Tag: memoir

Having the Horse Sense to Hear the Divine: a ★★★★★ book review.

One of my earliest memories involves a horse. I would have been 2. My family lived on an acreage underneath the big sky of central Alberta. We had two horses, a mare, and her yearling colt. Cinnabar. One afternoon I was in the sandbox behind our house and decided to go down the hill and visit with the horses. They watched me disinterestedly from behind their barbwire fence, glancing sideways at me, munching the pasture grass. I crawled under the fence to get closer to them. The yearling turned and ran and kicked me in the face. His rear hoofs scraped across my cheeks, just below my temples. Had I been one step closer, or the horse a little older, I may not be here today.  My mom tells me that I ran up the hill with more rage than pain screaming, “Cinnabar kicked me!”

 horses-speak-of-godMy family moved to the city and we didn’t have horses after that, but I would ride them, some, at the nearby dude ranch, or on my grandparent’s farm in the summertime if they happened to be watching their neighbors’ horses.  I love horses. They are majestic creatures, and I’ve since learned to not climb under fences and walk behind them, to respect their size and give them a wide berth.

Laurie Brock, an Episcopal priest and crisis chaplain, has a better relationship to horses than I ever had. In Horses Speak of God: How Horses Can Teach Us to Listen and Be Transformed, she shares the things she has learned from the horses she rides: balance, steadfastness, vocation, trust, routine, love. Brock writes, “I began to ride as a hobby. I did not expect to learn a language that spoke of God” (9).

Throughout these seventeen mediations, Brock weaves together stories of riding lessons, the horses she’s ridden, ministry, the church calendar, Scripture and the liturgy.  She is the student and she honors horses as her teacher. She learns from them. Sometimes the horses teach her about losing control, about having courage, and empathy:

As I reflected on the moment when I’d walked away from my dirty dishes and into the midst of tragedy in the aftermath of a death, I knew they were the same emoitions similar experineces. I could be in the presence of  grief and its wildness because I rode Izzy. And suddenly, I realized that the rearranging that hapened inside of my soul had to do with the words that horses had opened to me. (5).

Sometimes a particular horse would reveal something for Brock about facing fear, or discovering vocation. Sometimes the process of learning to ride illuminates an aspect of her own faith journey. For example, ‘collecting’ a horse—raising the horse’s head while keeping it’s weight slightly on its hind legs so that its movements are focused and directed—becomes a metaphor for own soul, as she finds for her soul the balance between control, energy, and direction in the Collect of the Eucharistic liturgy. (67-71).

Brock is both priest and chaplain but this is not a book about discovering God in the church. It is a book about wrestling with God and learning faith while learning to ride, It is about experiencing the grace of God in the face of a horse, and seeing the face of God in the grace of a horse. This is poetic prose. I highly recommend this book, especially for animal lovers and for those who connect with God outside of the church. Brock does a great job of translating the wisdom of the Christian experience into the language of horse and rider. The lessons she learned from horses are kinder and more generative than getting kicked in the face by a horse. God’s grandeur and grace. The divine and the equine. I give this five stars. – ★★★★★

I received a copy of this book from Paraclete Press in exchange for my honest review

 

Graves’ Life After Death Row: a book review

On August 18, 1992, in Somerville, Texas, a man named Robert Carter entered a trailer home and killed 6 people in cold blood, including his son. Then he set the trailer on fire to hide the evidence. 5 days later, at the funeral, he was noticed with burns and bandages on his hands. He was picked up by the police and because of the physical evidence(the burns) and inconsistencies of his story, they questioned him, he confessed and they charged him with murder. During the interrogation, he named Anthony Graves as his accomplice.

978-080706252-4Graves was the second cousin of Carter’s wife, but the two men didn’t know each other.  Despite no physical evidence tying him to the crime and an alibi, Graves was charged, tried and convicted. Graves would spend 18 years in jail, 12 of them on death row, before he was exonerated and went home a free man. Infinite Hope: How Wrongful Confinement and 12 years on Death Row Failed to Kill My Soul is Graves story, in his own words of how he got where he was and how he was able to hold out hope against hope that Justice would prevail.

