Pieces of a Puzzle Part 1.

One good book leads to another - or so it has been for me, lately. Here is the first one on my list, with more to follow:

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks
Two things fascinated me about this book, before reading it. I loved the title from the moment I saw it, not sure exactly who these people were or what was meant by "the Book". It turns out that the book in question is the Sarajevo Haggadah. This is the second thing about the book that captivated me. I wanted to know more about this book! The description on page 8 of People of the Book was all I needed to be captivated by curiosity:

The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain, was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind. It was thought that the commandment in Exodus "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness of any thing" had suppressed figurative art by medieval Jews. When the book came to light in Sarajevo in 1894, its pages of painted miniatures had turned this idea on its head and caused art history texts to be rewritten.

So the mere existence of the book in question is point of fascination to me. But there is more: the book was created in medieval Spain (when, how, why?). It somehow came to light in Sarajevo at the end of the 19th century (how, why?) - then apparently, during the seige of Sarajevo in 1992, the book was saved from sure destruction during intense shelling, by the Muslim head of the museum library.

The interweaving of the human stories - the People - the Jewish people and those who carried this book from medieval times to now - and the Book, this mysteriously created Hebrew manuscript in the form of a lavishly illuminated book - these are, in my mind, the elements of a story that has great potential. That the book "surfaced" from obscurity in Sarajevo, was nearly destroyed and then rescued and restored to its place as "the symbol of Sarajevo's multiethnic ideal" - by a Muslim man - that is a huge sweep of culture and history that I could not resist. Then, add that the author was in reality a war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Sarajevo, and she was in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo...I had to know what she would do with this!!

The book was very engaging, despite a few weaknesses, and in my next post, I'll explain how it led me to the next book...then a movie...and the music that revealed the puzzle itself to me.

In the meantime, here is the author's web site for the book and here is a map created especially for the book.

How to teach physics to your dog

Here a new book that is at once completely silly and really quite an accomplishment ( I hope!). Quoting directly from the book's site,

Each chapter is built around a conversation between Chad Orzel, a physics professor at Union College, and his dog Emmy...in which Emmy seizes upon some aspect of quantum mechanics as a way to obtain doggy goals.

Most of us have some experience with doggy goals, I suspect. It's great to see a physicist finding a fun and accessible way to help his students shift perspectives, from regular Newtonian reality to a quantum perspective, using this familiar and non-threatening knowledge to get started.

There are two introductory articles on the site to give you a sense of how much more easily your dog may adapt to nonintuitive concepts in quantum physics more easily than most of us - especially the first time around. I like the "Talking to your human about physics" article best, but both that one and "Talking to your dog about physics" are a great way to waste time. Which is, sometimes, just what you need.


Maybe I should try to talk to my dog (Ruby) about statistics - before I teach another class?

Unknown From Nowhere Reveals Extraordinary Gift and Stuns World

In case the story of Susan Boyle has passed you by, it is worth 7 minutes, 7 seconds to watch this YouTube video of her moment on the television talent show, "Britain's Got Talent". It's just a little bright spot that lit up in the last week...one that every woman in your life should see!

Here is an article from the New York Times.  

Dietrich Boenhoeffer was hanged on this day in 1945

I first became acquainted with this German theologian because of my interest in Genesis 1-3. How could things have gone wrong, I wondered, so early in the story of Creation? His book, "Creation and Fall: an Exposition of Genesis 1-3" gave me some insights, but ultimately proved to be a bit beyond my grasp.

Only later did I learn that Bonhoeffer was a founding member of the Confessing Church in Germany - a group that split from the Lutheran church, taking a clear stance against Hitler's policies of anti-semitism and calling for the church to resist Nazi policies. In fact, I learned in the film "Bonhoeffer" that he went frightningly far along that path, to the point of becoming involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler - which failed. He was discovered, arrested and imprisoned, and finally hanged on April 9, 1945. The Wikipedia entry here is a good place to get an overview of Bonhoeffer's life, work, and influence.

If you have ever considered what it must have been like in that time - or going farther, to imagine being a German citizen, or a member of the German Church ...well, I have not known what to think about it. What could anyone do? I recently watched the movie Divided We Fall ( "In Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia, a childless couple agree to hide a Jewish friend at great personal risk of discovery and execution.") These stories always challenge us, I think, to admit how difficult it is to make a significant sacrifice for others, and at the same time, to acknowledge that such sacrifice is the essence of our humanity.

A great quote from the Bonhoeffer movie home page makes the connection for me, at least:

"We have been the silent witnesses of evil deeds...Will our inward power of resistance be enough for us to find our way back?"

