Found it. And I see I had marked the same passage in my copy! If only I could remember all the great things I’ve read!!
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It only gets worse. But be sure to read on to the next blurb on Will for contrast. Funny I didn’t do so right away. This book requires time to digest.
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Last night when I woke early to use the bathroom I reached for The Chosen. I can see now it will not be a book which is content with a relationship consisting only of a chapter per night to send me off to sleep. Read the first section and I’m hooked. A whole other world with compelling, even fascinating characters. Great story! More later, my wife is ready for our morning walk.
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Thanks! Come to think of it, I think it would be a good one for my sons to read with me. maybe I’ll break that out again
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I thought about you and your sons and your father. The way the more orthodox friend (with the more secular interests) feels duty bound to accept an inherited religious position struck me as being an exaggerated representation of the duty any son must feel to preserve the faith of his much loved and religious father. That the less orthodox friend also has secular interests but is more drawn toward taking on the role of rabbi puts me in mind of how coercive parenting can have the effect of driving their kids away from what they want too desperately. Makes wonder how often fathers over-sell that faith, covering over their own doubts.
Also, interesting to see that even Judaism has its denominational fracturing.
Well now I am mourning the end of The Chosen, @Randy. That book pulls you in and drives you forward. Only once did I put a tiny dog ear on a page (217) I thought I might want to quote; but wouldn’t you know it, that was exactly what you had already quoted.
Wow, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be raised in such a careful, intensive way as both the friends had been in Jewish faith. The degree of effort and focus the fathers put into it is amazing. I’m sure this is not a uniform experience for everyone in that faith but still, how inspiring.
While I can’t directly relate to that sort of upbringing there was another theme I could relate to, the value and importance to the soul of listening to silence and not depending on having everything put in words. Language and rational analysis doesn’t require any input from the soul. Sometimes pain is required to discover there even is something greater to know than what can be decoded in language. That was true for me as well. Fortunately hard knocks were there when I needed them or I would have missed everything.
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Thoroughly enjoyed the graphic memoir The Best We Could Do which Thi Bui wrote and drew. I’ve never been so taken or moved by this genre before. Story of a young woman who apparently lives and teaches English and Art in my city and many of the drawings placed here were immediately recognizable. The tale of how her family escaped from Viet Nam after the North took over. Interesting to get this personal point of view of that period of history through the eyes of a young girl. But even more so I found watching her acquire the insight to admire what all her parents went through to save them, and forgive them for the ways in which the experience damaged them.
The other book that became available for me is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Read the first few pages and liked the writing. In reviewing it, Steven King said there were two great books written here in the last 50 years, Vonnegut’s Catch 22 was one of them and this the other. We shall see. But the book is so heavy I worry about holding more than 1000 pages up with my arthritic hands. I’d better load up on Turmeric and Valerian cream.
@Mervin_Bitikofer, I never got around to writing anything about A Canticle for Leibowitz. I enjoyed it but found the huge span of time over the three sections off putting as it forced me to abandon one cast of characters after the next. My biggest take away this time was to note how the “great simplification” which erased the state of learning and technology after the first nuclear apocalypse in the story reminded me of what we are going through now with so many rejecting the level of expertise that is available to us for their own gut appraisals of everything from masks to vaccines to rejecting the political practices which allow for a peaceful transfer of power. It as though we no longer want to conserve much of anything. Everyone’s offhand opinion is valued equally with anyone’s accumulated learning. We should only hope that an early simplification doesn’t somehow trigger the erasure of culture which in the book was caused by fear and tribalism that triggered the use of weapons of mass destruction.
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Well it has happened again. A book that was annoying me to the point of wanting to quit it got interesting again more than half way through. Even better there is talk about religion and the protagonist is 15 year old young woman who has been raised to pigeon hole religion as something quaint until she is dragged to a church (this is Italy so you know which kind) to hear a young scholar named Roberto speak. Yeah, the book is basically the literary equivalent of a chic flick but, don’t tell anyone, that’s a secret pleasure of mine.
