The main character is David Wolfe, a man whose life is approaching an exhilarating peak: he is a successful San Francisco lawyer, soon to be married, and preparing for a run for Congress. But when the phone rings and he hears the voice of Hana Arif, the Palestinian woman with whom he had a secret affair in law school, he begins a completely unexpected journey. After the Israeli prime minister is assassinated, Hana is accused of being the mastermind behind the plot. Now David faces an agonizing choice: will he, a Jew, represent Hana, a Palestinian, who may be guilty? Will he risk all to delve into the conspiracy he thinks is behind the assassination?

Now, if this was all that the book was about, I would not be proposing a book club! Through all the characters, Patterson does an amazing job of telling the history of both Israel and Palestine. He shows the complex web of problems that must be solved to achieve peace. It is a very balanced perspective that does not tilt toward one side or the other. We could have some very interesting and enlightening discussions about the book.

We are thinking about meeting three Sunday late afternoons or early evenings at our house in May or June: one todiscuss the Israeli views, one to discuss the Palestinian views, and the last to talk about how those views are shaping current events. If you are interested in joining us, please talk to Gail or me.

Jane

Holding on to a Past Life
First, a serious, compassionate, and often hilarious religious study and lively travelogue, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead. Ten years ago author Peter Manseau shuffled along in a very long line in an Italian basilica in Padua to see La lingua del Santo, the shriveled tongue of St. Anthony, which, legend had it, had been found “whole, pink, and healthy after the body it had spoken for had gone to dust.” Manseau writes, “the weirdness of waiting in line with the citizens of the world to view an extravagantly displayed piece of human flesh has never left me.” Thus began his growing interest in exploring why body parts of saints and other holy folks from throughout the world have been both repulsive and fascinating, physical and mystical, not only in medieval times but even today.

For centuries in Europe pilgrims have commonly waited hours to see the blackened child-sized finger of St. John the Baptist in Florence, the breast milk of the Virgin Mary (once in churches all over Europe, so that John Calvin sarcastically wrote “Had Mary been a cow all her life, she could not have produced such a quantity”) or the creepily upright body of St. Catherine, sitting on display in a church in Bologna. The divvying up of the bodies of saints, the trading and transporting them around Christendom, the fakes and forgeries (four heads of John the Baptist at one time?!), the dealers and thieves, the sales of keepsakes, tours, and pilgrimages became big business and caused big problems. The economics and policing of the relic business helped trigger the Reformation and its “domino effects of schisms within schisms” that eventually divided Europe, sending splinter groups, like the ones we now call the Pilgrims, off to new lands.

The power of relics for believers is not just ancient history. A French forensic chemist is now testing a shred of burnt bone and other substances in remains claimed to be St. Joan of Arc’s. And when Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, as an act of private devotion he closed himself in his Vatican apartment with the heart of the patron saint of priests, St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, a famous counselor and confessor. Vianney’s heart, recently brought from France, was a personal symbol for the new pope to be a reader of the hearts of his flock. To this day, every Catholic church contains a relic, but relics are not just for Catholics. Bits of the Buddha’s hair travel around the world; Manseau saw them on reverential display in a yoga center in California. The beard hair and cloak of the Prophet Mohammed are preserved in a heavily guarded Afghanistan shrine. Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s demand in 1996 to enter the shrine and his taking the Prophet’s cloak and wearing it before a crowd shocked much of the Muslim world—as a message of wordly versus otherwordly control. And lest you think the secular world is immune from the appeal of relics, consider the draw that the hair and toenails of Elvis Presley have for some devotees. Gross or great? You decide.

Are relics worthy of reverence as sources of miraculous healings or prayers answered? or are they silly symbols of idolatry? Viewing the ultrasound pictures of the bones of his not-yet-of-this-world first child, Manseau was surprised to suddenly recall viewing St. Anthony’s tongue a decade earlier. He pondered, “People are drawn to relics, I realized, because they make explicit what we all know in our own bones: that bodies tell stories; that the transformation offered by faith is not just about, as the Gospels put it, the ‘word made flesh,’ but the flesh made word. Behind the glass of every reliquary is a life story told in still frame. That was what I saw on the ultrasound screen as well. . . . I looked . . . at the fragile lines that represented the bones of my daughter, the frame of all she will be and know. These bones, I thought, these bones are where belief begins.”

