Category Archives: Nonfiction

A Wing in the Door

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A Wing in the Door by Peri Phillips McQuay is by turns a beautiful and a frustrating book. It narrates the fate of a female red-tailed hawk taken illegally by a would-be falconer from her nest when only a month old. The hawk — named Merak — is confiscated by Canadian authorities and kept at a rehab for awhile to be “untamed,” then released at a conservation center. McQuay and her husband, a naturalist at the center, live on site and observe the bird over the next several years.

At first there is some question whether Merak has been humanly imprinted, but it doesn’t take long to see that she has been. Her antics are both heart-breaking and humorous: building a nest on the front porch to lay her yearly eggs (always infertile, because she never mates); sparring with cats and dogs; finding various ways to communicate her moods to her human caretakers. For that is what the McQuays become, even though the original intent was to usher the hawk back into wild living. She proves permanently damaged — McQuay often uses phrases like “essentially infantile” — by her early contact with humans.

McQuay’s writing is beautiful. Her response to nature is poetic, and she finds many ways to infuse the narrative with interesting information about red-tails from her ongoing research. I found much of the material fascinating and could relate to many of McQuay’s perspectives on nature.

What was frustrating, though, was the co-dependent relationship the McQuays seem intentionally to preserve with Merak. It is clear early on that the hawk can hunt for herself. I couldn’t understand why they kept providing her with mice and (in winter, when she refused to migrate) muskrats from local trappers. It would have been more responsible to leave Merak completely on her own for a time to establish whether she could provide for herself, and, if she couldn’t, then keep her captive for use in the center’s educational programs. Our local nature center has several hawks that are not able to live in the wild, and they are licensed to keep them and provide for them, offering them some quality of life as well as protection.

Instead, the McQuays persist in providing food for the hawk as well as interposing themselves in other ways. Parents who never let their growing children make any decisions or experience any consequences on their own will be left with an unhappy, demanding human ill-equipped for life. In the same way, the McQuays end up with a moody hawk who looks upon them as her tribe, responsible for providing for her needs, and sharing her territory. By the end of the story they at last begin withholding food, and the hawk becomes more independent. (Even after Merak learns to supply her own food, McQuay’s husband interferes on one occasion by knocking a wild rat snake out of the hawk’s talons. ???) But she will never be wild, and she never learns how to relate to other hawks. It was hard not to feel that the McQuays were complicit in the unfortunate long-term results of the original crime against Merak.

The Messiah

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Last year, I wrote a post about the reasons I love Handel’s Messiah. It’s one of the posts that was lost when I switched hosts. But again I’m thinking of this sublime weaving of art and truth, delighting in it in my kitchen, in my car, and with my children.

On Sunday, my husband was called into work before church and was there all day. He called and invited us to meet him for supper at Friendly’s, and on the way I popped The Messiah in. Just as we pulled into the parking lot, we heard, “And His name shall be called, Wonderful! Counselor! The Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace! The Everlasting Father — the Prince! of Peace!” I was compelled to stop so I could throw out my conducting arm on “Wonderful!” (Fortunately, there was no one behind me.)

This was a repetition of an incident earlier in the week, when my husband was getting ready for work, and I was blasting the Hallelujah chorus in the kitchen. I was conducting with a spatula, caught in the midst of unloading the dishwasher. He burst forth in a falsetto “Haaaaaaa-lle-LU-jah!” sending the girls into gales of giggles.

It’s interesting to me that although this music is more highbrow than our usual fare, they always respond to it. That morning, my youngest twirled around the kitchen, arms spread. Sunday, on the way home from Friendly’s, my older daughter said, “We need to put this cd in and all be in the kitchen for awhile, listening.” There were questions (“Did she sing, “He shall speak peace to the heathen? Who are the heathen?”) There were aesthetic observations (on “Rejoice Greatly,” my oldest commented that it sounds like laughter — something I confess I never thought of myself. How could I have missed it? That soloist sounds like she’s laughing her head off.) There were more twirling and conducting, more failed attempts to sing along with our hopelessly couch-potato voices. I told them that traditionally, people stand for the Hallelujahs, and so there was some standing on chairs. We also reviewed the “Hallelujah” flashmob on YouTube.

It’s such deep, moving truth, set to music! Our methods of celebrating may be a little unorthodox and loose. They’re undisputably geeky as well. (I’m comfortable with my geekdom. The world needs geeks.) But The Messiah is one of the real delights of this season for me. I love the way it’s all Scripture, and the way that the repetition creates a model of meditation: a phrase or verse is sung over and over, building, as it gradually sinks in. Much of it is from Bible passages I might find inaccessible, or might read right over, if I were reading it by myself. But hearing it sung and accompanied with all the synergy of instruments and voices brings it into a whole new life.

