Book Briefs: December 11, 1987

Gold, Frankincense, And Books

The gift of a book is a twofold gift. First is the book itself, marvelous words and pictures leading to realms of the imagination.

Second is the gift of yourself. You believe that what delights you will also delight the recipient. The gift of a book celebrates the bond and the joy of mutual interest.

Forthwith, my recommendations for some of this season’s best books for giving:

A Way With Words

For someone who enjoys the way words go together, choose Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, and Virginia Stem Owens.

Buechner’s Brendan (Atheneum, $17.95) is a superb fictional treatment of a real sixth-century saint, set in the generation after the coming of Christianity to Ireland through the preaching of Saint Patrick. The conflict between Christ and paganism is fresh and direct—part of the fabric of life.

Brendan, son of Finnloag, spent his life in the monastic world. Reared there since his first birthday, he founded a monastery of his own, returning there after his fabled voyages around the Irish sea and the Atlantic, perhaps as far as Florida.

Playing Possum

An Excerpt

“I had a friend once who, inspired by the Epistle to the Philippians, I decided to practice dying as a spiritual exercise. He would come home from work, worn out and fretted by a job he didn’t like, to a house with crying babies and a restless wife, and he would lay down and die. Prostrate himself on the floor in the midst of domestic detritus and play dead, like a possum. He would fold his hands across his chest, close his eyes, and pretend it was all over. All the toil and strain to make a living, to make a life. No more obligations. No more responsibilities. No more opportunity to make his mark on an already crosshatched and scored world.

He said he found it marvelously soothing, playing possum. Just the promise of death, just a foretaste, was enough to calm his frazzled nerves. But it demanded discipline. In fact, after about a week he lost the hang of it. He could no longer die effectively. Life crept in again with its demands for decisions, its aggravating action. He only speaks longingly now of how he used to be able to die.”

—from Wind River Winter, by Virginia Stem Owens

As he did in Godric, Buechner uses an ancient life to explore the tensions of the twentieth century. The reader is also taken into a pocket of culture during what was elsewhere the Dark Ages. And the words pile up in glorious heaps to be enjoyed by the reader.

Dillard’s An American Childhood (Harper & Row, $17.95) explores her interior life growing up in post-World War II Pittsburgh. At age 10, Annie realized that she was fully awake, that there was a world outside herself. This awakening to the threshold of maturity is portrayed through the lens of daily life—a series of houses in different neighborhoods, summers with a grandmother at Lake Erie, snowball fights, dancing classes, and family joke-telling sessions. She played Indians on the grounds of the nearby Covenantor seminary, and read books on rocks, insects, or local history from the adult section of the library because juvenile books were so easily exhausted. Her regular attendance at Shadyside Presbyterian Church provides a background for appreciating the Christian orientation of Dillard’s previous books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Teaching a Stone to Talk. She sees life with a headlong intensity, remembers and describes with a clarity that awakens memories of one’s own childhood.

In Owens’s Wind River Winter (Zondervan, $10.95), the Wyoming terrain is informed by a vision of death and resurrection. Owens went with her husband in September to a canyon cabin in the Wind River Mountains to watch the world die into winter, turn white and grey and brown, become weak and sleepy—and to think about death. She had found such contemplation harder in a world filled with news, even the news of dying, and busyness. Somehow the clutter of civilized living covers, smooths over, and denies death. In a canyon-bleak winter, the letters from outside telling of deaths, cancers, and divorces are reinforced by the bones lying about and the fossils of prehistoric death.

Owens’s journal, however, is also joyful with the lift of Sunday Eucharists, loving people, blinding sun, and hardy animals. It is joyful with the hope of resurrection felt in the longer days of thawing March. But resurrection needs death to be resurrection. Hence a Wind River winter, a gift more for those numbed by living, who need to die before spring can mean much.

