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Godric by Frederick Buechner
HarperCollins Publishers, 1980 (1981 Pulitizer Prize Nominee)
Review by Nellie Boyd
October, 2006

Saint, Mary, virgin dame.
Mother of Jesu Christ, of God his Lamb,
Take, Shield, and do thy Godric bring
To thee where Christ is King.
Our Lady, maiden, springtime's flower,
Deliver Godric from this hour.
--Godric of Finchale

Godric of Finchale, a medieval English saint and hermit (1065-1170) and the earliest known English poet, is the subject of Buechner's work of fiction by the same name. Using as his primary source the hagiography written by monk Reginald of Durham (1162-1173), Buechner sheds the saint's halo, giving us instead a seasoned sinner, all the while immersing us in 12th century language, people, and places.

This earthy story begins at the end of Godric's 100-year-old life as he recounts his personal history to Reginald, a monk who's offered to be Godric's biographer. Godric leaves no sordid stone unturned as he details his adventures from home to Durham where he now lays dying. As a merchant and a sailor, Godric saw Rome, then Jerusalem, and everything between there and England. Leaving his quiet home in Norfolk, he traveled through markets, taverns, and whorehouses, cheating and stealing, having his way with merchants and maids of every class.
I started out as rough a peasant's brat and full of cockadoodledoo as any. I worked uncleanness with the best of them or worse. I tumbled all the maids would suffer me and some that scratched and tore like weasels in a net. I planted horns on many a goodman's brow and jollied his lads with tales about it afterward. I took up peddling as my trade. I cozened and tricked the way a baker yeasts his loaves till they are less of bread than air. I passed off old for new. I thieved and pirated. I went to sea. Such things as happened then are better left unsaid. ...
His personal wealth increased and he hoarded it away against some future time of need, or perhaps to only slake his greed. It was a dark path for Godric before he found his salvation one night in the Jordan River, after which he began his shoeless climb up the "seven-story mountain."

As Buechner draws the reader into this archetypical journey, he interjects Godric's wanton past with the old man's reflections: the wisdom of a mystic now 60 years a pious hermit. At 100, the saint has perspective on his sins, things done and things left undone, memories of souls who suffered in the wake of his selfishness; and the pain of Godric's memories stings the reader's conscience even as it sears his own.

Judgment could have been the heart of Buechner's message, but it isn't. There is Reginald. Reginald, who knows and loves the humble Godric, begins to read back the biography of the penitent centurion. Like God, it's the saint Reginald sees, loved and redeemed; and my own hope is embodied in the paradox of Reginald's version of an unholy yet holy life. Almost unwittingly, I found myself embracing my own sainthood, standing ready to complete my confessions with praise and prayer and blessings.

To please God . . .to be a real ingredient in the Divine happiness . . . To be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son - it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

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The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story by Frederic Buechner
(2006, Paraclete Press: 97 pages)
Reviewed by Bob Seney
Date of Review: October 20, 2006

In lyrical, almost poetical narrative, Buechner guides us through a history of Jesus' life by detailing and describing the many faces that Jesus presented throughout his life and ministry. He describes these faces as paradoxical and even contradictory. In six chapters, each followed by a brief "meditation," Buechner with his straight from the hip theology and scriptural interpretation introduces us to the many facets of Jesus' life and ministry. His honest retelling and interpretation of Scripture is easy to read and in fact quite compelling. Buechner brings us face to face with Jesus and leads us to a more intimate understanding of Our Lord. This work guides us into a richer knowledge of both the man and the Son of Man.

After reading Faces and starting one of his novels, it is easy to see why Buechner is popular at St. Mark's. His voice, writing style, and insights combine to create well-crafted and gripping works. I am most impressed with Buechner and intend to read more of this author. The library does have several of his works, but I think he is well worth having a full collection of his writings.

As I began to read Faces of Jesus, my first reaction was that this would be a good book to use for a class, but after completing the work, I would recommend it more for personal reading and mediation. It would be a highly appropriate book to read during Advent. You can expect to hear excerpts from this work in my future sermons. However, a class built around this book could be quite interesting, as it could be a search for the historical Jesus, the human Jesus, and the divine Jesus.

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The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton
Review by Ashley Steinhart
October, 2006

My immediate reaction after finishing the book was, "OK, what did I just read, what ever does it mean, and how on earth and I going to write a review of it?" Not an auspicious beginning to my career as a parish library reviewer. But I soon learned that I was in very good company with this response: the appendix to the book includes no less than five attempts that Chesterton himself made, in various interviews and writings, to explain Thursday. In these, he refers to his own book as "juvenile", "a foolish farce", and "a bad novel". He states with confidence that this book would certainly not be read in 100 years-an ironic statement considering the book was first issued in 1907 and I was, in 2006, holding a spanking new re-issue. He even describes himself as mad to have written it, saying, "…it flatters me to think that, in this my period of lunacy, I may have been a little useful to other lunatics".

