Finally.

Someone has exposed the ideology of positive thinking for what it is: a billion dollar industry that is turning out more crap in a day than all the cows in Sonoma County in a year.

Barbara Ehrenreich, who for decades has documented the decline of the middle class, takes a clear-eyed look at the ideology of positive thinking and how it has crept into every aspect of society from churches to businesses to government.

My father read Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 best selling book, The Power of Positive Thinking, to help improve his attitude as a tire salesman. He also listened to motivational tapes. If he was still a salesman I’m certain that he would shell out a few hundred bucks to listen to former President George W. Bush give a motivational speech at a “Get Motivated” seminar.

The sad, dark side of this “bright” ideology is the effect it has on people who are suffering. It teaches them to blame themselves for whatever misfortune befalls them. It promotes delusion instead of solutions.

Ehrenreich recounts her own experience (see video below) of being castigated for having the gall to get breast cancer. She argues that no scientific evidence exists that shows a link between positive thinking and resistance to cancer.

But there are plenty of positive thinking gurus who are willing to blame victims from the Holocaust to the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami for “attracting” disaster. Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret, wrote:

“Often [people] recall events in history where masses of lives were lost, and they find it incomprehensible that so many people could have attracted themselves to the event. By the law of attraction, they had to be on the same frequency as the event. It doesn’t necessarily mean they thought of that exact event, but the frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event. If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have no control over outside circumstances, those thoughts of fear, separation, and powerlessness, if persistent, can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It’s no accident that in a country such as ours – in which so many people literally buy into the myth of the law of attraction – Americans consume three-quarters of the world’s annual intake of anti-depressants. We are a nation that frowns on party-poopers. Ehrenreich believes the widespread use of pain and depression medication indicates that people feel enormous pressure to appear to be happy even if they aren’t. Nobody wants to be labeled as a complainer or a victim.

Religious leaders are getting filthy rich by selling this ideology. Joel Osteen is a slick, ever-smiling minister from Texas who runs the mother of all mega-churches. He has written several best selling books, such as It’s Your Time: Activate Your Faith, Achieve Your Dreams, and Increase in God’s Favor, that promise people that their faith will bring them wealth. Hey, it worked for Jesus!

Karen Armstrong (The Case for God) criticizes the myth of positive thinking. She argues that the “spectacle of suffering” we see every day in the media can actually help us understand the power of compassion to transform our lives and the world. She encourages people to confront their own and the world’s pain instead of running away from it (see video below). She argues, “So instead of seeing this suffering that we’re seeing as an intolerable burden, let us allow it to break our hearts for all people.” It’s the “impulse of compassion” that saves us.

The worst aspect of the ideology of positive thinking is that it discourages empathy and compassion for those, including ourselves, who are suffering. Joel Osteen doesn’t have crosses in his church, according to Ehrenriech, because suffering is a downer. Not even a gold cross?

VIDEOS

Barbara Ehrenreich (1 hour)
http://fora.tv/2009/10/24/Bright-Sided_Barbara_Ehrenreich

Karen Armstrong (3:43 minutes)
http://fora.tv/2009/08/14/Karen_Armstrong_Charter_for_Compassion#Karen_Armstrong_on_Suffering_and_the_Power_of_Compassion

Poets and mystics have a lot in common. They both work at seeing into the hidden mysteries of ordinary things that surround us every day. And while we are madly chasing wooden carousel creatures around in endless circles, they are watching a world bloom in bliss before us. Mary Oliver is a bit of both. Evidence opens simply enough with a poem called “Yellow.”

There is the heaven we enter/through institutional grace/and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing/in the lowly puddle.

The gift we are given in Evidence is the chance to see as the poets and mystics see. To see the sacred in those things we take for granted. To come alive with the vision of Japanese maples turned red along city streets or the Petaluma hills turned green by early October rains.

There was a man sitting in a room watching a documentary on television about Yosemite National Park, and he longed to be there in the midst of its grandeur and beauty. Outside his window, if only he would pull aside the drapes, was the real Yosemite.

Turn off your televisions!

In “The River Clarion,” Oliver writes: 

Of course for each of us, there is the daily life./Let us live it, gesture by gesture./When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?/And should we not thank the knife also?/We do not live in a simple world.

