Category Archives: recommendations

Excerpt from ‘Strangers and Sojourners,’ II

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[Anne and Edwin, the priest, are talking.]

Edwin: “I could have been the forerunner, even better than your garden variety rebel, a father of the revolution! Pretty intoxicating stuff, and I almost fell for it. In fact, I did fall for it. But it cost a ruined life to pay for my eyes to be opened.”

“Good heavens, have you killed someone?”

“No. Nothing so uncivilized as that. I…well, one can kill the thing one loves in a thousand ways. You can be on fire with passion for its beauty and ignore the hidden truths of a being, a soul. You can do all kinds of permanent damage thinking you’re making a beautiful creation, a free relationship.”

[Later, talking about his living at a subsistence level:]

“The little scraps that are left cover my food and firewood, and there are a few coins in the collection basket on Sundays. In Vancouver I was comfortable, respectably employed, influential…and quite wretched. [Here] I’m poor, but there’s a curious joy in this poverty.”

“Is this not,” Anne said carefully, pausing, “is this not just, perhaps, another romantic dream, this heroic poverty of yours?”

He laughed.

“Romantic? Nope, it ain’t romantic! It’s reality, and most of us don’t like much reality. Exotic images, impressions, good feelings, and above all, the illusion of being in charge, that’s what attracts us. Poverty is helplessness, vulnerability. You discover you aren’t God. You learn to live with certain kinds of pain that won’t go away.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 18

Excerpt from ‘Strangers and Sojourners’, I

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[Anne] no longer wished to be a person of quality, if by that word was meant a view from immense height upon an inferior humanity. Perhaps she would never cease to be an elitist, she thought, but it would be an elite of the merciful, the lovers of song and story, of children, of beauty, and of truth.

Precisely how that was to be defined and, further, how it was to be transmitted to her children was another matter. There was the immediate question of Ashley and that mind of his, so hungry for ideas. She knew that the fields and forest would teach him a wisdom that no city child could possess. But there was more to life, and she was determined to winnow it out for him. She saved her egg money and ordered volumes of books…

“Mama,” he laughed, looking up from [Gulliver’s Travels] “did you know there are people who start wars over whether you should cut your egg at the top end or the bottom end?”

“Yes, Ashley, I did know,” she smiled.

When he was twelve it The Scottish Chiefs. When he was thirteen and beginning to ask difficult questions about intangible things, she bestowed a copy of Les Miserables.

“Mum,” he said with a voice that was leaving childhood behind, “d’you think there are actually people who hate just for the sake of hating?”

“Yes. I do. I’ve met them. But the point is, Ashley, they don’t realize it. They think they’re improving the world.”

“I find that kind of hard to believe.”

“You will meet many such people in your life. They are sad and tragic. You would do well to avoid them at all costs.”

Stephen [the man] looked up from his old Irish poetry book and said, “There’s another way.”

“What way?” said the boy and the woman in unison.

“Treat them with mercy, but never let them have any power over your heart.”

~from Strangers and Sojourners, by Michael O’Brien, Part 2, Chapter 2

Have a Brick

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“It’s a brick!” my friendly land-lord said to me today when he saw the book I was reading outside on the steps. His wife joined us: “I can see that you like to read!”

Yes, I said. I’m always reading.

Usually I have several going simultaneously, but recently when I was reading Michael O’Brien’s books, nothing else could distract me. I finished Strangers and Sojourners today, and my next books are going to be Michner’s autobiography, also a brick, and The Wheel on the School which is so delightful I wish I could read it aloud to someone.

If you want rich, deep, human stories, run–don’t walk–to your nearest book source to find Sophia House and Strangers and Soujourners. They hardly deserve the flippant name of ‘novels’ because they’re so deep and accurately portray the psyche of intensely human characters. There is nothing cheesy or schmaltzy here.

Beyond the rich stories, I enjoyed the incredibly crafted sentences. Some were so delicious I had to re-read them and give them the attention they deserved. O’Brien makes every word count, weighting the phrases with stark, earthy, pungent nouns and verbs.

Sophia House is set in Warsaw during WWII. The tone of the book reminded me very much of Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev. They share the same kind of heaviness, darkness, and intensity. The flyleaf says “This is a novel about small choices that shift the balance of the world.”

I connected most with Strangers and Sojourners maybe because the main character is a woman, though I think the real hero was her Irish husband. The story follows Anne’s emigration from England to Canada, and her constant pursuit of home and identity. It’s a long story, and characters reappear in unexpected places, as well as ideas and words, ingeniously giving significance to each of the saga’s details.

