Spirituality

Review: The Fast

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Cover image of "The Fast" by John Oakes

The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without, John Oakes. Avid Reader Press (ISBN: 9781668017418) 2024.

Summary: The history, science, philosophy, and promise of doing without, set against the author’s own experience of a seven-day fast.

I suspect many of us have fasted either for religious reasons or in preparation for medical tests or procedures. After reading John Oakes book on fasting, I realized that there are other reasons for fasting: spiritual and philosophical ones apart from religious observance, for health reasons, for protest, and as a choice leading to death. I also discovered how pervasive the practice is, and like many other practices, subject to fads and frauds.

Oakes writes this book against the backdrop of engaging in a personal seven-day fast from food. Each of his chapters begins with a journal entry for each day of his fast, what he feels and experiences. He experiences hunger early on, but not significantly after the third day when the body transitions to metabolizing ketones. He grows aware of how much of our days revolve around food preparation. Intermittently, he feels weak or jittery, and sometimes struggles to focus. But most of the time Oakes is able to carry on most of his ordinary activities.

He considers the function of fasting as similar to that of silence as a “space between,” as a way to focus awareness and attentiveness. Oakes explores Greek, Buddhist, and Abrahamic roots of fasting and other ascetic practices. He weighs asceticism against the moderation of Epicureanism, the mean between deprivation and excess that was the place of pleasure. He notes the renewal of fasting in churches that stress personal transformation. Turning from philosophical considerations, he investigates the physiology of fasting over time, the benefits that may accrue particularly from intermittent fasting and the harmfulness of fasting for weight loss.

Perhaps one of the most illuminating chapters was that chronicling the use of fasting as a form of social protest. From the 12th century BC in Kashmir, to early Christians in Ireland (including Patrick), and to modern day activists like Angela Davis and Caesar Chavez, fasts were an effective means of protest. But protest fasts are also the occasion for brutalities, such as the force-feeding of Muslim detainees at Guantanamo post 9/11.

He includes a chapter on those who use fasting for fame and fortune, often engaging in fraud or faddism. These range from those claiming to never eat to those promoting fasts of various lengths for health reasons, sometimes with deleterious effects. This, in turn leads to a consideration of fasting as self-cancellation, a willful choice, sometimes genetically influenced as in anorexics, including “holy anorexics” like Catherine of Siena, who died of starvation at thirty-three.

In the end, the author concludes he will continue to embrace this practice, writing:

“That is the strange quality of fasting: its inside out invertedness, the idea and the reality that cutting back can add, that diminishment can bring strength and a measure of serenity. And when implemented as a hunger strike, fasting amplifies resistance.”

Nevertheless, he cautions against self-destructive excess of fasting enthusiasts and is careful to advise consultation with doctors before engaging in fasts.

The author approaches his own fasting from a non-religious perspective. Therefore, his book should not substitute for religious teaching from one’s particular faith on fasting. Rather, he sets the fast in both a personal and global context. We are introduced to the experience through the author’s journaling. We catch a global perspective on various cultural expressions of fasting. He carefully outlines both benefits and dangers associated with the practice. Above all, he reminds us of the ways our lives may be enriched by periodically doing without.

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Disclosure of Material Connection. I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program.

Review: The Language of the Soul

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The Language of the Soul, Jeff Crosby (foreword by Suzanne Stabile, afterword by James Bryan Smith). Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Summary: A survey of the deepest longings of the human soul, within ourselves, for our world, and for the eternal.

Saudade. A word from the Portuguese that, strictly so, is untranslatable. Words like longing, yearning, nostalgia, the burning hearts of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is the desire for something more that takes us into the realm of the spiritually transcendent. Jeff Crosby believes these longings are the beckoning of God, speaking to the language of our hearts.

Crosby has been reflecting on these longings for much of his life and gestating this book for the past fifteen years amid a busy career in publishing. In this work, he weaves his own experiences, the thoughts of other pilgrims, and the strands of music that have been another of his great loves to identify ten longings of the heart:

  • The longing for home
  • The longing for an undivided self
  • The longing for forgiveness received and extended
  • The longing for friendship
  • The longing for spiritual transformation
  • The longing for peace
  • The longing for community
  • The longing to be freed from unhealthy fear and anxiety
  • The longing for meaningful work
  • The longing for heaven, our hearts true home

It’s striking to me that these longings are framed by our longing for home. I think of how I treasure the hours I spend in the various comfortable and pleasing spaces in and around my own home and yet revel in images of beautiful homes (usually with a library, leather chairs, and a fireplace looking out on a beautiful vista). We call our home Rivendell, after the refuge of Elrond in the Lord of the Rings, the last homely house. It strikes me we all long for that house, which Crosby identifies with the longing for heaven that we glimpse in those “thin places” where heaven is barely veiled–a passage of music, a scene in nature, a description in literature, a poem.