When Graves was first arrested, he naively assumed, ‘the truth would set him free.’ Unfortunately, the Rangers and prosecutor working on his case didn’t seem to be on a mission to uncover the truth or check into Graves’s story. They sought instead to look for ways to trap him, get a confession, or find incriminating evidence. Thinking that he was helping himself, Graves went into interrogations and before a grand jury without a lawyer, assuming that if he was innocent, he didn’t really need a lawyer to protect him.  Unfortunately, a couple of careless answers were used to try to discredit his testimony at trial. When he was in his early 20s, Graves was arrested on a Marijuana possession charge but he was convinced by his lawyer at the time, to accept the prosecutors’ plea bargain (a guilty plea for dealing cocaine, in exchange for 18 months probation). The same prosecutor, Charles Sebesta was now trying to prosecute Graves for murder.

Then he did get a lawyer. A family friend arranged for him to have one of the best trial lawyers in Texas, Dick DeGuerin. DeGuerin believed in Graves’s innocence. But his fee was steep, and with no means for Graves or his family to pay him, DeGuerin abandoned Graves’s case shortly after he was indicted. The lawyer that took Graves to trial, Calvin Garvin, was sincere but inexperienced.

Later, it was uncovered that Sebesta, the prosecutor, suppressed exculpatory evidence in Graves’s trial (e.g. Carter had said to Sebesta the day before that Graves was not an accomplice and Sebesta pressured him to testify anyway without informing the defense), and intimidated Graves’s alibi witness with a threat that he would charge her for murder too. When a special prosecutor reviewed Graves case (18 years later), she recommended the charges be dropped. And a couple of years after that, Sebesta was disbarred for ethics violations relating to Graves case.

Infinite Hope recounts the story of Graves arrest, trial, sentence, eventual exoneration and his current activism. Graves was buoyed through the hard times by family and friendships near and far—pen pals and visitors, who followed his case—and faith in a ‘God who was good all the time.’

This is a hopeful story and it is a sad story. It is hopeful because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bent towards justice, even in a Texas capital case. It is a sad story because I want to believe that criminal investigators and DAs care more about justice than they do about getting a conviction. While the circumstances of Graves’s case are certainly unique and represent an egregious miscarriage of justice, it is unfortunate justice is not as fair and blind as we would like to think. Confessions get coerced, and people get railroaded by the system (often people of color).

This book is a personal story. There are other books deal with prison reform and capital punishment from an ideological or sociological perspective. Graves says at one point that he hadn’t really thought through his positions on the death penalty until he found himself on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. That made the issue far less abstract. I give this book four stars.

Notice of material connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via librarything.com. In exchange for my honest review.
Continue reading Graves’ Life After Death Row: a book review

The Pain of Labor and the Birth of Hope: a ★★★★★ book review

Pain marks our journeys. Pain is borne alone. 

Rachel Marie Stone is an English teacher and the celebrated author of Eat with Joy (IVP, 2013), the 40th Anniversary edition of the More With Less Cookbook (Herald Press, 2016), and numerous articles on justice, faith, food, public and maternal health. In her new memoir, Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light, she opens up about the ways pain has shaped her journey, alongside risk, anxiety, tenderness, and hope.

4533Stone describes the birth of her children (she is the mother of two boys), her family and personal history with osteogenesis imperfecta (O.I) (a genetic condition, she also passed on to her children), her teenage diagnosis of Scoliosis and the anxieties which have plagued her through life.  She opens up about a painful chapter when she and her husband Tim were in Mawali teaching at a Presbyterian Seminary that was marred by scandal, and the anxiety-ridden weeks after Stone caught the newborn baby of a HIV positive mother with her ungloved, cuticle-chewed and papercut fingers (Stone is an American doula who was in a Mawali hospital to observe).  There were also life-threatening illnesses in Mawali that affected her and her family (e.g. the dehydration that accompanies malaria). Later, she described to a group of beer-drinking-hipster pastors that her whole time in Mawali felt like a miscarriage.