I like how Anne and Stephen, the main characters, are often referred to as ‘the man’ or ‘the woman.’ It makes them seem plain and ordinary. The entire story is quite serious and sober, but I laughed toward the end of the book when I met the eccentric genius writer, Fran. I like when a writer writes about another writer, and O’Brien does it brilliantly several times in these books.

I’ve seen that sometimes novelists use dreams to reveal how their character changes, and I don’t know how to write a novel, but it seems to me that this method is a kind of cheap, easy way for the character to learn something that will influence him. Bring in the surreal, and anything can happen, and you can manipulate any character to think what you need him to think. O’Brien does this frequently in both books, but I forgive him for it because the rest of his writing more than makes up for it.

The stories search out the deep truths of peace, forgiveness, love, redemption, and what is really real. If you’re up to reading some bricks, you’ll like these.

In the next few days, I plan to post some particularly meaningful, powerful paragraphs and dialogues, because they’re too good to keep to myself.

Jesus Said It Works That Way

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Today I finished Larry Crabb’s Connecting after several months of taking small bites of it in order to digest it slowly. The last chapters are the most exciting and practical, but the first chapters are necessary to create the framework to understand what comes later.

His premise is that too often Christians with problems are given into the care of ‘professionals’ who can ‘counsel’ them and have the problem taken care of outside the church. But God actually calls the church to care for each other. Crabb says that living and speaking Gospel–not trained psychologists’ formulas–has the power to change lives. I know he’s right. Below are some excerpts from the last chapter. Try to stick with it even if it looks long!

When we can’t handle truth, [tragedy, difficulty, sin] when what is most terribly true is too disturbing to face, we run to facts surrounding the truth and hide behind them. It gives us something to do, something to think about that we can manage…There is of course some functional value in this tendency.

However, when we shift battles from responding to physical disease or circumstantial difficulties to fight for someone’s soul, things are exactly reversed.

Suppose instead we allow ourselves to be devastated by the truth, to be overwhelmed with the sadness and pain it creates. We will soon sense our inadequacy to change what needs to be changed, we will face the truth that a troubled, hardened, foolish heart needs to be impacted and that only the Spirit of God can make that happen.

At that point we will have only two choices: Yield to despair or find God. If we begin looking for God, we will then enter a whole new battle. We will be thrown onto God, we will long to see His face, we will wrestle with our fears and doubts in His presence, we will seek Him with all our hearts.

Because He promised to let us find Him when we seek him with a stronger passion than we seek anything else (such as solutions or relief), we will find Him. We will find Him in His word. After a long fall through darkness, we will land on the truth of his eternal, almighty, and loving character, and we will believe He is always up to something good. And we will find Him within us in the form of holy urges and good appetites and wise inclinations that reflect the character of Christ.

In more familiar language, the energy of Christ is released most fully when we most completely come to an end of ourselves…

…But without Christ’s energy flowing through us, we are not adequate to restore a soul to godly functioning.

The route to power [heart-deep change, healing] lies in embracing disturbing truth and moving beneath it to discover the exhilarating truth of God.

Nothing matters more than releasing the energy of Christ as we speak with people we love, especially when those people are in the midst of trouble.

Facing the truth of what is going on in people’s lives, no matter how ugly or sad, is a necessary path to discovering what is deepest within us. That truth then prompts us to nourish the life we find, to sanctify ourselves for the sake of others. (John 17:19) And then we’re freed to speak genuinely rather than skillfully…

Crabb is a visionary, but he is realistic. I know it’s possible to have a church community where people care for each other with the motivation that comes from having known the Redeemer. Where nothing is too bad or ugly or sad to talk gently about with another fellow pilgrim. Where we fight for each other’s souls instead of only toying with peripheral matters.

I have seen glimpses of this where I come from and where I am, and it gives me great hope. Because God’s love is the most powerful force in the world, and we can change our world by loving well. Our love and care for each other–not tidy formulas and answers– change our own lives, plus it says more to others than we can verbalize. A long time ago, Jesus said it would work this way. And He was right.

What’s Right

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My cyber-space friend, Elisabeth, whom I’ve never met but have corresponded with now and then, posted here in her blog yesterday. It was a heads-up about an article she’d written for Boundless, Focus on the Family’s resource for singles.

Both her blog post and article are well-thought-out and life-giving to both women and men. Women can get into a habit of bashing and belittling men, so it’s refreshing and heartening to hear a shout-out for strong, Godly men who, as Elisabeth says:
~affirm a woman’s worth,
~display God’s faithfulness and unselfishness, and
~lead by example, and expand rather than suppress who we are.

The article made me realize how rich I am with the strong, Godly men in my life. With very few exceptions, the men in my world have made me a better person, humored, encouraged and looked after me. I am newly thankful.