Findings

I listened to this story on NPR while making supper last night. It’s about a Chinese couple waiting while excavators dig out the building where their 2-year-old was staying with his grandparents. I wanted to somehow recognize their story, out there beyond the self-indulgent bubble of my blog with its books and ideas.

Frantic voices in another tongue
break the stillness of my kitchen.

They wait
for what is lost
to be found.

Long days, they wait –
propping one another up –
tossing the unraveling spool of hope back and forth
a gossamer thread
stitching them together.

The lost are found.

The child,
cradled in the arms of a grandfather,
his last vision the face of a grandmother
standing behind
steadying hands resting on Grandfather’s shoulders.

“Mommy is here” she moans into the rubble –
Another language, but an anguish that pierces me
stitching me to them
here in my kitchen half a world away.

Lost.
Found.
Lost.

Helen Kay’s A Pony for the Winter tells the tale of a pony who gives rides at an amusement park boarded to a young girl for the winter. Deborah, who’s 8 years old, learns the ropes of pony care and wrestles with the moral choice of whether to hide the pony from its owner when he returns in the spring. It’s not a picture book; text outweighs pictures. But there are still plenty of illustrations, and though the reading level is perhaps 3rd grade, younger children can read it with no problems.

Cowardly Clyde has been a real favorite this week. Clyde, a “cowardly” horse belonging to a bravado-filled knight, ends up saving the day (and the knight) from a rampaging ogre. When I came back from my morning walk yesterday, both girls were lying on their stomachs in my 7-year-old’s bed, reading and discussing, admiring Clyde, pointing out their favorite features of the pictures, dreaming what they would do in such a situation: “I’d bite him in the tail, then run around and around till he got dizzy and fell down!” was the best solution I heard.

The Mare on the Hill is a beautifully illustrated book about a white mare who fears people (kind of like Ginger in Black Beauty) who eventually comes to trust the young boys who long to befriend her. The text and paintings are by Thomas Locker, an acclaimed Hudson River painter. Gorgeous book.

Leah’s Pony is about a young girl living in the Dust Bowl during the great Depression. Her family’s farm is about to be auctioned off “the year the corn grew no higher than a man’s thumb,” and Leah makes a decision to sell her pony so she can bid on her father’s truck. (I’m tearing up just writing about it, actually.) It’s a wonderful story that inspires young children with a vision of the power their choices can have. (Good site here.)

Last but not least, Robert the Rose Horse… I’m very tired of this book, but my girls never seem to weary of it. We’ve checked it out of the library several times now. My older daughter read it through earlier in the year, and it was one of the first books she was curious enough about to push through as an early reader. It’s about a horse with an allergy to roses whose itchy nose ends up saving the day during a bank robbery. He’s a lovable equine, albeit one who walks around on his hind legs at will….

When I was in 8th grade, I found myself assailed by questions about the faith I’d been raised in. How would I prove God’s existence to my friends? What does all the church-speak mean? How could I know this was real? At the time, my Sunday school teacher heard my questioning and took it to heart, organizing the class around it. She had us all write down our questions, and she dealt with one each week.

I’m not sure how fully mine were answered. Sometimes living and gaining experience is required before things make sense. But the affirming respect and responsiveness she dared to offer us on her maiden voyage as a Sunday school teacher meant — and still means — a great deal to me. Os Guinness’s God in the Dark has been a fitting sequel to that first experience. Whereas the 8th grade class laid a foundation of viable Christian love and relationship, this book is a rigorous intellectual voyage that tackles exhaustively the nature of doubt in all its dimensions and varieties. It was a good read for me now, almost thirty years later, with a fuller range of experience under my belt and therefore different kinds of questions.

My only other experience reading Guinness was Fit Bodies Fat Minds, a much more witty and fast-paced book dealing with anti-intellectualism in the church. This book is written more reflectively and sensitively. A glance through the other reviews posted at Amazon shows that it’s unanimous: this book is a profound, unflinching tour through a difficult subject. It’s structured in three parts: first, an overview; second, a survey of seven “families” of doubt; and last, a look at two specific doubts, “Why, Lord?” and “How long, Lord?”

It’s an excellent book, though I had my usual struggles grappling with nonfiction. The unrelenting focus on its subject is a strength of the argument, but plowing through the many kinds of doubt was slow going at times. I also had to guard against the “That’s me!” syndrome of thinking I suffer from every single variety of spiritual doubt in the book.

However, I value it in two ways. First, it legitimizes — almost blesses — doubt as a stamp of authenticity on faith. “The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof,” writes Guinness, “but a world where doubt is never far from faith’s shoulder.” I’ve gotten whiffs of a spiritual gestapo mentality from some quarters where doubt is viewed as unbelief or sin, so I found this refreshing air to breathe. I also value this book for its incisive, constructive discussion. It’s not a book that wallows; solutions are proposed, and they’re complex, not simplistic.

On the whole the varieties of doubt that I could relate to best were the doubt of disuse and the doubt of injury (not Guinness’s names for them, but my shorthand). By the doubt of disuse, I mean the uncertainty that comes of not activating faith through choice, but waiting in the wings, safely outside the fray. My life at present is pretty insulated, and faith can take on an air of unreality except as a verbal thing. The doubt of injury has to do with the kind of deep-seated mistrust that comes of old wounds, the pain of which is attributed to God rather than the real offender. I know this is an area I need to give more thought to. I have a great suspicion of authority, and the cultural atmosphere makes me right at home in that. But some authorities are trustworthy, and need to be trusted, not hidden from, if faith is to escape being stunted. I’ll probably refer to this book along the way, because it sharpens focus and gives a language for thinking through a potentially paralyzing subject.