charity, self-esteem, and shared identity

Recently, I read Falling to Heaven by James L. Farrell. I've previously read Farrell's The Peacegiver and The Holy Secret. I'm always impressed by his insights into the gospel. Most of what he writes is so common sense and it's all scripturally based, but some of the insights still take me by surprise.

In the introduction (or is it the first chapter?) of Falling to Heaven, Farrell makes a point that has fundamentally changed the way I think about charity. He shares an experience about sitting in a sacrament meeting talk one day where the speaker was emphasizing the importance of loving ourselves. He asked himself where in the scriptures we are encouraged to love ourselves. He also spent a lot of time post-hearing-this-talk looking for references in the scriptures to Christ's self-love.

He couldn't find any.

The only scripture he found that could be read as referring to self-love was the oft-repeated commandment to love others as we love ourselves (the implication being that we must love ourselves if we're going to love others). Farrell suggests that Christ wasn't at all concerned with loving himself, but only with loving His Father and with loving us. When the scriptures talk about loving others as we love ourselves, it's referring to the fact that we must see others' pain as our own and celebrate others' accomplishments as our own--not that we need to focus on self-love. In other words, we need to seek to be so unified with the people around us--have our hearts knit together so closely with theirs--that there isn't a difference between what happens to them and what happens to us. This is what God's love for us is about: He fully experiences our pain as His own pain. His sense of self is broad enough to include all others--it looks outward, not inward.

Now, being the rhetoric nerd that I am, this concept immediately brought to mind Kenneth Burke's concept of identification. Burke writes that identification is about seeing what is alike between yourself and another person or an entire group of people. There is one major obstacle to identification, however, according to Burke: “[A]lthough I as a person may sympathetically identify myself with other people’s pleasures and pains, in my nature as a sheer body the pleasures of my food and the pains of my toothache are experienced by me alone” ("The Rhetorical Situation," Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues, 265-66). Because we inhabit separate bodies, we can't fully identify with one another. This is one of challenges of living in mortality in a physical body.

But the miracle of the Atonement is that one separate, individual body (the body of Christ) was able to fully inhabit and experience the separate, individual pains of billions of people. Christ bridged the gap of the inability of one body to connect with another body. He is one with the Father and Holy Ghost, and He can be one with us, as he prayed for in his intercessory prayer, if we will follow His example and receive His love.

How do we receive? I think we have to be willing to love as He did. We have to live the two great commandments. We have to lose ourselves in loving and serving God and others in order to find ourselves. This is why Moroni writes so urgently that we need to pray with all energy of heart for the love of Christ. Charity helps us to find better versions of ourselves. In loving others and following Christ, we become the children of Christ--part of his family. We take upon ourselves His identity--quite literally: we take upon ourselves His name--and in so doing we become one with Him and the Father. It's this perfect and complete connection with God and those around us that constitutes true charity. It's also what I believe heaven will be all about.

favorite books

Probably because I am (was?) an English major, people often ask me about my favorite books--a question I don't find it easy to answer.

Wayne Booth says that books are like friends: each one offers a different experience. When you sit down with a book, you sit down with a particular type of experience. Rather than having favorite books, then, I have books that I return to again and again for particular types of experience. I have books for comfort (Little Women or An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott), books for nostalgia (Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery), books for hard thinking (anything by Kenneth Burke), books for not thinking (Ella Enchanted), books for fun (Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling), books for inspiration (Gifts from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindburgh or A Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L'Engle), and books for pure, unadulterated pleasure (Emma or Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen). All of these books provide me with the particular experience I need when I need it--they're all favorites in that sense, but I can't really call any of them my favorite book.

There are a few books, however, that I do at various times apply the title of favorite to when I have to answer the question. And they are these:

And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

I love these books. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is about these books that puts them on the top of my favorites list. I realize that the experience offered by each of these books, although different, somehow link together for me. All of them provide me with a spiritual reading experience--an experience I'm not sure how to describe. Romans 8:16 talks about how the Spirit beareth witness with our spirits, telling us things about ourselves in a way that transcends verbal communication. These books speak to my spirit, which is why I call my experience with them spiritual. All of them have played an essential role in shaping the way I think about and interact with the world around me. I remember distinctly my first experience reading each of them.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia first when I was eleven. I cried when Aslan sacrificed himself in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I recognized the clear parallel with Christian theology, and wondered if it was sacrilegious that I was crying for the lion. That moment marked the beginning of my understanding of the Atonement of Christ. When I read about Shasta's long walk with the Lion and the stripes on Aravis' back in The Horse and His Boy (my favorite of all the Chronicles), I imagined my own walk with God and what He might tell me about my journey. Aslan represented to me a very personal, very loving, very tangible view of God. I love these books for teaching me that God has a personality.

