Greetings, bibliophiles.
As I write this, it’s a Friday in late July and we’re gearing up for a road trip. By the time you read the book reflections below, said road trip will be well underway. So I acknowledge that if you follow me on social media (here or here), by now you may well have seen a picture of, say, a cup of coffee on the patio of a Santa Fe hotel. Or a tweet about altitude sickness. Or some dispatch from a national park. Who’s to say, really.
The point is, I’m writing this in anticipation of what by now has probably already taken place. Welcome to the time warp.
What I’ve Read Recently
Last month, I briefly mentioned Andy Crouch’s latest book as the one I might read next. Lo and behold, it has come to pass. And wow, what a gift.
The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (Convergent) begins with this statement: “Recognition is the first human quest.” Crouch observes that from our first moments on earth, we’re looking for a face that is looking back at us. We have an innate need to be seen, acknowledged, recognized, known. And this recognition can only come from another person. Indeed, “before we knew to look for a mirror, we were looking for another person’s face.”
We need recognition as newborns and we need it at every stage of our lives. But while we tend to live our lives surrounded by people, it’s easy to lose sight of the mysterious gift of actual persons. And a lot of that has to do with the ubiquity of technology in our lives—technology that promises to connect us, but is actually powerless to make us more human, to make us less lonely.
“To be a person is to be made for love. This is both the indelible fact of who we are and the great adventure of each of our lives,” Crouch writes. “And it is precisely this central task—becoming the relational beings we are meant to be—that is so desperately difficult in our technological, impersonal world.”
That’s the central task of our lives, and the central aim of The Life We’re Looking For. Anyone who has read his earlier work will know that Crouch has an infectiously curious mind, and in these explorations he adeptly weaves history and science together with theology and sociology. While he’s sober-minded and clear-eyed about the downsides of the powerful technologies that shape our world, don’t mistake him for a Luddite. His philosophical and practical reflections on our technological world are imaginative and generative, not fearful.
Crouch’s writing is crisp and clear. It also stirs the soul. On more than one occasion, I was moved to tears. Like the extended passage at the end of chapter 11, in which Crouch invites us to imagine a community where every person—and especially the most vulnerable among us—is valued and cared for wholeheartedly.
Such a community, I’ve got to admit, is hard to find. It will not come about by accident. It takes intentionality and time. Lots of us will want nothing to do with a community like this—that is, until life teaches us that we need it ourselves. No wonder such a community is so rare. Rare, but worth cultivating. Rare, but worth sacrificing for. If recent experience has taught us anything, it is that the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“And when a plague came,” Crouch writes in the conclusion to that passage, “this community might be patient enough to take the small steps that it could, not just to protect its own members’ lives but to have the margin and resilience to care for others caught up in suffering and sorrow. Such a people might even remember the times of plague, famine, and war that are the inevitable accompaniments of history as times when blessing was somehow present, not because of an absence of suffering but because of an abundance of grace.”
Amen. Lord, may it be so, both in us and among us. As persons in search of a face, persons who need to feel felt, we’ll never stop needing a community like that, as long as we each shall live.
What I’m Reading Now
Next week, Katie and I are heading to a family reunion in Estes Park, Colorado. During the trip—we opted to drive—we’ll go more or less through Petrified Forest National Park. In New Mexico, we’ll skirt the edges of a trio of national monuments near Albuquerque and a couple more around Santa Fe. Making our way north into Colorado, we’ll pass by two national forests. Later, during the reunion itself, we’ll do Rocky Mountain National Park, a visit being organized by a French Canadian cousin-in-law who lives nearby. Our return trip home, taking a different route, will take us near (or through) still more parks, monuments, and forests.
How different this road trip would be were it not for the National Park Service, which marked its centennial in 2016. How different my childhood would have been: summers spent visiting Yosemite and Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Grand Canyon, Olympic and Sequoia and the Badlands. If not in fact “America’s best idea,” the national parks have got to be right up there.
Thinking about this reminded me of a book I’d seen on the front table at our belovèd Changing Hands Bookstore during that centennial summer six years ago. If memory serves, I sent a copy of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks (Picador) by Terry Tempest Williams to my parks-loving dad as a Father’s Day gift. Now, anticipating the road trip, seemed as good a time as any to read it myself.
Noting the hundreds of millions of people who visit the national parks every year, Williams asks, “What are we searching for and what do we find?” This is a good question, the kind of question we don’t always bother to ask when setting out on vacation. She suggests that “perhaps it is not so much what we learn that matters in these moments of awe and wonder, but what we feel in relationship to a world beyond ourselves, even beyond our own species.”
Today, national parks, forests, and monuments—places set apart for their natural beauty—often coexist uneasily with nearby extractive industries and real estate development. Williams also brings our attention to a complicated political and historical connection: “Reservations were bring established at the same time as national parks.”
Revisiting Google Maps, I see that during our drive to the family reunion and back we’ll pass through the Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Reservation, the Tonto Apache Reservation, Navajo Nation, Acoma Pueblo, Tesuque Pueblo, San Felipe Pueblo, and the Southern Ute Reservation. Maybe some others as well.
This, too, is the story of the land.
“By definition, our national parks in all their particularity and peculiarity show us as much about ourselves as the landscapes they honor and protect,” Williams writes. “They can be seen as holograms of an America born of shadow and light; dimensional; full of contradictions and complexities. Our dreams, our generosities, our cruelties and crimes are absorbed into these parks like water.”
In the pages to come, Williams’ “lyrical portraits” will transport me back to a number of parks and monuments I’ve already experienced—like Acadia and Gettysburg—and will introduce me to many I don’t yet know—like Big Bend and Gates of the Arctic.
I’ll take this book with me on our trip, and as I do, I’ll think about the questions and complexities Williams raises. Even as I marvel and give thanks.
What I Might Read Next
Years ago, out of the blue, my buddy Barnabas sent me a book of poetry called An American Sunrise (Norton) by Joy Harjo, the twenty-third poet laureate of the United States. It was a thoughtful gift from a thoughtful friend.
Even though Harjo is from Oklahoma (and even though I live in a state that is itself home to many Native persons and communities), for some reason this has always felt like a book I should wait to read until I find myself in New Mexico. So that’s exactly what I intend to do.
When I wake up at our hotel in Santa Fe in a few days, I’ll find a chair—ideally outside, in the cool high desert air—and will sit down with a cup of strong black coffee. I’ll take few deep breaths, listen to the birds. And then I’ll turn to a poem that seems fitting, maybe “Bless This Land” or “A Refuge in the Smallest of Places.” Perhaps the title poem, “An American Sunrise.” Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll start at the beginning, with the epigraph by Ray Young Bear, a line about healing being tied to a recognition of what has been lost.
If you enjoy these reflections, please pass them along. You can share this installment of The Bookshelf with the undifferentiated masses on social media. Or, if you’re so inclined, via text or email with specific persons who mean a lot to you. I’d be grateful if you were to do that.
As always, thanks for reading.
Tim