to Shmiel and his family (as I did above, because of the book) and notices the resonances of that word compared to others he might have used such as “died” or “were killed.” The book is rich in observations like this, and on themes such as the unreliability of memory and rumour, on facts versus judgment, on the nature of stories and storytelling.

Sometimes the stories we tell are narratives of what happened; sometimes, they are the image of what we wish had happened, the unconscious justifications of the lives we’ve ended up living.

Mendelsohn also weaves in the Torah’s opening stories, from Creation through Abraham’s offering of his son Isaac, drawing especially on the commentaries of Rabbis ben Itzhak (also known as Rashi) and Friedman. When it comes to parallels with the Cain and Abel story, for example, there’s more sibling failure in his grandfather’s family than his grandfather’s stories revealed, and failure in his own. (In fact, he says, the Cain and Abel story will be “eerily familiar” to anyone who has a family — which is everyone.) When he was a boy he broke his brother’s arm in a fit of jealousy and rage. Now, though, perhaps ironically, this “lost” brother is the one who travels with him and takes the photographs, and becomes, Mendelsohn says, “the greatest treasure” he finds in his search.

The Lost is a big book, sprawling, sometimes sentimental (Mendelsohn admits he’s sentimental), sometimes sad, but beautifully written, one of those books you come to the end of and feel grateful to have read.

Glory be!

Posted on November 23, 2010 by doradueck

A short post today, but momentous (I think), namely to say that we have the gift of another grandchild, a darling baby girl born yesterday. Our fifth grandchild but the first for this particular family (our second son and daughter-in-law). First or fifth, each birth feels amazing, even miraculous. This Inuit birth song expresses it best: