EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON: AND OTHER LIES I'VE LOVED, by Kate Bowler

I asked Google to find the cover of the book I'm about to praise. "Everything happens for a reason," I typed, and clicked "images." Instead of the cover, I got a pageful of annoyingly pious memes and posters--and this perfectly wonderful empathy card,

which you can order here.

I've never met Kate Bowler, but I heard Terry Gross interview her on "Fresh Air" (which is why I read her book), and I'm pretty sure she would love the card. 

Bowler, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, is the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford, 2013). The prosperity gospel is attractive: God wants you to be healthy and wealthy! And so if you trust God enough, and get rid of the sins that hold you back, and think positively, and (often) donate money to some ministry, God will make you prosper!

Except when he doesn't. Suppose, for example, that, like Bowler, you contract a mysterious neurological impairment that baffles doctors and keeps you from using your hands. Suppose you lose a much-wanted child to miscarriage. Suppose you discover at age 35 that you have stage 4 colon cancer.

Is your suffering your fault? Did you not trust enough, give enough, repent enough? Is God trying to teach you something? Is he using you to teach someone else?

No, says Bowler. These things happen because we're human.

Read this book if you've ever wondered why people suffer--or if you think you already know the reason.

Read it if you've ever wondered what to say to somebody whose has had a sobering diagnosis, or who has lost a loved one, or who is going through some other painful crisis. 

Read it, too, if you've ever wondered what not to say. The two Appendixes alone are worth the price of the book: "Absolutely never say this to people experiencing terrible times: a short list" and "Give this a go, see how it works: a short list."

Read it if you appreciate memoirs that are introspective but not self-absorbed, wise but not preachy, ironic but not unkind, often hilarious but never, ever chirpy.

And read it if you like good writing about what it means to be human that will make you laugh as well as cry.

I went back to Google and asked for "Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason." Here's what the cover looks like. I hope you read the book.

Black Friday at the pet store

The dog is right - this is the only Black Friday sale I was interested in. In fact, it's the only Black Friday sale I've ever gone to. And the only reason I went to this one is because my scruffy little terrier urgently woke me up at 6:00 this morning. This is the dog who, most mornings, would sleep as late as a teenager if we didn't drag her out from under the covers. I guess she knew about the sale.

So I dragged my protesting carcass to Pet Supplies Plus, vowing to come back home immediately if parking was hard to find - and snagged the space right next to the handicap space by the door.

Inside, a check-out line stretched from the cash register to the west wall of the store, angled right and continued to the premium dog foods on the north wall. A second line heading due north looked equally long. I noticed one shopper in pajamas.

No more shopping carts were available, so customers were using toddler-sized customer-in-training carts, stockroom carts, and dollies. No more of them were available either. Never mind. To save 30%, I was willing to schlep a 26-pound bag of Wellness Core Grain-Free Ocean Formula, a 5.5-pound bag of Orijen Adult Dog Food, a tube of poultry flavored toothpaste, and 2 packets of FrontLine Plus from the back to the front of the store.

The experience restored my faith in human nature.

Nobody was trampled. Nobody shoved. No voices were raised. Even the two dogs in line near me sat patiently - for 50 minutes, which is how long it took to get to the head of the line.

The man in front of me kindly held my place while I went in search of doggy toothpaste.

At 7:45, he commented that the sale was likely to be over before we made it to the cash register. At 7:50, however, an employee distributed cards marked "30%" to all of us in line.

I waved to a friend who was about 10 people ahead of me. After she checked out and unloaded her purchases, she brought her cart back into the store and gave it to me. I then shared it with the man in front of me, whose dog food bag was even bigger than mine.

The check-out clerk was efficient and pleasant. A smiling shopper came up to me as I headed for the parking lot and said, "I'm going to follow you and take your cart when you're done with it." I was happy to give it to her.

Everyone was so helpful and agreeable, in fact, that it felt like the way neighbors bond after a major snowstorm, or survivors after a disaster. Were we all thrilled to have escaped Black Friday unscathed? Or are animal lovers just really nice people?

Fear, death, and being human: thoughts before surgery

Heart and blood vessels
(Leonardo da Vinci)

I am scheduled to have open-heart surgery next week.

