[The Bookshelf #75] Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
Resources for resisting detachment and despair
(Image Source)
Since we last met, I’ve posted some new stuff to timhoiland.com, including a brief review of Fleeting Roots, a book of photographs by my friend Scott Bennett. I hope you’ll check it out, along with other reviews and miscellaneous odds and ends that don’t end up making the cut for the Bookshelf each month.
What I’ve Read Recently
C. Kavin Rowe’s short book Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope (Abingdon) packs a punch. In less than 100 pages, Rowe places a bull’s eye on the resurrection of Jesus as the singular earth-shaking reality that defines Christian faith. The resurrection not only explains the “surprising” rise of the early church but also animates any Christian witness today that is truly hope-filled.
In Rowe’s telling, “resurrection hope” is about so much more than inner tranquility as individuals face the frightening prospect of the end of life. It’s not less than that, but it’s so much more. Resurrection hope is good news for bodies—especially vulnerable, marginalized bodies—and for entire societies in turn.
“The earliest Christians knew that to make the truth of Jesus and his image known to the world they had to do more than just announce his arrival,” Rowe writes. “They needed to create ways of seeing and being that had not yet existed.” So what did they do? They got to work, creating “communities and institutions that took up space in public and made explicit through their order, structure, and practices what the human was in light of Christ.”
You may want to go back and read that paragraph again.
Early Christians were eager to share the good news of the risen Christ. This was really good news, after all! They knew that the resurrection changed everything, and they understood that new “ways of seeing and being” would be required. They didn’t make clever tracts disguised as $50 bills. They didn’t create mass hysteria about the enemies of the faith, real as those enemies surely were.
No, they built institutions and cultivated communities that became impossible to ignore. And who did those communities and institutions aim to serve? They were established to serve the sick and the poor. This, too, was totally new and “surprising” in the world of their day:
“The Roman world knew of poor people and sick people, of course, but it had never seen the ‘poor’ as a distinct group of vulnerable people that required response, and it did not know what it was to care for the sick during a plague in spite of the risk to oneself. The Christians, however, had learned through the story of everything that they were not to fear death, that they were to see Christ in the face of the poor and the sick, and that they were to be present to them and provide for them, come what may. The sharing of resources—first among many fellow Christians, and then beyond—nursing and doctoring during the plagues, the invention of the hospital and shelters for the poor. These were all Christian surprises for the world.”
It was only natural that these “surprising” efforts began with care for the poor and vulnerable children, women, and men in their own midst. But soon, “the radical commitment to see Christ’s face and blessing in the poor” led these Christians to seek out those in need wherever and whoever they were—regardless of belief or ethnicity or potentially questionable life decisions. As a matter of fidelity to the gospel, these Christians sought out hurting people that they might be relieved. Rowe cites the renowned historian and Augustine biographer Peter Brown, who writes that this profound “new departure” by the early Christians “threw open the horizons of society.”
These early Christians were living in a context in which they were not dominant, where they were in fact being martyred on the regular. Even so, day by day these resurrection people were fundamentally altering the landscape—not in pursuit of power or some illusion of cultural relevancy, but because they knew, in their bones, that a faithful witness to the risen Christ “required innovative structures that manifested the truth through their surprising existence in a world that had never seen them, did not anticipate them, and longed for them all the same.”
Resurrection hope is really good news. It’s what the world longs for. It’s what we need.
What I’m Reading Now
In the opening pages of his book Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays (Random House), Barry Lopez recalls a visit to China in the spring of 1988. With some fellow writers, he booked a trip down the Yangtze River through a “steep-walled canyon.” As their sizable passenger boat “plowed through,” leaving the wooden canoes of local fishermen in their wake, he notes that the air was “ripe with the smells of spoiling fish, fresh vegetables, and human waste.” He continues:
“The scene, a kind of Third World cliché, didn’t fully engage me—until I caught sight, unexpectedly, of great runs of vertical space on the right bank, variegated fields rising straight up, perhaps nine hundred feet, into a blue sky. The terraced slopes were as steep as playground slides, a skein of garden plots and traversing rice paddies, dotted with sheds and houses.”