It’s said that when someone congratulated Handel on the effect a performance of The Messiah had on its audience, he replied, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them — I wish to make them better.” I’m not sure what he would think of our antics. I’m not sure what he’d think of the sounds I heard as the girls were getting ready for bed on Sunday night — snatches of operatic trills and mundane statements delivered in the style of Handelesque recitative (“It’s time, it’s time, it’s time to brush my tee-eeth!”). But maybe The Messiah was making us better — more joyful, more animated by God’s Word, more mindful of the wonder of the Incarnation, from Bethlehem 2000 years ago all the way into our kitchen. And for that, I rejoice greatly.

Merry Christmas!

Outliers

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My pastor mentioned Outliers in a Sunday school class. He’d read part of it, and it sounded interesting. I picked up a copy at the library to read, but I wasn’t expecting it to provoke so much thought or to have such an impact. It’s really given me a lot to think about.

“Outliers” are exceptional people — people who excel far beyond the norm in some way. Malcolm Gladwell takes a number of such figures — software gurus, pilots, hockey players, lawyers, geniuses — and examines their stories. He ends up showing that all of these people emerge from social, economic, cultural, geographic, historical contexts, rather than being “self-made.” “It is not the brightest who succeed,” he concludes, “…Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

He puts it pretty strongly there. I don’t agree with quite such a strong emphasis on outside factors; the giftedness of these individuals is crucial to their success, too. But looking at the Bible, I see that context matters. Look at Joseph, who was prepared for his position of power in Egyptian government through the seeming tragedy of his betrayal and enslavement. Or look at Moses, prepared for leadership in Pharoah’s household. Look, even, at Jacob, a weasel, but one who was loved and promoted by his mother, and so he rose above his brother in the long run. It all seems to reinforce what Gladwell refers to as “the Matthew effect,” based on Matthew 25:29.

The book is interestingly written and researched, and it made me think deeply about a number of things — only a few of which I’ll mention here, in order of ascending importance.

First, parenting. There is a difference, Gladwell explains, between the way different classes parent. Lower class, poorer parents tend to care for their kids, but let them develop on their own. Upper and middle class parents are much more involved, teaching their children how to assert themselves, and how to live comfortably in the world of people. Part of the way they do this is through conscious instruction in how to communicate and carry themselves, and part of it is through scheduling their children’s time and exposing them to lots of different experiences and activities.

I find that I’m a blend of these approaches. I think free time is important, especially for younger children. But I also see the value of giving them varied experiences in varied social contexts. I’m not sure what exactly this means for us, but I felt this book affirmed the direction my thoughts are already going on that score. I have no desire to overschedule my kids’ time, but I think it’s time to be more proactive about getting them involved in more activities.

Gladwell describes the best parents as actively looking for their children’s gifts and interests, and seeking out ways to cultivate them. I’m pretty good on the first half of the sentence but tend to flounder on the last half. I mean, I find play options for them to do the things they want to do; I have one daughter who wants to be a museum exhibit designer, and I get her dioramas to build, clay and legos to create with, drawing supplies, miniatures. But what can we do outside our four walls to cultivate this design interest? How can we bring it outward into more cooperative endeavors with others? (My other daughter is a little less focused. She wants to be either a pet store owner, a horse trainer, or an artist. I feel a little less pressure there…)

Another thing the book gave me lots of food for thought on was education. I think any home educator would find this book stimulating, not necessarily because we’ll agree with all of Gladwell’s conclusions (I certainly didn’t), but because there is so much interesting material about the learning process, and the values common to excellent students. As a teaser, I’ll mention rice paddies, taking 22 minutes to solve a math problem, and how Asian cultures count as factors Gladwell mentions. If you want to see how on earth they fit together, you’ll enjoy reading this.

Ultimately, of course, the book makes me think about what constitutes “success.” The operative definition for Gladwell seems to include wealth, recognition, and full realization of potential. He argues for a culture in which more people can succeed in these terms, one that could be brought about if we made a few key changes in our thinking. As a Christian, I find myself thinking about how I would define success differently. I believe there is a loving Creator who has a purpose for me. Wealth and recognition may or may not be a part of that. True success would mean transformation of the thoughts and intents of my heart toward Christlikeness, toward love for others.

But I think it also involves full realization of potential, as in the outliers Gladwell discusses. How do I parent in such a way as to help my children “succeed” as followers of God? How can I use the knowledge in this book to help my children become the people God made them to be, with the influence he intends for them to have? How can I help them to reach beyond the limits I feel myself? They have gifts and talents and aspirations meant to be realized, meant to be shared with the world. We all do.

