Unexpected Gifts: Discovering the Way of Community by Christopher L. Heuertz

Sep11

This book was an unexpected gift. I was in the mood for something nonfiction, inspirational, and thought-provoking. And Mr. Heuertz delivered.

I know nothing at all about Word Made Flesh community, the community that Mr. Heuertz lived in and among and from which he takes his examples in the book. I know nothing of the jargon that Mr. Heuertz uses in his book: “contemplative activism”, “transitional awakening” and “prophetic community”. I am skeptical about the pantheon of heroes of whom the author has pictures pinned up in his office: Gandhi, Romero (who?), Che (?), Mother Teresa and Bob Marley(?). I got lost in the “progressive” new monasticism that Mr. Heuertz espouses and the sometimes dense, esoteric language he uses to describe his insights into community. I don’t think the author and I are on the same page, theologically speaking.

And yet . . . Mr. Heuertz has deep experiential understanding and wisdom about how Christians can and should live in community. I found a lot to think about and mull over, especially in relation to my church family, my immediate family and my homeschool co-op family, all of which make up the community where God has placed me. The chapters in the book talk about eleven “unexpected gifts” of living in community: failure, doubt, insulation, isolation, transition, the unknown self, betrayal, incompatibility, ingratitude, grief, and restlessness. All of these would seem to be issues and problems rather than gifts, but as we allow God to redeem our failures, doubts, griefs, and restlessness, we can receive these things as gifts to spur us on to greater growth and deeper relationship with Him and with others.

Failure: ” . . . let restoration become a journey toward brokenness. For in brokenness, our woundedness is best addressed, our fears are calmed, our shame is lifted, and love is extended.”

Doubt: ” . . . very real times of doubt lead both of us to places of lament—the grieving of the things that are fundamentally broken in the world—even as we simultaneously hope for more of God’s justice, presence and nearness. . . . in our community, when one of us has been down or experiencing doubt, we have found that the faith of those around us helps carry us.”

Insulation: “Our communities won’t always be able to offer us everything we need, nor will we be able to give back all that they need from us. . . That’s often when we need to step back, to refocus.”

Isolation: “The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community, may actually mean the exclusion of Christ.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Transition (or change): “Avoiding blame, not picking sides, speaking honorably of the communities we leave or the people who transition from our communities are all parts of a bigger process–one that must also include space for grieving and room for celebrating.”

The Unknown Self: I must admit that this chapter about self-image and identity didn’t speak to me, and I didn’t understand what the author was trying to say. Self-discovery is found in self-denial which allows us to be free and whole people? Or something.

Betrayal A powerful meditation on betrayal and forgiveness. “Our response to betrayal can be a powerful force, setting our life trajectories toward grace or bitterness.”

Incompatibility: Subtitled “When Together Is Too Close,” this chapter explores the difficulties and blessings of incompatibility or the flip-side of too much “chemistry” between people who need to maintain some emotional and physical distance (members of the opposite sex, for instance). I’m not sure I agreed with Mr. Heuertz in his simplistic solution, that we all just act like mature people and get along but not misbehave. I think it is more complicated than that and that there is a place for drawing “artificial” boundaries, such as two people of the opposite sex not being alone together or avoiding intimate communication with people who are immature or abrasive. Heuertz seems to sy that we should just exercise common sense and grow up.

Ingratitude: More powerful stuff. “Many of us hadn’t considered the ways in which ingratitude had created subtle distances among us–forgetting to say thank you when someone stayed late, pitched in, or helped complete a big project, or merely thanking each other for common courtesies such as opening a door. Sometimes not saying thank you when a meal tab was covered by a community member or failing to express gratitude for well-prepared meetings caused some of us to judge each other as entitled or ungrateful.”

Grief: “Grief must be accepted. We can’t control it; we have to experience the depths of grief. In a contemplative posture, we are able to receive the pain as a gift filled with healing and lament.”

Restlessness: I think I liked this chapter best of all because it spoke to my temptation to devalue and become tired of the daily-ness of my life and my calling as a mother. “Most of real life consists of living in the ordinary, in-between times, the space and pauses filled with monotony. Most of real life is undramatic. The challenge is to be faithful and consistent, ‘praying the work’ when no one is looking or when there’s no recognition of our contributions.”

“Becoming the best versions of ourselves often requires that we stay. Stay when things get hard. Stay when we get bored. Stay when we experience periods of unhappiness. Stay when the excitement wears off.Stay when we don’t like those we’re in community with. Stay when we fail or are betrayed. Stay when we know who we can become if we have courage to be faithful in the undramatic.”

