A minor

Today's Epistle reading mentions covetousness, and I was reminded of this quote from Gilead which made me look at covetousness from a different angle:

I don't know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.
That's interesting. There is certainly a sermon there. "Blessed is he who takes no offense at me." That would be the primary text. I hope I have time to think it through. (188)

(Matthew 11.4-6: "Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.")

Home Passage on Prayer

"She was less inclined to pray that she had been once. In her childhood, when her father, a tall man then and graceful, had stepped into the pulpit and bowed his head, silence came over the people. He prayed before the commencement of prayer. May the meditations of our hearts be acceptable. It seemed to her that her own prayers never attained to that level of seriousness. They had been desperate from time to time, which was a different thing altogether. Her father told his children to pray for patience, for courage, for kindness, for clarity, for trust, for gratitude. Those prayers will be answered, he said. Others may not be. The Lord knows your needs. So she prayed, Lord, give me patience. She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord, my brother treats me like a hostile stranger, my father seems to have put me aside, I feel I have no place here in what I thought would be my refuge, I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse. But it cost her tears to think her situation might be that desolate, so she prayed again for patience, for tact, for understanding―for every virtue that might keep her safe from conflicts that would be sure to leave her wounded, every virtue that might at least help her preserve an appearance of dignity, for heaven's sake."

―Marilynne Robinson, Home (2008), pages 68-69

Gilead Walking Vigil Quote

"People are always up in the night, with their colicky babies and their sick children, or fighting or worrying or full of guilt. And, of course, the milkmen and all the people on early shifts and late shifts. Sometimes when I walked past the house of one of my own families and saw lights on, I'd think maybe I should stop and see if there was a problem I could help with, but then I'd decide it might be an intrusion and I'd go on. [...] It was on the nights I didn't sleep at all and I didn't feel like reading that I'd walk through town at one or two o'clock. In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren't mine were Boughton's. And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I'd go into the church and pray some more and wait for daylight. I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."

―Reverend John Ames, in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p. 71

In the previous post, I mentioned Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Here are some friends on it:

Jeff Meyers: one, two, three
Josh Anderson
John Barach, who links to this Books & Culture review
Peter Leithart; see also this post of his
Wayne Larson
Jamison Galt
Joel Garver

Obviously now I have to give it another try.

Marilynne Robinson, Home

I haven't read much Trollope. I borrowed The Warden twice from the library and honestly can't remember if I finished it. (I tend to think not, but maybe so. Guess I need to check it out a third time in either case...)

Anyway, I haven't read much Trollope, and I've read even less Marilynne Robinson, but I'm interested in her new book, Home. Something makes me think she's continuing the tradition of Trollope and, more recently and perhaps more pulpishly, of Susan Howatch in writing clergy and "family saga-type novels which describe the lives of related characters for long periods of time fiction."

I read and enjoyed all of Howatch's church novels (the Starbridge series and St Benet's trilogy). A while back, I listened to the first few chapters of Robinson's Gilead on tape and just couldn't get into it at the time. I'll eventually give it another try. But I'm thinking of trying Home first.

Here are two articles that have whetted my appetite (thanks to Pastor Tom Clark of Tri-City Church & Academy in Somersworth, NH):

"Return of the Prodigal Son" by A. O. Scott in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 19, 2008
"At 'Home' With the Past: In Life and In Her Novels, Marilynne Robinson Looks Back to Find Meaning" by Bob Thompson in The Washington Post, Monday, October 20, 2008, Page C01

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Related post: "Clerical Fiction," which links to John Barach's post of the same title, which links to Lauren Winner's article, "Mitford Rules: Jan Karon and the clerical novel" (Books & Culture, Nov/Dec 2005, Volume 11, Issue 6), which mentions Trollope, Howatch, and Robinson all in the same sentence.

Koontz on Faith & Writing Odd

From "Chatting With Koontz About Faith" (Tim Drake, National Catholic Register, March 11-17, 2007):

Spirituality has always been an element of my books. People who see it as a sudden development were just not perceiving it previously, when it was less central to the story. I write about our struggle as fallen souls, about the grace of God, but I never get on a soapbox about it. I'm first and foremost an entertainer.

...and...

While I was working on The Face, a line came into my head … "My name is Odd Thomas. I lead an unusual life." It had nothing to do with The Face, but suddenly I began writing longhand — which I never do — and finished a first chapter of Odd Thomas. That book, from beginning to end, was a flow-state experience of great joy.

In the Odd Thomas series, the overriding theme is the beauty and power of humility. The first three Odd books were gifts to me, and I can't wait to write the fourth. Alone at the keyboard, you find that writing is meditation, sometimes even prayer.

Read it all.

Odd Relationship Quote

     "In spite of all that we had been to each other and all that we hoped to achieve together in the years to come, I had been able to hurt her―Why're you afraid of sex?―when she pushed me too hard about my fear of guns.
     "A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability of be inhumane to one another.
     "I am an optimist about our species. I assume God is, too, for otherwise He would have scrubbed us off the planet a long time ago and would have started over.
     "Yet I can't entirely dismiss that cynic's sour assessment. I harbor a capacity for inhumanity, glimpsed in my cruel retort to the person I love most in all the world."

―Odd, in Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas, ch. 21

"Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard's thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread."

―Odd, in Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas, ch. 19

"Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain."

―P. Oswald Boone, a.k.a. Little Ozzie, in Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas, ch. 16

Ritual & Communion

This post is a stroll through the links with little commentary. This week I've run across a few good discussions (or at least mentions) of the manner of celebrating the Lord's Supper:

Alan Knox writes about the "Lord's Supper as a meal in practice."
An article on the Visitor's Café at New St Peter's Church in Dallas mentions a list of common visitors' questions, including one that really intrigued me: "Why do you come to tables for the Lord's Supper?" (For what it's worth, I found this indirectly through my old friend Howard Davis, who became a fan of Elliott Greene on Facebook, which led me to Tyrannus Hall and New St Peter's.)
Jim Jordan writes about "Ritual Versus Christianity" on the BH blog.
Remy Wilkins builds on Jim's post, specifically on "The Order of the Eucharist."

Enjoy.