book-review | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Crying in H Mart

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 13:00:00 -0800

I came to Crying in H Mart with questions I’ve been asking my entire race- and ethnicity-conscious life. Questions of place and perception, where I fit and how others see me. Questions of whether people like me, my siblings, and Michelle Zauner will ever find ourselves in a world where we don’t have to explain ourselves as 한국사람 하고 미국사람, a biracial Korean and white person. Or, more to the point:

우리 엄마 한국사람, 아빠 미국사람.

My mom is Korean and my dad is white.

Zauner processes these same questions during a span of years where her 할머니 (grandmother), 이모 (aunt), and finally her 어머니 (mother) all die of cancer, leaving her to ask what it means to be Korean when her blood ties have all passed on.

Within five years, I lost both my aunt and my mother to cancer. So, when I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck; I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identify didn’t die when they did. H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone. It reminds me of who they were before, beautiful and full of life, wiggling Chang Gu honey-cracker rings on all ten of their fingers, showing me how to suck a Korean grape from its skin and spit out the seeds.

— Crying in H Mart, pages 10–11

This is also—as the title suggests—a book about food, for food is the universal and accessible medium of cultural understanding. Unlike the unique challenge of learning new languages, food graciously grants fluency in exchange for an adventurous will to try. For a foreigner to communicate wonder with their eyes wide open as their mouth busily works to understand what they’ve just bitten into instantly makes them one with the table and those around it, even if just for a moment. Zauner discovered this powerful language of love to be a bridge between herself and her mother, one that could transcend cultural divide and the many ways Zauner’s mother showed love in seemingly less than loving ways.

It would be easy for an outsider to dismiss this disconnect between what a parent gives and what their child receives as typical familial misunderstanding. Perhaps those with some sensitivity might also perceive the complexities of immigrant parents relating to their children raised in the United States. But the tension of biraciality is finding identity not only in the collision of two historically separate worlds but also in the new, rare thing that is distinct from and more than the sum of its parts. Being biracial is as much a both-and of the parent cultures as it is neither-nor, marked by a struggle to navigate two worlds that are our inheritance but have no box to put us in.

I had spent my adolescense trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone full. Someone whole.

— Crying in H Mart, page 107

With age comes wisdom and suffering. I don’t know which of the two proceeds from the other, or if together they form an ouroboros, locked in a never-ending cycle. Zauner experiences a great deal of both in the painful decline and death of her mother, a loss that took away more than just the love and stability of a parent. Earlier in the memoir, Zauner describes visiting a Korean bathhouse with her mother, father, and boyfriend. The spectacle in this scene are her white father and boyfriend stripping nude in the men’s partition—not Zauner’s identity. Next to her mother, Zauner makes sense. No one looks at her twice or asks her if she’s lost. But years later, without her mother to implicitly justify her, Zauner is forced to explain herself in that familiar and humiliating admittance of other-ness.

[An ajumma] looked into my face as if searching for something. I knew what she was looking for. It was the same way the kids at school would look at me before they asked me what I was, but from the opposite angle. She was looking for the hint of Koreanness in my face that she couldn’t quite put a finger on. Something that resembled her own.

…It was ironic that I, who once longed to resemble my white peers and desperately hoped my Koreanness would go unnoticed, was now absolutely terrified that this stranger in the bathhouse could not see it.

— Crying in H Mart, pages 225–226

Like Zauner, I have a Korean mother and a white father. She and I both excitedly rushed off to examine our eyes in the mirror after our mothers taught us about the double eyelid envied by Koreans. We’ve found some shred of Korean belonging in knowledge of its cuisine, perhaps especially when we share it with our white spouses. We’ve lost our elders to time and asked ourselves what hope for belonging we lost with them, even if we carry them with us in our middle names. We’ve tried to explain what being half-Korean feels like to our loving full-Korean mothers, only for them to tell us in a moment of blindsiding misunderstanding that we’re American, not Korean. And in all this, we’ve come to learn that there are no clean answers to questions of half-white biraciality in a nation that has barely even begun its reckoning with its oppression of single-race minorities.

