Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout (Book Review by Bob Racine)



                                      Published 2006


Midlife crises have become a widespread subject for consideration.  In fact, I often get the impression that it is virtually an honor today for anyone older than fifty-five to be able to claim to have had one.  Having weathered a perfect storm by that time, especially one involving personal identity, gives you a little heft when you are in conversation with anybody about major life issues.  Some of us seem to enjoy showing off our battle scars and walking others whose confidence we share through the drama of our past-life moments of truth.  Autobiographies have been penned recounting enormous life-altering changes that have had to be made under the gun of traumatic circumstances, domestic upheavals, cultural shifts, or heightened self-awareness.  We have no trouble claiming to be veterans of private wars or even iconoclasts.  I sense that before my time people had these crises but kept them largely to themselves or called them by other names.  You stayed married to the same person, attached to the same job, or if something happened that made it impossible to do either, you absorbed the shock and justified outcomes as the mysterious will of God.  Self knowledge as a result was not always in great supply.     

No novel I have ever read has taken me more richly and radiantly into that world of yesterday than Elizabeth Strout’s “Abide with Me.”  The victim of forced change and crisis is a Congregationalist minister, Tyler Caskey, presiding over a small town church in the state of Maine in the 1950s.  He gets married in his twenties to a young woman barely out of her teens, who turns out to be an inappropriate choice for spouse in a remote parish.  Compounding the marital crisis that this engenders is her untimely death, which leaves him with the rearing of two preschool girls.  How does a trained clergyman, who must bear the burdens of others, manage to maintain his poise and personal symmetry in the aftermath of this loss? 

The fact is, this one does not.  He goes into a kind of denial, tries to step outside this sorrow and carry on his duties and functions, fixed upon the Biblical promise, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength…They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.”  He thinks he has a clear sightline on what as a widowed minister he should do.  “For the sake of God he would do his job.  (What else could he do?) . . .His job was to stand in church with his shoulders back and his chin up, and make his congregation understand that being a Christian was not a hobby. . .Being a Christian meant asking yourself every step of the way:  How can love best be served?  His job was to be their leader, their teacher, their example.  A small parish perhaps.  Not a small job.”  A great ideal this, but suppose those shoulders have been bent too far for the chin to be raised, with a secret sense of guilt contributing to that weight?  His life for a while becomes an exercise in unconsciousness and concealment – not from his congregation but from himself.  He preaches on Sundays, makes pastoral calls, meets with the elders of the congregation, listens to peoples’ private woes, and carries on an apparent friendship with neighbors and his community.  But slowly the telltale signs of impotence and disengagement from reality begin to be noticed by those he endeavors to serve. 

He is unaware of how neglectful of little but vital things he has become.  His home does not get the care it needs.  His sermons begin to lose their thrust and fire.  And worst of all he avoids confrontation with the stark needs and inner turmoil of his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, in Kindercare.  Summoned to her school, he subtly resists the admonitions of the faculty about her bizarre and disruptive classroom behavior since her mother’s death.  Tyler’s mother, who lives not too far away, has taken over the supervision and expected rearing of his two-year-old, Jeannie, and because of Jeannie’s absenteeism from her own home he is in danger of losing all rapport with her and doesn’t seem to be aware of it.  A woman who confides in him over an act of domestic abuse gets no help from him; he seems to forget she has told him.  Most enervating of all to the quality of his clerical leadership is the emanation of gossip about his allegedly inappropriate interactions with his housekeeper.  Though the rumors are totally unfounded, he seems unable to take any steps toward clearing them up.   Best to ignore!  Yeah, sure!

Tyler does not realize until very late that what he is undergoing is not just a crisis of circumstance but one of faith itself.  Today (I’m not sure about the 1950s) we call it “the dark night of the soul.”  He dwells on the words of his favorite hymn, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide . . .”  He tries to do devotional readings.  Bonhoeffer, Nouwen and Kierkegaard contribute extensively to his private ruminations.  One of Bonhoeffer’s last musings in a letter to his mother before his execution comes to have special appeal to Tyler:  “Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.”  There seems to be some figurative affiliation between these words and what he senses is a coming showdown with his people over his continuing suitability to shepherd them.  

It was unthinkable back then for ministers to succumb, even temporarily, to conspicuous human failing.  They were supposed to be reputable examples of self-control.  Whoever heard of an experienced, educated, fully trained, accomplished man of the cloth needing pastoral counseling or therapy?  Or, if he needs them, he should get them in private and not involve the congregation.  But this congregation is catalyzed by his personal crisis into some heightened self-knowledge of its own, despite itself.  And that is what makes the book such a total absorption for me.   A total absorption and a very powerful, rewarding journey of the heart, involving many parishioners who are at some measure of loss as to how to help this man whose well is running dry!

Strout, a Pulitzer Prize winner for another novel with a Maine setting, is so wonderfully gifted.  She has an amazing grasp of human nature.  Several characters and their crises of soul and conscience are also given inspection every bit as extensive and poignant as Tyler’s.  Any one of them alone would be a suitable subject for a novel.  She paints with a very narrow brush, making us see the physical environment, especially the New England winters, in all its somber and quiet magnificence.  Her prose is graceful and impeccable and her pacing is so perfect that it makes gorgeous music right on the printed page.  Though her writing style is lean, you get the feeling after you have read the entire book that she has left out nothing.  How all the material threads out is worth the reading.  I highly recommend it for all sensitive and mature adults, church-affiliated or not. 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Called Away at Morning (Idyll by Bob Racine)



The mist was heavy, as I walked through the meadow.  As on most mornings thereabout, I waited until the early light came burning through, turning the gray soup to gold, my castle unfurling its shadows across my sodden path.  The emerging sun was a luminous fire finally clearing the air of all haze.  At its behest I surveyed the distant mountains.  They were a study in grandeur – always new, always spectacular and strangely forbidding! 

Then I saw him – standing on the mountain.  I cannot say how.  Surely my mortal eyes could not have identified anything or anyone from that distance?  And yet I knew he was there, not perched upon some peak, but standing on the green and rocky slope.  It was when I heard his call that I was fully assured that this was no hallucination.  He was not shouting.  There was no bellow from a cave, no blast, no amplified voice.  He spoke softly, but I knew he was miles away, deep in the forestation.  And I somehow knew that he would wait for me, however long I took to come, however long my castle held me in thrall.

My memory of the next few hours is as misty now as was the air that morning when I awoke from sleep.  But I remember that I heard myself singing a new song, a song of blessedness and expectancy.  I was not a lone voice; I was part of a chorus.  The birds and all the four-legged animals joined in.  The lowing of the deer harmonized with it.  The brook babbled with me hinting of that mighty river somewhere in those mountains that I had heard of but never seen.  I walked; I did not run.  It was a moment of rapture, even though I was still on the ground deep in the dense growth.  Perhaps he would lead me to that river.

I expected to reach the foot of a slope, where the flat earth suddenly gave way to an incline, but soon I realized I was on the mountain already and it felt just like the valley, like any other turf.  I had no sense of elevation.  I could not tell where the level ground left off and the slope began.  He had moved up further, and I knew I would never come close enough to him for me to touch him or take his hand or cling to his long arms.  I could not see all of him, only his head above the foliage or his feet along the shaded path.  But I was close enough to see his hand waving me on. 

Surely I was going to be led to the top, to a new vantage point from which I could survey the ground I had spent my whole life covering!  I expected transcendence.  Why would he have brought me all that distance, if not to open a new door, a door to heaven itself maybe, or at least a foretaste of it.  Had I not felt that morning upon awakening, before going outside, that this was to be a new and special and supreme day for me?  Would he have called me out, if he had not deemed me ready for a place in the company of angels?  Or at the very least he would lead me to the bank of the mighty river. 

But I knew by and by that this was to be a different kind of pilgrimage.  He led me into a thicket so deep I could only see the trees – around, before, behind and above me, concealing the sky.  We walked into dark and shadowy paths, ones I could never have found the courage to follow by myself.  Without his figure before me, however distant, I would have stumbled, struck my legs on rocks.  The song my heart sang had drifted into a cautious minor key.  Doubts fluttered all around me, like worrisome fireflies.  The sun began to give way to the darkness of the night.  How could the whole day have passed so swiftly? 

I became frightened.  I was far away from the castle I had heretofore called home and knew not if I could find my way back to it.  I tried to call to him, but my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth and unspoken words stuck in my throat.  I was growing more fatigued by the minute.  Streaks of light from the setting sun, poking through the trees, played across my face, as if teasing me before they disappeared altogether.  Finally it was dark, pitch black dark.  I could not see my hand in front of my eyes. 

Terror shot through me like a volt of electric current, as I felt strange hands begin to touch me and stroke my face and rub my back.  Were they human hands?  At first I was not sure.  They were like no hands of a human I had ever encountered.  They were roughhewn, coarse, and clammy.  I recognized none of the words coming out of their concealed mouths, but I began to hear mutterings and cryptic conversations in broken syllables.  The vernacular began to swell, and within minutes they were a babbling chorus grinding and fuming in their ferment.  While the language was foreign, I knew it was one that no lower animal could utter.  And I sensed that whatever the drift of their dissonant dialogue, I was the subject of it.  They were in dispute about what to do with me, this stranger who had crashed their nocturnal scene.  Perhaps I was to be a human sacrifice.  Perhaps this was an inspection to see if I was prime, if my flesh and bones would satisfy their deity. 

The hands then took hold of my shoulders and arms and began leading me through the dark.  I was not a stranger to darkness.  I had known the darkness of night after a sun-drenched day, but this dark was far more frightful.  What would it hold?