Unexpected Gifts was sent to me free of charge by the publisher, Howard Books, for the purpose of review. I am grateful to them and to the author for the opportunity to review and reflect on the ideas that Mr. Heuertz presents in this testimony of difficulties transformed into gifts.

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Sep10

Rose Under Fire is billed as a companion novel to Wein’s popular and award-winning World War II story, Code Name Verity. It’s not really a sequel, but it does take place after the events in Code Name Verity and some of the same characters do make an appearance, particularly Maddie, Queenie/Verity’s best friend. However, this new book is really about 18-year old American pilot, Rose Justice, who joins the British Air Transport Auxiliary in order to help end the war. The story takes place in England, France, and later, Germany, as Rose’s flying assignments take her closer and closer to danger and destruction.

Rose Under Fire may not please all of the fans of Code Name Verity because it’s not as psychologically suspenseful as Code Name Verity is. However, Rose Under Fire is a fascinating look at an aspect of the Holocaust and the concentration camps that I didn’t know much, if anything, about. After a series of misadventures, Rose ends up incarcerated in Ravensbruck, the infamous German death camp. It’s 1946, and the war is coming to an end. However, the Germans are determined to fight to the bitter end, and those who have been committing atrocities in Ravensbruck and elsewhere are making every effort to cover their tracks and maintain order before the Allies liberate the camps.

Part of the cover-up involves silencing those who can bear witness to the worst of the atrocities. Rose, who becomes an accidental witness to some of Ravensbruck’s most horrific secrets, is charged by the other women prisoners to survive and tell the world about the things she sees and learns while she is imprisoned.

While I was reading Rose Under Fire, I was reminded of Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. (I highly recommend both the book and the movie.) I thought perhaps that reminder was because Wein’s book takes place in Ravensbruck, the same prison camp where Corrie and her sister Betsy were held. However, it turns out that there is more to the echo than just a common setting. Ms. Wein lists The Hiding Place in her bibliography at the end of her book, and I found the following information in an article online:

“. . . at age eight, she (Elizabeth Wein) first encountered information about concentration camps, in a comic book adaptation of Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. She read the book itself a few years later, and then drew her own illustrated version of Boom’s memoir about hiding Jews from the Nazis at the family’s watch shop in Holland. ‘I was obsessed with her story, frankly,’ Wein says. ‘Something about how they managed to maintain hope resonated with me.’ ~Publishers Weekly

I was reminded of The Hiding Place because Ms. Wein did her research well. The Ravensbruck in Rose Under Fire is the real Ravensbruck, the same horrible place that is shown in Corrie Ten Boom’s memoir and testimony to God’s grace and mercy. Rose Under Fire isn’t a religious or “Christian” book at all, but there are touches of grace: a motherly prisoner who always prays before allowing her brood their daily crumbs of bread, another prisoner who gives her life in Rose’s place, and Rose herself who receives supernatural strength to endure unspeakable suffering. Rose is a poet as well as an aviator, and in her poems (Elizabeth Wein’s poems) she writes about suffering and hope and redemption.

I was reminded of Corrie Ten Boom’s famous statement of faith and courage: “No pit is so deep that He is not deeper still; with Jesus even in our darkest moments, the best remains and the very best is yet to be.”

And there’s the admonition of Elie Weisel, who said, like so many other Holocaust survivors say: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Rose Under Fire, though it’s fiction, is a true witness to the depravity of man and the tenacity of hope, sure to get a Cybils nomination in the YA fiction category.

An interview with Elizabeth Wein at Playing by the Book.

The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail by Richard Peck

Sep9

Do you know the Great Truth and the Central Secret of the British Empire? Probably not, if you’re human like me, so here it is:

FOR EVERY JOB A HUMAN HOLDS, THERE IS A MOUSE WITH THE SAME JOB, AND DOING IT BETTER.

So, there are needlemice and coachmice and guard mice–all sorts of mice, each with his or her own job, mirroring that of the humans who live in the houses, and palaces, of England. Unfortunately for the protagonist of this story, although he is a mouse, he is a very small mouse with no job and no name. Some of the other mice call him Mouse Minor because he is so small, but that’s not really a name. And our narrator has something of an identity crisis: he’s full of questions and gets very few answers from his aunty, Head Needlemouse Marigold.