They will open my chest, slicing right down the sternum, and they'll hook me up to a machine to pump my blood and keep me oxygenated while they mend my innards. I am told this will take from three to six hours.

Fortunately, I will be sound asleep the whole time. And to prevent any operating-room chatter from possibly invading my dormant brain cells, large noise-cancelling headphones will fill my ears with reassuring music.

I've known this was coming since 2003. In May 2008 I wrote a brief note about it here. Last March my cardiologist and I agreed that it's time to go ahead. A defective valve needs replacing. An aneurysm needs repairing. Some faulty electrical circuits need rewiring. Bring on the plumbers and electricians.

As Samuel Johnson said to his friend Boswell, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

In my case, the mental concentration is another word for fear. I felt fear when my cardiologist announced, "Mrs. Neff, you are not normal." (I also burst out laughing, which puzzled him.) I've felt fear every time  I've had echocardiograms, CT scans, MRIs, Holter monitor readings, and other tests - and I've had a lot of them. When the doctors decided I needed a catheter ablation, I could not stop shaking. My thoughts turned dark and morbid during three days in the hospital while they started me on a potent medication.

Most of the time, thank goodness, I can deal with fear. Denial works remarkably well. Failing that, joking can be effective. But when surgery became a date on my calendar, not just a remote possibility, I knew I had to pay attention. So I asked myself the obvious question, What are you afraid of? And I gave myself the obvious answers: Pain. Serious side-effects of surgery, such as stroke. Undesirable brain changes, such as compulsive alliteration.

Death.

Not much chance of that, they tell me. The numbers are excellent: the survival rate is at least 97 percent. I'm otherwise healthy, and my surgeon is one of the best. Not much chance of stroke, either. It happens, but not to the vast majority of patients.

When I strode up to the Grim Reaper to fling these statistics in his face, he was not impressed. Life, he pointed out, is a sexually transmitted condition that is 100 percent fatal. At age 63, if I am average, I can expect to live another 26 years (check out your own life expectancy here). That no longer seems very long. What's more, my healthy life expectancy is only another 8 years, according to the World Health Organization's database. I'm guessing I might have more time than that because I've never smoked, have had excellent medical care, have eaten good food, have exercised. My parents did all of those things too, and their health was good up to about age 79. But that's still only 16 years away.

If I survive this surgery - and I believe I will - I will probably have another 10 to 20 years before the artificial valve has to be replaced, or Alzheimer's infiltrates my brain, or I am attacked by cancer or strokes or some other disease. It's going to happen because I am dust, and to dust I shall return.

This is where I might go theological, or at least pietistic, and start talking about heaven, resurrection, immortality. I'm not going to do that. Undeniably many people find comfort in their faith. Morris West, author of The Shoes of the Fisherman and many other novels, faced open-heart surgery with strong faith: "Alive or dead, I was resting in the hand of Omnipotence. I knew with absolute conviction that I could not fall out of it" (A View from the Ridge, p. 145). Before he reached that conclusion, though, he had to face his own mortality. When he went into surgery, he knew he might never wake up.

As it turned out, West lived another 11 years: he died at his desk at age 83 while working on his 28th novel. He did, however, eventually die. So did all my ancestors. So did several of my friends. So will you. So will I.

This can be hard for us Americans to accept. When doctors want to talk with us about our end-of-life plans, some of us worry about death panels. When someone dies, we want to know who's to blame (the doctor? the hospital? the deceased's habits? ourselves, for not intervening in some way?). The idea that death is a normal part of being human - from the Latin humus, earth, soil, dust - is hard for us to understand - and what we do not understand, we fear.

Voldemort, remember, means "flight of death." His followers were Death Eaters - people who feared death so much that they were willing to kill to avoid it. By contrast, Dumbledore and Harry Potter accepted death willingly, and thereby saved the wizarding world. I don't expect to save any worlds, but I am guessing that if I can accept - really accept, believe at a gut level - that I am dust, I will save myself a lot of unnecessary anxiety over the next few days.

____________________________________

Oh, by the way, I may not be posting much for a while. Or - who knows - I may feel the urge to comment on every passing headline (someone please stop me! No one should blog while medicated!). If you want to keep up with Lively Dust but you don't want to keep checking back unnecessarily, sign up to "Follow by Email" - right-hand column, second box from the top.

Anything for money

Follow the money.