Even still, it’s nice to not be alone.

The Story of More

Tue, 26 May 2020 13:52:54 -0700

Climate change has become one of many sources of existential dread that I share with my generation, albeit one that I was slow to understand. Growing up in a conservative evangelical context, global warming was right up there with evolution in terms of science that was treated as if it contested the nature of God, his creation, and humanity’s place within it. Combined with teachers that were shy about the realities of our earth’s sickness and our hand in its decay, our plight was fuzzy to me, at best.

Yet activism and justice (social, environmental, political) are in the water now — albeit often diluted and consumed in the form of social media. The United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was another Trump decision to throw on the pile of his wrongdoings. The March for Science is now a three-year-old movement to use science for the common good and spur change. Natural disasters are now frequently linked to “weirding weather.” And yet, while I know climate change denial is an ostrich’s approach to problem solving, my knowledge on what the Paris Agreement says, what the March for Science marches for, or the cause-and-effect behind why the weather is now weird is embarrassingly limited. I’ve been drawing lines in the sand about “good” and “bad” approaches to our natural world without real knowledge, which is a lousy and ineffective place to try and enact change from.

Hope Jahren’s The Story of More is a wonderful primer on our natural history and how we got ourselves into the mess we’re in. By seamlessly weaving chatty stories about growing up in the American Midwest with no-nonsense, no-jargon statistics, Hope expertly guides us through Climate Science 101 less like a lecturing professor (though she is that) and more like a wise and smart friend. For nearly the entire book, she simply presents her findings without bias or interpretation — with a brief break in character to rant about how much she hates cars — seemingly trusting that we can wrestle with the implications ourselves. She shows us that it all boils down to some basic fundamentals: how many of us there are, the food we eat and where it comes from, the energy we use and how we produce it, and, finally, how all of that affects the natural world we live in.

The idea of scaring the public for the sake of scaring it scares me… People don’t make good decisions out of fear, history seems to have shown, and at least some of the time, people who are afraid are also prone to doing nothing… My own goal is to inform you, not to scare you, because teaching has taught me to know and respect the difference. I’ve found that fear makes us turn away from the issue whereas information draws us in.

— The Story of More, pages 139–140.

The Story of More is the story of our relentless pursuit of more food, more energy, more variety, more transportation, more possessions, more comfort. Conservation was discarded in favor of efficiency; instead of targeting “more for less”, we pursued “much more for more”. This mix of scientific findings and historical narrative is powerful and helped me understand modern first-world life in new ways.

In the appendix entitled “The Story of Less,” Hope offers some reflection questions on how we each can use less and share more. There are no cut and dry answers (and, as it turns out, there are more problems than any one of us could solve alone), but she provides a framework that gave me clarity beyond the behavior and tone matching of today’s armchair activism. I’m very thankful for her voice.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 12:00:00 -0700

This is a story about the weirdness of the world as understood by the mind of Christopher John Francis Boone, a boy with autism who lives with his father in a small town in the UK. Christopher hates crowds of people, vague questions, figurative language, being touched, and the color yellow (seeing four yellow cars in a row on his way to school makes it a Black Day, on which he doesn’t eat anything). But he loves all things scientific, mathematical, and factual. When he gets lost, he physically performs the Pledge maze-solving algorithm. When he gets stressed, he solves quadratic equations in his head. And his best approximation for life is the prime numbers:

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

— The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, page 12.

The book itself is one of Christopher’s school exercises. When he finds a neighbor’s dog stabbed through with a pitchfork, he takes it upon himself to solve the murder mystery. Siobahn — his teacher and likely the only person in his life that fully understands autism — encourages him to document it all like his favorite Sherlock Holmes novels. But just as often as it includes details about the case, it also includes Christopher’s meandering thoughts: his interactions with his father, his hopes for the future, and his bewilderment with the world.