One of the most interesting things Gladwell points out is that outliers all seem to follow the 10,000 hour rule. The Beatles, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Jewish lawyers who specialized in corporate takeovers — all of them had already put in 10,000 hours practicing in their field of expertise so that when their moment of opportunity came, they were prepared for it. It takes 10,000 hours, one neurologist explains, for the brain to assimilate all it needs to know to achieve true mastery of something. Gladwell points out that it’s next to impossible for anyone to log 10,000 hours at something by the time they’re a young adult — unless they have parents who support and encourage them. This book has been a wake-up call to be more intentional about some things with my children, and I believe that in the big picture I’m going to be very glad I read it.

The Lost Art of Reading

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David Ulin’s Lost Art of Reading has been a thought-provoking little book. Described as a “ruminative essay,” this compact reflection on the distinctiveness of reading, and its role in an increasingly networked information age, doesn’t really make an argument against technology or predict the death of reading. But it does acknowledge some ways books and reading are being changed by technology, and makes a case for being proactive about finding ways to preserve the immersion act of deep reading.

This author has very different tastes in books than I do, and when he talks of his own literary autobiography — his experiences with various books that have shaped him in the course of his life — I’m rarely familiar with the authors and don’t relate very well. But we all have our own stories of books that have been important to us, and experiences of reading that we treasure.

Ulin makes reference to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (as well as other sources), a book I read and liked very much last year. But where Carr makes a thorough examination of the effects of the Internet on our brain “circuitry,” Ulin’s focus seems more personal. How should we respond to the distractibility we develop when we spend time online? Ultimately his conclusion is not all that remarkable: “I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It’s harder than it used to be, but still, I read.” There is a pleasure in the journey, though, as Ulin’s observations about why reading matters, and what we come up against as we seek to get lost in a book, strike many familiar chords. I really liked his analysis of reading on the Kindle, something he has mixed feelings about (as do I). It was an affirming read in this sense.

As I neared the end, I found myself paying closer attention to my own online habits, and it’s not pretty. The main thing I notice is how many times I feel the urge to go to the computer for something, and then I tend to drift out into Internet-land for much longer than I intended. So I started to challenge that urge by setting a time for computer work, closing the laptop, and keeping a notebook and pen close by to write down anything that occurred to me to do online: check the weather; check email; see if Jessie Wise has a 5th grade grammar book coming out; track the packages that should be arriving this week; check on some blogs; visit the IEW website to see if my feelings have changed about that writing program’s approach; blog post ideas; et cetera...

I saved these tasks till the designated time, then sat down with my list. It felt good, and it worked pretty well; I closed the laptop again when I was done. I’m going to keep doing it. (Not even New Year’s yet, and this sounds like a resolution.) It was a small thing, a small boundary, but it helped to keep me more fully available to my offline life, which includes important (loved) people and things to do, along with some drudgery — and some reading time. I used it to finish up this book. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read The Shallows. Otherwise, start with that one. Like this one, it’s not a polemic, but it does establish a foundation that makes a more narrowly focused book like this one more meaningful.

Bursting with God-news

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The Annunciation by Jack Mattingly

Upon entering, Gabriel greeted her:

“Good morning!
You’re beautiful with God’s beauty,
Beautiful inside and out!
God be with you.” (Luke 1:28, The Message)

This afternoon I heard the song “Breath of Heaven” on the way home from the grocery store. It’s a song I’ve always assumed I liked, but today I realized: I don’t, particularly. It’s not really in keeping with the Scriptural account of Mary’s character in Luke 1. (I’m speaking from a Protestant point of view, by the way.)

In “Breath of Heaven,” Mary talks about “a world as cold as stone.” But in Luke 1, she speaks of God’s presence in the world — of his “mercy upon generation after generation of those who fear him,” and of how he “fills the hungry with good things.”

In the song, Mary says, “Must I walk this path alone?” She imagines God is having second thoughts about choosing her: “Do you wonder as you watch my face if a wiser one should have had my place?” But in Luke 1, she’s not alone. She and Elizabeth have the great gift of companionship in their high calling. And her sense of who God is is anything but distant and aloof: “My soul exalts the Lord, And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. For He has had regard for the humble state of His bondslave…”

In the song, Mary says, “Hold me together.” In Luke 1, she says, “The Mighty One has done great things for me; and holy is His name.” (And later, when Jesus goes to the cross, Mary is one of the few who has the fortitude to stand near him.)

It’s an idea we try over and over: projecting ourselves imaginatively into the Christmas story. Sometimes it enriches our faith and our depth of understanding. But in this case I think it alters the story, shrinking it down into a rather desolate, impoverished mindset.

Though sometimes (for me) The Message can have a similar effect of reducing Scripture to language that’s almost too pedestrian, I think in the case of Luke 1 it captures perfectly Mary’s spiritual exuberance and moral stamina:

And Mary said,

I’m bursting with God-news;
I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
His mercy flows in wave after wave
on those who are in awe before him.
He bared his arm and showed his strength,
scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
the callous rich were left out in the cold.
He embraced his chosen child, Israel;
he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high.
It’s exactly what he promised,
beginning with Abraham and right up to now.