The book is The Lying Lives of Adults by Elena Ferrante who is best known for the series of books beginning with My Brilliant Friend, a series I gulped down all too quickly. When I first put a hold on it months ago my place in line was over 130 so I was very disappointed to become so annoyed with it that I wanted to quit. I think now my annoyance had to do with the age of the protagonist, but her exaggerated irritability toward everybody is probably just an accurate portrayal of that time in life which I’d just as soon not be reminded of.
Anyhow I have a longish passage of dialogue to share which I hope won’t violate any norms. In it she finally gets to meet the young scholar again who is the fiance of her aunt’s god daughter who she also likes very much. I should mention that after hearing this scholar speak the first time she was inspired to read the Gospels. So when he asks what she is reading that is what she mentions but she has a strong reaction to them which comes off negative.
Roberto asked me:
“So you think the Gospels tell a terrible story?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t work. Jesus is the son of God, but performs pointless miracles, he lets himself be betrayed and ends up on the cross. Not only: he asks his father to spare him the cross, but his father doesn’t lift a finger and doesn’t spare him any torment at all. Why didn’t God come himself to suffer? Why did he dump the poor performance of his own creation on his son? What is doing the will of the father - draining the cup of torments to the dregs?”
Roberto shook his head slightly, the irony disappeared.
He said - but here I’m summarizing, I was agitated, I can’t remember clearly:
“God isn’t easy.”
“He should think about becoming easy, if he wants me to understand anything.”
“An easy God isn’t God. He is other from us. We don’t communicate with God, he’s so beyond our level that he can’t be questioned, only invoked. If he manifests himself, he does it in silence, through small precious mute signs that go by completely common names. Doing his will is bowing your head and obligating yourself to believe in him.”
“I already have too many obligations.”
The irony reappeared in his eyes, I sense with pleasure that my roughness interested him.
“Obligation to God is worth the trouble. Do you like poetry?”
“Yes.”
“Do you read it?”
“When I can.”
“Poetry is made up of words, exactly like the conversation we’re having. If t he poet takes our banal words and frees them from the bounds of our talk, you see that from within their banality they manifest an unexpected energy. God manifests himself in the same way.”
“The poet isn’t God, he’s simply someone like us who also knows how to create poems.”
“But that creation opens your eyes, amazes you.”
“When the poet is good, yes.”
“And it surprises you, gives you a jolt.”
“Sometimes.”
“God is that: a jolt in a dark room where you can no longer find the floor, the walls, the ceiling. There’s no way to reason about it, to discuss it. It’s a matter of faith. If you believe, it works. Otherwise, no.”
“Why should I believe in a jolt?”
“Because of religious spirit.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Think of an investigation like on in a murder mystery, except that the mystery remains a mystery. Religious spirit is just that: a propulsion onward, always onward, to expose what lies hidden.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Mysteries can’t be understood.”
“Unsolved mysteries scare me. I identify with the three women who go to the grave, can’t find the body of Jesus, and run away.”
“Life should make you run away when it’s dull.”
“Life makes me run away when it’s suffering.”
“You’re saying that you’re not content with things as they are?”
“I’m saying that no one should be put on the cross, especially by the will of the father. But that’s not how things are.”
“If you don’t like the way things are, you have to change them.”
“I should change even creation?”
“Of course, we are made for that.”
“And God?”
“God, too, too if necessary.”
“Careful, you’re blaspheming.”
For a second I had the impression that Roberto was struck by my effort to stand up to him that his eyes were wet with emotion. He said:
“If blasphemy allows me even just a small step forward, I blaspheme.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I like God, and would do anything, even what offends him, to be closer to him. For that reason I advises you not to be in a hurry to throw everything in the air: wait a little, the story of the Gospels says more than what you find in it now.”
“There are so many other books. I read the Gospels only because you talked about them that time in church and I got curious.”
“Reread them. They tell about passion and the cross, that is, suffering, the thing that disorients you most.”
What do you think, @Laura and my other reading friends? Maybe I’m just impressed as an outsider without much experience with the Gospels. Does any of this ring true for you who know them so well?
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Sounds like an interesting book – thanks for sharing.
I would agree with this… and I think it’s true of many things we read, because we often miss things the first time through, or the second, or third, and even moreso if our aim is Christian discipleship.
As for the blasphemy part, of course it does cause my “heresy alarm” to go off a little bit. 
