Tag / book review

by Annie Newman

DOUBLE Book Review: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and Untamed

A woman, unless she submits
is neither a mule
nor a queen
though like a mule she may suffer
and like a queen pace the floor.

The above is an excerpt of an Alice Walker’s poem, found again in one of the collected essays of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. I wonder if Glennon Doyle has read it. I think she would enjoy it, as much of Untamed is spent discussing exactly how to avoid being either a mule or a queen, so to speak. It was by complete happenstance that I started reading them at the same time: Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens being the arbitrary starting point for me off my list of 36 Minority Writers on Faith and Glennon Doyle’s Untamed being gifted to me by my sister. Reading them together was a heady experience, as they uncannily complimented each other in their ability to speak directly to my own life. Perhaps this speaks to the universality of our shared experiences, which is a nice thought in and of itself. Perhaps God meant for me to read them together, which will make some people roll their eyes, but I think it is also a nice thought.

Neither of these books is “religious” per se, though both books do touch upon “religion.” But I do not see my Christianity as separate and apart from the rest of my life, something that needs only be acknowledged on Sundays and holidays. Things as varied and mundane as gardening, child-care, and drunken late-night conversation can have a real bearing on our souls. I believe God designed it that way, so I wanted to share these two books with you on a “religious” blog, since they were stepping stones on my spiritual journey. (You can read my in-depth reviews of these books, as well as my other recommendations, on my GoodReads account.)

In short, Doyle’s book galvanized me and Walker’s book uplifted me. As a woman who is searching for meaning, finding out what it means to be something beyond “wife,” and “mother” while stepping back from the business I helped build with my husband, the prologue of Untamed rattled me so much I almost didn’t read the rest of the book.  In it, Doyle recalls seeing a cheetah born in captivity who clearly still has some sort of ancestral or muscle memory of the wild. 

She gives this cheetah a voice: “Something’s off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagine fenceless, wide-open savannas. I want to run and hunt and kill. I want to sleep under an ink-black, silent sky filled with stars…I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist.”

“You are not crazy,” Doyle answers the imaginary cheetah-rambling. “You are a goddamn cheetah.”

I felt – I still feel – exactly the way she described that cheetah, and it was unnerving to have a person I’ve never met before put into words something I was having trouble defining even for myself. I used to be scared that whatever creative endeavor I’m starting might fail, afraid to see them through to the end. But now, after reading Untamed, I’m afraid not to see them through to the end.

Walker, for her part, caught all the complexities of my Southern, female soul. Forty years my senior, a different race, different occupation, different sexual orientation and religious beliefs than me — and all I could feel was our similarities. I felt so much less alone after reading In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Her writings gave me permission to love the South. For all its wounds and wrongs, it is still a place of wondrous beauty and deep inspiration. Her essay, “One Child of One’s Own” encapsulates perfectly the joy and revelation, as well as the frustration and constraints, I have experienced as an artist who is now a mother. Throughout the book Walker highlights the sisterhood of women – yes, black women to be sure, but all women, as well – reminding us that it is our duty and our benefit to listen to each other, to lift up one another. To that end, I think her essay “A Talk: 1972” (titled further on in the text “How to Speak About Practically Everything, Briefly, From the Heart”) should be required reading for all women in America.

I (re)realized something, reading these two books together: If we answer Walker’s call in earnest to lift each other up, we will achieve Doyle’s proposed goal of finding our own wild again. We will live freely, neither mules nor queens, but wild and beautiful as cheetahs. And that, I think, is the way God would want it.

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by Annie Newman

Book Review: Acts of Forgiveness

I was excited to be tapped to review Ted Karpf’s new book, Acts of Forgiveness, as the offer came right as I was searching for non-majority voices in Christianity.  An Episcopalian priest and a gay man, Karpf was on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic both in the States and South Africa, providing compassionate pastoral care at a time when people were gripped by fear.  This memoir documents that time and more: following the author’s journey to acceptance and forgiveness.

What I find so compelling about this book is that Karpf does not shy away from showing us his uphill climb – truly, his ongoing struggle – with acceptance and forgiveness.  Karpf has lost what he thought would be his retirement home, was unceremoniously removed from a fulfilling and influential position in the church, and been left by his long-time partner, among other losses. Some of these are more recent and some not so, but it is evident that Karpf still acutely feels the hurt that each loss brought.  Yet through prayer, therapy, and wise mentorship, Karpf has found ways to accept and forgive.  It makes for some honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, reading.

If forgiveness is something you struggle with (don’t we all?), then I particularly recommend chapter two, appropriately titled “Forgiveness and Loving.” When asking Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s advice on how to pray for his ex, the archbishop’s response was “until you love him.”  Karpf tells us:

I was again flummoxed and frustrated. I had no inclination to pray for him; I wanted him to disappear.  So that prayer took nearly a decade to pray as well, during which I often had to ask myself, “Is there anyone or anything unforgivable?”  I must respond, if I am to remain faithful to scripture, my faith, and experience, “Probably not. No, nothing and no one is beyond forgiveness, but learning to accept that fact, and gain the stamina and will it takes to do it, may take a lifetime.”

Later in the chapter, Karpf reveals the cyclical and spiraling nature of forgiveness, a message received with his natal chart reading.  “You must learn to forgive your mother,” Dr. Chakrapani Ullal told him, “She needs your forgiveness in order to complete her karmic journey. This is not for your sake, but for hers. You must be the father she never knew.”  In so doing, it seems that Karpf found healing some modicum of healing himself, as well.

