Friday's Volume: Island of Saints by Andy Andrews

When a music student's parent dropped a humidifier off at my front door this week, she also included a bag filled with such necessary items one needs when sick: cough drops, Vitamin C, seltzer, night time medicine, green and herbal teas .... and a book.  With an already insurmountable pile of "to reads" waiting, I thought, I'll be on my 6th antibiotic before I can get to this one.  However, as I positioned myself on my trusty couch yesterday morning with my hot tea and electric throw, I picked up the book that I had placed on top of the  stack ... and I never put it down.  

Though the names have been changed to literally protect the innocent, Andy Andrews has embarked upon a story which reads like  fiction; but is not.  While digging up a wax myrtle in his own backyard on the northern Gulf of Mexico, the author unearthed a rusty old can that housed Nazi artifacts and 3 very old photographs ... one which included Hitler himself.  Putting aside his other writing assignments for this one adventure, Andrews goes on the search of a lifetime, and what he discovers rocks his world.  And many of those around him.  

Because it is a true story, I had to really discipline myself NOT to turn to the last page and see how it ends.  After all, fiction often comes wrapped in lovely paper with pretty bows.  But life rarely does.  I encourage the reader to use the same restraint and just read for the ride.  You won't be sorry.

If you are a history buff, well then you have U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico and a Nazi walking the streets of a Southern coastal town during WWII.  If you like love, there's that, too.  But Island of Saints is not just a novel and it won't be found in the fiction, romance or historical sections.  Rather, you will find it in the "Self-help" section for reasons the author himself explains.  As the subtitle reads, it's "A Story of the One Principle that Frees the Human Spirit."  What might that be?  Well, dear reader, you'll just have to get the book and find out for yourself.  

With a copyright date of 2005, it might not be the newest read out there.  But that doesn't change the fact that it's still a wonderful story and well worth your time.  And besides, you'll be smarter when you're through.

**Note: When I text the mother to thank her and tell her how much I was enjoying the book, she told me that she grew up in that area and that her relatives are mentioned in the book.  It's a true story y'all.  Keep that in mind as you read it.  

Friday's Volume: Andy Catlett -- Early Travels

It is no secret I have an affinity for Wendell Berry ... at least his writings.  Not one of his books yet has disappointed me, including this last one I've read: Andy Catlett: Early Travels.  I had already met Andy in The Memory of Old Jack.  He was a teenager then about to enter his first year in college.  And I imagine I ran into him in Jayber Crow as members of the Port William society continually come up again and again in all of Berry's novels.  In this particular book, he's a smite young.  In 1943, at nine years of age, Andy embarks on his first out of town visit ... on a bus -- and alone, to a whopping tens miles away to see both set of grandparents who live in the now familiar to this reader, Port William.  As he himself says, "As I saw it, it was nothing less than my first step into manhood."  His right of passage.

 

It's a story written through the lens of time and age as Andy remembers belonging to a community that loved him, a people that shaped him.  Mainly, his grandparents and their "families." 

I think one of the things I love so much about Berry's writings is the way his words turned into sentences turn into memories for me.  I am privileged to have known and remember well my grandparents and even great-grandparents.  They, too, worked the land and appreciated hard work and a tired back.  They, too, experienced change.  Some "came over" on horse drawn buggies and they all were taken to cemeteries in gas powered Cadillacs.  The difference according to Berry:  "The wagon passed through the country at a speed that allowed your eyes to come to rest.  Whatever you wanted to look at in the road ditch or the fence row or the field beyond, your sight could dwell on and you could see it." 

I think another reason I like Berry's Andy Catlett and all of the inhabitants of Port William so much is because I, too, live among my ancestors.  My ground is sacred to me.  Everywhere I look I see them.  Where they worked, where they played, where they shopped, where they fished, where they worshiped, and, yes, where they are buried.  And maybe that's why I was drawn to this particular passage nearing the end of the book.

Time is told by death, who doubts it?  But time is always halved -- for all we know, it is halved -- by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal.  The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined.  We believe that the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, though we know nothing about it.  But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer.  It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which, if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim.  And here I am, an old man, traveling as a child among the dead.

We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births.  For time is told also by life.  As some depart, others come.  The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome.  I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren.  Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming.  And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present.  Time, then, is told by love's losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost.  It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb.  The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much.  No one who has gratitude is the onliest one.  Let us pray to be grateful to the last.

And thus, Berry does just that.  He makes me grateful for those who have gone before me as well as for those who have and are to come. 

Read the book and be thankful...

 

 

Friday's Volume: The Memory of Old Jack

Chapter 1: "Though he stands leaning on his cane on the porch of the hotel in Port William, looking out into the first cool morning of September, 1952, he is not there. He is four miles and sixty-four years away, in the time when he had music in him and he was light."

Thanks to my friend and author Dale Cramer, my love affair with the people of Port William began with Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry.  Through that memorable and colorful barber, I was introduced to most if not all of her citizens.  So I was delighted to find yet another Berry read in a local used bookstore: The Memory of Old Jack.