I loved that fact that this book is full of repetitive motifs and running gags and just gentle humor. The mouse world itself is delightful to explore. Set down in the secret, hidden pockets of Victorian England where Queen Victoria is about to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee: Sixty Years Upon the Throne, the mice study in schools, sew costumes and uniforms, pledge service to the Queen, and generally keep themselves hidden from but indispensable to humans. When Mouse Minor asks about his name, he is told several times that “Nameless is Blameless”, as if that settles the question. His tail, shaped like a question mark, emphasizes all of the questions that Mouse Minor entertains and asks incessantly of himself and of everyone else. Not that he gets any answers–until the end of the story.

Illustrator Kelly Murphy is the same artist who illustrated Elise Broach’s Masterpiece, another book about a tiny creature in a human-sized world, and her illustrations are detailed, vivid, and uite a complement to the story. Note particularly page 121, “a fall from this height would do me in”: Mouse Minor is in the foreground of the picture, being dangled by some unknown flying creature from a great height above a human ballroom where tiny human dancers are bowing and dancing in courtly fashion. Then on page 140, we get to view an illustration of Queen Victoria herself, in all her (faded) glory.

I definitely recommend this book for a Cybils nomination.

Cybils category for nomination in October: Middle Grade Speculative Fiction.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in August, 2013

Sep8

Children’s and YA Fiction:
Imperfect Spiral by Debbie Levy, reviewed at Semicolon.
I also read and reviewed several picture books set in Korea as a part of my Picture Book Around the World sequel to Picture Book Preschool. Someone asked if I had an ETA for PBAW (don’t you like the acronyms?), but I’m sad to say that I’ve been working on it sporadically for a good while now, and I’m not much closer to finished than I was last year at this time. If a bunch of you asked me to “pretty please finish” so that you could purchase Picture Book Around the World, I might get motivated to actually buckle down and get it to the (self) publishing stage.

Adult Fiction:
The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin, reviewed at Semicolon.
A Wilder Rose by Susan Wittig Albert, reviewed at Semicolon.
The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.

Nonfiction:
Prayers of the Bible by Susan Hunt.

I can’t say I read a lot of books this month, but what I read was pretty good. I’m still thinking about a review of Wally Lamb’s Columbine shooting novel, The Hour I First Believed.

Poetry Friday: To Autumn by John Keats

Sep6

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

What lovely descriptive lines:
“season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
“thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind”
“barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day”
“the small gnats mourn among the river sallows”

Could you even begin to describe a season, or a day, or a mood so vividly and beautifully? I couldn’t, which is why John Keats is the poet and I am me, a humble admirer of Keats’ craft.

Listen to Robert Pinsky read To Autumn.

For more poetry on this Friday or any day, see Poetry Friday at Author Amok.

Imperfect Spiral by Debbie Levy

Sep5

The marketing blurb on the back of this YA novel says “for fans of Jodi Piccoult”, but since I’ve been underwhelmed by the Jodi Piccoult novels I’ve tried, that’s not much of a recommendation. I would say that Imperfect Spiral is much better than a lot of YA novels and transcends the “problem novel” genre.

Danielle Samuelson spent her summer babysitting five year old Humphrey Danker. Humphrey is precocious, persistent, and perhaps slightly “perculiar”, as he likes to pronounce the word. He has an imagination that stretches from aliens called Thrumbles of the planet Thrumble-Boo all the way to throwing the perfect spiral with a pint-sized football. That is, Humphrey imagines throwing the perfect spiral, but he never actually does it because he is killed as our story begins in a tragic car accident.

And it’s all Danielle’s fault. Or is it? This book is about assumptions and the judgments we all make about ourselves and about one another. Danielle thinks Humphrey’s parents, especially his father, might be somewhat overbearing and expecting too much out of Humphrey. Danielle’s parents think her brother Adrian, who dropped out of high school, should shape up and live up to his abilities. Danielle believes that she should have prevented the accident that killed Humphrey. The neighbors think that the illegal, undocumented immigrant family who ran into Humphrey should be held responsible. No one knows exactly what Humphrey’s parents think about the death of their only child. Everyone in the story makes judgments and finds fault when the guilty party is mostly just an imperfect world.

I am fascinated by how people survive after a horrendous tragedy changes their life, especially a tragedy in which the person in question is at fault or might have to accept some blame for the tragedy. I’m also amazed and saddened at how we as a culture and society need to find someone or something to blame for every single tragic event that occurs. If a car malfunctions, it must be the fault of the manufacturer or of the last mechanic to work on that car or of the owner for not being more careful in its maintenance. It can’t be just an accident. If I fall and break my head open, it must be the fault of the people who made the surface I’m walking on or my fault for walking recklessly or your fault for distracting me from walking. Someone must take responsibility. Something must change so that no one, anywhere, ever will fall and break their head open ever again. Laws must be passed and named after me. Rules must be formulated for safe walking. Walking must be regulated or outlawed or only done where there are no possible distractions or safety hazards.