This is where the clever beauty of this novel shines through: in some ways, we all are bewildered with our world. People don’t say what they mean. Solid, committed relationships break. We fill the world with noise instead of thoughtful presence. Through the eyes of Christopher, we can learn empathy for those who simply can’t cope with these strange nuances as well as we do (or don’t). Through the thoughts of a boy who thinks of everyone as different from himself, we’re reminded just how many common threads bind us all together. And through his quips — which he would never call jokes because he claims to not know any or understand them — we can find humor in truth.

Mr. Jeavons asked me whether this made me feel safe, having things always in a nice order, and I said it did.

Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.

— The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, page 25.

All That Is Made

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 12:00:00 -0700

This book is a celebration of the Creator God who created all that is made and invites us as humans into a continual process of co-creation. It is a purposeful urge to reorient our making away from idols of productivity or self-promotion and towards others and the world. It is a gentle reminder that God has delighted in our existence since before we knew him, and continues to delight in what we bring, albeit imperfect, broken, and lacking. We do not earn our keep; it is lavished on us. So we, in turn, pour ourselves out for others through our making, trusting the perfect Creator to use our humble gifts in magnificent ways.

Jesus invites us into a generous creating—a creating that does not fear, that is not self-conscious, and that is generative in purpose… ultimately our art should be generous. A gift. A thing given over and over and over because we are called to be love to the whole of the Earth.

— All That Is Made, page 22.

All That Is Made is a guiding hand in reimagining creativity as an aspect of all humans instead of an elite few. We are all made in the image of God, so we all carry the desire to create, to make, and to build. This frees us from constructs of who is creative and who is not, and the pressures that come with each (the pressure to produce and the feeling of inferiority, respectively). And in that freedom, All That Is Made argues that we should all take part together in boldly reimagining the world as it should be, on earth as it is in heaven, with all the elusive stepping stones between here and there.

It is our artists, our poets, and our entrepreneurs who remind us that how it is right now, is not how it always will be. It is creatives that remind us that the arc of the universe bends towards God’s justice. It is creatives that both give voice to our suffering and imagine a world in which it is not wasted.

— All That Is Made, page 15.

If nothing else, All That Is Made did for me what it advocates for all creativity to do: to bring healing, restoration, and hope. As a mathematician and computer scientist, I’ve endured a lot of boxes being put around me in how formulaic or robotic my thinking and work must be. Against the backdrop of tech culture, passion projects feel worthless without a monetization strategy. I’ve been afraid that I don’t know what I need to know to make an impact.

But I know that this work is creative. I know that it is generative in purpose. And I want my making to be a gift to those around me: I want to give it all away. Open-source, easy to use, and out in the world to be used however God and others might use it. This has always been true in my heart of hearts. To see my desires spelled out on beautiful pages was both relief and clarity. Reflecting on it invokes something deep and emotional in my soul.

Creatives who follow the way of Jesus are called to give away every last trade secret, every lesson learned, every skill set acquired, and lots and lots of art.

We are blessed to be a blessing.

We are creative, not for ourselves, but for the flourishing of humanity. We start companies, not for personal gain but to reimagine the marketplace as a place of generosity. We make things so that our communities are filled with the creative energy of God, allowing the next generation to join in the work of ushering in shalom.

— All That Is Made, page 29.

Hallelujah. Amen. May it be so.

Notes

Geoff Gentry gifted this book to Annie and I, hoping that it would be something useful to reflect on. He was right.

The Phantom Tollbooth

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0700

The Phantom Tollbooth is a fable in every chapter, clever wit in every paragraph, and careful thought in every sentence. It is both a treatise on critical thinking and a tender story of a young boy’s adventure. It is just as much an epic struggle between Wisdom and Ignorance as it is a playful comedy where the first character to cry is a watchdog named Tock lamenting the fact that he goes ticktickticktick while his brother Tick goes tocktocktocktock. Perhaps most importantly, its excellence is a testament to the fruits of curious wonder and deep wisdom, two values that its fantastical characters try very hard to get Milo — the protagonist — to pursue.