That could be the conclusion of an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times, "Economics Behaving Badly." People make irrational decisions all the time, say authors George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel, and the field of behavioral economics helps to explain why. Unfortunately, policymakers are misusing behavioral economics "as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics"


Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, and Ubel, a professor of business and public policy at Duke and the author of Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds With Economics, pile up examples of everyday irrationality.

For instance, New York City requires restaurant chains to post calorie counts on menus. This is supposed to encourage diners to lose weight. Good idea, but it won't make people slim. Studies indicate that people consistently choose whatever food is plentiful and cheap, and as long as we continue to subsidize corn and refuse to tax junk food, obesity rates will stay high.

Or consider the inflated prices of American pharmaceuticals. Studies have repeatedly shown that "pharmaceutical industry gifts distort decisions by doctors," and yet the health-care reform act does not ban them. Instead, it requires doctors and teaching institutions to "make information about these gifts available to the public." Does anyone seriously think that informed patients will rise up and refuse to accept prescriptions from doctors who are stuffed to the gills with bribes?

In every example in Loewenstein and Ubel's article, the bottom line is money. Consumers go for whatever is cheap, whether or not it is good for them. Suppliers go for whatever makes the most money, whether or not it is good for their clients.

The authors don't extend their discussion to Congress or state legislatures, but our elected representatives have a history of voting for whatever the most generous lobbyists and campaign contributors want them to vote for, even if most of their constituents don't want it, even if the nation or state can't afford it, and even if the effects will be generally harmful.

And then, knowing that their constituents, like themselves, want to have as much money as possible, state and federal legislators vote to reduce - or at least not to raise - taxes.

Such ill advised spending without adequate resources has led my home state, California, and my state of residence, Illinois, to the brink of financial collapse (see "Illinois Stops Paying Its Bills, But Can't Stop Digging Hole"). This is not rational behavior, but any other approach - raising revenues, for example, and trimming spending - seems just too painful to consider.

After all, the sky is not falling. Yet.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Memo to fans of Precious Ramotswe, Alexander McCall Smith's Motswana heroine of the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency series: Mma Ramotswe is magnificent, no doubt about it. But she is, after all, the creation of a man from Scotland. It's time to meet a real African woman, this time from Nigeria: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Don't panic. You can pronounce her name, even if you've never set foot in her country. Take it one syllable at a time and you'll have it in no time. Read her books and you'll never forget it.

Adichie, 33, is the author of two novels and one book of short stories. Purple Hibiscus (2003) is a family drama, partly the coming-of-age story of a 15-year-old girl and partly the character study of her father, who is both a philanthropist and a vicious tyrant. Publishers Weekly called this debut novel "lush, cadenced and often disconcerting." For American readers, the setting may seem as exotic as Mma Ramotswe's, but the characters, especially the girl Kambili, are far more nuanced and intimately depicted than are the cheerful citizens of Gabarone.

Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is also rooted in a family's experience, but set against the background of the Biafran War (1967 - 1970). Adichie's publicity website describes it well: "Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all."

Adichie's most recent book, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), is a collection of twelve short stories, most of them previously published. I'm not usually a short-story fan, and I'm glad I read the novels first because they introduced me to contemporary Nigerian characters. With that preparation, however, I found these short stories fascinating. All the central characters are Nigerian, but several - like Adichie herself, part of the time - live in America. "The Arrangers of Marriage," for example, features a Nigerian woman brought to Flatbush (Brooklyn) after a hasty marriage to a Nigerian doctor who has not been entirely honest about his life in the U.S.

Last October Adichie gave a wonderful speech at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) called "The danger of a single story" (thanks to my Kenyan friend Wambura Kimunyu for pointing this out). Listen to the whole thing: it's a great introduction to Adichie, and she is full of insights about literature and other cultures. One of her observations helps to explain her title:

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called “American Psycho” — and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.

I've learned a lot about Nigeria from Adichie's books, and I've enjoyed immersing myself in a culture that is so different from my own. More important, she has shown me people who are very much like me and like people I know. She has added her stories to my stories and other stories I already knew - and, if a single story is dangerous, then the more stories we listen to and tell, the richer and more compassionate we will be.

Say her name again: Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie.

Good-bye, Daddy

Fifteen years ago next week, on my mother's 85th birthday and exactly one week before Ash Wednesday, my father died.