Stone is open and vulnerable about the painful parts of her story, and the particulars of her story are pretty different from my own. As a man, I will never know what it is like to carry a tiny, invasive being inside my own body, much less the pain of labor. I have never gone to Africa or been exposed directly to the threat of HIV. Though I have had my own anxious encounters and painful life chapters that have felt like miscarriages. There are worries I carry and episodes I can’t put a pretty bow on. As different as our stories are, Stone opens up for me a space to reflect on the ways pain and fear have shaped my own journey.

But Stone’s book is not just a book about the pain and anxiety, but about hope. Hurt and joy come intertwined. And so the osteogenesis imperfecta that plagues her family story, also reveals a rootedness—a connection to her mother, grandmother, and great-grandparents. The pain of birth and bearing children is intermingled with the joys (and travails) of motherhood, and the special, physiological and psychological attachment between her and her children. Even the painful feeling of miscarriage in her time in Mawali comes commingled with relationships and connections she and her husband made there. While the pain was hers alone to bear, she was strengthened in her journey by sympathetic guides, a supportive family, and joyful encounters with others.

Hope is born as Stone risks, faces down the pain, endures and emerges. Birthing is a poignant image. I underlined several passages. I particularly loved the “Blood” chapter when Stone describes the messiness of birth, relating it to the incarnation of Christ (calling the often misogynistic Christian tradition to task for the ways they sanitize Christ’s birth).  I also loved how her own experience of pain and bringing life into the world gives her compassion and extend forgiveness toward’s mothers facing hard choices who chose to abort, even those in her own family history.  Perhaps one of the gifts of pain is it gives us empathy and compassion for the painful journeys of others.

This is a great book. Read it. I give it 5 stars. – ★★★★★

Notice of material connection: I received an electronic copy of this book from the author and publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Nurturing the Faith to Sustain: a ★★★★★ book review

Sophfronia Scott came to Christian faith as a child, having read a religious tract and praying the prayer at the end. Her family wasn’t regular churchgoers, though her father listened to eight-track tapes of Reverend C. L. Franklin and movies like The Ten Commandments, King of Kings and the Greatest Story Ever Told.  When she was in college, at Harvard University, she reacted to a Christian friend’s harsh judgmentalism towards athiests and this increased her wariness of church. She  had thought about getting baptized, even spoke to Rev. Peter Gomes about it, but Gomes’s requirement for baptism was being committed to a Christian community, and she wasn’t about to join a church.

 

this-child-of-faith

she came to church and a more significant faith as an adult. Her young son, Tain Gregory,  heard Where is Your Hairbrush? on satellite radio in the car. This led to the discovery of other Veggie Tale Silly Songs and the Veggie Tale cartoon. As Tain learned about the Bible from vegetables, he began to show an interest in faith, God and spiritual things. One day he

 

said he wanted to go to church. So Sophfronia, her husband Darryl and Tain decided to start attending church together. They settled on Trinity Episcopal Church, the church that Tain’s preschool had been in.

I knew before reading This Child of Faith, that Sophfronia had a son who was a third grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School when a gunman entered the school. The events of that day entered the national consciousness. It was the fourth largest, single shooter massacre in U.S. history.  I figured, given the significance and severity of that event, this would be a difficult read, knowing that any Sandy Hook story would be intense.

And it was. Tain lost a close friend (a godbrother) and other people he cared about. Sophfronia struggled with the best way to help Tain process the trauma. But despite the way that day impacted their family and community, this memoir is not really the story of the Sandy Hook shooting. Rather, this is a story of a mother and son, each growing in their Christian faith and the resource their faith was to them.

Sophfronia tells us of Tain’s faith and childlike wonder, the way he saw God everywhere, his gregarious and generous spirit, and the things this called up in her. She also describes what she did to help nurture Tain in the faith, her lesson planning for children’s worship (which she was conscripted to occasionally lead), and the day she and Tain were baptized together. She talks about how their pastor walked with them through difficult stuff, such as the death of a friend’s husband and Sophfronia’s sister.  The school shooting happens near the end of the book. It is Sophfronia and Tain’s faith journey that would give each the resources to process that painful event. Their family worshipped together at Trinity church, they were fed by sacraments, oriented by liturgy and the liturgical calendar, and bolstered by devotional practice and prayer, surrounded by the community of faith.

