Recently in Quotations Category

This is going to be a very difficult book to review. I'd rather just quote the entire thing to you--it is simply THAT good. Ostensibly a book on child-rearing, Ms. Jungreis-Wolff uses the occasion to teach all of us some solid Torah wisdom that we would be wise to incorporate into our own lives. Let's start somewhere:

from Raising a Child with Soul
Slovie Jungreis-Wolff

[Speaking to parents who are concerned about taking their daughters to the funeral of their grandfather]

"I appreciate your concerns," I told them, "but life is not Disneyland. Besides the proper honor that is required to be given to their grandfather, your girls must experience life. We cannot protect our children forever. This is a perfect time to teach your children about the body and soul. Spend time putting together a beautiful memory journal about Grandpa. Permit your daughters to observe that sometimes parents cry and experience sadness for those we love. It's okay. Reassure them that we also find comfort with time and don't cry forever. We feel happy again. Memories remain in a special place, deep within our hearts, forever."

A simple enough beginning--although this isn't anywhere near the beginning of the book, but it is followed close on by this passage:

A disciple approached his rabbi, the renowned Baal Shem Tov. "Each time I feel that I am approaching G-d, I find myself farther away than ever."

The Baal Shem Tov replied, "When a father wishes to teach his infant how to walk, he waits until his child is able to stand on two feet and then places himself nearby. He stretches out his arms within a few inches. Even though the child is afraid, his father's presence encourages his child to take a step. After the first unsteady footstep, the father retreats a bit, his arms still beckoning his child. Seeing his father still within his grasp the child moves one foot forward. With each retreat comes one more step.

"'What's happening?" the child wonders. "Every time I try to reach my father he retreats. I move closer but he is farther away.'

"Your situation is quite similar," concluded the Baal Shem Tov. "G-d wants you to travel a distance and grow as you seek Him. Learn how to search for G-d and you fill find that G-d is there, right in front of you."

Ms. Jungreis-Wolff then continues to teach us what this has to say about child rearing, but we would do well to pause and internalize this lesson for ourselves before we try to apply it to our children. And that is the small miracle of Ms. Jungreis-Wolff's book. She teaches us that we must first live what we want our children to learn, and then, learn it they will--by example rather than by words that are often contradictory.

Let me share another moment, earlier in the book:

[referring to getting calls from parents trying to help their children deal with the fallout of 9/11]

I introduced the parents to a most poignant prayer, one that is also part of the bedtime Shema. It is the prayer of the angels. We tell our children that we call upon G-d and his ministering angels to protect them during the darkness of night.

"Beshem hashem . . . . in the name of G-d, may the angel Michael be on my right, may the angel Gabriel be on my left, may the angel Uriel be before me, and may the angel Rafael be behind me and above me is the presence of G-d." These words convey to our children that the angels above along with G-d love them as much as their parents and protect them at all times. Our children never feel alone.

And what better lesson can be found to teach a child.

While Slovie Jungreis-Wolff provides us with sound advice about how to raise our children, she also feeds our souls and encourages us to become better people ourselves--in that way our children receive the maximum benefit.

The book is filled with fascinating insights into Judaism and has a tremendous amount to say to those of us who have also inherited the great traditions of the Jews. That is not to say that we are one in the same, but that we have much to learn from the wisdom and insight that great Jewish thinkers, scholars, teachers, and simple people have preserved from the treasury G-d has given them.

Ms. Jungreis-Wolff is an Orthodox Jew and as such they hold the name of Our Father and Heaven as Holy and not something to commit to a medium as transitory as paper or pixels on a screen. Because I hope that she will be encouraged to do more books like this when she sees this review, I choose within it to honor and respect her great tradition.