We are obsessed with blame and with making everything completely safe and risk-free. But sometimes there are just accidents. Maybe, in hindsight, those accidents could be prevented, but at what cost to our freedom and our sense of adventure and our joy? I believe that as we have become a post-Christian culture with a belief that this life is all there is, we have become so concerned about preserving life that we have boxed ourselves, and especially our children, into tiny, circumscribed lives that have no room for risk and creativity and untrammeled joy.

And yet, if my daughter died because I let her walk to the grocery store by herself, how would I live with myself afterwards? I don’t know, but I like the way Ms. Levy’s Imperfect Spiral asks the questions that I ask myself about this tension between guilt, responsibility, imperfection, and freedom.

Definitely recommended for 2013 Cybils nominations in the category YA Fiction.

The Rest of the Story: Eric Liddell

Sep4

The late Paul Harvey had a feature on the radio called “The Rest of the Story” in which he would tell familiar stories of well-known people and events or commonplace tales of ordinary people–and then tell “the rest of the story”, the part that not many people know or the part that gives the true story an ironic twist. I’ve been reading a lot of unusual stories myself lately, and I decided to share a few of them with you here at Semicolon.

Olympic gold medalist Eric Liddell is featured in the movie Chariots of Fire. If you’ve never seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

In the movie and real life, Eric Liddell refused to run in a qualifying heat scheduled on Sunday because he believed in keeping the Sabbath holy. He had to withdraw from the 100 meter race, his best event. Liddell began to train for the 400 meter race instead, and he ran the race in the Olympics and won. Eric Liddell broke the existing Olympic and world records in the 400 meter race with a time of 47.6 seconds. After the Olympics and his graduation from Edinburgh University, Liddell continued to run in track and field events, but he always refused to compete on Sunday, citing his desire to please God above all else.

In 1925, Eric Liddell returned to China where he had been born and where his parents were missionaries. He served as a missionary there until 1941 when he was captured and interned by the Japanese who were invading China during World War II. It was there in the internment camp that “the rest of the story” of Eric Liddell’s allegiance to God’s principles above all else took place.

Sunday Salon: September

Sep1

It’s the beginning of the –brrr months, as my husband calls them, our favorite season of the year. We’ve started school, had our disasters and reluctant bouts with self-discipline, and now it’s time to settle in, learn, and enjoy the autumn. Autumn is a lovely word, by the way, “from Old French, autumpne, or directly from the Latin, autumnus.”

I’ve done several autumnal series of posts about food over the years of this blog:

Apples: Fact, Fiction, Poetry and Recipe.

Pecans, the Nut of the Gods.

Autumn and Pumpkins

Potatoes: a Positively Ponderous Post.

You might enjoy reading about these autumn-ish foods as we head into September.

Then, there are the books of September.
Due out in September, 2013:
The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde. 09/03/2013 The Chronicles of Kazam, Book Two, sequel to The Last Dragonslayer.
Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. 09/10/2013
Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch. 09/12/2013
United We Spy by Ally Carter. 09/17/2013
The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs. 09/30/2013

September Events and Books:
September, 1914. During World War I, after the Battle of the Marne, both sides reach a stalemate in northern France, and the armies face each other from trenches along a front that eventually stretches from the North Sea to the Swiss border with France. Reading about World War I.
In September 2009, Abby Johnson was called into an exam room at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas to help with an ultrasound-guided abortion. What she saw in the ultrasound picture changed her mind about abortion, about the pro-life movement, and ultimately about her own relationship with a loving God. Read more in Abby’s book, Unplanned.
September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Spain and Ireland declare their neutrality. Later in September U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt announces that the U.S. will also remain neutral in the war. Mila 18 by Leon Uris tells the story of the Jewish people of Warsaw, Poland as they fought and hid from the Nazis who were determined to exterminate them.
September 7, 1977. The U.S. signs a treaty with Panama agreeing to transfer control of the Panama Canal to Panama at the end of the 20th century.
September 8, 1492. The Voyages of Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta begin. Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card includes both history (Christopher Columbus, native Central American cultures, and slavery) and futuristic/dystopian/utopian elements.
September 8, 1900: A deadly hurricane destroys much of the property on Galveston Island, Texas and kills between 6000 and 12000 people. The Galveston hurricane of 1900 is the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States. Reading through a hurricane at Semicolon.
September 16, 1975. Papua New Guinea gains its independence from Australia. Peace Child by Don Richardson is a wonderful missionary story set in Papua New Guinea.
September 28, 1961. A military coup in Damascus, Syria effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria. Mitali Perkins recommends a couple of books set in Syria, in light of the present crisis in that war-torn country.