Letting Go of This Life
Though not all of us will become saints whose bodies may be revered, we can be sure that we all will die. As Jennifer Hollis reminds us in Music at the End of Life: Easing the Pain and Preparing the Passage, if we are fortunate to have time to prepare, dying need not be extremely scary or stressful. In particular, music can physically and emotionally help ease the way for the dying and their families as they move to their next state of existence.

Hollis, president of the Music-Thanatology Association International (and COS member), has written a profoundly beautiful and personal book about spiritual journey, vocation, and ministry to those nearing the end of life in this world. Far more than an account of her own personal path, however, Hollis’s book offers a fascinating history of the emerging field of music-thanatology. The field was founded just forty years ago but has origins in medieval times, when monks at the monastery at Cluny would sing psalms or chant prayers for a dying brother, members of the community never leaving his side until his death. She describes what training is like for today’s aspiring music-thanatologists (“First, build a harp!”—though other instruments or none at all may be used), examines the spiritual and emotional demands on practitioners (who may have never witnessed a person’s death), and provides great insights into the challenges of incorporating spiritual care through music into the entrenched traditions and routines of hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices. She notes how music-thanatologists differ from music therapists or therapeutic musicians. She also includes research on the palliative effects of music-thanatology on a patient’s physical condition—reducing pain and agitation and easing respiration, even in the comatose.

The heart of this book for me were the many unforgettable stories about the effects of music vigils on families and the dying. Music vigils have healed family rifts, enabled families members to approach the topic of withdrawing life support, and created space for their grieving—and also, surprisingly, their laughter—at the time of their loved one’s death. Likening music-thanatologists to spiritual midwives, Hollis’s stories also show how music vigils change staff members’ attitudes at care-giving facilities. As one chaplain said, “When I . . . have done patient care following a vigil, it’s really amazing. It’s like the groundwork has been laid for just an awesome conversation. Really honest conversation.” One music-thanatologist believes it can change the medical “culture”: “What we noticed is that when we started bringing music-thanatology into the patient rooms, all of a sudden, the nurses would say things like, ‘Would you leave the doors cracked while you’re playing?’ . . . they wanted to be part of that care that was just offered. So it started to change the conversation. It started to change where medicine had no goals around being with people who were dying. All of a sudden [the nurses and social workers] started talking about making them more comfortable . . . We noticed that rather than avoiding the care, they wanted to be a part of something that they perceived as tender, loving, and beautiful. [It] fulfilled a deeper need they had, as healers.”

Hollis, an accomplished harpist who ministers at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, writes, “I am called make this small offering, with my homemade harp, and my own voice, and as much love and compassion as I can offer.

“People often ask how I can be a music-thanatologist. My answer is that the other side of grief is love—a deeply human, beautiful, striking, everyday love. The privilege of being present with dying patients has offered me insight into mystery—the mystery of loving family and friends, the brevity of life, and the courage ordinary people demonstrate every day. It is true that I witness a tremendous amount of grief at the bedside. But I also witness the love people have for one another and their tender struggle to express it in words, gestures, stories, or simply a look. It is pure grace to be invited into the presence of this love—a man stroking his brother’s forehead, a granddaughter whispering stories to her grandmother, an elderly man gazing at his wife of 50 years, friends gathered around a bed, holding hands.”

When the time comes, may we all be so lucky to have someone like Jennifer Hollis or another music-thanatologist helping us let go of our life here, gently and lovingly.

Available at Robbins Library in Arlington Center: Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead, by Peter Manseau (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2009), and Music at the End of Life: Easing the Pain and Preparing the Passage, by Jennifer L. Hollis (Santa Barbara: Praeger/ABC-CLIO LLC, 2010)

This remarkable book is a New Testament for the general reader and for people who love words—a version literary, historical, and truly poetic. The translator/editor, Willis Barnstone, is a professor of comparative literature at Indiana University and former professor of Greek at Colgate University. He is also an acclaimed poet and biblical scholar. Placing his choices of words into rich historical and biblical context, Barnstone manages to blend the reality of the gospels’ time and settings with modern meaning (and commentary) into a thought-provoking, lyrical text. He strives in part to emulate a far earlier biblical translator, William Tyndale, who when translating a Greek version correctly into the people’s English of his day (1525) wrote “He was a luckie fella” (later inflated in the far courtlier King James Version as “He was a fortunate gentleman”).