How many of us are unhappy with our lives and who we are? How much time, money and energy do we spend trying to get somewhere else that is better than where we are or trying to be someone else who is better than who we are? Is our unhappiness the result of where or who we are or, instead, the result of chasing wooden carousel creatures around in endless circles? We may be wasting our lives waiting in long lines for institutional grace while ignoring the bliss that puddles offer us.

Be yellow finches!

Do you remember when you first felt mud squishing up between your toes as a child? When was the last time you stuck your head outside the car window like a dog and smelled the wet fragrance of a forest? Shouted in church? Ran through the park singing? Given thanks for a slice of melon?

Poetry like Mary Oliver’s demands that we pull back from our busy lives and spend some time by the side of a river. To listen to “tongues of stones, in the restless waters.” It doesn’t even have to be a river. It could be anything. The sacred isn’t in a box. Pull back the curtains and look outside your window.

Words are tricky. It’s easier to trust silence to express what we want to say. Silence brings us closer together, like absence, more than words because words are abstractions of reality that once spoken harden around life like amber encasing a prehistoric butterfly. Silence is possibility. Where do words come from anyway if not from silence?

Words separate us. It’s not only that we speak thousands of different languages and dialects throughout the world; those of us who speak the same language have a hard time connecting with one another through language. We hear what we want to hear. We keep talking, not particularly to say anything new, but to avoid the silences that carry the risk of the new breaking though language. Silence is uncomfortable. It’s almost as if we’re afraid that the other person will sense what we’re trying to hide with all of our talking.

Nick Hornby has a way of writing the silences into his conversations between people. Or, to be more accurate, he gives us a peek behind the curtain of words into the silences that define us and our relationships.

Annie is dumped by Duncan. Who is a nerd obsessed with a reclusive former rock singer/songwriter named Tucker from America. Who Annie, by a long series of unlikely circumstances, winds up sleeping with in her seaside English village of Gooleness. Annie feels like she has wasted the last fifteen years of her life with Duncan. When she falls for Tucker, she can’t find the right words to express her feelings for him.

“She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate the way one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies.”

(Is this the distinctive curse of the British who are condemned from a young age to live in the shadow of Shakespeare? Probably not.)

“She tried one last time. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I know that . . .  that love is supposed to be transformative.’”

Nick Hornby takes two people who are never supposed to meet, or be transformed by love, or escape from the amber that encases them in their separates worlds, and somehow, through words, not silences, frees them. It is sort of a literary miracle. A path covered by interlacing shadows and light of words and silence. A path carrying us toward those parts of ourselves that long for escape from our prehistoric slumber of abstract certainties. And, finally, toward the pure flight of silence. The freedom only love allows.

This will be a difficult book for many people of faith to read.

First, it contains the most searing indictment of Organized Religion that I have encountered. Surprisingly, this critique isn’t delivered in a derisive litany by a well-known religion hater like Christopher Hitchens. It comes from a Franciscan priest who speaks with a deep love for his religious tradition.

Second, it asks people of faith to change. To come out of their sanctuary of “us versus them” thinking and to see the sacred in every moment. In every person. Rohr is attempting to recover Christianity’s lost tradition of contemplation. This scares the shit out of the church. But it’s something people are searching for in these troubled times when nothing seems certain except death, taxes and Chevron’s profits.

My own spiritual journey over the last year has led me to a daily practice of contemplative prayer. When a friend of mine, Ruah Bull (a spiritual director, and one of Petaluma’s best kept secrets) recommended that I read Rohr, I jumped at the chance. The good folks at Copperfields unknowingly supported my newly acquired addiction to all mystics great and small by ordering The Naked Now.

One of the best things about The Naked Now is that each of its twenty two chapters stands on their own. You can start at the end, the middle, or the beginning of the book. It doesn’t matter. You will learn to see as the mystics see wherever you begin. Just begin.

One of the secrets that Organized Religion is keeping the lid on is the truth that God is everywhere in every moment for anyone to see. If this secret became widely known, what would we need with all of those priests and liturgies and doctrines of this or that religious minutia?

When you can find God within yourself, why do you need someone else to tell you where to look?