Birthdays and Books:
Jim Arnosky, writer of nature and art books for children, was born September 1, 1946.
Elizabeth Borton de Trevino, whose historical fiction book I, Juan de Pareja, won the Newbery Medal in 1966, was born September 2, 1904 in Bakersfield, California. Also born on September 2nd: Poet Eugene Field and children’s humorist Lucretia Hale.
Aliki Liacouras Brandenberg was born September 3, 1929.
Children’s author Joan Aiken was born on September 4, 1924 in Sussex, England.
Lost Horizon author James Hilton was born on September 9, 1900.
Short story master O’Henry was born September 11, 1862.
On September 13th, Carol Kendall (1937), children’s fantasy writer, Else Holmelund Minarik (1920), author of the Little Bear easy readers, Roald Dahl (1916), humorist, and Mildred Taylor (1943), historical fiction writer and Newbery medalist, were all born, greatly adding to the breadth and joy of children’s literature.
Essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson was born September 18, 1709.
September 19th is the birthday of Arthur Rackham, illustrator, b.1867, William Golding, novelist, b.1911, Rachel Field, childrenâ€™s author.
Poet T.S. Eliot was born on September 26, 1888.
September 29th is the birthday of Elizabeth Gaskell, novelist, b.1810.

A Reading List for September 24, National Punctuation Day.

Autumn is my favorite season.

The Trip Back Home by Janet S. Wong

Aug26

Picture Book Around the World: Reading Through Korea I’m working hard on my Picture Book Around the World sequel to Picture Book Preschool, my preschool read aloud curriculum for homeschooling your preschooler or kindergartner. This week at Semicolon, we’re going to continue to visit Korea through the medium of a treasure trove of picture books featuring that country and its children.

This picture book about a child and her mother visiting the mother’s home in rural Korea gives a good feel for the ambience of farm life in South Korea, maybe a a decade or two back from now. The narrator and her mother give gifts to the family and accept gifts from their family as a framework for this story of exploration of Korean culture and customs.

The illustrations by Chinese artist Bo Jia are lovely, colorful and exciting. Story and pictures work well together, and the entire package gives children (and adults) a little slice of Korean family life.

I was reminded of childhood visits to my grandmothers’ homes, even though we didn’t have to go all the way to South Korea to visit them. And I felt a little nostalgic for those family times, reunions, and get-togethers. I’m probably painting the past with rosy colors, but it seems as if people had more time for family and visits and just sitting and talking when I was a child. Nowadays it’s my children who are too often too busy to spend time with their grandmother, even though she lives in a little apartment just behind our house.

Oh, well, it’s a good book for a unit on Korea or grandparents or family life—or just for reading together, snuggled up on the couch.

My Cat Copies Me by Yoon-duck Kwon

Aug22

Picture Book Around the World: Reading Through Korea I’m working hard on my Picture Book Around the World sequel to Picture Book Preschool, my preschool read aloud curriculum for homeschooling your preschooler or kindergartner. This week at Semicolon, we’re continuing to visit Korea through the medium of a treasure trove of picture books featuring that country and its children.

The unnamed narrator of this simple story is a little Korean girl who has a pet cat. As girl and cat play together, the cat copies the girl’s actions: hiding in the closet, chasing after insects, sitting quietly together. Then the girl decides to copy her cat and gain strength and inspiration from the independence and fearlessness of her cat.

That’s about it. There’s not much of a plot, and the story ends where it begins, girl and cat together. The illustrations, by author Yoon-duck Kwon, are colorful and engaging, but rather odd in places, at least to Western eyes. In most of the illustration girl and cat stand together about the same size, which seems a little off. And in one picture the girl looks out from inside the cat’s eye. I don’t know exactly what that’s supposed to mean.

However, this gentle tale of a girl and her cat might appeal to cat lovers and pet adventurers as they identify with the girl and her pet. I just hope nobody tries to copy the girl on the front of the book as she copies her cat and crawls on top of a bookshelf full of books!