That description immediately transports me back to scenes from my childhood—spent not on the Yangtze in China, but in our family’s Toyota Hilux, twisting up and down dusty switchbacked roads in Guatemala’s western highlands. Instead of rice paddies, we passed milpas planted with corn. But these too were cultivated on slopes “as steep as playground slides.”
My memories of those drives are mostly of boredom. That, and carsickness. For Lopez, though, “The boldness of the farming ventures made my heart race.”
This story he tells, of being physically and emotionally moved simply by noticing what is easily ignored, says so much about the values and commitments that animated Lopez in his travels and his writing over so many years. (He died on Christmas Day in 2020.)
“Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention,” Lopez writes, in the closest thing he has to a credo. “Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.”
(I love all the perhapses in there. May our credos be just as gentle.)
Lopez’s recurring preoccupation in these essays—with paying attention and being patient—remind me a bit of Wendell Berry’s body of work. And that third part of the credo, about “what the body knows,” calls to mind the groundbreaking work of Bessel van der Kolk—especially in the passages where Lopez writes about the unspeakable traumas he endured as a boy. Taken together, these emphases form the basis of what others have called his “priestly”vision.
At various points in this collection, Lopez refers to the Sixth Extinction. As he writes of the frightening realities facing our “burning world,” however, it’s to his credit that he never does no flippantly, and he’s careful when it comes to casting blame.
In one essay, we accompany Lopez to rural coastal Alaska, where he visits an indigenous community of subsistence walrus hunters. Yes, an isolated town where people eat walruses in order to survive. He writes about walrus hunting there with nuanced curiosity rather than dogmatic contempt, even though walruses (like so many of earth’s creatures) face an uncertain future, first due to hunting and now because of a loss of habitat.
Lopez seems to understand that to love the world and to be invested in its future doesn’t always mean leaving it untouched. Nor does it mean endlessly consuming without regard for limits and consequences. Lopez inhabits the vast space between the two extremes, and in this book he invites us to join him there.
This may sound like a bleak book, with endangered species and melting ice and childhood trauma accounting for so much real estate. But it’s not bleak. It’s an aching love letter to our beautiful but fragile world, a world worth embracing fearlessly. Even though it hurts. Even when it breaks our hearts.
In a later essay, writing about the changes that have befallen his old stomping grounds in the San Fernando Valley, he concedes that the wildness of that place is not coming back. Still, he insists, there’s more to the story than that:
“The arroyo chubs, three-spined sticklebacks, and crayfish of my youth I suppose are entirely gone, but what I see in the water is not nostalgia or despair. I see the infinite patience we associate with the still ocean. And I see behind me here on the river’s banks the ebb and flow of diverse humanity, engaged, adapting to whatever mean threat or wild beauty may lie in its path.”
And in that, Lopez says, he finds some of the resources we need to resist “the great temptation of our time: to put one’s faith in despair.”
What I Might Read Next
Here in the Southwest—here in the Valley of the Sun, at least—we have an inverted relationship with the seasons. For people in temperate zones, summer is synonymous with the outdoors, while winter is the season for hibernation. Here, in the arid subtropics, it’s just the opposite. This weekend, for example, temperatures here will soar to well over 110°—hibernation weather, if you ask me.
So in a meager attempt to live vicariously, perhaps, in the land of pleasant outdoor picnics, I’ve got Summer Solstice: An Essay (Black Sparrow) by Nina Maclaughlin on deck. The book’s description: “Summer is fireflies and sparklers. Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. Lemonade and long dreamy days. The treasures of the season are gone much too soon — but they’re captured here, in loving sensuous prose that’s both personal and universal, for you to find any time of year.”
As always, thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these reflections. And do let me know what you’re reading these days.
Tim