Every word is an absolute joy to read. Norton Juster achieves the kind of simplicity that comes at the cost of both knowing what exactly one wants to write and cutting away all superfluous material that does not achieve that goal. The entire novel is written in everyday prose fitting for a bedtime story, and yet contains layers of subtlety that should give the reading adult pause. Juster masterfully mixes serious lessons (that must not be obvious even to many adults, seeing how our world is) with hysterical moments of relief, all in a stream of whimsical adventure. Take, for example, the following scene:

Except for these, and the big brass cannon being pulled along behind, they all looked very much like the residents of any other small valley to which you’ve never been.

— The Phantom Tollbooth, page 146.

Paradox, absurdity, and humor, all wrapped into such a simple little description. Or take, for example, an unabashed jab Juster takes at the Humbug:

After demonstrating that there was nothing up his sleeves, in his hat, or behind his back, [the Mathemagician] wrote quickly:

4 + 9 – 2 x 16 + 1 ÷ 3 x 6 – 67 + 8 x 2 – 3 + 26 – 1 ÷ 34 + 3 ÷ 7 + 2 – 5 =

Then he looked up expectantly. “Seventeen!” The Humbug shouted, who always managed to be the first with the wrong answer.

— The Phantom Tollbooth, page 188.

The pages of this book are riddled with such perfect moments as these.

I’m sure that many compelling essays have been (or could be) written on the many social tendencies The Phantom Tollbooth chases after with the sharpest wit — getting lost in trivial tasks, becoming an arrogant and condescending specialist, or being too afraid to have your own thoughts, for example — but it suffices to say that The Phantom Tollbooth gives a looking glass into how our own world has banished its Rhyme and Reason. It is relevant even today, nearly 60 years after its original publication. But unlike the dystopias of its time, The Phantom Tollbooth is permeated with hope. And with what better weapon can one burn back the darkness?

“And remember also,” added the Princess of Sweet Rhyme, “that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you’ll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”

— The Phantom Tollbooth, page 234.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Thu, 27 Dec 2018 12:00:00 -0700

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a work of lyrical beauty on a backdrop of persistent ugliness and cruelty, a masterpiece in storytelling set in a world of narratives forgotten or ignored, a page-turning delight built atop a visceral and aching pain. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward gifts us with the story of a 13 year-old named Joseph whose White father Michael is in Mississippi’s maximum security prison and whose Black mother Leonie is gone and high more than she isn’t. Joseph lives with his Black grandparents — two hardened but caring strongholds of wisdom and love, both carrying a lifetime of sorrow but only one carrying cancer — and his 3 year-old sister Kayla, who seemingly adores her big brother more than anything or anyone else in the world. A kind of mystic spiritualism hangs over Ward’s world and characters, so when a sudden road trip drags Leonie, Joseph, and Kayla from their coastal home deep into the heart of Mississippi, the present and all its struggles never seem far from the brutal past that created them.

The rural South is not a kind place in Sing, Unburied, Sing, and the descriptions of its natural beauty are too often marred by the countless Black men and women whose lives ended violently on its soil. As a reader, you experience this world primarily though the eyes of Joseph, who knows the hardship of his own life but has not entirely lost his innocence or, as is the case for his grandfather Pop, had it taken away from him. Ward expertly weaves rich family history and flashbacks into the present narrative so that it seems multiple stories are always unfolding together, heightening our ability to see the connections between them. These exact sort of connections are pregnant with one of Sing, Unburied, Sing’s primary themes: that we cannot separate the modern South and its deep, infected scars from the history that shows us how those wounds were inflicted, and that this history has roots not in big movements and national news, but in every sullen lynching tree and unjust court ruling.

Take, for example, the following passage that showcases Ward’s ability to tie a conversation about the past together with the current feelings of the narrator, who has just had his first encounter with police brutality (feel free to skip this if you wish to avoid even minor spoilers).

“My name?” he says.

Richie, I mouth.

He looks like he wants to smile but doesn’t.

“He told you about me?”

I nod.