With this as the gauge, I find myself firmly in the camp of the lunatics. I found Thursday more than a little useful. It is a fanciful, quick read that captivates with elegant and interesting prose. In Thursday, which I will sketch only vaguely to keep from spoiling the "secret" of the story, the protagonist is a policeman who infiltrates the Supreme Council of Anarchists in Europe in the 1890s. This council is chaired by the ultimate anarchist mastermind, a man called "Sunday", and each of the other council members is named after a day of the week. Our hero is "Thursday". But this council has a secret, the unraveling of which is the point of the story.

Woven through the fabric of this fanciful novel is a theology that stands in stark opposition to the nihilism and anarchy that were characteristic of pre-war Europe in the 1890s. Indeed Chesterton claims to have written his "nightmare" novel as "a protest against the pessimism of the [eighteen]nineties". It also stands, in my mind, as a protest against the pessimism of our own time, reminding us to expect to find allies beneath the masks of our perceived enemies. The Man Who Was Thursday is worth the quick read it represents, for both the story it tells and the elegant style in which it is written. There is no deep theology here, but Chesterton is too hard on himself in his own self-deprecating reviews.

The version of this novel that we have in St. Mark's library is a recent re-issue, annotated by Martin Gardner. Let me warn the reader that Gardner's annotations can be a bit overblown and annoying, with many notes taking twenty or more lines on a page that has only three lines of Chesterton's text, often describing in way too much detail the geography of London, including lists of who "once" lived in various locations like Leicester square. Gardner also blows one of the "secrets" of the novel in his notes. The novel reads better if you skip most these notes and come back to them later if interested.

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The Complete English Works by George Herbert
Reviewed by Luri Owen
Oclish scholar, orator, poet and priest, was popular among readers of his day and continues to speak to readers in the 21st century. The Complete English Works includes his poems, the complete text of The Country Parson, his personal collection of proverbs, his letters and the text of his will. While there is plenty here to amuse and inform a reader who chooses to read it from cover to cover, it is equally well-suited to being opened at random for a quick "snack" between other tasks.

Most of us read a few Herbert poems in high school English classes. Reading them as an adult reveals not only a poet with a flair for rhyme and meter but also a deeply spiritual philosopher with a rich relationship to Christ and His church. Herbert's faith was shaped by his lifelong association with John Donne, who had been close to Herbert's family throughout Herbert's life. His poems exhibit a simplicity of language that clothe a complexity of thought; his poem "The Elixir" is a plea to be able to see God in all things, and his assertion that "A servant with this clause/Makes drudgery divine:/Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws/Makes that and th' action fine" (180) reminds us that, then as now, the most humble action is divine when done as to God. He also reveals himself to have been ahead of his time in writing what is now called concrete poetry, where the words of the poem are arranged to replicate the shape of the object that is the subject of the poem. "The Altar" (3) is written in rhyming couplets of varying meter such that it appears on the page in the shape of an altar table.

The Country Parson, His Character and Rule of Holy Life is, in effect, a behavior guide for pastors. Published the year before his death when he had been ordained for only two years, it is a thorough discussion of a pastor's behavior, public and private, divided into thirty-eight short commentaries, the shortest of which deals with "The Parson in Mirth" (236). Herbert informs us that "The Country Parson is generally sad" but concedes that "instructions seasoned with pleasantness both enter sooner and root deeper" and so concludes that, depending on the hearer, a priest may use some humor to make a point.

The first proverb on Herbert's list is one familiar to many today, "Man proposeth; God disposeth". Of the 1024 he collected, many resonate with wisdom today as well: "He that is warm thinks all so;" "Love and a cough cannot be hid;" "There would be no great ones if there were no little ones," and lastly, "He that wipes the child's nose kisseth the mother's cheek" (257-287). Herbert's thinking is revealed as much by what he considered to be words of wisdom in common use as his original writings found elsewhere in the book.

The Complete English Works is a good read for any amount of time a reader has to give to it. It is written in the literate English in use in the 1600s, so it may take a few pages for the language to become comfortable, but the vocabulary itself will be familiar. It is a book that, once sampled, readers will want to consult often.