Finally - a shortcut (as I am on break, but still at work!) - the entry for "The Cost of Discipleship" from the Wikipedia article that I am leaning so heavily on here:

Bonhoeffer's most widely read book begins, "Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace." That was a sharp warning to his own church, which was engaged in bitter conflict with the official nazified state church, The book was first published in 1937 as Nachfolge (Discipleship). It soon became a classic exposition of what it means to follow Christ in a modern world beset by a dangerous and criminal government. At its center stands an interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount: what Jesus demanded of his followers—and how the life of discipleship is to be continued in all ages of the post- resurrection church.

All I can say is, wow-he really lived his faith. And we are called to do the same...each in the way that we are called. Clearly, there is much need for discernment, but I am challenged by this anniversary of Bonhoeffer's death, coming as it does in the Christian Holy Week, to consider what its message is for my life.

The Soloist - Music and Survival on the Streets

This is a great story, a great book - Steve Lopez is a LA Times reporter who sees a homeless man, Nathaniel Ayers, playing his violin in a freeway tunnel on his way to work. He needs an idea for a story, and decides to stop and see if this might be one. He is captivated by the character and the contradictions he encounters in Nathaniel. Nathaniel is playing a violin with just two strings. Yet, somehow, he is producing music - and as Steve gets to know him, the mystery of how truly gifted he is, and how he came to be living on the streets and playing in a tunnel is slowly unraveled. It is a journey not to be missed - it is real, but astonishing, to follow the progression of events (I won't spoil it by telling you!). At the same time, Lopez manages to meet and talk with members of Nathaniel's family, as well as friends and teachers from his earlier life.

A few key facts won't hurt: Nathaniel suffers from schizophrenia; he once studied music at Julliard; and his anchor to sanity seems to be music. Lopez is a reporter with a nice family and a nice house. He loves going after a story, and he loves wrapping up the loose ends and moving on. But with Nathaniel, it is not that neat, and it is not at all easy for Lopez to know what is coming. It is a dance, and a roller-coaster ride; it is costly , it is not easy, it is not familiar and it is not comfortable.

So while the role of music in Nathaniel's healing is huge and soul-satisfying, I like to remember that the unlikely friendship between these two men also played a leading role. The strength of that connection allowed them both to grow far beyond what they imagined possible, each in his own way. For Nathaniel, well, a universe has opened up - or so it seems to me, to us. Yet there is no pretense in this book, no imagining that only good things will follow. It is that real.
In conclusion - read it!!

The Soloist was featured by the libraries in Philadelphia and that is how I knew about it. Steve Lopez was once a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I found this video , on youtube with the real Steve Lopez and the real Nathaniel Ayers - celebrating Beethoven's birthday, I think. It was so cool to see them that I decided not to look for the movie trailer after all.

Music and human survival

I just came across this quote:

I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.

from a welcome address by Karl Paulnack of the Mankato Symphony Orchestra in Mankate, Minnesota. I highly recommend that you take a minute, when you have a minute, to read the entire address. I will be late for work because I did this!

But I am struck by the power, the beauty, and the truth of music. And, I think that this address represents a turning point for me in how I view music in my life.

I will soon be posting a review of a book about a homeless schizophrenic man whose only real anchor to beauty and sanity is music. The book is "The Soloist". I think that his story captures a truth that we can all recognize. By a very strange coincidence, I stumbled across this quote just now, and the truth of it struck me even before I read the entire address. Once I did, I realized that music can not be peripheral in life... Which is GREAT!!! I now have a good excuse to move what was once labelled "Art and Entertainment" into center stage!!!

Happy Tuesday!!

Leaving the Saints - Escape from intellectual captivity?

Margaret Beck's memoir, "Leaving the Saints" is very much a personal account of difficult life that is still unfolding. In my opinion, it was written in the midst of a healing process that had not completely taken hold. Margaret Beck is the daughter of the late Hugh Nibley, the highly respected chief apologist of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. As the book opens, Margaret is confronting her father in a carefully staged drama. He is, at the time, in his nineties and has recently been released from the hospital. He is clearly physically frail. Mentally, he is a wall. She has raised once again her allegations that he sexually abused her as a child. He completely rejects this – he denies that any such thing could have occurred. She has asked a friend to hide and listen in (in the next room) because she wants this conversation to be her evidence. The lack of trust goes back a long time, it would appear. Still, one of them must be wrong, but neither one will give an inch.

How can this be? Shouldn't we expect more, from two clearly intelligent adults who supposedly had a firm moral upbringing? I suppose that this is one reason that I continued to be interested in the story. I wanted to know more about these two individuals – who they were, how they got to this point, and how the tension would be resolved.

What we find out is this: Margaret was raised, and later married, in the Mormon church. She speaks as someone who is now outside the church, because she is – in the course of her memoir she describes what it was like to breath the intellectual air of Harvard University, where she and her husband have gone to pursue graduate studies. While at Harvard, she begins to examine her beliefs and those of her church with a new lens of rational thinking – it is her own personal enlightenment. Her husband and good friend is with her and they are both seriously questioning parts, at least, of their former faith and its doctrinal basis. Which is to say, they have serious doubts about the basis of their entire lives.

