By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
March 2010

People find many different ways to use this time we call Lent to reach deeper in their lives. At Memorial, we are working on the things that are helpful on a journey through Lent. For me, books fall into that category of companions on the journey. So here are a few new books I have found helpful that you might enjoy as well.

Mary Gordon is well known as an author, with highly acclaimed novels like The Company of Women and Men and Angels. She has wrestled throughout her life with the Catholicism that was so much a part of her growing up. In her new book, Reading Jesus: A Writerís Encounter With the Gospel, she probes the story of Jesus as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- the original biographers.

She struggles with the hard questions in the Gospels, the parts that modern minds have trouble with: the miracles, the claims that the world is near an end, the calls for a perfect life that seems beyond our reach, the anti-Semitism, the whole idea of Jesus being both human and God. She has far more questions than answers, reflecting her own discomfort with many of the Gospels.

But she also revels in the stories and she ends with the words that the four Gospel writers use as Jesus is dying on a cross. ìIn these words,î she writes, ìI find the concentrated essence of what I understand to be Jesusí divinity; they are drenched in the human, what the human might be if it were possible to remove from it all the impediments of self-regard, and its fruits, malice, envy, greed.î

My friend Jim Wallis tries to create a road map for removing some of those impediments. He leads an organization called Sojourners. Jimís new book is called Rediscovering Values on Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy.  He observes that even though people are anxious to know when the current economic crisis will be over, the more important question is how the experience of the last few years will change us. He explores societal changes, of course, but also changes in the way we might live as individuals, drawing heavily on the scriptural traditions that we often talk about around here. (This book could be great for a discussion group.)

Those of you here on Feb. 14 may remember I quoted Sara Miles. She told her conversion story from your standard left-wing agnostic to a passionate believer in Jesus in her previous book, Take This Bread. Her new book, Jesus Freak, continues the story of seeing the kind of community she thinks Jesus intended in the midst of the chaos of feeding the hungry inside an Episcopal church in San Francisco.

Miles has a great ability to bring to life the motley mix of characters she encounters, characters who might well have found their way into the stories of the people Jesus encountered along the way. And when she finds the street people and co-workers and church hierarchy are driving her nuts, she writes, "The thing that sucks about being a Christian is that God actually lives in other people."