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Jane Kenyon Collected Poems
Review by Mary-Catherine McAlvany
October 2006

I was told by one of my teachers that to properly read poetry one must find a quite space. It's not the kind of reading that can be done with outside noise or kids running around. One needs find quite to open the pages and soak in every word--every point of imagery--and reflect on its merit and truth. For me, reading poetry is like reading the Scriptures-it feeds my soul. So when I was able to pick up Jane Kenyon it was like communing with a kindred soul over coffee. Kenyan has a way of breaking apart the world into as few words as possible. This was especially true for me in her poem Alone for a Week, where she laments her husbands absence when she writes "The bed on your side seemed/ as wide and flat as Kansas;/ your pillow plump, cool, and allegorical….".

Married to the current Poet Laureate of the United States, Donald Hall, the creative duo were the envy of the poetry world. After her early death from cancer in 1995, Hall went on to write volumes of poetry about their life together, and about her death. She was, by many accounts, understood to be the better of the two poets-and even Hall agreed on this point. She has anchored her place in poetry as one of America's greatest female poets.

Kenyan is quietly moody and decidedly clever. Her work belies a wanting restlessness, a consciousness of being a stranger in a new place, of being a solitary being, and the separation of death which comes to us all. She could even be accused of being rather pedestrian, though there is a gravity to her work that can only be discovered in reading a poem over and over again. Meditating on it. I was moved when, in her poem Portrait of a Figure near Water, she wrote "we think we burn alone/ and there is no balm./ Then water enters,/ though it makes no sound." And again in her poem The Socks, she deepens words with play: "While you were away/ I matched your socks/ and rolled them into balls./ Then I filled your drawers with/ tight dark fists."

Poetry gives voice to that which we often cannot find words. The greatest poets brandish words so smoothly, seemingly so easily, that one could read past the subtleties of their usage, missing their great depth. When in her poem Mud Season Kenyon observes in the opening lines that "Here in purgatory bare ground/ is visible, except in shady places/ where snow prevails", she speaks of something more elemental than just the land. She is germinating a spiritual motif. In fact, there is much of her work that shoulders the spiritual-a great weight that must be made manifest in words. And she sheds it through imagery of land, nature, life on a farm, the family home, and the quaint villages of New England.

The Collected Poems compiles all of Kenyon's previously published poetry into one anthology. It surveys her progression as a poet and betrays how in her later poems she wields the word with intense affection and learned skill. The Collected Poems is a dense read, but the beauty and joy of poetry is that one can read it as slowly as one likes (It once took me two years to complete an anthology of Russian poetry). It is also worth mentioning that at the rear of the Collected Poems is Kenyon's translations of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. One of my favorite poets, Akhmatova is earthy and yet otherworldy, and intensely in love with the word. Reading Kenyon's translations of her work marked them with a patently Kenyon feel. It would be well worth your time to read this collection.

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The Anglican Spirit by Michael Ramsey
(Dale Coleman, ed. Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1991.)
Reviewed by Chandler Jackson
October 19, 2006

Michael Ramsey was the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury and was a scholar, prophet, and ecumenicist who strove throughout his episcopate to reach out to other Christian communities, as well as other major faith communities of the world. Much of this volume reads as a history of the Anglican Church, from the days of Henry VIII, through the Tractarians of the nineteenth century, to our own time and the outreach to the Church of Rome and the Orthodox east which consumed so much of Ramsey's tenure at Canterbury. However, this is not a dry, academic history. On the contrary, it is full of the life and exuberance that was Michael Ramsey.

While some may be tempted to steer an inquirer towards this book for a history of the English and American Anglicanism, this might be a mistake as this book contains a much deeper message and requires some knowledge of church history to truly gain all of the nuggets contained here. Ramsey does make clear the via media, the "middle way" favored by the Anglicans of Elizabethan England, as well as the importance of the tri-fold emphasis of Scripture, tradition, and reason in the doctrines of the Church. According to Ramsey, we must always regard Holy Scripture as the supreme authority for doctrine, but that Scripture must be interpreted through the lens of ancient tradition, the Fathers of the ancient church as guides to understanding Scripture. Alongside Scripture and tradition, Anglicanism also appeals to reason. It is through this appeal to reason that we are able to reconcile Scripture and science as in the realization that Scripture contains more than history, but also poetry, drama, symbolism, imagery, and a wealth of other literary forms to express the handiwork of God.

The volume concludes with two chapters related to Ramsey's ecumenical work - first in his meetings and conversations with Pope Paul VI, culminating in the acceptance by the Church of Rome of a wider Holy Catholic Church that exists in relationship with Christ. The final chapter relates Ramsey's experience in reaching out to the Holy Orthodox Church. This group of churches contains the ancient sees of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, as well as the churches in Greece and the Balkans. While he did not achieve the same degree of acceptance with the Holy Orthodox Church as he did with the Church of Rome, Ramsey was able to see the formation of the Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue, which led to the "Moscow Agreed Statement." This document showed considerable understanding of the character of the differences between the faith communities, especially in the meaning of tradition, which has long been held as a unifying point. However, due to the political structure of the Orthodox world Ramsey encountered during the days of the Soviet Union, and the ordination of women within the American Anglican Church, closer unity was not realized during his episcopate.