The trouble arises when Margaret becomes pregnant and it is clear that the child will have Downs' Syndrome. At this point, the couple decides to leave Harvard, where abortion would be expected, to head back to Utah where the kind of support they will need is assured. While there, Margaret eventually ends up teaching at Brigham Young University. And this, it seems, is where the troubling signs that she has noted along the way with LDS leadership and control are shown to be true indicators of serious trouble. I won't include the details here – but after several incidents where it appears that doctrinal conformity is valued above actual scholarship, the damage is done – both to Margaret and to the reader. I say damage because the implication is clear and damaging. Margaret presents herself as one who is seeking the truth. She continues to try to piece things together, to make allowances, and to assess what is really going on here. But in reality, the only facts she presents are her own reports of what happened. And this is the nature of a memoir – people get to tell their own story. Period.

But I was disappointed. I felt set up and let down, because I thought that someone as scholarly – both from an upbringing among the intellectual elite of a major denomination, and from her own academic credentials - as Marget Beck would enrich her personal story with witnesses, references from verifiable sources, and corroborating accounts. But as she tells it, it is all inside, hidden from public view - so there is none of that.

Ultimately, I was disappointed in Margaret because I wanted her to be a heroine, or at least to solve the mystery for me - but instead she was a real person with many doubts and weaknesses, learning to speak the best version truth that she can access. And there are wounds to heal. She is sure that the abuse really happened. Her father never gives an inch in denying that. It is remarkable to me that there is so little movement towards a point of reconciliation about this, as if forgiveness, compassion, and love for one another were not even in the picture. But these are very difficult, they take time, and they require honesty and bold love (see Dan Allendar's book for more on that!). So we, as readers, are left with doubt, and with more questions than we had at the beginning.


I must say that I have not read many “leaving the faith” stories – usually I identify more with those trying to find a sensible way in...so I am grateful for Margaret's account of losing her early convictions and continued seeking, all the more so because there is no apparent tidy resolution at the end. Just more questions....One of them being, can you really trust someone who would treat her own father like that, in his old age – regardless of the past???

Left to Tell - A Rwandan Woman's Story, and the film: Hotel Rwanda

If you have seen the movie "Hotel Rwanda" you may have a good idea of what "Left to Tell", by Immaculée Ilibagiza, is about. If you have heard about the Rwandan massacre from news reports, you may be surprised, as I was, to find a personal account of a Tutsi woman who survived the massacre. This book tells the true story of Immaculée Ilibagiza. It is the story of her life in Rwanda beginning long before the conflict, a relatively comfortable life punctuated only occasionally by episodes of tension. She recounts incidents that point to the escalation of tensions, until finally she is forced to flee and finds shelter with seven other women in the bathroom of a Hutu pastor and family friend. At this point the incomprehensible inhuman slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus, many of whom were friends and neighbors, has become a reality.

For more than three months these eight women lived inside a single cramped bathroom. While they were hidden, they were not completely isolated - they heard the mobs outside calling out their names, and they heard much more that I will not relate.

Immaculée's story is a gripping personal account of her life in the midst of this impossible-to-imagine situation. It is also the story of her reliance on faith, on God, on prayer in the midst of terrifying circumstances, to sustain her. And this is the amazing thing about books, about being a reader - here, we find ourselves in the shoes of Immaculée - and seeing the scene as she sees it, we also walk through, with her, in faith and prayer.

In a similar way, one of the aspects of the movie, "Hotel Rwanda" that made it so powerful was its focus on the Paul, the hotel manager, who was able to save 1,200 lives by being, essentially, a very very good hotel manager. The film has been criticized for not depicting the genocide more completely, but (quoting from Roger Ebert's excellent review) "director Terry George and writer Keir Pearson have made exactly the correct decision. A film cannot be about a million murders, but it can be about how a few people respond."

And this is also what makes "Left to Tell" so interesting and so moving. The individuals in these two accounts of the Rwandan massacre do not feel courageous in the face of their terrible circumstances, but they make choices that require courage - and faith - and they defy the odds, each in their own way, by the way they respond.

Postscript: Convinced that she was spared for a reason ("Left to Tell"), Imaculee has written two additional books and has also established a charitable fund to help orphaned children in Rwanda and elsewhere on the African continent.

Hanoi Streets

Four months ago I was in Hanoi, Vietnam, with my mother and sister, there to adopt and bring home her two-year old son, Ryan. It was a time of watching and waiting - we did not speak the language, did not usually know where we were, precisely, did not really know how the process would unfold...we stayed in a comfortable western hotel with other families who were adopting children, and together we were ushered about by our Vietnamese adoption coordinator. It all went without a hitch and we left after twelve days with a little boy who wore his feelings right up front - stormy and eager and content and frightened though he was, he remained brave and willing to risk security for what seemed promising...how we love him already for this and his tender, generous, adventurous heart!