I can only hope that G-d continues to raise up such great, wise, gentle, and caring teachers. I can only hope that G-d cultivates the garden of our barren hearts to receive the seed of wisdom and allow it to grow. Only in this way can we preserve a good life for our children--a life that will be a joy despite the hardships and difficulties a life in which we remember always:

Honor and respect are the basic foundations of our homes. Our sages give us guidelines as to what constitutes honor and respect. As parents, we are responsible for setting certain standards of behavior in our homes. Some behaviors are acceptable, and some are never up for discussion.

In Judaism, we call this derech eretz, literally, "the way of the land." It means that there is a spiritual standard of living. It is the proper way to act in life. We establish a fundamental quality of life by which we exist. This spiritual standard of living guides us in our day-to-day relationships in life.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if more people would observe a derech eretz both within their homes and outside of them? Wouldn't we be approaching that kingdom of G-d we claim to want in the world? Wouldn't it be great if our actions in addition to our words inspired our children with love of family, love of neighbor, and love of G-d?

Ms. Jungreis-Wolff does not need me to tell her this, but you do: this book is a great mitzvah a blessing-act for everyone who encounters it. Just in reading it, our hearts are raised to love Our Father G-d. In living it, our lives are made a mitzvah for our children and for countless others we encounter every day.

You must have this book--you really must. You must read it and allow its deep and compassionate wisdom to transform your life. In living these truths, we become not only better people, but better Christians--we reconnect to the roots that give life to the whole tree. G-d grants His wisdom where He may, and we are free to receive from the many fountains He raises. Do not pass this one by--it is too wonderful for a review to make clear. It has the power and potential of a great devotional--a wellspring of love for G-d shared with the whole world, starting with our own families.

Ms. Jungreis-Wolff, if you should happen to read this, thank you, thank you, thank you. What a blessing this book is to all of us. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your compassionate heart with all of us.

This book is due out 6 January 2009, ordering information follows:

ISBN: 0-312-54196-1
St. Martin's Press
Trade Paper $14.95
Slovie Jungreis-Wolff
Raising a Child with Soul

If you are raising children yourself, know someone who is raising children, or need to raise your own spiritual child, you cannot afford to be without this book.

from Love Over Scotland
Alexander McCall Smith

The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisation; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place.

This is from the third novel in the Scotland Street series and it, perhaps, presents a good example of the critique I cited in the review of those books. However, I also think it is an observation that many of us have already internalized. I know that there is a certain comfort to the familiar, but a spreading and corrosive tedium also. There soon will be no more "exotic" you'll go to Kingali, Kikwit, or Hachinohe and see only Starbucks and MacDonalds out to the farthest horizon. Its a bit sad.

Morning prayer, day-in, day-out 7/365 with rarely a break. And each round of the weeks, I experience something new in the Psalter, I hear something different as the words are spoken. I experience the prayers from where I am at that time, and so they have a different savor on the tongue, in the mind, in the heart.

And today there is a certain sense of joy and frustration.

from Psalter, Wednesday Week 1 of Ordinary Time

My God, the sons of men
find refuge in the shelter of your wings.

They feast on the riches of your house;
they drink from the stream of your delight.
In you is the source of life
and in your light we see light.

Keep on loving those who know you,
doing justice for upright hearts.
Let the foot of the proud not crush me
nor the hand of the wicked cast me out.

See how the evil-doers fall!
Flung down, they shall never arise.

While I relish the mercy of the Lord, I am often aghast at how He allows the wicked to rule and retain power. Ruthless, brutal, heartless, and cruel--the leadership of the world is so often the leadership of oppression. This is true from governments down to small businesses. Wanton small acts of cruelty from the company my wife worked for that ordered her to put two staples into the application of any person of color to the Lehman Brothers and other precipitators of our present crisis. Will they suffer from it? Not at all, and yet the suffering they have caused and will cause is incalculable.

Do the evil-doers fall? Rarely. How often are those who consistently vote for the extermination of small lives cast out of office--aren't they rather celebrated and extolled? How frequently do we witness any comeuppance?