Some months later I wrote a short memoir about my parents, death, dying, and faith. I say I wrote it, but at the time it felt like I tore it out of my chest. It is the most real thing I have ever written. U.S. Catholic magazine published it for Ash Wednesday 1996. Today, the day before Ash Wednesday 2010, I share it with you.

To dust you will return

From U.S. Catholic (March 1996), pp. 34-36, © 1996 LaVonne Neff

The deacon dipped his thumb in the ashes and marked my forehead with a cross. It was Ash Wednesday 1995, and I was having no trouble remembering my mortality. Less than 24 hours earlier, I had buried my father.

Nine or ten years ago, my father began showing signs of forgetfulness. Nothing serious, I thought. I have trouble remembering things myself.

A year or two passed, and his memory lapses became more noticeable. “I may have already mentioned this,” he would say, and I would cringe, knowing he was about to embark on a story he had just finished telling five minutes ago. Maybe he needs his thyroid checked, I said to myself.

In 1989, when my parents were 79, my husband and I flew 2,000 miles to help them close up their condominium and move into a retirement apartment. My father met us at the airport. He could not remember where he had left the car, and on the way home he got lost three times. As we packed and moved their things, we continually ran across small portents: a comb neatly tucked in a shoe, a pan lid on the bookshelf. In the pantry, next to 17 jars of Metamucil, were 37 bottles of hand lotion. And everywhere were reminder notes scrawled in my father’s hand: “Harold phoned.” “Go shopping.” “The bread is in the refrigerator.”

Why I am a liberal

Liberal means favoring freedom.

In 17th and early 18th-century Europe, liberals brought down the Ancien Régime—a totalitarian alliance of church and state—and (with many false starts and not a little bloodshed) developed their current democratic systems of government. In America, liberals wrote (and fought for) the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

In England and America, especially, liberals favored free markets and strong businesses. Commerce, they believed, was a safer ruler than king or pope, because commerce was based on “enlightened self-interest.” Economic liberalism led to exploration, the industrial revolution, and an increased standard of living for Europeans and Americans.

However, 19th century captains of industry began rivaling 18th-century despots in their opulent lifestyle, and in turning a blind eye to the miserable living conditions of the workers who supported it. Liberals—that is, lovers of freedom—began arguing that freedom is possible only when everyone has access to education, decent housing, adequate food, reasonable working hours, and a safe working environment.

Today, some Americans think that liberals are anti-business and pro-government. Perhaps some who wear the liberal label are, but this is not true liberalism. I repeat: liberalism means favoring freedom. But this does not mean freedom without limits.

As a Christian, I believe in original sin: we all fall short of God’s ideal. I also believe in community: we are individually members of one another, and our enlightened interests must extend to others as well as ourselves. (That is why I am a liberal and not a libertarian.)

Alas, communities of sinful people are rarely better than the individuals who form them, and often—because of the increased power of the group—they are considerably worse. Think of the powerful medieval church, for example. Christ instituted the church for the good of humankind, but “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton, a devout Catholic, wrote that in a letter about the power of the pope.

If power corrupts the church, it also corrupts secular governments and multinational corporations. America’s founding fathers limited religious power by including the first amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights. They limited the government’s power by dividing it into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. They did not limit the power of multinational corporations, because even though the Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602, multinationals were not a huge concern in colonial and frontier America.

Paradoxically, excess power, wherever it occurs, needs to be limited in order to allow freedom to flourish. Another name for freedom without limitations is anarchy, and a frequent result of anarchy is totalitarianism. Untrammeled freedom can destroy liberty.

Given humanity’s power-hungry sinfulness, the best way of limiting one power is often by keeping it in balance with other powers. In the Western world today, our princes are not kings or presidents or bishops, but CEOs and financiers. Tomorrow our princes may come from some other sector, requiring different kinds of limits. The important thing for a liberal is not to be anti-business or anti-government or anti-church, but rather to be pro-liberty, and to seek to limit any power that is dangerous to basic human rights.

One thing is certain: as original sinners, we are powerfully attracted to the god Mammon. Whoever has the power also has the money, and whenever power goes out of control, it enriches itself at the expense of others. If you want to know who needs restraining at any given moment, follow the money.