“He tell you how he knew me? That we were in Parchman together?”

I huff and nod again.

“They don’t send them there as young as you no more.”

My wrists won’t stop hurting.

“Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.”

It’s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone.

“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always look the same.”

Like my marrow could carry a bruise.

[…] I have to look away from the wrong of the boy folded onto the floor of the car, so I stare out the window at the tall trees flashing past and think about the gun. Even though it reminded me of so much cold, I think it would have been hot to touch. So hot it would have burned my fingerprints off.

— Sing, Unburied, Sing, pages 171–172.

Enough cannot be said about Ward’s ability to craft prose that reads like grand poetry and easy conversation all at once. Her descriptions are delightful and vivid: every texture is tangible, every climate palpable, every smell immediately recognizable. Only when it comes to the occasional cultural subtlety or clever trick does Ward seem to slow down, as if to gently stoop to our understanding and check that we’re keeping up. Take, for example, this gem (no spoilers, so read freely):

There are people: tiny and distinct. They fly and walk and float and run. They are alone. They are together. They wander the summits. They swim in the rivers and sea. They walk hand in hand in the parks, in the squares, disappear into the buildings. They are never silent. Ever present is their singing: they don’t move their mouths and yet it comes from them. Crooning in the yellow light. It comes from the black earth and the trees and the ever-lit sky. It comes from the water. It is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, but I can’t understand a word.

I am gasping when the vision passes. The dark underbelly […] looms before me: creaking then silent. I look to my right and see a flash of the water, the rivers, the wilderness, the cities, the people. Then darkness. I look to my left and see that world again, and then it is gone. I claw at the air, but my hands strike nothing; they rend no doorways to that golden isle.

Absence. Isolation. I keen.

— Sing, Unburied, Sing, page 241.

The questions that this novel leaves about what hope and healing look like in the rural South are pertinent ones, and their delivery is somehow both searing and soothing, holding our feet to the fire while knowing it is what we need most. I am very thankful to have read my first Ward novel, and hope to have caught my breath by the time she releases another.

Half the Sky

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 12:00:00 -0700

This is arguably the most compelling, relevant, and urgent book on injustice in the modern world that I’ve read. An immediate self-critique is that I haven’t read many books in this area, but that fact does not make my statement any less true, nor does it negate the praises of others who were similarly woken and shaken by its contents.

The authors — two New York Times journalists by day — guide the reader through a structured and deep lesson in the reality of oppression and violence against women across the globe. Acknowledging at one point that rattling off statistics is a less powerful motivator than utilizing anecdotes, their writing places women’s stories in the forefront. For all their gut-wrenching, repulsive details, this method is indisputably effective. Rape, forced sex trafficking, genital cutting, involuntary drugging, fistulas, and systemic denial of opportunity form an incomplete list of topics on which Nick and Sheryl report. The often literally gory details of these brutalities will remain difficult to forget.

Perhaps most importantly, the book refuses to play a game of shock-and-awe preaching. Every call to action is qualified by cited research, which in turn is vetted for implicit and broken assumptions. The reader is repeatedly reminded that there is no silver bullet for these issues, so in its place, Nick and Sheryl dish out a whole menagerie of ammunition. Current governmental efforts, individuals starting movements, social entrepreneurship, and international aid groups are all discussed at length.

Every chapter is followed by an afterword that directly engages the reader. The last chapter is entirely dedicated to applying the newfound knowledge from the first thirteen chapters. The appendix is stuffed with 47 organizations and aid groups that maximize cost-effective aid and impact for local people, complete with websites and ways to get involved. Nick and Sheryl take every opportunity to move us as Western readers from our armchairs into places of progress, and I thank them and the women whose stories they shared for it.

Mapping Your Academic Career

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 12:00:00 -0700

I had set myself on the path of a PhD when I picked this book up at Urbana 2015, and hoped to read up on some guidance. When finally getting a chance to read it a year later, however, I found myself flipping through the life of professor — not a discussion of how best to center my life around Jesus while navigating graduate studies! In a conversational but direct manner, Burge describes the life trajectory of a faculty member in three main stages, each with their own goals, challenges, and successes. Taking the position of an amateur developmental psychologist (himself a professor of New Testament theology), he divides the three main cohorts of professors not by age, but by maturity.