The most challenging part of grasping this perspective on faith is that it requires us to do the hard work of seeing the sacred within ourselves, other people and all things. If you could pay someone to exercise for you every day until you had the beautiful body that you’ve only dreamed about, how much money would you be willing to fork over? Church folk are more than willing to pay the professional clergy to do their spiritual workouts for them. Rohr puts the burden of getting in spiritual shape back on us. The Naked Now is a workout for flabby souls. To paraphrase Olivia Newton John, it’s time to strip down and get physical.

Okay, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Rohr is right: God is present in every moment and every place. All we have to do to see God is to learn how to see; and by learning to see as the mystics see we will be transformed. Sounds simple.

But what would happen to our world if the practice of seeing as the mystics see caught on?

How could we go to war? Once you were able to see God within yourself and other people, it would be impossible to kill another human being even if they had been labeled “the enemy.”

How could we slaughter animals? Once our eyes were opened to the suffering that animals undergo in slaughterhouses (like Rancho Veal Corp. in Petaluma), it would be impossible to gobble up a pork chop without feeling even a small portion of the pain that animals are put through by our voracious eating habits.

How could we destroy the earth? Once you could see the sacredness of everything from a daisy to Yosemite, it would be impossible to feed our children’s future to the Chevron monster for the sake of a drive across town to buy a bag of potato chips and a six-pack of beer.

Mystics are dangerous. That’s why they’re often jailed and murdered. Usually by fellow believers. Learning to see like mystics doesn’t only mean that we will see the light; it also means we will see the lies and liars that imprison us in darkness.

If a mystical revolution is brewing, you can bet some heads will roll. The Naked Now might be a book that people of faith should stay away from. It’s a dangerous book to read and take seriously. As a matter of fact, I remember one of those subversive mystics once saying something about the dangers of believing in God:

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

That comes from another book that’s probably too dangerous for people of faith to read.

There are twelve short stories about life in Nigeria, and the lives of Nigerian immigrants in America, in The Thing Around Your Neck. I was just getting warmed up when the last page faded unceremoniously to white.

The first story hooked me.

A young girl watches her brother suffer the ordeal of imprisonment and torture. In prison he undergoes a slow transformation from a teenage thug to an unlikely friend of an old man, risking his own life to save the suffering man from his sadistic guards.

Each story is better than the last because themes and threads from previous stories are woven together throughout the entire collection.

Reading a book is mostly done by feel. By the heart. If it’s good. Which this one is. You have to develop a love for the characters, or at least, an abundant liking for them, to carry you from word to word. To see into the heart of the words. These stories have a strong beating heart that will stir yours.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nsukka, Nigeria, in the house once occupied by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. While in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, she began her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). The book was shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize (2004) and awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (2005). Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), is set during the Biafran War. She is working on a new novel about the experiences of Nigerian immigrants.

I am very glad that I picked this book off the shelf at Copperfields. Not only because my discount card maxed out and gave me ten bucks off on my next book. It’s one of those books you want to read again. And I can count those books on my fingers.

How do we select books to read? My son is hooked on the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. I guess we stick with authors we like. I do it because I’m lazy. But finding a new author we like is one of the greatest joys that a reader can experience. It’s better than discovering a new Ben and Jerry’s flavor. Most of the time.

Reading short stories is an easy way to test drive an author. Short stories are a modern literary form so you can’t go much further back than Mark Twain. Nowadays publishers don’t publish many short story collections. A collection of the best American short stories comes out every year; but it isn’t the same as reading a collection of short stories by one author. Thank you Mr. Knopf.

I’m trying to read authors from many countries to get a sense of the world that is a little different from the perspective offered by CNN. (Isn’t it funny that artists are rarely, if ever, invited to comment on world affairs by cable news shows? What does an artist know about the real world? They just make stuff up from imagination, right? Imagination is kid stuff.)   

It’s been said that writers write to discover what they know. Their imaginations aren’t chained to a particular set of beliefs or an abstract conception of the world. They create worlds. Some of their worlds look like the ones we’re used to. Adichie recreates the world she knew in Nigeria and the world that Nigerian immigrants are creating in America.

All of us are creating new worlds all of the time. Not just writers. “America,” politicians like to say, “is an idea.” Freedom. That’s why anyone can come here from anywhere in the world and become an American. There isn’t a real America. It’s always America becoming America. That’s why it’s beautiful. It’s a country that’s always becoming a country.