Self-righteousness

I believe everything I wrote yesterday: torture is always wrong. No matter what.

However, last night I got to thinking about how very easy that is for me to say. I have never tortured anybody. I have never wanted to torture anybody. I have never even pulled the wings off a butterfly.

Nor am I in a position where I have the power to torture anybody, or to decide that anybody should be tortured, or to judge whether or not torture is legally permissible.

So, yes, torture is always wrong. But it's not something I've ever personally struggled with, so in making that judgment--the right judgment to make! and one that every Christian should agree with!--I can very easily slip into self-righteousness. I am right! (And I am, of course.) Those other Christians are wrong! (As indeed they are.) I am so much better than they are. (Whoa... not likely.)

Here's what I'm thinking I should do: pick a book of the Bible, any book. Read it for its big ideas. Try to identify its major ethical teachings, whether they are explicitly stated or implicit in the stories related. Look especially for areas where I clearly do not measure up. Ask myself why not, and see if I can do something about it--change an attitude, change a habit, add or subtract some activity, whatever.

I say I should do that. I don't know if I will. I expect it would be ever so much more difficult than saying torture is always wrong. Though of course it is very wrong, without exception.

Torture and white Christians

I am distressed by the Pew survey showing that of all religious groups, white evangelicals are most likely to approve of torture and white Catholics are second most likely. Yes, Catholics had the Spanish Inquisition and Puritans had the pillory, stocks, and branding, but I’d hoped we’d gotten past all that. Perhaps the survey results are just one more indication that the doctrine of total depravity is correct.

Fortunately, the survey doesn’t tell the whole story. The post by Mr Neff on CT’s LiveBlog notes that in 2006, Christianity Today magazine ran a cover story called “Five Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong,” and in 2007 a wide range of evangelical leaders signed a document called “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror.” Many evangelicals are appalled by torture and have been speaking out against it for years.

Likewise, the Catechism of the Catholic Church said in 1997 that "Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity," and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a document in February 2008 that began, "The Church stands firm in denouncing torture as it undermines and debases the dignity of both victims and perpetrators. Pope Benedict XVI said 'the prohibition against torture cannot be contravened under any circumstance.'"

What would the world think of Christians if we stood up for human rights for the poor as well as the rich, for the unborn as well as the born, for the old and sick as well as the young and healthy, for women and children as well as men, for the guilty as well as the innocent, for immigrants as well as citizens, for gays as well as straights, for Muslims as well as Christians, for enemies as well as friends—even when doing so is unpopular among our friends or downright dangerous, and even when we disagree with the people whose rights we are protecting?

Most Christians, thanks be to God, already stand up for human rights in most of those situations. Unfortunately, all of us (being human) find some causes more compatible than others, and all of us have blind spots. Perhaps the Pew survey will challenge us to reexamine our attitudes in those areas where our politics and the views of our friends may be at odds with the teachings of Jesus.

When does an individual human's life begin?

Yesterday the FDA approved Plan B—the morning-after pill—for over-the-counter sales to 17-year-olds (though not until certain labeling changes are made). Web information about Plan B stresses that the method "isn't effective if you're already pregnant, and it won't terminate an existing pregnancy." According to the prescribing information document, it works "principally by preventing ovulation or fertilization.... In addition, it may inhibit implantation."

Does this mean Plan B is an abortifacient? Can there be an abortion without a pregnancy? And when does an individual human's life begin?

Last August Tom Brokaw asked Nancy Pelosi when she believes life begins, and she has been widely criticized for her answer: "I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition."

Pelosi was half right: theologians have indeed differed widely as to the exact time of "ensoulment," that is, when the soul enters the body and the fetus becomes human. Nevertheless, as Michael J. Gorman has shown in Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World, from its earliest days the church has opposed abortion, even though abortion was frequent in the Greco-Roman world. And the Catholic catechism is clear about what the church teaches today: "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception"-- which the church defines as the moment of fertilization.

Conception, however, can mean implantation rather than fertilization, and that is the meaning used by writers of Plan B's ad copy.

After the human egg is fertilized, from eight to eighteen days go by until it completely implants in the uterus and pregnancy begins. According to the definition used by many in the scientific community, until a fertilized egg has implanted in a woman's uterus, she has not conceived and is not pregnant, even if the fertilized egg is in her body. And if she is not pregnant, abortion is not possible. Therefore, it is reasoned, Plan B pills do not cause abortions.

