Wonder

Review: Things That Matter Most

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

Things That Matter Most, Christopher de Vinck. Brewster: MA: Paraclete Press, 2022.

Summary: A collection of essays that remind us that the things that matter most are as close as the beauty of things around us from fireflies, to Fred Rogers, to friends and family, and to the tip of our fingers.

A few years ago, we were staying at an inn with a patio that looked out over fields in a rural setting. We were sitting as the evening was coming on and we began to see the meadow before us lit up with a light show of fireflies. We sat in wonder, recalling our memories of catching fireflies as children and the unfading wonder of these insects that can generate their own light beckoning, “Here I am.”

Christopher de Vinck’s collection of essays brought these memories to mind and how such simple and wondrous things point us to what matters most in our lives. His essays take us from the sea shore to the woods and to the wondrous “blue birds” seen by his mother, emigrating from Belgium, our common blue jay.

More than the wonders of our world, he explores the wonder of friendships. One of the earliest essays in the collection describes his “spiritual neighbor,” Fred Rogers who often ended conversations saying, “Well, Chris, you know who’s in charge.” He writes of the compassion of a policeman who caught up to his son on the highway to return a wallet the son had left on the car roof.

He moves from personal friends to those in literature from Hamlet to Jay Gatsby to Atticus Finch and Emily Dickinson and May Sarton, all people who give him some insight into the question of what matters most. He gives thanks to Wendell Berry and Toni Morrison. He reminds us of what J.D. Salinger, Paul Revere, and Alfred Stieglitz have in common–a shared birthday. He writes of helping the students he taught to find themselves in the literature they read:

“When we know who we are we can build a life upon wisdom, love, and compassion, and set the footprint of our lives firmly onto the earth for others to find who need the evidence and the inheritance of goodness as a guide for the future. When we know what matters most, we know where we are going” (p. 18).

His memories run back to his own childhood, to the Kennedy assassination, and down to the present, the closure of a neighborhood hardware store, and the death of loved ones. An essay of hearing a dripping of melting water outside turns into a reflection of the passage of time, and this is something that runs through his essays. He makes us aware of the fleeting wonder that is our lives, how full and rich and precious our shared moments are, precisely because they pass.

He concludes with recounting the death of his mother at 99, as “time ran out.” Not long before she died, she observed, “You don’t think of it, Christopher, but far ahead, yet closer than a heartbeat, something immense, wild, holy grabs you and won’t let go.” Her final words to Christopher? “I love you.”

We live in a broken and yet beautiful world with eternity in our hearts and mortality as our future. Christopher de Vinck offers us wonderful reflections on the seemingly ordinary, that point us to the truly precious in life.

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

Review: Recapturing the Wonder

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Recapturing the Wonder

Recapturing the Wonder, Mike Cosper. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017.

Summary: Explores the disenchantment many Christians experience living in a modern secular age and the practices that may “re-enchant” our world with the supernatural presence of God.

Thoughtful commentators from Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt to James K. A. Smith and David Foster Wallace have observed how we live in a disenchanted, disillusioned secular age. In this work Mike Cosper engages these commentators and how the disenchantment of the modern world affects Christians’ experience of the reality of God. He writes about the contrast between an enchanted world and a disenchanted one:

“Perhaps to best understand disenchantment, we can look at its opposite, the ‘enchanted’ world of a few centuries ago. In that world, men and women saw themselves as spiritual creatures, vulnerable to blessings and curses, to angels and demons, and subject to the god or gods who made and oversaw the world. This enchanted world was part of a Cosmos, an orderly creation full of meaning, a place with a purposeful origin and a clear destination, guaranteed by the god or gods who made it and rule over it. At the same time, this Cosmos is full of mystery, a place where our knowledge has its limits and an unseen spiritual realm is constantly at work, shaping our everyday experience.

In disenchantment, we no longer live in a Cosmos; we live in a universe, a cold, hostile place where existence is a big accident, where humanity is temporarily animated ‘stuff’ that’s ultimately meaningless and destined for the trash heap” (p. 11).

For many Christians, the Word of God becomes an abstraction–concepts rather than the living Word of the Living God, working in the world. What Mike Cosper seeks to do in this book is to explore both the corrosive effects of the secular world on our faith, and the practices through which we might recover a vibrant, transcendent faith whereby we recognize the presence of God in all of life.

Cosper begins with three chapters that chronicle the expressions of disenchantment in contemporary Christian life. After describing the disenchantment, he chronicles our modern efforts to self-justify through constructing a social media persona as our modern religious sacrifices that the God of grace mercifully brings to an end. Likewise, he reminds us of the recent focus of many churches on hype and spectacle instead of the slow, steady rhythms of grace by which we encounter God in the ordinary rhythms of life.

In the next three chapters, he commends several practices that break us out of the self-hype spectacles–solitude and secrecy, abundance and scarcity, and feasts of attention. He commends having a life beyond what we post on social media. He uses Lewis Hyde’s The Gift as a parable of living generously and honoring the gifts we receive as well as those we give. He invites us into a life where we feast on giving our attention to God’s world, and sometimes to feasts themselves.

The seventh chapter was of great interest. He looks at Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I was intrigued, having recently read the later (reviewed here). He suggests both were seeking transcendence, Merton through a rule of life, and Kerouac, through attentiveness in the moment. Recognizing the downsides of each lifestyle (most of us don’t live in the monastery, and Kerouac’s road was tremendously self-destructive), he suggests we need both.

Each of the chapters concludes with spiritual practices connected to the chapter. Cumulatively they help us focus on God in our hours, days, weeks, and years, and special seasons and feasts of the church. We learn examen, Ignatian prayer and praying the Psalms, practices of solitude and silence, fasting and feasting, and how to weave all of these into a rule of life. The author shares his own rule, one that struck me as marvelously do-able.

There are a number of books that have been written about our secular age. Likewise, a number have been written about spiritual practices. The particular gift of this book is the bringing of the two together, pointing to the importance of, and telos of these practices. Cosper helps us see that through them, we recover a sense of the greatness of God in the ordinary of our hours, days, weeks, and years–which make up a life. More than this, he captures something of the deep joy of secrecy, or a long leisurely feast with friends, or seeing an abstract Word come alive to us. One senses that you are walking alongside one who is recapturing the wonder of a transcendent God who is also immanent in our world–and that we may as well.