Adichie is helping us understand that Nigerian immigrants are making America more American than it was before they came here. Her writing is the equivalent of a 50-ton bulldozer plowing into the fence along the US-Mexico border.

She is writing about many worlds: Nigeria, America, Nigerian-American and on and on. Old worlds creating new worlds. It makes me think that belonging to this place we call the world has gotten too complicated for simple categories of us-versus-them. The lines are so blurry now that it’s impossible to keep people locked inside steel cages of separate identities. Where do I leave off and you begin?

Adichie is writing us into new worlds. It might not be the world we think we know but I know it will be more beautiful than the one we see on CNN. They have such little imaginations on television.

Artists often have a better understanding of how the world really is because they don’t have an idea of the world that blocks their imagination. When they do we wind up with paintings of Stalin or Mao waving to hordes of smiling peasants. The business of artists, and mystics, is seeing new worlds coming into being in every moment and place. They create to discover creation. And what is the world if not a creation in progress?

I’ve decided that I like these twelve stories because they aren’t just stories. They are stories creating stories. I guess that’s why writers keep writing. There is always another story to tell.

Fade to white.

Take a visit to the author’s website: http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/

            Why have so many mystics been persecuted by religious authorities? Were they jealous of the mystics mad love for God or that the mystics wrote about God’s mad love for humanity? The mystics were dangerous to religious authorities because they were replacing fear of God with a passionate, wild, heretical love.

            Love Poems from God contains poetry by twelve of the greatest mystics in the Muslim, Hindu and Christian traditions. What is a mystic? From reading these poems (which are translated with artistically sensual license), it seems that a mystic is someone who is capable of having a direct experience of God’s love through all things. Especially themselves.

            They are souls on fire.

            Rabia (c. 717-801), a popular Islamic saint from the Sufi tradition, was kidnapped as a young girl and forced to work in a brothel until her fifties when her freedom was bought by a wealthy patron. She wrote, “In my soul there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church that dissolve, that dissolve in God.”

            The theme of a God who is found within us illuminates these poems. Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) was imprisoned and tortured by fellow priests for leading a reform movement in the Carmelite order. He wrote, “Finding our soul’s beauty does that – gives us tremendous freedom from worry. ‘Dig here,’ the angel said – ‘in your soul, in your soul.’”

            I was astonished by the sensuality of the poems. We don’t usually associate the language of passionate sex with an experience of God’s presence. So it’s not surprising that the mystics are unfamiliar to many people of faith. But the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Scriptures uses this language to describe our relationship with God. It begins, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.”

            Why not use sexual imagery to describe God’s love for us and our love for God? The last I heard sex and love were a pretty happy couple.

            Hafiz (c.1320-1389), a Persian poet admired by writers from Goethe to Garcia Lorca, wrote, “One regret that I am determined not to have when I am lying upon my death bed is that we did not kiss enough.” Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) wrote, “‘I won’t take no for an answer,’ God began to say to me when He opened His arms each night wanting us to dance.”

            Kissing, dancing. I could get use to this kind of prayer.  

            Why not? Is a religion that is dry and bereft of passion worth believing in?

            Years ago in seminary I was shocked to hear another seminarian once say that he often got an erection during worship service. (That guy could pray!) Now I understand what he was talking about. His sexuality and spirituality weren’t separated from one another. If prayer is an ecstatic spiritual experience, it seems appropriate that mystics would use the language of sexual ecstasy to describe their union with God. Love, spirituality and sex make a great team. Like the Marx Brothers. If you had kicked out Groucho, it’s likely that Harpo and Chico would have wound up selling life insurance or used cars.

            Put passion back into religion.

            Rumi (1207-1273) wrote, “With passion pray. With passion work. With passion make love. With passion eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?”

            Reading these poems felt like coming home.

            Last Friday when thunder and lightning startled more than a few Petalumans from their sleep, I went outside to watch the show. It was three in the morning, and mostly still, except for the low rumble of distant thunder and an occasional car passing by. The sky flashed every few minutes. I could feel the earth opening to receive the softly falling raindrops. The trees were still. The bushes were still. As if the thunder hadn’t disturbed their sleep. I tried to be still too. We were all very grateful. Sometimes that’s all that God asks of us. To be still. To let the raindrops fall on our face.