Being a father of two, parenting is interwoven throughout Karpf’s story.  Being a priest and advocate during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, death is as well.  But the two exist poignantly, sometimes heartbreakingly so, together in the later chapters.  His daughter’s suicide attempt, and the generously re-printed correspondence between Karpf and a young couple experiencing the loss of their daughter, cemented him in my mind as someone I would want to counsel me both through parenting and through dying.  “As I sit here contemplating my own death, which is really never far away,” Karpf tells us, “I can only report that the stripping away of controls or supposed controls leaves me emotionally and spiritually incapacitated at the front end, though it can become revitalizing and renewing at the far end.”  Perhaps he has already come out the far end of those contemplations, because I found comfort in his ability to delight in his children (even if they didn’t turn out the way he thought they would), and his gentle questioning surrounding death.

“Life comes at me at times with frightening speed and minimal understanding,” writes Karpf in the closing pages of his memoir.  Isn’t that true for all of us?  And yet here is Karpf, admitting his failures while gaining perspective. Allowing for forgiveness of himself and working on forgiving others.  Reminding us that forgiveness and love are a journey, and that, however hard those roads may be, we are not alone when we choose to follow them.

You can find Acts of Forgiveness for purchase at the link, but there are also several upcoming opportunities to win a copy: 

Also, the author will be “stopping by” the blog later today, so if you have any comments or questions for him, be sure to leave them in the comments section yourself!

by Annie Newman

Book Review: God of Earth

I hate preamble, but I must share some background on this book and my relationship to it.  I promise most of my upcoming book reviews will not have so much back-story.  In fact, you can read a much more straight forward bonus book review of N.T. Wright’s God of Earth on my GoodReads page. Oh my, I’ve managed to preamble my preamble.  If I have any readers left after such a sin, let’s get to it:

I met author Kristin Swenson through the farm (for those new to the blog, I’m a farmer when I’m not writing or mom-ing) when we were starting out in Charlottesville.  She gifted us her book God of Earth shortly after it was published in 2016, when I was six months pregnant with Betty.  I got about halfway through it, then had a baby, and it got buried on my nightstand through no fault of its own.

I’ve picked it up several times in the intervening years, and I’ve read (and enjoyed) the first half many times now.  I brought it with me when visiting family last Christmas and finally made it three-quarters through the book, and now have finally finished it for real!

I want to reiterate, my slow reading has nothing to do with the readability of this book – which is an easily-digestible 139 pages – and everything to do with the external pressures of kids and livestock.  It flows gently yet insistently, like a spring creek, and strikes the perfect balance of wonder and urgency discussing ecological issues in Christian terms.

God of Earth brings God, particularly Jesus, into a sphere where I have (in my admittedly limited reading) rarely seen him: in and of the Earth in the most physical way possible.  This book reminds us again and again of Jesus’ visceral nature, challenging us to do the same:

The Earth is not out there, a discrete entity in splendid isolation but enmeshed in all sorts of relationships just as Jesus was with family, friends, and disciples. The God of earth, like the biblical Jesus, is relational. The friendship works boths ways.  What makes a friend to the God of earth, to the Jesus beyond Jesus incarnate in the earth itself?

If we take this question to heart, we will marvel at the world around us anew, and also be moved to attend the myriad ecological crises we face with new determination.  Swenson takes time to marvel throughout the book.  One of my favorite quotes coming from the beginning of chapter five:

The cellular wisdom of dynamic nature (what makes a rose smell like a rose and guides giraffes to evolve long necks), the energy of weather both relieving and terrifying, the urge to love and be loved, the source of all stories and art and surprise, the architect of death and keeper of mystery–that which both contains and transcends everything, the only One worthy of all worship through all time–became of earth-stuff one day, undeniably small, and absolutely vulnerable.

She goes on to describe Jesus coming to earth as a baby, miraculous and normal as any other baby.  It made me think about God in a whole new way, as discussed in this post here, where I reference her baby analogy in greater length.  It made me want to hold the whole earth tenderly in two hands.

And to behold the earth as such a precious object, I am motivated all the more to be part of the solution to climate change.  I have a long way to go, as I’ve discussed before, as I guess you do, too.  Swenson urges us to do better for sure, but she offers us this much needed grace:

“If you already care at all, if you are trying to live responsibly on the plant, then you and I, dear reader, are hardly the ones pounding in the nails.  So, if we spend our time attacking each other, already acting with ecological sensitivity, then we have let Rome–the greater world powers [oil companies, lobbyists, the shipping industry…]–load onto us their far graver sins.

This does not, of course, excuse inaction, and no one could accuse Swenson of saying so.  What this book does do, however, is provide hope where hope is needed, acknowledge grief and sadness both personal and global, and overall speak encouragement.  If you feel overwhelmed by climate change and what your role could possibly be in helping to combat it, this is the book for you.  If you need a new, organic way to think about our Christian God, this book will breathe fresh air into your beliefs.  I encourage everyone to pick it up and read it, it will do good for your soul.

This is my first book review, and I aim to do one a month from here on out in addition to my regular Bible reading.  If you are enjoying what you read please follow the blog for more!  Click the folder icon in the upper left corner of the menu, and you can follow via WordPress or email.  And don’t forget to check the blog out on Instagram and Twitter, too!  If you want to see what else is on our reading list, follow me on GoodReads and check out our post 36 Minority Writers for you to Add to Your Reading List.