The question remains, of course: does Plan B take human life? Is the fertilized egg a human person before pregnancy occurs? This is a question of faith, not science. For Christians who believe that human personhood begins with fertilization, Plan B is morally wrong. Other Christians, who also consider themselves pro-life and anti-abortion, argue that human personhood begins with implantation; for them, Plan B may be morally neutral.

As one who has favored the first group, let me give a few arguments on behalf of the second. In some ways, implantation may be a better model than fertilization of when embodied life--the union of dust and spirit--begins.

First, human beings are more than genetic codes: we require community and nourishment in order to live. Implantation brings the developing cells into community with their mother and provides them with food and hormones and everything else they need.

Second, each human being is a unique and unrepeatable individual. Until implantation is achieved, the developing cells may split into twins or triplets. Individuality is not assured until the cells attach to the uterus.

Third, fertilization can occur in a laboratory, but--so far, at least--no baby will result unless at some point implantation occurs.

And yet the fertilized egg has its very own DNA, and perhaps this is reason enough to consider it fully human. To some, though, that sounds rather disembodied. Does a cell with a DNA code have infinite value, the same as cells that have burrowed into their mother's womb and established a relationship with her that she feels in every part of her body? Is human nature based in a code or in a relationship?

These are important questions with implications not only for the morning-after pill, but also for assisted conception and embryonic stem-cell research. The answers to these questions are not as clear as some of us would like. They can't be found in the Bible or in scientific journals, though both sources contribute to our understanding of the issues involved. Christians of good faith disagree. As human beings who thrive in community, we need to keep our voices down and listen to others, as we would have others speak softly and listen to us.

Home: a review

I confess: I did not especially enjoy Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 novel about the Ames and Boughton families. Maybe the build-up was too great: some of my friends thought it was life-changing, the best novel they'd ever read. I thought it dragged. I kept waiting for something to happen. And by the time it did, I had lost interest, though (because I was reading it for a book group) I plowed on to the very end.

So when, out of a sense of duty to Literature, I checked out Home, I waited until it was almost due to begin reading. And then, much to my surprise, I got hooked.

Both novels are set in the fictional small town of Gilead, Iowa, in the mid 1950s. Gilead's narrator is the Reverend John Ames, a semi-retired Congregational minister; Home's narrator is Glory Boughton, the youngest child of the Reverend Robert Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister and Ames's best friend. Both books focus on Jack Boughton, Robert's ne'er-do-well son, though Gilead takes care of a lot of Ames family business before finally getting around to Jack.

I liked Home because in some ways it reminded me of my parents' home: Like Rev. Boughton, my father was a dignified, kindly, and reasonable man who spoke in stately cadences and shared Boughton's moderate--but oh, so wrong--views on the nascent civil rights movement. My home, like the Boughton household, was a

scene of utter and endless probity, where earnest striving so predictably yielded success, … the kind amenable to being half-concealed by the rigors of yet more earnest striving.

Like Jack, I broke my father's heart. Like Jack's father, my dad struggled to be gracious while disapproving of my religious choices. Like Glory, I dutifully cared for my parents in their final illness; like Glory, I dreamed of escape.

I'm not trying to turn this review into a memoir; I'm just warning you that if you didn't care for Gilead and don't have a history something like Jack's or Glory's or mine, you may not like Home either. On the other hand, there are many good non-biographical reasons to like this book. Robinson's writing style is wonderful: spare, never fussy or pretentious, never calling attention to itself; but sharp-eyed, deeply aware of human foibles, often wryly humorous. Her characters, no matter how flawed, are sympathetic. These are people we know and love.

Here is Glory describing her behavior toward her wayward brother:

Dear Lord. She had tried to take care of him, to help him, and from time to time he had let her believe she did. That old habit of hers, of making a kind of happiness for herself out of the thought that she could be his rescuer, when there was seldom much reason to believe that rescue would have any particular attraction for him.

Indeed Jack does not want to be rescued, at least not on the terms the good citizens of Gilead would prefer--or if, on some level, he does wish to come home (he often plays "Softly and Tenderly" on the piano), he believes he is unable to do so.