In an interview in Library Journal, Barnstone offers the following explanation:

“Briefly: [this book’s] a restoration of the probable names of persons and places to their Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew originals; a book that avoids Biblespeak, the half-lovely archaized speech that most translations fall into after the King James Version, or really infelicitous lowbrow talk that floats like lead when the scripture is gold. I attempt to translate the Bible as others have translated Homer or Virgil. Why not? I also show that the name changes—Elizabeth for Elisheva, James for Yaakov, Mary for Miryam—are an attempt to mask the fact that all the characters, big and small, except for the Romans, are Jews. Jesus was a circumcised rabbi who died during the Passover days of the seder. I also show by translating much of the book into verse that like all the world’s religious scripture the book was meant to be chanted as it is today in Greek Orthodox churches. We read the Song of Songs, Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and many of the prophets as lineated poetry. We should do the same with the New Testament, which, like the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), was half in poetry, including Revelation, the epic poem of the Bible which I did in blank verse.”

He goes on to say, “I have also taken out the artificial pomp by using messenger, not apostle, and student rather than the Latin disciple.” An apostle stays at home and admires his robes, but Paul’s apostles, many of them women, hit the road for the cause.

Why a new translation now? Barnstone answers,

“I hope the reader feels that the restored scripture reveals the commonality of the Abrahamic sects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I hope the faithful and secular see a work closer to the original scripture and not bathed in the propaganda of bias and willful persuasion, a fascinating read, with verve and freshness. Unlike most scripture it has whimsy and humor for a world drowning in gravity and fear and misunderstanding. Surely laughter is part of our life and not a sin against seriousness.”

We all know that the same ideas expressed in different but similar words can reveal whole new ways of thinking. I’m not a biblical scholar and can’t vouch for the accuracy of Barnstone’s translations, though, so here are two familiar passages, from the gospels of Markos (Mark] and Mattityahu [Matthew] that demonstrate what Barnstone has tried to do. Read them and see whether you think a bit differently
about Jesus the Messiah, or “Yeshua the mashiah,” his calling, and his teachings. Barnstone’s ample notes and commentary can help you with words and names that might now seem unfamiliar—so get this book from Robbins Library in Arlington and take a look.

The Restored New Testament, Mk 1: 1-5
Good news

In the beginning of the
gospel of Yeshua the
mashiah, son of God.

As it is written in Yesha-
yahu the prophet

Look, I send my messen-
ger ahead of you,

And he will pre-
pare your road;

The voice of one
crying out in the desert,

Prepare the way
for Adonai and make his
paths straight.

The book opens as the Searcher, a raccoon, returns to Old Tree after a night of scavenging. Belly full, he climbs into the arms of Old Tree and falls deeply asleep. Throughout the day, a powerful storm swells the sea and shakes the ground. Fierce winds threaten to pull Old Tree up from the roots, but can’t. Old Tree holds firm and the Searcher sleeps through the storm, peacefully oblivious.

Old Tree is not simply a “giving” tree. Old Tree is a symbol of strength, protection, shelter, selflessness, and unconditional love. A twist at the end shows the Searcher is not oblivious to Old Tree’s generosity. They seem to honor each other in their nurturing relationship. One can draw parallels to any caring relationship, but particularly parents and children and our relationship with God.

Mr. McPhail tenderly conveys a symbiotic relationship featuring protection, gratitude, acceptance, and mutual kindness.

Encourage new parents, reassure a child, or simply tell someone you’ll always be there for them. Give them a copy of The Searcher and Old Tree.

The season of Advent, more than any other time in the church year, invites us to embrace the spiritual discipline of waiting. This Advent season, explore in community those things you are awaiting and the ways in which you await them, and discover spirituality inherent in the process of waiting. This group, facilitated by Amanda Akes, will creatively use Holly Whitcomb’s book, Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting, to create space for meditation, reflection, and discussion. Whitcomb’s book is not required for participation. Childcare will be provided.

We will be meeting in the Parish Hall on
December 9 at 7 pm
December 17 at 7 pm

First up, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, a plainspoken book that extends the ideas first presented in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan heads straight into the confusion created by government sponsored nutritionists about the composition of a supposedly healthy diet. He distrusts this advice, pointing out that the political and economic winds seem to blow the healthy diet in different directions from year to year, depending at least on the most recent successful lobbyists. Simplicity and localness are his guide and he encourages us to spend more time and money on food, growing it ourselves, finding it grown locally, and preparing it at home. Michael Pollen lives in Berkeley, CA and is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Enough said.

Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, by Michael Hallowell takes a strong position on the virtue of locally grown food. He explains the environmental consequences of food shipped all over the world in considerable detail. After reading this book, you will never happily eat a papaya in Boston in December again.

Weighing in to challenge the romance of locally grown food is Just Food by James E. McWilliams. “It’s so much sexier to reiterate the mantra of eating local, growing rooftop gardens, foraging for wild dandelion balls, and keeping backyard hens. And this is wonderful. We can keep things local—we should keep things local—but we must also stop insisting that our behavior is, if universalized, a viable answer to the world’s present and future problems,” he writes. McWilliams’ critique of the current assumptions of the “green culture” makes for thought-provoking reading.

For those who like to digest their issues wrapped in a good story, pick up Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life. Co-written with her husband and daughter, it chronicles one family’s experience eating exclusively locally in Appalachia. It’s a wonderful story with short segues to inform you on the issues and great recipes to make the whole topic more palatable.

For hungry readers, all four books provide food for thought.

In 2008 the Rev. Forrest Church, an author and a Unitarian minister in New York City, discovered that a cancer first diagnosed in 2006 had returned, and he now had just a few months to live. In a letter to his congregation he wrote, “In more than one respect, I feel very lucky” and promised to sum up his beliefs about love and death, the cornerstones of his long career as a minister, in one last book about this test—“the final exam” as he calls it—of his religious faith.

Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow is that book—short, candid, and very eloquent. Rev. Church meditates on his experiences with the deaths of family members, including that of his father (Sen. Frank Church of Idaho), friends, and parishioners. He also ponders the public’s fascination with more-dramatic deaths, such as those who perished on the Titanic and the death of a celebrity like Princess Diana. Weaving these observations with portions of his sermons, he explains why he has come to believe that death’s purpose is to help us become compassionate and loving.

This realization came to Rev. Church slowly. He went through a divorce, struggled for years to find ways to comfort grieving parishioners, and became an alcoholic. On the road to sobriety he finally realized he would never be his father’s equal—and didn’t need to be. At that point, his “mantra” for finding balance and confronting his fears became “Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are.”

In other words, he advises, count your smallest blessings and be frequently grateful for them; do the little things—not the impossible—to show love and try to make amends if you need to (pick up the phone, write a note); and don’t try to be someone you’re not, but instead use your special gifts and talents realistically. Dying peacefully, he believes, requires living in ways that minimize the amount of unfinished business left in our relationships, by seeking and giving forgiveness and finding ways to love one another.

Rev. Church provides down-to-earth advice for those who are terminally ill, those visiting them in the hospital (in the “Bedside Manners” chapter), and those trying to care for them at home. One surprise for him, for example, was realizing that he had made peace with his death long before his four children and wife had. He knew he had to help them face their sadness and regrets, and he discusses how to have and manage such difficult but ultimately rewarding conversations.

He also writes very movingly about Jesus’ crucifixion, fear, and anguish—and about the essence of resurrection, “the saving gift of Jesus’ love, transcending the power of death.” Church believes that we, too, will transcend death, if only we will try while we still have some time. “Life is a gift, not a given. The path of life is strewn with trapdoors. Every day is a miracle,” he writes. For Church, our life after death hinges on our ability to create—as Jesus did—a legacy of love while we’re living.

This is a practical, wise, and deeply compassionate book. You can also read a (highly condensed) version of the book’s key concepts in Rev. Church’s article “Moving from Crisis to Awakening,” in Business Week. The book is available from Robbins Library in Arlington.

Here are a few quotable quotes:
We belong before we believe. —Joanna Wragg, Diocese of Southeast Florida
We believe that love without justice is cheap sentimentality. — Carter Heyward, Diocese of Massachusetts

Ours is the perfect church for people who aren’t perfect. —John F. Schwaller, Diocese of Minnesota

From smells and bell to speaking in tongues—we have it all. —Sheena A. Lawrence, Diocese of Atlanta

Tired of fire and brimstone? Try incense. —Louie Crew, Diocese of Newark

God loves you and there’s not a thing you can do to change that. —Tom Van Culin, Diocese of Hawaii

It’s a church where you can come in without leaving your brain at the door and then have the opportunity to love all those who came in with their “wrong” ideas. —Leo Frade, Diocese of Southeast Florida

Catholic without the pope and with women; protestant without the gloom. —Catherine Gallouet, Diocese of Rochester

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Life in a small house set in a place and time apart, and rambles in the outdoors are the fabric for the observations and reflections that are threaded throughout. I’m not sure there is a ‘Tinker Creek’ – but as I recall her place descriptions, I think of a wooded and well-watered eastern landscape, perhaps more mid-Atlantic than New England, but not unfamiliar in its plants, animals and topography to a ‘Yankee.’