Sophfronia lists Tain as her co-author. She wrote the book but includes occasional memories and reflections from Tain. With an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College, this is a well-written memoir. And despite its graphic and heart-rending conclusion, this signals hope. Their faith carries them through trauma and loss.  I highly recommend this. Five stars! – ★★★★★

Notice of material connection: I received a copy of this book from Paraclete Press in exchange for my honest review.

Another Benedict Option: a book review

St. Benedict has gotten some good press recently. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher published The Benedict Option (March 2017) arguing that Christians ought to segregate themselves from modern society in order to live out our Christian calling away from the corrupting influence of liberalism. Dreher’s thesis harkens back to Benedict of Nursia’s  monastic rule and the intentional and cloistered Benedictine communities he founded.

At-Home-in-this-Life_9-page-001-663x1024-1Jerusalem Jackson Greer discovered another ‘Benedict Option.’ In At Home in this Life, Greer describes how she dreamed of moving with her family to the country, so she and her husband could impart to their children the virtues of hard work and life on the land and mutual life. Unfortunately, their house in town didn’t sell, and as she listened to God’s voice, and the rule of St. Benedict, she heard the call to stay put where she was. Benedict’s call to stability (not moving from where you are planted) resounded louder than the call to withdraw. Greer was called to stay.

Greer’s book is one part memoir, one part DIY manual for life on the homestead, and one part spiritual disciplines guidebook. Greer shares honestly about her hunger for a deeper spiritual life, how Benedictine spirituality has shapes her practice, and the ways she has learned to embody Christian spirituality in everyday life (not that this is always easy). She takes us on a journey from her angsty desire to be somewhere else (e.g. a country farm), toward learning how to embody Benedictine virtues of humility, hard work and hospitality in ordinary life. She describes what she’s learned from the practices of stability, stewardship, silence, stillness, prayer, Sabbath, manual labor, mutual support, humility and hospitality, and along the way she gives us tips for painting walls, making laundry soap, patching sweaters with doilies, crafting prayer flags, starting worm farms and gardening, cooking (together), hospitality, and organizing garage sale fundraisers.

Greer is a different from me. She’s from the south and loves the country. I’m a North-Westerner and am a city boy. I was drawn into Greer’s story by our mutual love for Benedictine spirituality, and the writings of people like Barbara Brown Taylor, Wendell Berry, Kathleen Norris, Joan Chittister, Dennis Okholm, etc. I enjoyed reading her story about how the wisdom of St. Benedict works out in her everyday life and the ways she’s learned from stability, silence, humility and humbleness. Her description of learning to navigate meal preparation with her husband reminded me of some culinary angst my wife and I had early in our marriage. Greer writes with insight, vulnerability and a good humor. I enjoyed this book. I give this book four stars. ★ ★★ ★

Notice of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book from Paraclete Press in exchange for my honest review.

Open Heart Surgery to Open Heart Life: a book review

Struck is Russ Ramsey’s story of his brush with death. He was struck with a bacterial infection which destroyed his mitral valve, the heart valve which prevents backflow in the left ventricle of the heart. He required open-heart surgery and gained a new perspective through his struggle with sickness, depression, chemical addiction to painkillers, a brush with death and his recovery.  As a father of four, pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville and author he reflects on how his brush with mortality affected his family and his faith.

4494Ramsey’s story unfolds in four acts. Part one describes the affliction, his diagnosis, operation and first month of treatment. Part two, Recovery, explores month 2-5, the early days of recovery, depression, and rehabilitation. Part three, Lament (months 6-22) describes Ramsey’s movement back into the ministry of soul care, with fresh insights and empathy from his own struggle. Part 4, Doxology,  shows death and suffering swallowed up in hope and praise, as Ramsey looks ahead to life and resurrection. An afterward, written by Lisa Ramsey, Russ Ramsey’s wife, tells of her journey as she stood by her husband in sickness, diagnosis, surgery, and recovery. There are ways in which her afterward is my favorite part of the book because she refuses to make a ‘life lesson’ out of her husband’s infirmity. She marks the time as significant and is grateful for the ways God sustained them. It is enough.