            Nature is God’s love poem to us. And it’s one passionate gal.

The difference, if there is one, between great art and mediocre art is a matter of intention. A great artist has a passion for the art form itself while a mediocre artist uses the art form to express an idea.

Raymond Chandler despised mystery writers like Agatha Christie who wove improbable plot lines that no self- respecting private detective would be caught dead in. The Big Sleep and Chandler’s other novels and short stories allowed their characters to write their own plot.

Can you imagine Picasso deciding during his Blue Period to paint scenes of waves breaking on a beach? He wasn’t painting ideas; he was letting the painting lead him wherever it wanted to go.

People of faith often make the same mistake as mediocre artists. They try to impose their ideas of God on their faith. My pastor, Rev. Blythe Sawyer, preached a sermon last Sunday about opening our faith to the unlimited possibilities of images of God. If we get stuck in thinking about God as an old man with a white beard we won’t be open to seeing God as a young girl inspiring us to get off our asses and dance once in awhile (my words, not hers).

Jose Saramago is a great artist. His publisher lets us know he is a great writer by printing his credentials as a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature on the cover. I’m not sure that would make someone buy the book; but it helps. The average customer in a bookstore spends three seconds looking at each book. My own method for deciding on a book is to read the first sentence. If it makes me want to read the first paragraph, and then the first page, and so on, I’ll buy it.

“The following day, no one died.”

If you can resist that line, I have a painting of Bodega Bay to sell you.

Saramago’s sentence structure, or lack of structure, he is a writer of the postmodern variety, shifts back and forth between the story of death’s holiday and the narrator’s interpretation of the unfolding story. This approach led me to go back and forth between my role as a reader and my role as an accomplice of the narrator in reading the story. Saramago brilliantly blurs the line between author and reader.

You have probably had an experience of this kind if you have ever attended a reading by an author. The event opens with a flowery introduction by a bookstore employee or the chair of some sort of literary committee or establishment, followed by a few modest witticisms by the author and then the reading. Afterwards, the audience is allowed to ask a few questions and, under the best circumstances, engage in a dialogue with the author. This is a chance for the audience to collaborate with the writer in the art of literary criticism, which is a fancy way of saying what a person likes and doesn’t like.

The same process occurs in Death with Interruptions. It may occur with any book or work of art; but it occurs in a self-conscious way with great art. As soon as someone says, “I don’t understand that painting” or “I hate that painting,” they have entered into a dialogue with the artist. Their emotional response is part of the art. That’s what critics of controversial art don’t understand.

When the Catholic League mounted a boycott against Andres Serrano’s crucifixion in urine or Cosimo Cavallaro’s chocolate statue of Jesus they had entered unwittingly into a dialogue about the art work with the artists. They ranted and raved against the artists for deliberately trying to piss off people of faith but what they were really upset about was the idea that someone might think differently about God. As guardians of the True Faith, their job is to prevent that sort of nonsense. We all know that God is an old white guy with a beard, right?

Saramago continually surprises. I don’t want to see another painting of waves breaking on the beach. That’s only one idea about waves, and not a very good one either. I’m sure that there are a lot of irate waves who are tired of being stereotyped by artists who are trying to make a quick buck off tourists from Iowa. Waves don’t even refer to themselves as waves anymore. They want to be called swells.

The ending surprises. I will never think of death in the same way. I imagine that there are people who will never read Death with Interruptions because it has the word death in the title. Who wants to read about death? On to the next book for three seconds.

Resist the urge to turn away. Great art makes demands on us. We have to confront our own limitations. That’s the fun part. We can break free of those ideas that have held us prisoner inside ideas of reality and enter into a dialogue with reality itself. If art makes us feel more alive, more human, more in love with life, of which death is a part, it’s worth a few bucks and a few hours of our lives. But if it only confirms our firmly held ideas, it isn’t worth three cents or three seconds.

May I begin with a digression? I realize it violates the rules of English major physics; but in the words of the immortal Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, “I must! I must!” (And to digress from my digression: for anyone who has read more than one of my book reviews, it must be clear they contain more digression than substance.)

And now, let the digression begin!