Until the final chapter, the entire book spans less than a 24-hour period in which Jack Beechum, a farmer whose entire life has been lived off the land, reflects on his 92 years. He remembers wars, recalls deaths, courtship and marriage -- which includes a powerful tension between marital obligation and romantic passion; he contemplates his parenting – or the lack of it, friendships, working the land, the “difference between hopeless and hopeful work”; and the difficulty of leaving his home of decades to live out his days in the old hotel converted to an old folks’ home.  “For years now Jayber Crow has referred to the establishment as the local airport: ‘Where are gathered those about to depart into the heavens.’”

You will certainly not find in The Memory of Old Jack the hype and fast movement that is so prevalent in most of today’s entertainment.  It’s a patient book filled with a certain rhythm, like life, and therefore, you must be patient with it.  In doing so, you will discover a pace that slows down the soul and makes you cry for what was and will never be again.  All of Berry’s writings are compelling to me, and just like Jayber Crow, he tells yet another wonderful story, this time through the eyes of Uncle Jack; a story that is earthy, tragic, triumphant, and heartbreakingly beautiful. 

Some books take hold of me, and this is one of them. Even after turning the last page, I couldn’t put the story or Uncle Jack away. I’ve had to live with it and him awhile. Cherish his stories. Honor him. Even grieve his losses. Much like we need to do with real people who have touched our lives.  Although possibly not for everyone, The Memory of Old Jack will remain a part of my “favorite” collection to be savored again and again through the years.  But for now, Old Jack and his memories ... well, they just pause and sit a spell with me.

Friday's Volume: Jayber Crow

Every now and again I’ll get hold of a book that gets under my skin.  That becomes family.  That when I turn the last page, I raise it to my lips and kiss its cover and then press it for a period over my heart and mourn its end.  That’s what I did with today’s book. 

Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself.  Quite the title given by its author Wendell Berry. 

In this rich, pastoral novel, Jaber Crow tells us his story beginning with his birth near Port William, Kentucky in the early 20^th century.  But after the untimely death of both of his parents in the flu epidemic of 1918, and then his guardians when he was 10, he is sent to an out-of-town church orphanage where he grows up knowing of loneliness and want and soured to rules and institutions.  After a stint in pre-ministerial college, Jayber is drawn back to his childhood home where he lands the position of town barber.  A born observer, he hears much, watches carefully, and spends the next 50 years learning its citizens by heart.  This is the story of a man’s love for his community and his abiding and unrequited love for a woman who has made one bad mistake.  He tells their stories (and his) with great tenderness, and in doing so, we come to know these townspeople and care deeply for them.  And ever so slowly, we become participants. 

Nearing the end of his career as a barber, Jayber writes, “ I came to feel a tenderness for them all.  This was something new to me.  It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces.  They had known hard use, nearly all of them.  You could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis.  They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather.  The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thorn stuck, pinched, punctured, scraped, and burned.  Their faces told that they had suffered things they did not talk about.  Every one of them had a good knife in his pocket, sharp, the blades whetted narrow and concave, the horn of the handle worn smooth.  The oldest ones spoke, like Uncle Othy, the old broad speech of the place; they said “ahrn” and “fahr” and “tard” for “iron” and “fire” and “tired”; they said “yorn” for “yours,” “cheer” for “chair,” “deesh” for “dish,” “dreen” for “drain,” “slide” for “sled,” and “juberous” for “dubious.”  I loved to listen to them, for they spoke my native tongue.”

This book is about a love that breaks the barrier of time and of loss that grieves silently.  It’s about darkest despair and deepest joy.  It is about the tug of war between heaven and hell.  About community in its rawest sense.  There is much humor and not a little sadness, but despite everything, the author lets us know there is always hope.

If you have never lived in a small town in America, then here is your guide.  If you have lived in a rural setting, then expect to find friends within these pages … if not family members.  If you have ever loved from afar, ever been rowdy, afraid, lonely, confused or have questions of faith that no one can answer, well then you just might have a friend in Jayber Crow.  But beware, our narrator is not a “religious” man, but rather a man of hard-won faith, a faith unique to himself and his life.  As he finishes out his time in a modest shack on the river, he still walks into town for church.  But even then we hear him saying, “I don’t attend altogether for religious reasons.  I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream.”  And you will, too, as you sit with him and listen to his stories.

Jayber Crow does not disappoint.  In a media inundated with the sensational, with sex and with violence, this novel is a gift.  By the time you finish it, you, too, may just wish you didn’t have to let it go.  I know I did.

Truly beautiful story.  One to be read again and again.

Friday's Volume: An Altar in the World

Many years ago, I read a book by Mark Buchanan in which he proposed that things of life were not so much divided into religious and secular, but into sacred and profane.  I think that was a beginning of my looking for the sacred in the ordinary, as my blog title insinuates.  No doubt, that's why if I were to keep a Top 10 list of favorite books and another for authors, today's "Friday's Volume" would be high on both.  May I introduce to you AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD by Barbara Brown Taylor.