Giving Beauty

If it is sheer beauty you desire to give, you could hardly do better than Messiah Highlights and Other Christmas Music, compiled and edited by David Willcocks (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Holt, $24.95). As with his 1983 Carols for Christmas, Willcocks has matched each musical excerpt with excellent reproductions from the collections of the museum. Seven selections from Messiah are presented in their entirety, plus two from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, one from Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ, and a dozen assorted carols, all with full voice parts and piano accompaniment.

Poetry should not be forgotten. Jean Janzen, Yorifumi Yaguchi, and David Waltner-Toews combine their talents in Three Mennonite Poets (Good Books, $13.95). Rich with a mixture of cultures and images, sparsely honed and well-chosen words open up the common fabric of lives quickened by God. Often it is a very ordinary word in an unusual place that awakens the reader: The silence of a leaf falling on water “… disturbs / my silence / like the explosion / of a / temple bell” for Yaguchi. Janzen remembers that “… Love outgrows / its newest clothes, and what / we finally wear is a patchwork / of the given and the taken.” Waltner-Toews has “… cords of unused words / stacked up around me. / I’ve left enough unsaid / to keep us warm / all winter.” This is a collection to be savored between friends.

Wendell Berry’s Sabbaths (North Point, $12.95) is also a feast. Other poets watching Berry have noticed clearer and clearer intimations of Christianity in his work. His sure grasp of words and biblical imagery guide our own seeing: “… a shelf / of dark soil, level laid / Above the tumbled stone. / Roots fasten it in place. / It will be here a while; / What holds it here decays. / A richness from above, / Brought down, is held, and holds / A little while in flow. / Stem and leaf grow from it. / At cost of death, it has / A life. Thus falling founds, / Unmaking makes the world.”

Something To Learn From

For Bible students, there is what may be the best atlas you will find for a long time. The Harper Atlas of the Bible, edited by James B. Pritchard (Harper & Row, $49.95, 134 maps, 450 illustrations), has amazing graphics—maps that simulate satellite photos, viewing the terrain from many points of the compass and giving a sense of topography—surrounded by photos of archaeological finds and contemporary scenes. This is a highly visual, full-color atlas, with the written text rarely taking more than half the page—just enough to give the historical framework.

And the Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, edited by Allen C. Myers (Eerdmans, $29.95), has nearly 5,000 entries to tell you about the people, places, things, books, and ideas of the Bible. Based on the Dutch Bijbelse Encyclopedic (Kok, 1975), the dictionary has been extensively updated by a team of 55 editors, translators, and contributors. Occasional photos and line drawings, plus 12 pages of color maps, illustrate the 1,100-page text.

History buffs will enjoy the Atlas of the Christian Church, edited by Henry Chadwick and Gillian Evans (Facts on File, $40.00). The editors are joined by nine other scholars to provide a good balance of text, 42 maps, and 302 illustrations (usually by artists from the period being described). The Atlas is organized in three segments (up to A.D. 500, 500–1500, and since 1500) and includes 26 special essays, a chronological table, a bibliography, and a gazetteer.

For a close look at Augustine of Hippo, converted 1,600 years ago, give your friend The Restless Heart, by Michael Marshall, with photographs by Charles Bewick (Eerdmans, $19.95). The book is the result of a tour of cities where Augustine lived and worked. The popular biography draws on the Confessions and uses historical, geographical, and cultural information to provide a well-rounded account of a decisive figure in the early church. Nearly 60 pictures of modern landscapes, ancient ruins, and art provide an added dimension.

A Child’S Delight

God’s flurry of questions to Job form the basis for Who’s a Friend of the Water-Spurting Whale?, by Sanna Anderson Baker, hand lettered and illustrated by Tomie dePaola (Cook, $7.95). Baker’s choice of questions and her sparse wording are just enough to awaken wonder at God’s greatness. And the simple forms and subtle colors of dePaola’s art provide a fitting vehicle for nurturing awareness of God’s glory. Because the book shows effectively, it does not need to explain. For children or grandchildren ages four through seven, and the adults who read to them, this is a treat.