In between, Crosby explores the longings that permeate our existence. He invites us to recognize our discontent with fragmented, divided lives and to pursue the solitude, silence, and wise direction that is the path to a seamless existence. He shares his own experience of a panic attack and the practices of examen to recognize the presence of God amid the anxiety-producing concerns of our lives. He likens the burden of our own transgressions and grievances toward others as a rock-filled pack that confession and forgiveness of ourselves and others helps us unload. He speaks of a marketing meeting with one of the leaders of the Empty Hands Fellowship for a book project that was set aside because of a family in need in an unhealthy, mold-filled shack, exemplifying the richness of community we often only long for. He speaks of anam cara friends who never “should” on us, and take that away from us when we try to do it to ourselves. And this just from half of the ten longings.

As I mentioned, song as well as scripture and literature has been important to Crosby and one of the treats is that he offers a playlist for saudade and for each of the longings at the end of each chapter. I haven’t created all of these playlists but was able to create a playlist on Spotify for his Saudade playlist and suspect one can find most or all of his recommendations on a music streaming service.

Along the way, we learn from many of the spiritual writers Crosby has worked with over the years of his publishing career, yet Crosby weaves these into his own “playlist” as well, exploring our longings and the practices that draw us to the one in whom our longings find their fulfillment. As I read, I felt I was listening to one, still on the way, and yet living a purposeful, increasingly seamless vocation moving joyfully toward his, and our hearts true home.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Seven Brief Lessons on Language

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Seven Brief Lessons on Language, Jonathan Dunne. Sofia, Bulgaria: Small Stations Press, 2023.

Summary: Explores the spiritual significance embedded into the letters, sounds, and structure of our language.

When I was young, the host of a local children’s program took the initials of a child having a birthday that day and turned it into an amusing drawing. I felt there was something of that sort going on with this book, but I could not say that I was amused with the letter play in this book and the supposed spiritual truths the author found in the vowels and consonants and words of our language.

The book is patterned on one by Carlo Rovelli titled Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. The book consists of seven short readings and a postscript. The author believes our language is encoded with spiritual truth for those whose eyes are opened, and through these “lessons,” the author proposes to offer the insights that will open our eyes.

The first chapter is on the alphabet, the vowels and consonants, how they are formed, phonetic pairs of consonants (important to the ideas he develops) and their connection to breath, water, and flesh. A clue to what he would be doing comes early, when through a series of transpositions he connects breath, water, and flesh to “father,” the one who speaks all into existence. Subsequent chapters reflect on the Alpha and Omega, the “I” that is both “I am” and the sinful human ego that needs to go from I to O, the One who is Three, Love, Believe, and Translate.

Here’s a brief example from the chapter on the Trinity of the kind of language play one encounters throughout the book:

“As when we place three Os together, we get G O D, so when we place three Is together we get I l l. We become ill when we are apart from God, when we turn our back on him” (p.53).

All of this seems clever letter and word play in service of a book on spirituality. The method seems to me arbitrary, and one that could be used to say almost anything. Also, much of the book focuses on the English alphabet and words while treating with spiritual concepts that are transcultural.

I assume the sincerity of the writer, and would agree with many of the spiritual insights as a fellow Christian. But the method would have us looking for phonetic clues to reveal spiritual meaning rather than the plain meanings of the words of the scriptures and the creeds, which feels more of “Gnostic” or hidden knowledge than Christian.

The book also felt a bit of a “bait and switch,” at least it’s title, modeled as it is on Rovelli’s book which really is on physics. These really are not, except perhaps for the first, lessons on language but spiritual reflections drawing upon the author’s wordplay.

For those who truly value language and its power to unveil spiritual reality, I would commend the works of Marilyn McEntyre <https://www.marilynmcentyre.com/books>. As for this, I would take a pass.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program.

Review: God in the Modern Wing

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God in the Modern Wing (Studies in Theology and the Arts), Edited by Cameron J. Anderson and G. Walter Hansen. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: Ten Christian artists offer reflections on different pieces of modern art found in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, considering both the faith of the artists and what one might see in their art through the eyes of faith.

G. Walter Hansen, a retired theology professor and appreciator of modern art, describes the origins of this book in the preface to this book. He worships at Fourth Presbyterian Church in downtown Chicago, located about a mile from the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. He contrasts the perceived distance between Christian faith and modern art, and his own growing appreciation for the works he finds in the Modern Wing. Out of this came the presentations that are basis of this book. Working with Cameron J. Anderson, former executive director of Christians in the Visual Arts and co-editor with him of this book, Hansen invited ten Christians in the arts to give presentations offering their own reflections on particular artists and works of art found in the Modern Wing. The contributors not only met this assignment but also offer insights into, using the expression coined by Flannery O’Connor, the “God-haunted” character of modern art, as well as the faith of many of the artists.