And yet, I don't really want to see comeuppance either. Rather, I want to see the evil-doers fall--fall into the arms of God and cease to do evil. I want to see the sources of the world's evils dry up--avarice, pride, ambition, lust for power. And I know that they cannot go entirely because it is these drivers that given humanity some of its greatness some of its ability to cope with almost anything. Mysteriously, love is not a tremendous motivator to exploration of new worlds. It is the Dionysian that propels us--but even as tempered, it hurls us toward the stars, untrammeled it hurls us toward Hell itself.

And so the frustration of the psalms. I read the line and at first I want to see the evil-doer cast down--in fact, like the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado, I have a little list. It's not even alphabetical, but ranked. And sometimes I think, Lord, if you saw fit to smite these people, I would not be tremendously troubled. And then I go to confession.

Nevertheless, it would be good if I could see the evil-doers fall--fall into the arms of our Lord and cease to do evil. That, in fact, would be more satisfying than to see them destroyed. And yet, it happens so infrequently--or so it seems.

But I have to call to mind the words of St. Paul who reminds us that the sower of the seed is often not privileged to see the harvest of that same crop. So, I suppose by that logic, I do my part in the fall of evil-doers when I return goodness for malice, blessings for curses. "Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." (Rom 12:20 quoting Proverbs 25:21-22).

Oh, but how satisfying it would be to see some of the evil of the world lessen, to see some surcease of the repletion of the foul.

I discovered only this morning that I have been off by a week in my morning prayer--praying out of synch as it were. As that is the case, I'll continue being off by a week for this day because of the psalm that speaks so loudly to me right now:

from Psalm 42

Why are you cast down, my soul,
why groan within me?
Hope in God; I will praise Him still,
my savior and my God.

Around me are any number of causes for sorrow and despair. I received alarming and difficult news from a dear friend, for whom I ask your prayers. Matter at work are difficult and require much prayer and reflection. And then there are the larger things wrong--these show up in minor, but still frightening, ways such as the smaller number of advertisements in the Church Bulletin, the "for Rent" sign on the house next door.

Father in heaven, when your strength takes possession of us we no longer say: Why are you cast down, my soul? . . . Inspire us to yearn for you always, like the deer for running streams, unti lyou satisfy every longing in heaven.

Note, every longing in heaven--not all the yearning for peace and certainty that we have here on Earth--but every longing in heaven.

I truly feel the weight of the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." I would that they were less interesting. And yet everything is allowed by God for the purposes of proving us and refining us and making us more capable of heaven. Refinement is always painful, burning away the dross always difficult. And yet our hope is in what is left behind once all of the excess has been done way with.

How often do I skip through Psalm 51 to arrive at this verse?

Psalm 51

A pure heart create for me, O God,
put a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
nor deprive me of your holy spirit.

Often to the point of forgetting the hard words that I need to internalize:

My offenses truly I know them;
my sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned;
what is evil in your sight I have done.

While the promise of the latter half of the psalm is a great balm, the pain it is supposed to ease is that of the first half of the psalm--recognition and bone-deep recognition of my constantly sinful state. Without the first, the balm will not be withheld, but its healing will feel trivial, not worth the trouble of a prayer. When I forget my sinfulness, I cannot be deeply grateful for my salvation. If I think I have done nothing wrong or that what I have done is small and trivial, then salvation will be a bandaid--not the life altering surgery it is supposed to be.

from Acedia & Me
Kathleen Norris

The monastic perspective can assist us specifically with regard to understanding the value of community. Imagine for a moment that the people you encounter at home, work, or school are the very people God has given you to pray with, eat with, and play with for the rest of your life. And you are supposed to thank God for this, every day, several times a day. This is what monastic people take on. And what they've learned from this particular asceticism, in attempting to live in peace with themselves and with others, may constitute their greatest gift to us.

What struck me as I read this passage is that, in fact, it should not require any remarkable feat of imagination, because this is, in fact, precisely what God has done. Not perhaps for the rest of our lives, given our mobile society, but certainly for that entire portion of our lives while we live amongst these people.