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge. Williams is a southwestern writer, native to Utah, and interleaves environmental change with personal challenge – the rising of Great Salt Lake, her mother’s breast cancer, and the nuclear history of the region. Her personal grappling with Mormonism, feminism and family is movingly described in the ‘The Clan of One-Breasted Women.’

Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early. I gave this book of poetry to my daughter’s high school posse when they graduated, hoping (if they ever read it!) to keep them in mind of their childhoods in the outdoors. They are all graduating from college this year. This volume of my favorite poet’s work includes a number of poems that speak to her life and surroundings on Cape Cod, as well as to her questions, revelations and struggles with God and with the church. For those who are already Oliver readers, Thomas Mann has written about her poetry in God of Dirt: Mary Oliver and the Other Book of God.

Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer. A novel, and one of my favorites. I’ve read it twice, listened to it on CD (lovely, listenable recording), and even used it as a classroom text; maybe I’ll read it again this summer. The setting is the forested hills and farmed valleys of Kentucky. There are several main characters I think of as archetypes of human relationship to the natural world. The story alternates point-of-view, and at first you may feel distracted by putting down and picking up the threads of each story. Part of coming into a place is learning how all the stories fit together.

bell hooks, Belonging. I’m a bit hesitant to recommend this, because I am still reading it; I’m using it in my Ecological Thought class this summer. Belonging is a series of somewhat autobiographical essays about coming home to rural Kentucky after decades away–away from this geographic place, and away from hooks’ childhood social status as a poor black child in a rural and racist environment. It’s not well edited, and reads a bit like transcripts of talks she has given. ‘Spirit’ in this book includes both hooks’ references to the role of religion in her family and upbringing, an evangelical faith which seemed as out of place as her color, accent and origins when she went off to college at Stanford and throughout much of her academic career; as well as the spirit of challenge in hooks’ explicit confrontation of the ‘isms’ and ‘archies’ that are used to oppress people and the earth.

Margaret Visser, The Geometry of Love: Time, Space, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church. If Visser considers Sant’Agnese fuori la Mura, a 14th-century church outside Rome, as ‘ordinary’ one wonders what she finds extraordinary. For those who, like me, haven’t traveled in Europe, the place seems exotic! For those of you who are traveling, Visser’s book is guide to ‘deep travel—using a focus on one place to explore the universal themes listed in the book’s title. Reading this lovely book is like walking into this church, and into the past, as Visser explores its history and architecture in counterpoint with the symbolism and theology of the structure. This isn’t a book to rush through. Save it for a hot, humid day when the thought of leaving a crowded, dusty street for a cool, stone stairway that leads you down through centuries to a small chapel where you can wander with this talented guide at your leisure, and take the discoveries at your own pace.

Gunilla Norris, Being Home. In the spirit of the ‘stay-cation’, I can recommend this and any other of Norris’ books of meditations for their simplicity and spiritual potency. Taken like vitamins, one a day, you’ll find that a little reading goes a long way. Being Home includes short (1-2 page) meditations on daily activities, from Making the Bed and Sorting Wash, from Opening the Window in the morning to Locking the Door at night, that guide us in recognizing the sacred in the everyday, in the place where we live. I also recommend Norris’ other books: Being Bread, Invitation to Silence, and Simple Ways Toward the Sacred.

This wonderfully illustrated book is a conversation starter. Like any good conversation it is about questions, not answers. It is a way to open up your child’s questions about people who are different from them. It is a continuation of what we began recently in Sunday School. Mary Knab, our resident professor of physical therapy, generously came along and answered questions on physical disabilities. What’s it like to walk with crutches? Why do some people walk differently or talk like that? If your leg breaks and it can get better, how come your spinal cord can’t?

For children to include others they need not to be afraid. Talk with them. Answer their questions. Start with a good story. As you know, you’ll probably learn a lot yourself!