I enjoy reading history and I enjoy reading theology, so this book was a great pleasure for me. Although a brilliant scholar, Ramsey is able to relate to any reader, regardless of background or previous study. While this volume will provide wonderful historic insights into the history of Anglicanism for the student of the subject, it will also provide new strength for any member of the church.

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Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poems and Prose of Ranier Maria Rilke(Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Reviewed by Luri Owen
October 2006

Ranier Maria Rilke has been called the greatest poet of the twentieth century. He wrote in both German and French. Ahead of All Parting offers his two most famous poetry collections in their entirety as well as other poems, prose selections from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and nine uncollected short prose pieces, all translated from German by Stephen Mitchell.

The book's title comes from a poem in Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus:" "Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were/behind you, like the winter that has just gone by" (487). As I read the poems in English and realized that they were translated in unrhyming lines, I wondered how they were written in German, and was pleased to find the original German poem printed on the facing page. There are indeed rhyming lines. The poems themselves seem to sing themselves along in English, the language accessible and the subjects compelling. "I would like to step out of my heart/and go walking beneath the enormous sky" (13) is a sentiment that many feel on soft summer evenings or cold winter nights in southwest Colorado; thankfully, Rilke gives us the words in his poem "Lament."

Rilke worked for a time as a secretary to Auguste Rodin, who encouraged him to observe things and events objectively; reading Rilke often gives the reader the sense of observing a scene rather than reading about someone else's impression of the scene. There are many love poems here, both romantic and spiritual-Rilke didn't have a single lifelong romantic partner, and he writes of passion and heartbreak in pure, clean language that leaves no doubt of his meaning and feelings. His prose is equally clean, reminiscent of Hemingway: "You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up . . ." (250).

Ahead of All Parting is a beautiful, rich read, a book that needs some time to be read well. The prose selections as well as the poems beg to be read and thought about and then read again; regardless of the arrangement of the words on the page, all of Rilke's writings in this book are poetry. Readers won't say that they can't put it down, but probably won't be surprised to find that they don't want to let it go; that, having experienced this poetry, they want to experience it again and again.

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Where God Happens
(Boston: New Seeds, 2005) by Rowan Williams
Reviewed by Chandler Jackson
October 19, 2006

Dr. Rowan Williams is the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. Long a highly respected theologian and scholar, Archbishop Williams has published many books that deal with heavy theological issues. This book is not one of them. Using the Desert Fathers of the early church as his point of departure, Williams calls for a renewal of the contemplative life these early mystics exemplified. In Williams' opinion, "Where God Happens" is between people - within the interactions between believers and between believers and other. In short, God happens wherever we allow Him to happen.

One of the joys of this volume is the extensive quotes from the writings of these fourth-century Fathers and Mothers of the church. In addition to the quotes used to bolster his arguments, Williams includes many quotes on topics ranging from humility to perseverance in an appendix, as well as an extensive bibliography for those wishing to delve further into the subject and desiring to read more of the writings of these early Christians.

Any book by Rowan Williams would be worth reading, although some may require more background than others. Many are very approachable for anyone, especially his works in the post-9/11 world.

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Simply Christian - N. T. Wright
Reviewed by Zach Gottlieb
10/20/06

Simply Christian is a book written by N. T. Wright, whose aim was "…to describe what Christianity is all about, both to commend it to those outside the faith and to explain it to those inside." In order to effectively accomplish this task, Wright made a point of dividing his writing into three specific parts. Part one raises questions which parts two and three begin to answer. The goal of part two is to lay out the central Christian belief about God. In part three the author describes what it looks like in practice to follow Jesus, to be energized by the Spirit, and most importantly to advance God's plan. By cluing the reader into this three-fold structure in the introduction, Wright shows the reader where he is headed, a useful stepping-stone when trying to navigate such a tricky subject. Throughout, N. T. Wright quotes, and cites specific passages from, the Bible in order to both add weight to what he is saying, and to allow the reader to identify with each of the author's points through such citations.

Simply Christian is a fast read, and though the ideas are undeniably complicated, Wright does an exemplary job of simplifying his explanations to illuminate his ideas. While Christianity is anything but simple, this book can be understood even by those who are not well versed in Christianity. Anyone would be able to understand the principles that are at its heart. In this book, N. T. Wright's intention was to write about Christianity as a whole, and not to attempt to differentiate between the many varieties thereof. "This book isn't "Anglican," "Catholic," "Protestant," or "Orthodox," but simply Christian.

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