I read Les Miserables (complete and unabridged) for the first time when I was fourteen. I remember staying up until 4am one night to finish it and bawling through Jean Valjean's death. I had a headache all the next day because of too little sleep and too much crying. It was the book that really made me fall in love with reading--with the experience of losing myself in another's persons words, words that became mine too as I read them. I decided to major in English after reading Les Miserables.

As for And There Was Light, this book impacted me perhaps the most of all. It's the autobiography of a boy who was blinded at the age of seven and went on to lead a major resistance against Hitler during the German occupation of France. I read it when I was sixteen.

How can you resist a book that contains these opening lines?:

As I remember it, my story always starts out like a fairy tale, not an unusual one, but still a fairy tale. Once upon a time in Paris, between two world wars, there lived a happy little boy.

I think it was in August 2001 that I read And There Was Light. In September 2001, the words of Jacques Lusseyran would play through my head as I tried to process the tragedy of 9/11. Here he is describing how he mentally survived his interrogation from the SS:

One small piece of advice. In a spot like this don't go too far afield for help. Either it is right near you, in your heart, or it is nowhere. It is not a question of character, it is a question of reality. If you try to be strong, you will be weak. If you try to understand, you will go crazy. 

No, reality is not your character which, for its part, is only a by-product--I can't define it, a collection of elements. Reality is Here and Now. It is the life you are living in the moment. Don't be afraid to lose your soul there, for God is in it. 

Make all the gestures you like. Wash your hands if there is a place to wash them, stretch out on the ground, jump up and down, make a face, even shed tears if they help, or laugh, sing, curse. If you are a scholar--there is a gimmick for every category--do what I did that night. Reconstruct, out loud, Kant's arguments in the first chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason. It is hard work and absorbing. But don't believe any of it. Don't even believe in yourself. Only God exists. (245)

This book came to me during perhaps the most difficult year of my life and it taught me that it's important not just to cope with adversity. We must learn to thrive in spite of it and see the beauty available even in ugly times.

The fact that I read all of these "favorite" books at very formative ages says something about why the experience of reading them is still so special to me when I go back to them years later. Sometimes, as a jaded MA, schooled in the ability to maintain critical distance, I miss the magic (and, yes, I mean magic) of handing myself over to a book--of making myself vulnerable to all the emotions it asks me to feel and losing myself in believing it--in its honest expression of the thoughts and feelings of another human being and in the honesty and literalness of my own reading of it. I hadn't learned to really question books when I was teenager, so I simply experienced them. Sometimes experiencing them meant making them over in my own image and reading my own experiences and feelings into them perhaps too much, but isn't that the magic of reading? That uncritical process of connecting my spirit with the undefinable spirit of the book is what made reading so personal and so valuable. That was how I read when I was eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. And when I revisit these books, I can read like that again. I go back to them for that experience--the spiritual experience of reading.

What are your favorite books? And what experiences have they offered you?

the home-maker

Earlier this summer, I read Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Home-Maker, originally published in 1924. Despite its title and publication date, it's quite a forward-thinking novel (not that that stopped me from feeling embarrassed when people saw me reading a book that was ostensibly about home-making).

The Home-Maker is the story of an efficient, energetic housewife, Eva, who is utterly depressed with her life and utterly unfit for motherhood. Despite this, she devotes herself to her housekeeping and family life in order to fulfill traditional societal expectations for her. Although Eva is viewed by her neighbors throughout the novel as an unimpeachable and perfect mother, her children are completely stifled, stressed, and anxious around her, to the point that they literally become sick. Her husband, Lester, is also unhappy. He is a very insufficient breadwinner who cannot seem to make his way in the career world.

One day, Lester is fired from his job. Feeling he has failed his family in every possible way and that the most he can now do for them is die and let them collect life insurance money, Lester decides to commit suicide and make it look like an accident. But, the perpetually unsuccessful Lester is not successful at suicide either. Instead of dying, he becomes paralyzed and can no longer work.

Eva, always the perfect wife and mother, makes the sacrifice of entering the workforce to support her paralytic husband and her three children. As expected, she finds she's very good in the workplace and her husband in turn finds he's very good at home with the children. After working for a little while, Eva's personality changes. She becomes more relaxed, her relationships with her husband and children improve, and the family begins to genuinely enjoy their time together. Conversely, Lester benefits from being home and from watching his children grow and develop. He becomes a more attentive father and contributes to the family in ways he couldn't before.