I love memoirs because they open up the reality of another’s experience. I appreciate Ramsey’s sometimes raw honesty and the way his diagnosis enabled him to forge deep friendships with and offer hope to co-strugglers (like Barbara, a woman he and his wife knew dying of cancer). There is no sentimentality here. There is pain, grief, depression, loss and sadness. There is also an enduring faith. Ramsey opens up about the depths of his experience. He underwent open heart surgery and learned to live open-heartedly.  I give this book four stars.

Notice of material connection: I received a copy of this book from IVP in exchange for my honest review

Taking Mission Beyond Privilege: a book review

We live in a divided America: Republican and Democrat; haves and have-nots; Caucasians and minority communities; Christians and Muslims (or really anyone else), educated elites and the illiterate. We are divided by politics, religion, race, economics, and culture. And you don’t have to look too far for evidence of how deep the divide. We’ve witnessed the public debate over who’s lives matter whenever someone gets killed and have heard the startling statistic that three-quarters of white Americans are without any minority friends.

y648What Makes D.L. Mayfield’s memoir Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith so good is the way she opens up about the challenges of living in the divide.  Raised on a steady diet of missionary biographies and dreams of heroic self-sacrifice she began living and working with Somali-Bantu refugees with hopes of winning converts and gaining significance from her missional efforts. Instead she found her Somali friends eyed her with suspicion and treated her presence with benign neglect. Committed to friendship with her Somali friends, her attitude gradually shifts to one which is more reciprocal and mutual than that of mere missionary. Her mission field transforms as she learns to give and share the love of God with her Somali neighbors.

When Mayfield begins her mission, she is full of privileged assumptions and believed-expertise. She confronts her own privilege, her  need for recognition, and she makes the shift from expert/sage to that of listener. Here are a couple notable quotes I underlined as I read (chapter titles in parentheses, the electronic copy I read didn’t allow me to specify location) :

I am not poor. I drink lattes during droughts, eat hamburgers during famines. I profit off the world I was born into, an economic system that crushes and oppresses. The problem was that I was born at the top, and so all of those troubles at the bottom used to seem so hazy to me. This is the real problem of being rich and happy and healthy and popular: it becomes easy, oh so easy, to forget about the rest. (Wade in the Water)

The longer I knew my refugee friends, the more ignorant I became. Or at least, this is how it seemed to me. I started off so confident, so sure of my words and actions. Over time, I became immersed in their problems, falling headfirst into a crash course on how hard it is to make it on the margins of the Empire, and I ended up becoming overwhelmed, overworked, and slightly bitter. I went from feeling like an expert to a saint to finally nursing the belief that I was a complete and utter fraud and failure, and this was the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s the only way I could ever start to learn to be a listener. (Part 4, The Life-Changing Magic of Couch Sitting)

I liked Mayfield’s book a lot. In part because I could relate to it. I spent two years in ‘urban mission,’ prior to going to seminary, with organizations that required me to raise personal support. In the early days of my mission I found it easy to write ‘support letters’ telling friends back home about what good work I was doing in the inner-city. However these letters became harder to write farther into my tenure as missionary. It became harder for me to ‘pimp the poor’ and as I was confronted daily with the cycles of poverty, addiction and racial inequities, I wondered what good we were doing. Prayer became difficult for me as I watched neighbors and homeless friends gain one small victory only to hit with an insurmountable roadblock (or get sucked back into an addiction).

Mayfield names a similar sense of disillusionment as the missionary romance wears off for her, but she comes out the other end, hopeful, if chastened. Books like this are necessary because they image for us what it looks like to learn to lay down our privilege, rights, and delusions of grandeur in order to join in relationship with the other. In a divided nation like ours, this is sorely needed. I give this book five stars and recommend it to anyone, especially those of us on the privileged side of the divide.

Note: I received this book from BookLookBloggers in exchange for my honest review.