If you decide to read this book and are not immediately smitten, keep going for at least 30 pages; 50 or 80 would be better. The book starts slowly, and there's a lot of rumination where I wouldn't have minded some action (I am so shallow). Eventually you'll find yourself in the kitchen or the back garden with Glory and Jack, absorbed in their conversations, involved with the two old gentlemen, wondering what Jack will do next.

And then, if you happen to be reading this with a friend or for a book club, you can talk about any of the book's big ideas: Grace. Depravity. Predestination. Forgiveness. And, especially, Home.

McCain is right

In 1870, just before Italian troops occupied the Vatican and just after most delegates from the Western hemisphere hurriedly left for home, the first Vatican council promulgated the dogma of papal infallibility. It was not the church's finest hour, but it led to one of the most-quoted dicta in the English language. Lord Acton, an English Catholic, wrote this to the Anglican bishop of London in 1887:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Members of the U.S. Congress should be forced to pay attention to that quotation--the whole paragraph, not just the famous sentence--several times an hour as they decide what to do about the current financial crisis. If there is a Congressional sound system, perhaps Lord Acton's words could regularly interrupt the soft music. Because no matter how dangerous the current financial situation, we may be facing even more dangerous abuses of power if Congress votes to give the treasury secretary everything he wants.

Paul Krugman, in this morning's New York Times op ed piece, "Cash for Trash," noted that some "are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq."

Krugman summarizes the administration's proposal thus:

... a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out.... Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

"After having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control," Krugman says, "the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now."

This sounds uncomfortably like the situation in 2001-2, when the president argued and Congress agreed that Mr. Bush needed to be authorized to do whatever he deemed necessary to fight terrorism. One result of the Authorization for Use of Military Force has been a major increase in executive power, often at the expense of human rights. If Congress decides to give the treasury secretary free rein to do whatever he deems necessary to fight world financial meltdown, executive power will increase still more.

In 1973, during President Nixon's second term, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a book called The Imperial Presidency. In 2004 in his book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, journalist Charlie Savage applied Schlesinger's term to the George W. Bush administration. If Congress passes the treasury secretary's proposed legislation, presidential power will have gone way past imperial. What term will historians and journalists coin to describe the result?

John McCain was slow to see the financial juggernaut coming, but his comment this morning was right on:

"Never before in the history of our nation has so much power and money been concentrated in the hands of one person, a person I admire and respect a great deal, Secretary Paulson," McCain said. "This arrangement makes me deeply uncomfortable. And when we're talking about a trillion dollars of taxpayer money, 'trust me' just isn't good enough."

Out of the squirrel cage

I have not posted anything for quite a while. This is partly because I’ve been traveling (Maryland, Cape Cod) and partly because I’ve been thinking. Or, more accurately, squirrel caging, defined by one website as “the act of rumination on negative thoughts.” Mr. Neff calls this obsessing. I call it seeking information and making contingency plans.

I have not wanted to turn this blog into a confessional of any sort. I completely understand a friend of mine who, during her first visit with a spiritual director, said, “I don’t want this to be about me.”

But maybe I’m being too reticent. Lively Dust is about being human, earthbound, mortal. It’s about the interplay between spirit and flesh. If I can write about food and wine, maybe I can also write about malfunctioning bodies, even if one of them belongs to me.

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I have known for five years that I have a defective aortic valve and an aneurysm of the aortic root. Every year I get scanned various ways, and so far my structural defects have not affected my daily life. But last month I learned that my heart is growing less efficient (qualifiers like “moderate-to-severe” appeared on my report), and my cardiologist predicts that sometime between now and Medicare I will be split open, my heart will be stopped and removed from my body, machines will sustain me, and my aorta and two valves will be repaired or replaced as needed.

I can think of several ways I’d rather spend a day.

Yes, I know my chances of full recovery are excellent. As my incredibly young doctor-chick with the perky smile and Gap trousers puts it, “Almost everybody survives. You just gotta do what you gotta do.” She’s absolutely right.

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Still, I do not “go gentle into that good night,” even the good night induced by anesthesia. Though I accept that “all flesh is grass” (Isa 40.6) and that “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Eccl 3.20), I resonate with Woody Allen’s observation: “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

The prospect of heart removal, repair, and replacement is a powerful memento mori, even though I may well go on for another twenty, thirty, even forty years. My great-great-aunt Emma, when she was 97 and living with her 94-year-old sister, Ella, said to my mother, “We’re coping fine right now, but I do sometimes wonder what we’ll do when we get old.”