There are two ways to look at America’s recent penchant for idiot kings. One is that a dumbed-downed American people don’t want to know the truth because it’s terrifying. The other is that God wants to confound the world’s greatest empire so that the harm it inflicts upon the rest of the world is kept to a minimum. You choose.

Sandwiched between the former idiot king George W. Bush and a future idiot queen like Sarah Palin is a king with a brain. But Americans are becoming restless with President Obama’s persistent candor about the country’s problems and challenges. Too much! Too fast!

God is probably worried too. What would happen if the American government cut back on its elephantine defense budget, and instead, listened to the cries of the people for better health care and schools? Prayers would take a big hit. God would have a lot of time to count stars and journal; but it’s not as much fun as saving the world.

End of digression, more or less.

Fortunately, presidents aren’t the only leaders whose brazenly flaunted idiocy can keep God awake at night. There is never a short supply of religious kooks. Especially in Texas. Which is where it all began for Ryan McNear, the Petaluma-bound protagonist in The God Patent.

Ryan is on the run. A laid-off software engineer whose meth-laced fling with an exotic dancer broke apart his marriage, Ryan is an unlikely hero. When he is unable to make child support payments, he skips town and lands up in Petaluma. Working a legit job is impossible. If he signed a standard W-2 form with an employer, the authorities would get a whiff of his scent. They would track him down for not paying child support and haul his rump roast back to Texas faster than Bill O’Reilly can turn a pack of lies into the Gospel truth.

The heart of this tale is a science-versus-religion battle over a couple of patents that promise to unlock the secrets of the universe and turn the power of God into an ExxonMobil wet dream.

On one side is Ryan and a new batch of quirky friends that includes a heartless lawyer (is that redundant?), a dedicated scientist who is sexy enough to lure Ryan back from the dark side and a teenage whiz kid with pimples and a handful of condoms. The other side includes the usual suspects: the evil government in cahoots with an evil corporation in cahoots with an evil university run by a right-wing religious megalomaniac. Just your typical Houston suburb barbecue crowd.

Ransom Stephens skillfully weaves together multiple plot lines and characters in a fast moving story that kept me hungry for the denouement and some baby back ribs. I loved hating the bad guys in The God Patent. They are evil in the most ordinary capitalist, self-righteous way. You might run into any of these bad guys at a megachurch or a corporate boardroom and think they’re perfectly respectable. But behind closed doors they are building machines that will take the capital G out of God. Or at least give him a mild case of indigestion. Thankfully, there are always heroes like Ryan who can see through the plastic smiles and boob jobs.

Halfway through The God Patent I found myself wondering how it would be possible to rescue Ryan from his randy software engineering self. For the first few chapters, it was hard not to dislike him immensely for what he had done to his family.  

But as I kept reading, it became apparent that Ryan’s fall from grace had given him a glimpse of the corrupt core of mendacity that is eating away at our society like Rush Limbaugh at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Lies and power are inseparable. Nowadays politicians don’t even apologize anymore when they’re caught in a lie. They know the public expects them to lie. And they are more than happy to oblige. 

Ryan chose a different way. He decided to stop lying and running away. He grew a heart. Not one of those 3.0 versions of Microsoft’s Love bundle. A real heart. The kind that gets tested and still beats true. Okay, I’ll say it. He learned to love again.

Well, he is living in Petaluma now. What did you expect?

Ransom Stephens got it right. The Petaluma scene. The suspense software. The dark side in all of us that is battling our hardwired angels. And to top it off, you can read The God Patent online for only four bucks at http://www.scribd.com/doc/15609842/The-God-Patent-By-Ransom-Stephens.

And you can order some Texas-style barbeque at http://www.bustersbarbecue.com/

In a recent poem, Jane Hirshfield rifts on the expiration date on a plastic container, and gets personal about the metaphor of perishability: “I found myself looking:/ now at the back of each hand,/ now inside the knees, / now turning over each foot to look at the sole.”

Her poems often begin with the easily overlooked stuff of everyday life. Like buttons (“The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure.”) and walnuts (its “almost welded-in sweetness”).

But like a familiar melody that jazz musicians take apart and put together again, the everyday routine we think that we know by heart is transformed by Hirshfield into a soulful rhythm.