What's important here is the necessity of thanking God for these people regardless of how we might feel about them, and thanking Him for the community that we have around us. Honestly, how many of us can claim that we do that faithfully every day? I don't see any raised hands on this side of the ether.

An amusing sample of the prose of a Nobel-Prize winning author.

from Death with Interruptions
José Saramago

Lovers of concision, laconicism and economy of language will doubtless be asking, if the idea is such a simple one, why did we need all this waffle to arrive, at last, at the critical point. The answer is equally simple, and we will give it using a current and very trendy term, that will, we hope, make up for the archaisms with which, in the likely opinion of some, we have spattered this account as if with mold, and that term is context. Now everyone knows what we mean by context, but there could have been doubts had we rather dully used that dreadful archaism background, which is, moreover, not entirely faithful to the truth, given that the context gives not only the background but all the innumerable other grounds that exist between the subject observed and the line of the horizon. It would be better then if we called it a framework. Yes, a framework, and now that we finally have it well and truly framed, the moment has come to reveal the nature of the trick that the maphia thought up to avoid any chance of a conflict that might prejudice their interests. As we have said, a child could have come up with the idea. It was this, to take the sufferer across the frontier, and, once he or she had died, to bring him or her back to be buried in the maternal bosom of his country of origin.

I don't know why the book is written in this way--long discursive paragraphs that include everything imaginable; single sentense that contain pages and pages of dialog, Seemingly endless and pointless detail about minor characters and odd incidents. And yet, despite all of that which seems an over-abundance, there is about this book something really enjoyable. It is a kind of romp that compels the reader through. I'll let you know if I think the same by the end of the book. But for the moment, I'm having a good time trying to figure out the purpose of the choice of narration.

First, Happy Birthday Ms. Rice--I'm three days late, but very gratified at the gift you've given us all with your confession.

The subtitle of this book is revealing: A Spiritual Confession. It is not a confession in the sense of enumerating sins but a kind of Martin Luther confession--"Here I stand, I can do no other." But Ms. Rice stands firmly with the Church despite blemishes and a long period of estrangement, during which she called herself an atheist. During this period she struggled hard to maintain her atheism, but if the truth be told, there were signs always of the Holy Spirit at work bringing her gently home.

The book is superb. We learn enough of Ms. Rice for the events and revelations to make sense, but not so much that one is perhaps distracted by too much information. Much of the book focuses on her early life in New Orleans and the preliterate formation of her faith--a formation that endured the trials of a long period of distance (38 years.)

As one progresses through Ms. Rice's story, one learns many details about her including her real name, and incidentally her birthday.

It's hard to know where to start in looking at the book, but perhaps the best place is in the facts that most fascinate me. Ms. Rice had a great deal of difficulty in her early life obtaining information through reading. This continued through her early college career. How interesting then that she took up pen and made her living through her writing.

I have said before, and I do not mean it as unkindly as it sounds, that i have never cared much for Ms. Rice's writing style. Up until her Life of Jesus books, I had not completed an entire novel although I tried nearly all of the early ones. But given the struggle she had with literacy, the gift of writing that she has is an enormous accomplishment. It does not make me inclined to like the writing style any better, but it does cause me to bow down once again before the Creator who so mysteriously imbued her with these contradictory trends. Who knows the divine path in it? But divine it is and through the combination of these things, Ms Rice was able to return to her early love of the Lord. More, it is to be hoped that by sharing the story of her struggle she will lead a great many back home with her.