Cohort 1 is concerned with finding security, Cohort 2 with finding success, and Cohort 3 with finding significance. Burge fills out a structured outline for each in his short text, first discussing the marking characteristics of each group, then warning against a series of common failures and difficulties, and concluding with the moments that define the closing of a cohort. It’s a helpful collection of list-like information, which makes searching for information easier.

Coupled with conversations with my advisor on the academic life, Burge provides a good framework for understanding a faculty’s personal and professional progression. While not all of it is anywhere near relevant to me right now, it acts as a high-level road map for understanding what’s to come.

The Meaning of Marriage

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 12:00:00 -0700

This book is an informative, gospel-based discussion of marriage based on a sermon series Keller gave in 1991. Rooted in equal parts theology, pastoral experience, and lives lived as husband and wife, the Kellers address topics ranging from the vision of a Christian marriage to spouses' individual relationships with Jesus to singleness to sex and beyond. Their clarity and simple speech make accessible the depth of their study and wisdom, while their anecdotes offer the humor and practicality necessary to understand these truths against the backdrops of our own interactions with married life. The main text is well attended by footnotes, which often point to helpful resources and candid insights. But underlying every discussion is the constant call back to the very nature of God, and that focus allows anyone — teens, singles, marrieds, widows, or divorcees — to learn something from this book.

I came to this book during a time of pre-engagement, searching for answers I didn’t have questions for, laden with a sense of how much I didn’t know but needed to know before diving into a lifetime of relationship. The Kellers' focus on the gospel, though elementary, provided the logical, relational, and structural basis I could plant myself on while seeking answers in the rest of their writings. While “Some Practical Counsel for Marriage Seekers” (p. 237–249) offers a comprehensive list of things to think about when one finds themselves in the stage I’m in, I found myself gravitating more towards the theoretical, conceptual constructs around marriage: the commitments to sacrificial love with justifications fleshed out beyond “because Jesus sacrificed”; a discussion of gender differences while using scalpel-like precision to cut away the cultural baggage in tow; and a beautiful image of striving towards our true selves as an answer to the day-to-day frustrations encountered in living so intimately with another messy, broken human.

The most radical idea for me is a consequence of eternal commitment: in marriage, the frustrations and shortcomings of ourselves and our partners are entirely effects of sin which obscure the true nature of a person, but it is that true version which we bond ourselves to in marriage. Some scattered quotations on the matter:

Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say “I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!'” Each spouse should see the great thing that Jesus is doing in the life of their mate through the Word, the gospel.

— The Meaning of Marriage, page 132.

If you don’t see your mate’s deep flaws and weaknesses and dependencies, you’re not even in the game. But if you don’t get excited about the person your spouse has already grown into and will become, you aren’t tapping into the power of marriage as spiritual friendship. The goal is to see something absolutely ravishing that God is making of the beloved. You see even now flashes of glory. You want to help your spouse become the person God wants him or her to be.

— The Meaning of Marriage, page 134.

…What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness. You’re committed to his or her beauty. You’re committed to his greatness and perfection. You’re committed to her honesty and passion for the things of God. That’s your job as a spouse. Any lesser goal than that, any smaller purpose, and you’re just playing at being married.

— The Meaning of Marriage, page 135.

While I’m not entirely in agreement with the handling of gender norms in this book (though they are still more progressive than one might expect), many other ideas were very helpful. I could see myself coming back to these ideas time and time again to get a healthy dose of perspective in the midst of my laughable, honest, heart-wrenching attempts at knowing and being known, loving and being loved. But for now, this has given me a little more confidence to take the first step.