But it sounds to me like the idea of “changing God” has more to do with changing our own perception of God rather than insinuating that something finite could truly change the infinite. If that’s the case, then I would agree, as I’m glad my perception of God has not been exactly the same throughout my life up to this point.
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I read it that way too. It is we who see through the darkened glass and have to guess at what may be on the other side. But I envy you your long term relationship to these stories (not meaning to imply falsehoods). I suppose it is like a human relationship in that way. At some point I realized the only way to go any where new in a relationship was to go past the early stages of all of them which, like childhood, has its own charm. But maturity also has its rewards.
I lack any heresy alarm to speak of but I had the idea he was really saying he would risk what may traditionally be thought as heresy for the sake of moving closer or building a better connection to the source of what is sacred. My sense of the character is that he would never debase or forswear what he knew to be sacred.
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Exactly – and key here is “tradition” – we often build those on shaky ground. That was one of the things that kept the Pharisees from understanding who Jesus was – they were so entrenched in their own traditions, and in believing that they had mastered the law and all that was required of them, that they were unable to accept that they were closer to the state of the poor and the sick and “sinners” than the “chosen few.”
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Yes, and Jacob wrestling with God was an example of what some could call blasphemy, but led to wisdom and insight instead
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They don’t get pithier than this, from classical antiquity of course: ‘The church may be a whore but she is still my mother.’.
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How prose, like poetry, can open us up to the ideas otherwise hidden 
Faith often seems just like this, a propulsion onward. Thanks for sharing @MarkD!
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Glad you liked it. Funny but I was just listening to a video on youtube in which Iain McGilchrist answers questions for about 45 minutes from participants in a graduate study group on religious experience. At one point they discuss the difference between wanting, desiring and longing. Someone says that wanting and desiring push or drive you toward the object of your desire, while longing draws or pulls you toward the object of your longing. I think Iain says religious spirit is more like longing. Objects of desire being things you can put your hands on generally, one is driven to the thing directly. But with religious feeling it isn’t always clear how to proceed but one goes to great lengths not only to close the gap but first to find out which way to go.
I’ve watched the video twice now. McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary, a book whose spell I am under now. He took twenty years researching and writing it and I’ve been working away at it in between novels for a while now. Many people feel that there is religious significance to the work and for me personally it is the reason I am here and thinking more seriously about what it is which gives rise to belief in God. In this video he admits that his book is definitely informed by a religious sentiment and that gets elaborated in answers to various questions. What he has written has brought my fuzzy ideas into sharper focus. But in only on a couple of pages does he discuss belief or anything else to do with religion which I copied out in the 82nd post in this thread.
I’m currently reading The Penguin Book of Haiku by Adam L. Kern (Trans.). I love these short, pithy verses which pack so much punch in terms of observations about life, nature, or social settings. Sometimes Haiku are funny (Like describing the smell of the market on a hot day) other times heart wrenchingly sad or incredibly profound.
Like this example by Togetsu:
Studies and ladders:
Skip a step and there’s no
Moving on up
A bit like the Western saying, “You need to walk before you can run”, it reminded me that when I feel I am not acquiring skills or knowledge fast enough, that this frustration needs to be offset with patience, humility, and self-control.
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Very interesting, I’ll have to take a look at his work! I’m also trying to have a better understanding of faith and religiosity, how to connect the church with people of other belief systems where we can share faith with trusting relationships where others aren’t afraid we’re coming at them with coercion. Apologetics can only do so much, and I think many in the church believe apologetics has more “proofs” than it actually does. I applaud the authors and thinkers who are able to enlighten the rest of us 
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We’ve been talking about Haiku at home, hoping to read about Japanese culture more and see how a 5 and 7 year old do with three lines and syllables 
@LM77 does this book have descriptions or explanations? Would an American be able to read it as well? In my college English courses, I found myself floundering between reading too deep into a work, or not deep enough 
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Randy in looking back for recommendations I missed I found this one for Being Mortal. My library has it and I just put a hold on it. Pretty sure my wife will want to read it too. Thanks.
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Nice Haiku. My wife is working on a presentation to her Bible study group, and I shared it with her, as she was in the research phase and getting a little frustrated.
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