Within minutes the blackness was pierced by a tiny orange point of light.  As we moved closer, it grew in size, until I distinguished the sight of a campfire.  The light and the heat it gave off I welcomed, but the sight of it 
was alarming at first.  Was this the sacrificial flame that would consume me?  Were these the flames of hell about to choke me?  Were these companions of mine devils or damned souls?  But then the hands released me.  Suddenly no one was touching me, and I knew much to my relief that I was not a prisoner.  I had entered a circle of humanity in which no credential was required of me, no oath, no initiation rite – a new kind of kinship.  And at once there was no hostility in the flare of the campfire.  No fire-breathing dragon was present.  The flames were strangely endearing.  I had been called to this place – this dark, remote, wilderness abode and I was not a lone pilgrim any longer.

I danced with joy in the bright glare.  The fire warmed my face.  The fear of the dark subsided.  Whatever secret this place kept I knew it would be a blessing to discover, if he ever gave me leave to discover it.  Round and round I went in my frenzy and frivolity.  Half of me felt like a pagan, a fire worshipper.  But the other half knew he was somewhere round about, and that he was the author of this new epiphany. 

I shouted with a new voice, my throat at last clear and resonant.  “Oh great One, sing to me, keep my soul safe until the daylight returns.”

I danced and danced and danced, as if there were no one else on earth but me, forgetting for the thrilling moment that I was not alone, that I was being watched, that in front of the fire I was the most visible of all, and perhaps the most vulnerable.  

But by and by I saw him standing at the edge of the crowd, and there was the river behind him. 

There was the river at last!!! 

I had thought it would be a surging river, but it was calm and gentle, and its very gentleness drew me to it.  And he, the one I had followed, seemed empowered by it to minister to the throngs.  He was placing his healing hands upon them, stilling their tempests, assuaging their pains, calming their fears.  I discovered I was in line, being pushed closer and closer to him.  I was prepared for a long wait, but before I knew it I was in his space, and I was distressed to find that I could not look him in the eye or even touch his arm.  But others behind were not so restrained.  A scurvy hand reached out and around me, apparently waiting for his healing touch.  But the One before whom I thought I stood did not respond to it.  The hand waited, shaking in mid air, feebly attempting to arouse the compassionate heart that we all heard beating.  How many anxious and daunting minutes did it take for me to discover that that heart was my own?  The malodorous hand wanted to touch and be touched by me, and at once many were clamoring – for me!  Me, their fellow dirty pilgrim!  Me, the one who had not known his way through the dark forest!  Me, the scion of privilege reduced to the child of fear!  Beseeched by the hungry and solicitous throng!

My reticence to touch the One in whose steps I had walked suddenly was gone, in the blink of an eye.  But when my hand darted out, I found that he was not there; I did not see him.  I had just been standing feet and inches away, but now even as I craned my head in all directions I could not find his form.  I still felt his presence – spirit but not substance.  At once I understood.  He had left them all in my care – the sick, the crippled, the battle scarred, the squatters in ragged clothes, giving off acrid smells, their faces ashen and streaked with old and familiar torments, even the deranged.  I was part of the ragged throng, though we seemed not to be of one tribe or one nationality. 

I fell to my knees, I cried.  Without speaking a mortal word I was emptied of all illusion, of all craving for my own private nirvana, for some scented path to the eternally ethereal.  I was shoulder to shoulder with the sufferers all around me.  There was no easy escape, nor did I wish for it.  All day I had thought my pathway was but the means to reach him, to embrace him, to wrap my arms around his shoulder or snuggle in his arms.  The journey I had supposed was only something to endure, the forest only something to surmount.  The means toward the glorious end!  But now, transformed by his evanescent spirit, I knew at last that the journey itself was his gift to me, the pilgrimage that would go on and on.  My castle no longer beckoned to me, and from the crest of the mountaintop I looked down and saw that it was not a castle at all.  Now everything in creation was inviting – the air, the soil, the transforming flame, the life-giving river.

Everywhere was now home. 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

The Company You Keep (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                             2hrs & 1 min, color, 2013

How many of you remember The Weathermen, more accurately known as The Weather Underground?  During the 1960s there was a movement called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), dedicated to the creation of a more just system of government and economics and opportunity for all classes of citizenry in these United States and the beleaguered nations of the known world.  As the title suggests, the movement started among U.S. college students, active not only in protest against the Vietnam War which was underway at the time but against all use of “imperialistic” measures on the part of our government.  And yet it was peaceful in its methodology and the pressures it tried to bring to bear upon those in power to effect needed change.  But by the end of the decade many in the movement had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the pace of change and out of this dissatisfaction grew a more radical, militant and subversive offshoot, who became convinced that only by armed warfare against the government could any national face change be brought about. 