Cameron Anderson opens the collection with an introductory essay on “Being Modern” exploring the spirit, style, and self of modern art. He observes:

“Calling on their generative agency, artists sought means to foment aesthetic, social, and political revolution. If modern art labored to rid the picture plane of propaganda, then artists became the self-appointed guardians of this new visual horizon. This new generation flaunted its moral and creative freedom, but it also lived beneath the burden of its tragic flaws and lapses” (p. 11).

The following chapters focus on one to a few artists and works in the Modern Wing. The first takes us on a kind of tour through the eyes and ears and sketch pad of “Hadlock,” from Matisse’s Bathers by the River, through the Cubism of Picasso, the work of Diego Vazquez, works of Paul Klee, and others, interspersed with comments of gallery visitors, and the epiphanies of God’s presence in the works and even the inadvertent comments of visitors. Matthew Milliner considers the works of Chagall, Magritte, and Dali, particularly the last’s return to Catholic faith. Cameron Anderson discusses Constantin Brancusi’s soaring columns and his Bird series, and the expressions of joy they convey. Contrast this with the earth-bounded Walking Man of Alberto Giacometti and Anderson sees in these two both the aspirations and existential boundaries of what it means to be human. Joel Sheesley returns to Cubism, considering Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, probably unlike any portrait you’ve seen, not representation, but negation, a statement of what one is not, of what is missing, as apophatic theology has done with God.

Bruce Herman introduces us to the later art of Philip Guston and Richard Diebenkorn. Guston’s Bad Times focuses on “human beings behaving inhumanely.” Many of his paintings explore humanity at its worst, asking “what are we?” but one, Couple in Bed portrays the beauties of faithful love. We are invited to consider Diebenkorn’s Ochre in the Ocean Park series, an affirmation of joy in color and form. Linda Stratford writes of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. The latter, with his Stations paintings, especially fascinated me, black vertical bars with differing widths and locations on a series of canvases, or “stations.”

I had the opportunity to see some of Mark Rothko’s works a few years ago. Makoto Fujimura helped me understand the layers of color floating on many of his canvases and why I must visit the Rothko Chapel if I visit Houston. David McNutt introduces us to the faith of Andy Warhol and the connections between the “Pop” and spiritual sides in his life. Steve Prince describes the prophetic art of two black artists, Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White, as well as some of his own prophetic work, and what it means to be a prophet in art. Finally, Leah Samuelson, who works in the community art movement, writes about her encounters with the walking sticks of Andre’ Cadere, who would walk through exhibits, leaving his color-banded walking sticks as impromptu installations. She uses this to explore the art of protest and restoration.

In what I thought an apt afterword, Cameron J. Anderson considers the significance of these presentations as an invitation to make space in our hurried lives to contemplate these works, how they reflect the human condition and the nature and meaning of our modern selves. He observes the “nature of craft” and “nature of being” that has been under consideration throughout. As we study these works, we both explore how the artists have accomplished their works, and what they “saw” as they worked. He considers Charles Ray’s Hinoki, pieces of a fallen tree that captured his attention that he turned into an installation. It, like all art, poses the question, “Has anyone else seen the thing that I have seen?” And to go with it is the question, are we seen, and loved, and what does this mean for our existence?

The text is accompanied with black and white figures in the text as well as twenty-two color images in an insert. These cannot substitute for seeing the works, but certainly help make sense of the artists readings of these works. Late, in life, without former training, I’ve picked up the paint brush and enjoyed painting with my wife and local artists, many with far more art training. I have only the vaguest understanding of the movements within modern art but this work whet my appetite to know more. It reminded me that Christ is at play (reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins) in the ten thousand places of the modern art world. As Anderson challenges us, will we make space to see, and to be seen?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Iona

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Iona: New and Selected Poetry. Kenneth Steven. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2021.

Summary: A collection of poems connected to the island of Iona, the spiritual home of the author.

The island of Iona, part of the Inner Hebrides, located off the west coast of Scotland has been a destination of spiritual pilgrims from around the world. The Iona Abbey is a focal point, purported founded by St. Columba, an exile from Ireland, who brought Celtic Christianity to the island, and Scotland in turn. It became a center of scholarship and monasticism throughout the isles. It is believed that the Book of Kells was at least begun here.

Between the island’s rugged beauty, history, and the abbey, it is regarded by many as a “thin place,” one where the veil between earth and heaven, humans and God seems especially thin. Kenneth Steven, a widely published poet and frequent BBC guest, has spent summers since childhood and longer periods on the island, roving its hills and beaches, often barefoot, as he notes in many of his poems. In this book, poems written on the island on many occasions and for different publications are gathered together. It is apparent that Iona is a “thin place” for Steven, a title of one of his poems and the questions he asks in a poem titled “Iona: “Is this place really nearer to God?/Is the wall thin between our whispers/and his listening?”