If your children caught the excitement of the Constitution’s bicentennial this year, We The People, by Peter Spier (Doubleday, $13.95), will expand their perceptions and delight them at the same time. Both text (sparing) and color illustrations (profuse, more than 300 in all) are by Spier. Beginning with an endpaper map of the United States in 1787 and a four-page narrative, he uses a mixture of “then and now” water colors to illustrate the preamble sentence. The book teems with life and variety; with generations of people enjoying a more perfect union, justice, tranquility, defense, welfare, and liberty.

By Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Sibley formerly managed Logos Bookstores in Cleveland, Ohio; and Nashua, New Hampshire.

Read It Through Tears

Lament for a Son, by Nicholas Wolterstorff (Eerdmans, 1987, 111 pp.; $6.95, paper). Reviewed by Paul W. Nisly, chairman of the Language, Literature, and Fine Arts Department, Messiah College, Grantham, Pennsylvania. Shortly after he wrote this review, Professor Nisly’s 21-year-old daughter was killed in a collision with a tractor trailer.

At the funeral service for my beautiful, nine-month-old nephew who had appeared healthy only hours before his death, someone spoke words of comfort: “God obviously needed him more than we did, so he took him home to himself.”

On another occasion, when my sister’s back was broken in a vehicular accident and life itself was uncertain, my brother-in-law, a minister, received scores of letters of encouragement and comfort. The verse most often quoted was Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good …” I grow weak with hearing such comfort.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, philosopher, professor, author of scholarly volumes, writes here a lament for his son Eric, killed in a mountain-climbing accident when he was only 25. Wolterstorff writes as a father—deeply, honestly, personally—avoiding the easy answers, refusing to accept superficial pieties. He resists saying. It’s okay because we know Eric was a Christian and this accident was God’s will. Or, Death is simply a part of life; sooner or later, we must all go through this stage too. Or, Really, I wouldn’t want him back; he’s so much better off now.

No, Wolterstorff faces the myriad questions that crowd the windows of his consciousness, questions that have no convincing answers. “To the most agonized question I have ever asked, I do not know the answer. I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess.”

Nevemess

Refusing to hide, Wolterstorff stares death in the face: Death is physical, death is unique, death is an enemy. And death is final: “It’s the nevemess that is so painful. Never again to be here with us—never to sit with us, never to laugh with us, never to cry with us, never to embrace us as he leaves for school, never to see his brothers and sister marry.”

A father confronting his incredible loss, Wolterstorff grieves, laments. “Sorrow,” he writes, “is no longer the islands but the sea.” In his sorrow, he values those who offer love and comfort. “But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is.” For, in a deep sense, each must grieve alone. Wolterstorff cannot finally share his sorrow with us—or even his family. Nor can we enter completely into his—or anyone else’s. Life is a mystery. So is death. And love.

Ultimately, Wolterstorff sees in the Creator God of the universe not one who explains our suffering, but one who shares it with us. “God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into his heart.”

For the gift of this personal meditation, the Christian community should offer profound gratitude. Perhaps once or twice a year—in a good year—one reads a book so compelling, so essential, that one wishes to advise all friends, “Here, please read this book. It’s wonderful.” Simple and profound, Lament for a Son is such a book. How long will it take to read this lament? An hour maybe, if you are a good reader. But if you read it through tears—as I did—it will take considerably longer.

In Good Hands

An Excerpt

“Elements of the gospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did something else, something important, but not that. It did not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection. If I had forgotten that hope, then it would indeed have brought light into my life to be reminded of it. But I did not think of death as a bottomless pit. I did not grieve as one who has no hope. Yet Eric is gone, here and now he is gone; now I cannot talk with him, now I cannot see him, now I cannot hug him, now I cannot hear of his plans for the future. That is my sorrow. A friend said, ‘Remember, he’s in good hands.’ I was deeply moved. But that reality does not put Eric back in my hands now. That’s my grief. For that grief, what consolation can there be other” than having him back?”

—from Lament for a Son, by Nicholas Wolterstorff

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