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Squirrel-caging isn’t all bad. After running round and round the wheel day after day, eventually this squirrel gets bored and goes off in search of nuts. Today I caramelized six pounds of onions. Tonight I will set a pound of navy beans to soak, and I will put a batch of bread dough in the refrigerator to rise overnight. Tomorrow a dear friend I have known since we were eight years old arrives from Italy, where she has lived for the last thirty-some years.

Over the years our parents have died, our children have grown, our bodies have slowed. But thank goodness we are not pure spirits, even if the dust part of us isn’t as lively as it once was. Tomorrow night we’ll enjoy hearty peasant food and drink good red wine as we talk about books, travel, friends, family, and the way we used to scandalize the small college town where our fathers were respectable professors (“What will people think?” my mother kept wailing).

It takes a body to enjoy an evening like that. An imperfect one will do.

Frail children of dust

I grew up singing "O Worship the King," a 200-year-old hymn written by Robert Grant, a British MP and social reformer. It includes this concise description of the post-Edenic human condition:

Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail . . .

Now, I don't think we're frail because we are dust--Adam and Eve and Jesus were dust too. Nor do I think that our frailty is limited to our dust component--fallen spirit does every bit as much damage as fallen dust. But frail we certainly are, and our feebleness is especially distressing when it shows up in church.

Like, for example, when religious leaders (not always Catholic, by the way) sexually abuse children, or when they wage their internal wars ("We're more scriptural!" "We're more loving!") in the press and courts of law, or when they fleece their followers to support their own lavish lifestyles.

Is this the church against which "the gates of hell shall not prevail" (Matthew 16:18)?

Well, yes. We're a mess, as imperfect dust-spirit creatures are bound to be, but we're not nearly as messy as we once were. Consider the state of church leadership in the tenth century:

In 904, Sergius III had his two rivals, Leo V and Christopher I, incarcerated and killed. He had come to power with the support of one of the most powerful families of Italy. This family was headed by Theophylact and his wife Theodora, whose daughter, Marozia, was Sergius' lover. Shortly after the death of Sergius, Marozia and her husband Guido of Tuscia captured the Lateran palace and made John X their prisoner, subsequently suffocating him with a pillow. After the brief pontificates of Leo VI and Stephen VII, Marozia placed on the papal throne, with the name of John XI, the son whom she had had from her union with Sergius III. Thirty years after the death of John XI, that papacy was in the hands of John XII, a grandson of Marozia. Later, her nephew became John XIII. His successor, Benedict VI, was overthrown and strangled by Crescentius, a brother of John XIII. John XIV died of either poison or starvation in the dungeon where he had been thrown by Boniface VII, who in turn was poisoned.

--Justo González, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1: 275

One might read such horrors and conclude that religion does more harm than good. However, despots such as Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao do not raise one's trust in atheistic benevolence. Here are some ideas I draw from our frail and feeble church:

• The Catholic reform movement Call to Action is right in emphasizing that "we are the church, the people of God." We are not defined by our leaders. Jesus said our leaders are our servants, not our lords (see Mark 10:42-45).
• At the same time, we must keep in mind that we too are feeble and frail. "Not the preacher, not the deacon, but it's me, O Lord / Standin' in the need of prayer."
• People who want an authoritative church to decide, legislate, direct, and control should read more history.
• People who think John-Paul II and Benedict XVI are going to destroy the church should read more history.
• Justo González's two-volume set, The Story of Christianity, is a good place to start.
  

Robert Grant does not leave his frail dusty hymn singers quivering under the bed. His next line puts the emphasis where it should be, especially when the messy church threatens to block our view of the horizon:

In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail.

Pontoon

From Garrison Keillor, Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon (Viking, 2007), 166:

Dorothy said she believed in letting bygones be bygones and each to his own and live and let live. "There is too much backbiting and malicious gossip in a small town and that is the truth and everybody knows it," she said. "It wouldn't hurt people to be a little more forgiving and tolerant. That was how Evelyn was. She used to say, 'There's a lot of human nature in everybody.'"