One more point before I proceed to the final analysis. Ms. Rice determinedly does not apologize for the fiction she produced up until the Jesus Books. She, in fact, helps explain the personal meaning of the writing in her life. Regardless of whether or not it had any personal meaning, she is right not to apologize for it. A writer writes because they cannot do otherwise, and a writer writes what is in the depths of her or his heart. If that is darkness, perhaps writing is a means of exorcism, if light perhaps it is a means of praise. Ms. Rice has had both, and through her writing she struggled with her alienation from the faith. Ultimately, that writing may have been instrumental in bringing her home. Yes, she wrote about darkness, because I have not read all the way through a book, I cannot comment on the nature of this, and do not wish to. I heartily endorse Ms. Rice's attitude toward her work. It would seem that a thinking reader, or even a casual reader, would be engaged throughout her work in the struggle that she waged. And by that engagement they might come to a tempering of faith, or perhaps to the cusp of faith. I don't know.

All of that said, when we get to the end of the book, we cannot but realize that Ms. Rice has some very unorthodox views of the faith. Not heterodox, and not necessarily unorthodox in the sense of denying doctrine, but she brings to her view of the Holy Family a unique set of issues involving gender identification and equity. These are good to hear about. Ms. Rice is not proselytizing her notions, but giving us a deep and honest sense of where she stands. That is refreshing. She is disturbed by the pedophilia scandal. She is upset by the notion that women cannot be ordained. She has little patience for some of the patterns of the Pre-Vatican II church (the index of forbidden books) even while she cherishes its beauty and magnificence. She struggles with some of the divisions within the church and with some of the church teachings on sexuality. And for all of that, she has come and intends to remain there. Let me share with you a stirring passage from the end of the book:

from Called Out of Darkness
Anne Rice

But I see people driven away from churches by these issues. And some for their whole lives.

And too many make the mistake I made. They leave the loving figure of Jesus Christ because they feel they have to leave his churches.

I will never leave Him again, no matter what the scandals or the quarrels of His church on earth, and I will not leave His church either.

Next Sunday, I will walk into my parish church as I do every week, and I will celebrate the Mass with my fellow Catholics, and I will stand before the altar of the Lord.

I stop here, not because that is the end of a beautiful passage, but because, you all should have the pleasure of reading it for yourself.

Ms. Rices' story is told in beautiful and simple prose. There are within these pages prose poems and long litanies of praise. (She even gives us pause to reconsider our opinions about the commercialization of Christmas--in a wonderful, beautiful way.) But they never intrude, nor are they ever dull or extraneous. I was buoyed up in my own lackluster spiritual life by being able to share for a moment the difficult journey of this determined woman. It is good to know that the spiritual life is a struggle for all and that my own bleakness does not hold a candle to the torment others feel as they seek meaning in Jesus Christ. Not that I relish that all must struggle, but it's good to see once again how good the Lord has been to me.

Let me recommend this book to the attention of everyone who struggles with the Church, either doctrinally or spiritually. Or if you know someone who is hurt and struggling, buy this book and give it to them. For seekers, at whatever stage, Ms. Rice's work will give hope and some measure of joy. And let me part with this passage from near the end:

Why did He do it this way? Think about it. He made the Universe. So He could have done it any way that He liked. He knew what His intentions were. He knew what we were. He knew what He meant to do. Why begin in such complete obscurity and helplessness? Why begin in the arms of a woman who had to provide for His every physical need?

I find myself confounded by this, as confounded as I am by the horror of the Crucifixion--that the Lord surrendered to the process of birth and maturation, that He entrusted Himself to the weakness and the inevitable frustrations of a developing little boy.

This is not merely the measure of love, but the measure of an overwhelming affirmation of the human condition. You have been a child, so I became a child. That seems to be what the Infant in Mary's arms is saying to me. No wonder He can later say with such conviction in Matthew 18: "Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." He had become a child, quite literally and completely, to enter the Kingdom of Humankind.

I found myself dazzled by this as I thought of it this morning. I was dazzled by His long journey from babyhood to manhood, dazzled by the tenderness of those little hands and little feet.

Nothing short of magnificent. Anne Rice threatens to teach me how to love God again as I should. I can only say with a great fullness of heart and aching, yearning--hank you for this birthday gift you have given me and everyone who chances to read it. What a real blessing, what a vulnerable sharing.