Turn off your iPod. This music is live.

An unfair advantage that children have over adults is their natural ability to perceive the magical realm of reality. The popularity of books like Harry Potter cannot be reduced to a single element; but the desire to confirm one’s suspicion about the extraordinary lurking below the surface of the ordinary must be given its due.

Hirshfield gently leads adults back to their younger imaginative days when a rock could be as interesting as the Cathedral of Notre Dame (“The work of a rock is to ponder whatever it is:/ an act that looks singly like prayer,/ but is not prayer.”).

Each day we live is filled with a thousand decisions about the way we perceive our surroundings. We get into the habit of seeing what we expect to see. Nothing changes. Especially us. Seeing the unexpected is a transformational experience. Hirshfield’s poems are a reminder that we can change if we open our eyes to the extraordinariness of our surroundings.

What happens if we read poetry like Hirshfield reads life?

We become lovers of words, of moments, of the sensuality of presence. We become what love turns us toward. Like a tree turning toward the sun — “the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,/ it turns in another.”

How many invisible habits have we accumulated over the years? I wonder if blind conformity and the practice of indifference in a world being torn apart by violence and suffering are less toxic than the daily habits that prevent us from seeing the beauty of small things. Not much is at stake. Just ourselves. Hirshfield warns: “But habit is different: it chooses./ And we, its good horse,/ opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit.”

Neigh.

___________________

You can watch Jane Hirshfield read some of her poems at the following websites:

Anne Rice is well known for the Vampire Chronicles. It must have surprised many a faithful reader that she chose to write about Jesus. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is the first book in a trilogy on the life of Jesus. Next week I will review the second book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. The third book hasn’t been released yet.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is a revelation. Rice paints a believable portrait of Jesus’ childhood. In the afterword, she describes an exhaustive process of research for the book that covered the full range of New Testament scholarship. Her goal was to make Jesus come alive for readers:

She is wildly successful. Jesus’ emotional struggle with his identity, even as a child, is insightful and moving. His relationships with his mother and father, other family members, and a large cast of historical and fictional characters, draw out his personal and public struggle over the relationship between his humanity and divinity.

Rice writes so beautifully I felt as if I had become another character in the novel. That’s the sign of a brilliant writer. Readers not only feel the emotions of characters; they live through the characters. We are challenged to wrestle with the same conflicts. The conflict between the desire to use violence to overthrow hated rulers and the longing for peace. Or the conflict between the struggle to faithfully live out their identity as Jews and the struggle to live harmoniously with Romans, Greeks and other peoples. A book like this allows us to grow with the characters.

It’s possible for us to identify with Jesus’ thirst to know the truth of his infancy. A truth that his parents and family have hidden from him. The mystery at the center of Jesus’ life radiates outward affecting everyone he touches. Rice’s delicate, elegant handling of this mystery makes every page compelling. We know and we don’t know. We want to know as much as Jesus wants to know.

People don’t like living with ambiguity. We want answers to the great mysteries of life. Geez, I want to know why the streetlights always turn red every time I come to an intersection. Now that’s a mystery I know I will never solve.

It’s easy to apply the word mystery to matters of faith when we are confronted with difficult questions. Or we can choose to cram mystery into a neat little box of certainty. But Rice invites us to stay with the tension of mystery so we can discover a deeper truth about faith – just as the young Jesus had to wrestle with the ambiguity of being fully human and fully divine. It’s the story, not the answers, that makes life interesting. And Rice is one hell of a storyteller.

Mysteries get crucified. We live in polarized times. There are persons of faith from the great religious traditions who make no room for people, even of their own faith, who have different perspectives. This polarization extends into the political sphere and our social and cultural life. At times, listening seems to be a lost art.

In Rice’s book, Jesus learns to listen deeply to the inner dialogue between his human and divine sides. He makes room for the dialogue. It’s the reason that he develops as a human being and a sacred being. Are you listening to your own inner dialogue?

The polarization that is poisoning dialogue in our world stunts our development as human beings and sacred brings. Rice’s book is hopeful because she points out a different path. So I’m heading to the bookstore soon to buy the second book in the Christ the Lord trilogy. Red lights or not.

“A Closer Walk with Thee.” Sung by Mahalia Jackson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Qq_cVoLzs