What I am reading or about to read

What I am reading or about to read

February 2015

By Dan McDonald

 

            When it comes to reading I am a plodder at best and often inconsistent. I live alone, am often guilty of living an unbalanced life, and probably spend some time dealing with depression and discouragement. So reading, like so much is something I do in fits and jerks. This month I finished reading two books.

            One of them is a book of photographs. I am going to count it as a full-fledged book. Vivienne Gucwa’s beautiful book New York through the Lens brings together her photographs of New York City with her inspirational story of how she began taking long walks with a camera to relieve herself of stress in a difficult patch of her life. Six years later the photograph hobby that began during that season of stress has turned into a best-selling book. She is as good of a writer as she is a photographer and she expresses her story and presents her work in such genuine humanity that you can only be happy to feel in some way connected to her success. One of the things I like is that there is a second book of photographs in the works for later this year. To that I say a resounding YES!!!

            I also have just finished Timothy Keller’s book; Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. My background in the Christian faith is Evangelical. Keller is an Evangelical. Sometimes you read a work that is sound and seeks to present a full and fair treatment of a subject, and it leaves you flat. But I enjoyed this book because it has the feel of a pastor who seeks to understand truth and wisdom so that he might stand under the people to whom he ministers in their seasons of suffering. That is one of those clichés that has real meaning. He seeks to understand so that he may stand under those to whom he ministers. I definitely express my appreciation for this book.

            I am trying to read a diverse group of books as I move into my next group of books to be read. I cannot speak of what I have discovered in them as much as why I want to read them. Little by little I will tell you later what I discover as I read these books.

            First I have started and never finished Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island. I have always found starting the book to be a wonderful experience. I need to start it and dedicate myself to finishing it. My beginning and never finishing this book says something about me I suppose. I am drawn to the devotional life. I am drawn to the contemplative. But I also often lack discipline so as much as I am attracted to the contemplative I also am prone to wander from it before its work in me is set and established. But perhaps this is the perfect time to take up Merton once more as recently we celebrated Merton’s 100^th birthday.

            February is black history month. My soul was moved last year as the events around Ferguson grabbed our attention. I believe that for my part I need to listen more closely to the voices of African-Americans and people of color. I am sure that healing between races and ethnicities in our land will require a lot of careful listening to people whose backgrounds are different from our own backgrounds. Last year I bought and this month I hope to begin reading Maya Angelou’s classic I Know why the Caged Bird Sings.

            I want eventually to read Professor Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces That Keep us Apart. The reality, in regards to the divisions of race, is that while things have improved in recent decades there can still be no denying that American life’s most segregated day of the week is Sunday.  The impression I have, from what I have learned about Professor Cleveland, is that her treatment of things will be fair, compassionate but also passionate, illuminating and constructive.

            There is a novel I will likely read between Angelou’s book and Cleveland’s work. In the last year I took on a renewed interest in the Middle East. This time I have tried to understand the perspective of the people that few in my quarters seek to understand. But more and more I believe the call to follow Christ involves us to be called to seek to make humanity the interest of our lives. I look at how Jesus spoke of a good Samaritan to the religious people of his day, and am persuaded that if he spoke in our context he might well speak to us of the Good Palestinian. When he spoke of the good Samaritan he reminded his hearers, whether the religious leaders who opposed him or the disciples who followed him that the people they tended to despise as a lesser people and race were in God’s eyes fully human as much as the people with whom we were more comfortable. I am convinced that we must have a shift in how we think of Middle Eastern people. We must have our mindsets troubled as much by our tendencies to imagine ourselves superior as we should feel ashamed of our tendencies to imagine the men and women of the Middle East as humanly inferior to us. To that end I wish to read Susan Abulhawa’s critically acclaimed novel, Mornings in Jenin. She is an offspring of Palestinians who lived in the Jenin refugee camp. I suspect I will learn to more deeply appreciate a people who struggle with being pushed out of their lands and properties that many of them had tended for forty generations. After following a handful of Palestinians on Twitter I have learned to think of them first and foremost as human beings. The Christian call is not to close our ears and hearts to the sufferings of these people but to have a perception of mercy and justice big enough to be inclusive of Jew and Gentile, Israeli and Palestinian. It is not our place to yearn for one people’s blessing at the expense of another, but to desire the blessing of all people. The peacemaker who will be counted blessed will be one whose love for those opposed to one another will be filled with anguish until adversaries become companions. For it is truly true that the opposite of war is not peace, but creation. War is destruction and killing, peace is often only an interlude between wars, but creation is when those who had been accustomed to killing and destroying choose instead to build, to cultivate, to share, and to turn swords into ploughshares. As long as we imagine a world where we get to choose winners and losers, the blessed and the cursed; then we can never be peacemakers.