Although the book is occasionally didactic and somewhat predictable (there is, however, a bit of surprise toward the end), I thought Fisher still managed to create a fairly compelling novel that is well worth a read.

In particular, I enjoyed how Fisher examines what it means to be a parent. This book is not really about liberation for women, although that's a theme. Really, it's more a book about liberation for families and individuals. Fisher argues that each member of a family inherently has specific talents and abilities, and that a person's role within the family should be dictated by what they have to give, rather than by what they are traditionally expected to do. Fisher makes it clear that she feels good parenting is a difficult and complicated process that requires respecting children as individuals with wills and personalities of their own, and not seeing them as creatures to be "managed." She recognizes the skill and intelligence it takes to parent well and to truly make a home, and is therefore just as passionate about celebrating the role of home-maker as she is about pushing for tolerance for working mothers. I find it interesting that Fisher seems against the idea of passing the parental role on to someone outside of the family circle. For Fisher, each family needs to figure out for themselves a lifestyle that respects and nourishes each member of that family, including the children.

P. S. Although The Home-Maker is, I think, still under copyright, you can access Fisher's Understood Betsy at Project Gutenberg. I actually read this book first, and stumbled onto The Home-Maker in an attempt to read more of this overlooked author. Understood Betsy is a children's novel about an overly-coddled little girl who learns how to take care of herself and develops some self-esteem. It's even more didactic than The Home-maker, but worth a read for the hilarious opening chapter alone.

Winnie-the-Pooh

Recently, I re-read Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne. Although I first read these books as a teenager, not as a child, I was well-prepared to love them thanks to Disney and some shortened storybooks about Pooh that I was very attached to as a child. (I may have watched Disney's cartoon about Pooh being stuck in Rabbit's hole about a million times as a child.) When I finally discovered the books themselves, I was delighted not just to find my favorite stories, but to see that A. A. Milne was a wise, witty, ironic author. It is clear that he loved telling and writing these stories as much as his son must have loved hearing them. I liked the way he included his conversations with his son in the book. You feel like you're listening in on their bedtime ritual. I'd love to read these books out loud to a child.

Obviously, one of the best things about these books are the characters. Although the Bear of Little Brain himself is always endearing, you really can't top Eeyore in my book. How can it get better than a gloomy, bitter, attention-starved stuffed donkey? It doesn't hurt that he also gets most of the best lines. One of my favorite Eeyore moments occurs when Eeyore suddenly realizes in the middle of his thank-you speech that a party he thought was for himself is actually for Pooh bear:

"I might have known," said Eeyore, "After all, one can't complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said 'Bother!' The Social Round. Always something going on."

I love it. Poor old Eeyore.

I also love this:

Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent."When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?" "What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?" "I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.

A 122-years-overdue library book

was finally returned this month.

It's really too bad that the library isn't planning to collect the $37,000 fine. That kind of money could keep them going for a while after the end of libraries.

Leaving the jungle

Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside him, as he had never been hurt in his life before, and he caught his breath and sobbed, and the tears ran down his face.

"What is it? What is it?" he said. "I do not wish to leave the jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?"

"No, Little Brother. That is only tears such as men use," said Bagheera. "Now I know thou art a man, and a man's cub no longer. The jungle is shut indeed to thee henceforward. Let them fall, Mowgli. They are only tears." So Mowgli sat and cried as though his heart would break; and he had never cried in all his life before.

From The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

Dear Enemy

Have any of you ever read a little book called Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster, grand-niece of Mark Twain? Or, perhaps more likely, have you seen the movie starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron?

No, you say?

Yeah, me neither.

But, the other day, I did happen to read the sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs, a lovely little epistolatory novel called Dear Enemy. Although the novel is somewhat blighted by a heavy focus on eugenics, I actually quite enjoyed Webster's style and her main character.

Dear Enemy is the story of a young woman named Sallie McBride who, as a new college graduate (yay women's movement--this novel was published in 1915), agrees to manage an asylum that is refuge to 113 orphans. The novel is a collection of her letters, mostly to her friend Judy (who is apparently the star of Daddy-Long-Legs), recounting her adventures in superintending the orphanage. In the course of a year of living and working at this orphanage, Sallie grows out of her frivolous society ways, drops her politician boyfriend, and becomes an independent New Woman.

All in all, I recommend it. It's fairly humorous and unsentimental for a story about orphans that contains frequent discussions of alcoholism and insanity and includes a scene with a baby in a burning building.

Really, it is.

Enjoy.