Many of the poems begin with simple observations of the natural world–of otters, butterflies, spider webs, geese, and woodpeckers. Others hark to the past of the island. We imagine the harp of a Celtic bard or the fiddle of St Kilda. We observe Columba in prayer in the marshlands. We visit the ruins of Clonmacnoise monastery, imagining the community of men who broke the water of wells and lit turf fires in winter.

Some of the poetry in the collection reflect his devotion. In “Honestly,” Steven encounters God not in the stone buildings but the moorlands. In “Island,” he describes coming to the island with prayers that were “ragged things,” the breaking of the jar of his heart, and leaving the island “see through, clear.” “Prayer” wonders how anyone could not believe in God after a blue spring day, fields, orchids, the sea, the wind.

The last part of the book takes us from Iona to the shores of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the communities of the Amish and more global reflections on the land, and on the realities of Good Friday and Resurrection. Yet we cannot help but think that his thoughts take him back to Iona in his final poem in this collection, “Sacred Place.”

This is poetry that lingers long enough in a place to see and receive what is present. To linger in these poems is to glimpse and imagine the world of Iona, as seen and experienced by the author. Until you or I can visit, these poems take us to this “thin place” known as Iona.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: That Way and No Other

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That Way and No Other

That Way and No Other, Amy Carmichael (Introduction by Katelyn Beaty). Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2020.

Summary: A curated collection of writings of Amy Carmichael, the missionary to India who became house mother to girls saved from sex trafficking.

Amy Carmichael had visions of missionary service fired by interactions with the likes of D. L. Moody at Keswick conventions. She tried to work among Manchester factory workers but her health failed. Later, she was rejected for missions in China due to health concerns. After working in Japan for fifteen months, she returned home with excruciating headaches. Finally she sailed from England in 1895 for service in India. She never returned. Even there, her visions of evangelistic ministry took an unexpected turn as young girls started arriving at the compound in Dohnavur–girls brought there as an alternative to sexual slavery in the local shrines. She questioned, “Could it be right to turn from so much that might be of profit…and become just nursemaids?” Then she remembered Jesus washing the disciples feet and realized that it was not hers to question where the Lord would assign her to serve. She oversaw a growing ministry to these girls until her death in 1951.

She also wrote. Her books inspired generations of Christians, many to mission service. In this book, Carolyn Kurtz has collected excerpts of her writings under several themes: Nothing Kept Back, Always a Soldier, Prayer Hunger, Your Chief Love and Friend, Forget Yourself in Serving Others, Poetry in Childhood, and Embracing God’s Will. Some are short, aphoristic in character, some are longer, many filled with lush descriptions of her setting. One example:

The Gloriosa Superba is native to South India. During the autumn rains you find it shooting in the lane bordered thickly by huge cactus and aloe. Here and there you see it in the open field. In the field it will have a chance, you think; but in the lane, crowded down by cactus and aloe, great assertive things with most fierce thorn and spike, what can a poor lily do but give in and disappear? A few weeks afterward you see a punch of color on the field, you go and gather handfuls of lovely lilies, and your revel in the tangle of color, a little bewilderment of delight.

Other excerpts describe the alternative to the refuge they offer the young girls, the horror of the form of sexual trafficking to which they were subject:

A medical missionary, a woman of wide experience, was talking to a younger woman about the temple children. She had lived for some time, unknowingly, next door to a temple house in an Indian city. Night after night she said she was wakened by the cries of children–frightened cries, indignant cries, sometimes sharp cries of pain. She inquired in the morning, but was always told the children had been punished for some naughtiness. “They were only being beaten.” She was not satisfied, and tried to find out more through the police. But she feared the police were bribed to tell nothing, for she found nothing through them. Later, by means of her medical work, she came full upon the truth.

Many of the writings describe the challenges, compensations and joys of work with these girls. So much of this is seen through a life surrendered to Christ. She writes:

Can you find a promise that if we follow the Lord Jesus Christ, life is going to be fairly easy? I do not think we shall find even one. But we shall find ever so many promises assuring us that however things are, we may count on strength to make us brave and peace to keep our hearts at rest.

This is a wonderful collection that captures the essence of Carmichael’s spirituality, her love for the people and place to which God called her, and the struggle and joy she found in entrusting herself to the Lord’s calling. The quotes are accompanied by as short biography by editor Carolyn Kurtz, and an introduction by Katelyn Beaty, reflecting on Carmichael’s life and the role of women in missions, then and now.

I also came across this quote for lovers of books that might be a good way to conclude:

It matters a good deal that your book-food should be strong meat. We are what we think about. Think about trivial things or weak things and somehow one loses fiber and becomes flabby in spirit.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.