Barbara Brown Taylor spent her formative years as an Episcopal priest in Atlanta and then in Clarksville, GA until she left full-time ministry to become a professor at Piedmont College, a decision that stretched her faith beyond the four walls of a church building.  In today's book, she introduces us to her new discoveries of spiritual practices and the uncovering of new "altars."  Unlike the common disciplines of fasting, prayer, and lectio divino (sacred readings), her disciplines are the far more barefoot-on-the-pavement kind.  Just listen:

The practice of waking up to God
The practice of paying attention
The practice of wearing skin
The practice of walking on the earth
The practice of getting lost
The practice of encountering others
The practice of living with purpose
The practice of saying no
The practice of carrying water
The practice of feeling pain
The practice of being present to God
The practice of pronouncing blessings

The first time I picked up this particular book, it was a read-through.  I'll even admit I began by approaching it cautiously, just as I do any author with whom I'm unfamiliar.  But now it sits next to me at my reading station, the couch in my sun room.  I pick it up often, and I linger over passages.  I absorb them.  I think over them.  And very often, I pray over them.  Whereas I'll be the first to admit that some parts are very interesting ... if not daring, I can turn to any page, and be blessed. 

A friend with whom I shared a copy of this book gave this insight: "Barbara Brown Taylor models a transparency that enables people to see themselves."  Indeed she does.  I know for me, it has come in the form of a yearning to know God more and to experience His presence in a greater reality in day to day living.  From walking barefoot in the backyard to being stuck in traffic, from going to the local grocery store to digging Yukon gold potatoes in the backyard, Mrs. Taylor reveals concrete ways to see in all we do the sacred in the ordinary -- the altars in the world, if you will -- if we'll just pay attention.

Who knows?  The ground you're standing on just might be holy.  Anybody care to take off their shoes with me? 

Just an ordinary moment...

Friday's Volume: Sacred Space

Confession: I am a bibliophile.  I haven't always been one -- at least I don't think I have.  But there were early symptoms as far back as 4th grade when I volunteered in the church library every Sunday afternoon.

According to my dictionary, a bibliophile [bib-lee-uh-fahyl] is "a person who loves or collects books, especially as examples of fine or unusual printing, binding, or the like."  I can't say my taste in books is toward the "unusual" or expensive -- except for the fact I like purchasing them rather than checking them out from the library, as they, being the media specialists, seem to get ticked when you write in theirs or, even worse, commit the cardinal sin and turn down a page corner.  But since "booklover" and "one who reads habitually" are also included in the definition, I think it's safe to confess, "Guilty."

It's not unusual for me to have several books going at one time.  And it's also not uncommon to have a book mark stuck in assorted and various ones just waiting to be picked up again ... because I got interested in something else.  Quite frankly, that's one of the reasons I keep a list of my books in the column of my blog.  It makes me finish it, because I won't record the thing until I've read the last page and closed the back cover.  But very often, I've wanted to comment about a book ... somewhat like a review, to let the reader know if I enjoyed it or not.  Whether its worth the time.  Thus "Friday's Volume."  I won't be posting something every week because I don't read a book a week.  Sometimes I linger over them.  Others are meant to be read over long periods of time -- like today's choice.  And quite honestly, I never took the Evelyn Woods Speed Reading course.  I ... read ... every ... word.

So here's my first Friday's Volume.

Sacred Space: the prayer book 2012

I'm nowhere through with this one as it's, as you can see, a 2012 prayer book.  But because of the true gem it is, I wanted to go ahead and share it with you -- just in case it peaked your interest.  No author is listed except The Irish Jesuits, and entries are taken from their website at www.sacredspace.ie. 

Sacred Space began the first Sunday of Advent, November 27, and will take me through Saturday, Dec. 1.  Each day I am invited to make a "space" in my day, thereby making it a sacred space.  It begins with something to think and pray about each day of the week.  I then engage in recognizing the presence of God with me; breathing His life into me; sitting quietly and becoming aware.

This week I've also been encouraged to ask for the grace to be free of my own preoccupations and to be open to what God may be saying to me.

And then I turn to the day's passage.  Sometimes it may be as lengthy as 10-11 verses.  Or it could be only two.  I read it several times -- normally out loud.  I linger over it.  I ask questions of the text.  I place myself there.  If need be, there are "helps" with the text that might move my thinking in a certain direction.

Today's reading was Mark 3:13-19; the account of Jesus going up the mountain and calling the 12 to follow Him -- and then appointing them apostles.  I've read it a dozen times, if not a hundred, through my life.  But today I recognized the sacredness of the moment.  The solemness.  The intimacy.  And probably the cluelessness of the apostles as to what was really happening.

What is stirring in me as I pray?

Am I consoled, troubled, left cold?

Has it moved me to act in a new way?

I share my feelings with Him.

And each time ends with the doxology:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

World without end. Amen.

Sometimes I say it, but more often I sing it. 

This might not be the kind of book one would expect to find in a person's first book review, but it's one that's really impacting my life right now.  It's teaching me how to center down; how to pray; how to experience God and His presence on a daily basis.

If I knew how to include stars in this text, you'd see 5 of them.

Just an ordinary moment...