By LeRoy Lawson
Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor
Jana Riess
Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2011
Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives
Thomas French
New York: Hyperion, 2010
The title gives it away: Jana Riess”s Flunking Sainthood isn”t going to be your most serious read this year. It may be, though, the most fun.
Actually, Riess is serious about the exercise of spiritual disciplines. Her tone is lighthearted, even flippant at times, but her soul thirsts, yea even longs, for the living God.
So she goes to work. Her plan is to tackle one of the time-honored spiritual disciplines a month (after January, which is for getting set up). Here”s what the plan looks like, from her table of contents:
February: fasting in the desert
March: meeting Jesus in the kitchen . . . or not
April: lectio divination
May: nixing shoppertainment
June: Look! A squirrel!
July: unorthodox sabbath
August: thanksgiving every day
September: Benedictine hospitality
October: what would Jesus eat?
November: three times a day will I praise you
December: generosity
Then comes the epilogue and her confession: practice makes imperfect.
You may not resonate with the author”s sometimes bold, sometimes halfhearted attempt to discipline herself in each of these areas, but as a lifetime loser in attaining the art of spirituality, I did. And do.
Fasting usually just leads to a headache, fixed-hour praying to skipped-hour praying. The practice of gratitude is one of my favorites””until I feel like grumbling over this or that supposed injustice. I like Sabbath-keeping, unless something really important comes up. And generosity? That”s easy, until it means giving up something I don”t want to let go of. I can be hospitable on occasion””to people I like and who don”t give me grief. And several times I”ve been a vegetarian. Except when I needed a hamburger fix.
See why I identify with Riess?
Her inclusiveness is refreshing, even if unnerving. She observes fasting “like a Muslim during Ramadan,” which means starving by day and feasting after sunset, a practice that makes some sense, doesn”t it? And who doesn”t appreciate the stark beauty of the Jewish Sabbath? For that matter, who doesn”t need the regularity of the Liturgy of the Hours?
Riess roams widely in search of inspiration, finding it in Dorothy Day, Thornton Wilder, St. John Chrysostom, even the irritating Brother Lawrence. Among many well-chosen quotations, she includes one from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said famously of the Sabbath that Jews don”t have fantastic buildings; instead they have the Sabbath, their “palace in time.” A thought well worth a Christian”s pondering.
Don”t skip her epilogue, where her yearlong journey into spiritual failure is redeemed. Her father””her faithless, deserting, absent-for-most-of-her-lifetime father””is dying, and she, the deserted, confused, almost-but-not-quite resisting daughter, is called to his bedside half a country away. To her surprise, she could forgive him, holding his hand as he slipped away. He hadn”t reformed. He had lived as an unkempt, unloving, bitter old man. But she could forgive him.
And she could look back on a year of fruitful spiritual disciplining:
Those attempts at sainthood that felt like dismal failures at the time, actually took hold somehow. They helped to form me into the kind of person who could go to the bedside of someone who had harmed me and be able to say, “I forgive you, Dad. Go in peace.” Although I didn”t see it while I was doing the practices themselves or even while I was writing the chapters in this book, the power of spiritual practice is that it forges you stealthily, as you entertain angels unawares.
If she is right””and I think she is””then let the forging begin.
Captivated
I suspect I wouldn”t have picked Thomas French”s Zoo Story off a bookstore shelf, not because I don”t love zoos (which I do) and am not fascinated by animals (which I am), but because with the press of higher priority reading, I”d have passed over it for weightier fare.
I”d have deprived myself of a treat. Fortunately, fellow Christian Standard columnist Jim Dahlman put the book in my hands. The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is Jim”s writing mentor. He couldn”t have chosen a better one.
French calls on his expertise as an investigative reporter and his gift for suspenseful storytelling in Zoo Story. As the book opens, 11 America-bound elephants are being rounded up and herded into the belly of a wide-body Boeing 747 destined for Tampa, Florida. Their new home would be Lowry Park Zoo, one of this country”s best refuges for rare endangered animals. The journey over was risky; their life in captivity no less so.
Their story is only one of the fascinating tales told here, tales of love and sex (Enshalla and Eric, Sumatran tigers), power and domination (Herman and Bamboo, chimpanzees), exotic tastes (Ladybug, the black bear who craves oranges and peanut butter), and a dazzling selection of other creatures vying for our attention: a rhino named Naboo, a black vulture named Smedley, a mourning dove named Myrtle””and the beat goes on.
The animals””pachyderms, reptiles, mammals, birds, sea life””hold center stage at the zoo; what goes on behind the scenes is, if anything, even more dramatic. Starring at Lowry Park Zoo in the years the author covers in this tale is Lex Salisbury, the brilliant, charismatic, visionary, tyrannical CEO. Though he brought the zoo from its tawdry decline in the 1980s into world-class status in this century, he apparently did so on the backs of his overworked, underpaid, and shorthanded staff who nonetheless loved their jobs and who discovered, when they”d worked at the zoo long enough, that “they began to see what looked like human behavior in the animals, and what looked like animal behavior in the humans.”
A set of questions haunts both author and reader: Although zoos provide excellent entertainment for city-bound spectators, what price are the animals paying? Is their captivity humane or cruel? Are the zoos actually saving them from extinction, as their keepers claim? Human encroachment on or even destruction of their natural habitats is endangering ever-larger numbers of species; have human attempts to protect them in zoos and animal preserves done anything more than assuage our guilty consciences?
Important questions, and French treats them seriously. But he never lets them take away from the one really held captive by this book: the reader.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a Christian Standard contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee.Â
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