They called themselves the Weather Underground , born on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor in 1969.  Violence for them replaced peaceful pressure and protest.  Several banks were robbed, government buildings were bombed (the Pentagon, the Capitol and the State Department), even a Brinks truck was attacked and a police officer killed during the melee.  Their activity continued far into the 1970s, though it began to peter out after the Peace Accord with Hanoi was signed in 1975, with only scattered pockets of incident between then and 1981.

Naturally you would expect any movie pertaining in any way to the Weathermen to contain at least some violence.  But “The Company You Keep,” smartly mounted by Producer/Director Robert Redford, written by Lem Dobbs and based upon a novel by Neil Gordon, is a completely non-violent narrative.  It has its setting in the recent past long after the movement’s activity has come to a halt and many of its former instigators scattered to the wind have been reduced to names on the FBI wanted list.  Those who abhor explicit violence can take comfort from the complete absence of gunplay or bloodletting.  No one even gets socked or punched or tackled.  Even the arrests that are dramatized are non-violent.  No car chases, not even any sex!  This is not, therefore, a thriller in the usual sense of the term.  But it is intelligently made, scripted, acted and emotionally involving.  Perhaps we could call it a thinking person’s thriller.  I as a thinking and somewhat caring person delighted in every minute of it, in spite of some drubbing by other critics.       

The screenplay centers upon a widowed lawyer (Redford) and his eleven-year-old daughter (Jackie Evancho – yes, the singer) living in Albany, New York, still grieving over the wife/mother’s recent accidental death.  The girl has been through a severe emotional time of it, but what she does not know is that her locally respected, professionally successful and loving father has another identity and her life on account of it is about to be shaken up once more.  He is a former member of the Weathermen who for thirty years has been eluding capture under an assumed name.  Dad is exposed thanks to the tireless and slogging work of a young newspaper reporter (Shia Labeouf) investigating the arrest of a woman (Susan Sarandon) also a longtime Weather Underground fugitive affiliated with Redford.  The connection is made in newsprint and the shadow game between the reporter, the FBI and the previously respectable lawyer begins.    

As it so happens Redford, wanted for the murder of a bank employee, was not in the bank, having already withdrawn from the robbery and the movement, but since his car was used to make the getaway he has been the target of the FBI for thirty years.  Only one person who knows that fact can clear him and that is an old lover (Julie Christie).  His hunt for her carries him and us across country through many twists and turns.  En route he gets to see how other former participants are presently living.  One in particular (Nick Nolte) is not sure he wishes to help his old friend and endanger his own livelihood from a lumber business.  Chris Cooper plays Redford’s innocent brother, who nevertheless takes care of the eleven-year-old daughter while the hunt is in progress.  One moment our fugitive is a man of spotless repute, the next he is a pariah that not even old acquaintances are eager to assist. 

Actually the reporter’s strand of narrative in the film is as gripping as that of the lawyer’s.  Under the gun of his ill-tempered editor boss (Stanley Tucci), on a small newspaper competing with the major dailies, he is ready to move the earth and the sun to get to the bottom of Sarandon’s and Redford’s stories and make a big name for himself.  Like the ex-radical he is tracking he too does a lot of traveling about the country checking out clues and interviewing people once in cahoots with Redford and the lawless network.  He uncovers so many details that he incurs the wrath of the FBI unit searching for Redford when it appears that he is ahead of them and maybe interfering with their search.  Of course the net inexorably closes, all bumpy roads leading to the same place, a quite suspenseful and gripping climax and the revelation of a deep shady secret that Redford and Christie share.     

Redford made a casting error on the film that is glaring – that of himself in the lead.  His septuagenarian face and figure make him a most unlikely father of a preteen child.  But his charisma and focused attention to the many intricacies of his character’s dilemma largely compensate for this oddness.  No one could have crafted this production and its highly political content better than he.  I have enjoyed all the many films he has directed; he has a good sense of balance and proportion, and he is not afraid to tackle difficult subject matter.

What keeps us emotionally in the story’s grip is of course the question of the child’s fate.  If caught, Redford knows that not only would he lose his freedom but her as well and she him.  We are allowed to examine the subject of radicalism and the mindset of a terrorist but from a very personal vantage point.  How does one complete the kind of past these people have run from?  What becomes of old shibboleths that once threw otherwise civilized people into drastic and explosive and antisocial compacts?  How does one live with secrets, hidden or exposed?  Even apart from what such a one might owe society and its system of justice, how does one live with the defeat of the former cause when time has proven it impossible of realization? 

There is much reflection verbalized in this film, but Redford does not get mired in words.  There is movement and atmosphere and vibrancy and bracing tension and of course keenly wrought performances by a choice bunch of professional actors and actresses in supporting and featured roles.  And let’s hear it for Dobbs’ script!  There are lines that ought to be carved in stone for future generations. 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.