Becoming Native to This Place

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I was introduced to Wes Jackson’s work through reading Wendell Berry. The two men have a longstanding friendship and have similar views of what Berry has called “culture and agriculture.” In Becoming Native to This Place, Jackson explores the ways our assumptions about the earth as an inert repository of resources for us to extract and manage developed, how they are destructive to community, and how they might be changed to develop new paradigms in our relationship to nature.

Like Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson sees agriculture as the heart of our relationship to the earth, a discipline that reveals our attitudes toward the world and each other. He operates The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, which has worked for several decades to “develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops.”

The book asks several important questions. Why does land cultivated by post-World War II methods produce less, and erode more, than it did before cultivation? Why does it support less life? How did the ideas underlying our system of food production, our use of land and animals, and our reliance on nonrenewable energy develop? Perhaps most basically, what if the settlers of this country had approached their lives asking a different question: “How do we become native to this place?”

I read this years ago, but since then I’ve had children and experienced the Little House books. I couldn’t help but think of the Ingalls and Wilder families’ resounding failure at agriculture as they pushed westward. Kind of like the preacher in Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, they brought the assumptions and methods and crops from their places of origin, and it just didn’t take on the prairie. Yet they saw it as a very promising place, and they were right; it was a very fertile landscape. But it had its own ecology, which was foreign to them, and which for whatever reason they never really figured out. Their style of farming was to impose themselves on the land rather than to figure out where they were and how to live there.

That, I think Wes Jackson would say, is pretty much the story of America — or of what Wendell Berry has called The Unsettling of America. There are aspects of this book that I don’t have a good enough backing in science to really know what to do with; Jackson has a B.A. in biology, an M.A. in botany, and a Ph.D. in genetics, and though he writes accessibly enough that I could usually understand, I don’t have the context to evaluate it. I didn’t have a clear sense of the underlying moral or spiritual framework Jackson advocates either, though he sees our various compartmentalizations — of church and state, of science and philosophy, of empirical knowledge and moral knowledge — as negative.

However, when he writes about how different localities have different ecosystems and therefore don’t lend themselves to industrialized agriculture that crams all places into the same mold, it simply makes sense. When he writes about human arrogance in acting confidently before we know all that we think we know, and then having a big mess on our hands afterward, it simply makes sense. It’s easy to feel helpless, but we can at least start where we are, and begin to get to know our own place. I felt glad about the nature study our family has embarked on this year, because learning to love one place is the beginning of an ecological ethic. If we love our place, and learn the names of the native living things that constitute our community, and tune in to the stories going on all around us, we can begin to live with more awareness — and perhaps eventually with more wisdom.

Seed speculations

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It seems like an odd time of year to be thinking about seeds.

It began over the weekend, when my husband got to thinking about God’s provision of seed-bearing plants very early in the creation story. He’s been thinking about the investment of time and resources as seeds, a metaphor Jesus uses often in his parables.

Coincidentally, the seed preoccupation continued with my daughter’s birthday party, where we made two seed crafts.

The first is from an idea Alice posted on her blog.

That’s grass seed in there, along with a Christmas cactus cutting. “God sent new life into the world in Jesus,” I explained to the kids. “And when we invite him into our hearts, God plants new life in us, too.”

“I don’t think he grows like grass,” replied one little girl.

I refuse to be moved — I like my metaphor! These ornaments are a perfect object lesson — or at least, they will be if the seeds actually sprout (which they haven’t — yet).

To plant a seed and see it grow
Is something every child should do,

And when it blossoms, how it grew
Is something every child should know,

And when its seeds are ripe to sow,
A child may see the old made new.

To grow and gently grow and grow
Is something people should do too.

(Harry Behn, “Lesson)

The second craft was pine cone bird feeders.

Our family ended up with several, since both daughters made one, and I did too. We hung a few in the evergreen out back, and we’ve gotten lots of entertainment out of watching the squirrels.

These squirrels are planters themselves, burying their winter stores here, there and everywhere. I’m sure they’re largely responsible for the grove of walnut trees on our back bank.

Last but not least comes Anno’s Magic Seeds, a thoroughly wonderful picture book that explores the concept of multiplication. I bought it awhile ago at a book sale, wrapped it up to give to my daughter on her birthday, and forgot about it. So it was like getting a present myself this week, too. It’s a simple story about Jack, who gets some seeds from a wizard and learns how to provide for an ever-growing number of people, as well as how to save and plan so that even natural disaster doesn’t destroy him. The “magic” is really the everyday magic of seed-bearing plants, cultivated with common sense. There is something I really love about this book, and I recommend it highly.

It’s strange to me to see such a strong theme being worked out without any forethought, especially a theme that seems more suited to the spring.