Many people have asked me “How can you tell whether you’ve got a friendship on which you can base a marriage?” The answer that Kathy and I have always given is this. When you see the problems in each other, do you just want to run away, or do you find a desire to work on them together? If the second impulse is yours, then you have the makings of a marriage. Do you obsess over your partner’s external shortcomings, or can you see the beauty within, and do you want to see it increasingly released? Then move forward. The power of truth that marriage has should hold no fear for you.

— The Meaning of Marriage, page 159.

The Bronze Bow

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0700

This story is a powerful one, using Israel at the time of Jesus not as a backdrop but as a fully manifested world. Daniel, a teenager by our standards but a grown man by theirs, makes a vow to live and to die for God’s Victory, a victory he believes can only be achieved when the despised Romans are driven from their land. His desire for his people to be free quickly and characteristically becomes marked by an intense hatred for the Romans, and this hatred becomes the very fabric of his existence. However, as his friendship with scholarly twins Joel and Thacia develops and he adopts the responsibility of caring for his sister, he bruises himself against the rigidity of his own resolve, all the while being lured inexplicably to the words of the teacher Jesus. The tension between his longing for the destruction of the oppressor and Jesus’s countercultural message of a Kingdom already come wage a war in Daniel’s mind as he gathers recruits to fight for The Cause. But it requires everything that Daniel had put his hope in — The Cause, his self-sufficiency, and his hatred — to fail him before he encounters Jesus radically and transformatively, giving him a way to be at peace with everything he had run from and with everything he would now live into.

Reading this book made me feel a kind of pained longing that I don’t usually feel. I read it in a time of my life marked by dryness: the absence of a pulsing, vibrant relationship with God. And every time Speare depicted Jesus speaking to the children, whispering to the crippled, or touching the lame, my heart ached. I began to crave that Jesus, the giver of life and hope to the lonely and rejected. I wanted so badly to see him more — much more than Daniel did most of the time, which left me frustrated in watching Daniel accidentally but continuously perpetuate the very brokenness that haunted him instead of turning to the one that breaks every chain.

As frustrated as I was with Daniel, it’s clear that the Jews of Israel were much more frustrated with Jesus. The Zealots wanted him to repel the forces of Rome, but he would not fight. The people of Capernaum wanted him, but not all understood him. The crowds wanted to crown him king, but instead he slipped away into the hills at night to pray. And yet, he upheld that the Kingdom of Heaven had come. While much of the “history” is familiar and biblical, The Bronze Bow provides a window from which to watch people grapple with their own expectations as they looked for deliverance from a situation they deemed “all wrong,” “backwards,” and “not what God would want.” I think there’s an important lesson to be learned there.

“If he is the Messiah, how soon will he lead us against the enemy?” Simon walked on for a time without answering. Finally, he spoke. “He will never lead us against Rome, Daniel. I have given up all hope of that.”

[…] “Then why do you stay with him?” All the boy’s bitterness broke through the reproach.

“Where else could I go?” Simon answered.

“What has he offered you that is worth more than Israel’s freedom?”

“He has offered me the kingdom.”

Daniel’s anger was rising. “When do you think you’ll have this kingdom?”

“You will not understand this,” said Simon. “In a way, I have it already.”

“That’s fine!” the boy’s scorn was close to tears. “You have the kingdom! You can shut your eyes while all around you–”

“I have not shut my eyes,” said Simon. “I know well enough that nothing in Israel is changed. But I know that it will be, even if I never live to see it with my own eyes.”

“Listen to me, Daniel,” he went on. “You’ve seen him caring for those people — the ones so low that no one, not I or anyone else, cared what happened to them. When I see that, I know that the God of Israel has not forgotten us. Or why would He have sent Jesus to them, instead of to the rich and learned? Like a shepherd, he says, who will not let any of his sheep be lost. I’m a poor man, and ignorant, but I know now that with a God like that I am safe.”

[…] “What has he done to prove it? How do you know you’re not risking your life for nothing?”

“We can never know,” Simon answered slowly. “God hides the future from man’s eyes. We are forced to choose, not knowing. I have chosen Jesus.”

— The Bronze Bow, pages 243–244.