On the long ride out to the orphanage and back, as our driver took a winding route around and across Hanoi on busy streets, and then sped along rural roads, we saw glimpses real life here, glimpses of a life out of our context, gone in a breath... On the surface, all was calm and steady like the rain. Witness the street life - city residents, visitors, commuters in constant motion, walking and riding bicycles and motorscooters, rain and shine, often with two riding together. Women wearing dresses and heels, or pants and sandals; young men sending text messages while driving. Traffic flows here, it does not obey lights and signs as there are few of these. It winds its way, flowing through and around obstacles like water through a sieve, like a stream. And that is mostly what I see...there is a beauty in it and I am not sure if I am blind to the real story or just seeing what is.

Constant Kindness in my Inbox

On the eve of Albert Schweitzer's Birthday (January 14, 1875 - September 4,
1965), I found this article in my Inbox, from the director of the local Greater Philadelphia Albert Schweitzer Fellowship program - my friend and colleague, Nikki. I loved the story - true! - of a very comfortable couple and their huge decision - inspired by the life of Albert Schweitzer - to live for others.

At the bottom of the same email I found these words:

"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate."
- Albert Schweitzer.

I don't know much about Albert Schweitzer, except that his life has been an inspiration to many, and what I have read here. From my participation in the fellowship program, I have absorbed a bit: Schweitzer established and served in a desperately needed hospital in Lambaréné, in what was then French Equatorial Africa; he was known for his commitment to living with Reverence for Life. There is much much more to his life (see link above!), but with just this - just the words above - I find fresh and nourishing values to consider in these fearful, survival-oriented times.

Misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility - all are in the air, these days. We are tempted to "wait it out" - hoping for problems to go away, for the market to bounce back, for the ice to melt - not always the worst thing to do... But consider the claim: "Constant kindness can accomplish much...". It rings so true to me - I have been the surprised recipient of undeserved kindness many times, and have found that a soft word really can quiet a storm...but (I admit with great shame) I tend to think of a focus on kindness as a detour from accomplishing much. :(

So, it is amazing to consider instead an attitude of constant kindness, and what it might do!

Yet, it is not all that simple to contemplate the practice! Kindness...in the face of hostility? Is this wise, even? But the image of sun melting ice, of coldness 'evaporating', of hard feelings softening, hearts opening - this is the image to which we must cling...that these difficult realities might be transformed.

Into what, I ask (with you)? Real differences do not evaporate, nor is truth, simple truth, at odds with a heart of kindness. So, then one must consider this power of "constant kindness" - bold and true - with care, in the face of its enemies, in the reality of truth obscured, positions in conflict, a focus on gain and loss. Constant kindness is creative, it is reverence for life, all of life. And what is possible when we approach all of life, your life as well as mine, with this reverence? I have no easy answers, but I sure hope I get to find out.

Out Stealing Horses

I was about to embark on a three-hour train ride when I picked up Per Peterson's "Out Stealing Horses" in the bookstore at the station. Set in Norway, the book traces the life of Trond Sander just after he moves into a remote riverside cabin, alone, at sixty seven years of age - only to have "all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him". Norway is a far off land ...I have been only as far as Denmark, so I was curious enough, then saw a claim that the book was "...a gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader's own experience of life". Who could resist a claim like that? And from the New York Times Review of Books, at that?

"Out Stealing Horses" is a trip into nature and story, interwoven; into the life of a man who has loved and grieved, who still has an achingly intense longing for his father and for understanding pieces of his own story, the mystery of his father and his past. When Trond was young, during the time of the second World War, when Norway was occupied by the Nazis, his father would disappear for months at a time. Yet Trond enjoyed a deep and trusting connection with him that was based on the depth and truth of moments lived together - beautiful moments, captured with the eye and heart. The intrusion of the bigger picture into the personal life and relationships is only understood many years later when Trond has a chance to talk with friend of his father's. I felt as hungry as Trond to know more about what was going on in his father's life, the village, and the country.

By chance, I picked up the October 20 issue of the New Yorker which also has a review of a book by Per Peterson: his newer novel "To Siberia". This reviewer also mentioned the "astonishing" earlier novel "Out Stealing Horses". He picked up perfectly what Peterson is about: "Peterson's real interest, though, is in the physical and emotional distances that separate his characters from each other and from their former selves". That may be true - but to me, the separation is always conveyed through longing for connection and understanding, and it is endured with meticulous attention to past and present - and with trust, always.

Every time I pick up this book I want to read it again. Maybe I will.

Here is the NY Times review

The first chapter is available, too.