[The Bookshelf #76] Wonders Never Cease
Reflections on books from Stanley Hauerwas, Joyce Maynard, and Tomáš Halík
Photo by Katie
I’m writing this from an honest-to-God log cabin in Coconino County, Arizona. Having recently survived 31 consecutive days of highs at 110+ degrees back in Phoenix—a streak that incinerated, if you will, the previous record of 18 days—it’s good to be taking some deep breaths and long walks here amid the pines.
There’s no air conditioning up here, but we don’t really need it, not even in these dog days of summer. When we arrived in the afternoon a few days ago, the temperature on our dashboard read 79. Right now I’m wearing a hoodie.
Wonders never cease.
What I’ve Read Recently
I love the cover photo on the original InterVarsity Press edition of Prayers Plainly Spoken by Stanley Hauerwas (later re-released by Wipf & Stock, with a different design). In the photo, we see an old stone church. Isolated. Ramshackle. The mountain landscape is shrouded in thick clouds—a layer of fog topped by a menacing gloom that threatens rain, or worse.
We know this building has endured some harsh weather. It’s unclear whether people continue to gather here to pray. But if there are still a few who do, the prayers in this profound collection from Hauerwas would be in their language. As the title of the book suggests, these are not polished prayers, nor are they overly pious. They are prayers for those who have endured stuff—prayers for those who no longer have the luxury of cliché.
Hauerwas, a theologian and ethicist who has written many scholarly and popular books, grew up in a working-class family in Texas. His father, a brick-layer, was the designated “pray-er” at extended family gatherings. And it was seen as a given that the younger Hauerwas would someday assume that responsibility. But praying spontaneously was not something that came naturally to him—not even after graduating from seminary and earning a PhD in theology. The written prayers of the church? Absolutely. His own ad-libbed offerings? Not so much. I’ll admit I can relate to that.
Joining the faculty of Duke Divinity School, and persuaded that he should start each class with a prayer, Hauerwas did the only thing he knew to do: he began writing prayers each morning before the students arrived. These prayers would often have to do with the day’s readings and lectures, or with recent world events, or the happy and sad occurrences in the life of their particular community of faith and learning.
Students began asking for copies of the prayers. Soon he was being encouraged to publish them. Hauerwas initially resisted making the prayers publicly available for the same reason he had been uncomfortable praying spontaneously: fear of praying to appear pious. I appreciate that impulse, even as I’m glad he eventually overcame his resistance.
In this collection are prayers about marriage, war and peace, chickens, hurricanes, Eucharist, fear, patience, and the deaths of students, colleagues, and pets. Profoundly biblical and theological prayers in profoundly plain language.
And then there’s the prayer he was invited to give before a Distinguished Professor’s luncheon. Hauerwas knew without being told that the university president was expecting something generic and predictable, the kind of prayer that wouldn’t offend or exclude. Because Hauerwas has been a vocal critic of watered-down civil religion—“A vague god vaguely prayed to serves no one well”—he initially declined the offer. But then he called back and said he’d do it after all. The prayer he wrote for the occasion is called “Addressing the God Who Is Not the ‘Ultimate Vagueness’” and it’s every bit as pointed as you’d imagine. (Due to his protest “and perhaps, prayer,” Hauerwas notes that the university has stopped having a prayer at this event.)
So no, Prayers Plainly Spoken is not a collection of polished, pious prayers. But neither are these prayers boring. Not by a long shot.
What I’m Reading Now
Earlier this summer, I came across a piece in the Travel section of the New York Times that caught my eye: “The Accidental Innkeeper: How an American Novelist Became a Hotelier in Guatemala.” It turns out that Joyce Maynard, a novelist whose work I didn’t yet know, happens to own and operate a hotel at Lake Atitlán, my family’s favorite vacation spot during my growing-up years. So when I discovered that Maynard’s new novel The Bird Hotel (Arcade) was largely inspired by her time at Lake Atitlán, I knew right away I’d want to read it.
The setting for the novel, we are told, is wholly imagined. It takes place at a beautiful lake in a country (checks notes) to the south of Mexico, where indigenous traditions live on, where tourists wear hemp and do yoga, where one might eat foods like pepián and papaya. The lakeside hotel in the story is called La Llorona and not, for example, Casa Paloma. Looming over this imagined lake is one active volcano; Lake Atitlán, on the other hand, has three sleepy ones.
So, no, this is definitely not Guatemala. And absolutely not Lake Atitlán. Wink wink.
The early pages of The Bird Hotel—set in New York and San Francisco and a number of places in between—are marked by one tragedy after another. Before Irene ends up in the country with the hotel by the lake, she has been through a lot. An awful lot. She’s eager to get away, to start over. And she most definitely doesn’t want to talk about it.
This puts her in surprisingly good company with the others she will meet at the lake. “With rare exceptions,” the narrator tells us, “they were people fleeing their past and trying to write a new story. Concerning who they had been or what they’d done in the country they came from, most said little, if anything. That was the point. It didn’t matter anymore, what had happened before.”
Only, the past does matter. It matters in our lives and I have a feeling it will matter in this novel.
I’m nearly 150 pages into the story and an inciting incident has just occurred. We’ll see how things unfold from here.
What I Might Read Next
Several years ago, as part of a book club, we read I Want You to Be: On the God of Love (Notre Dame) by Tomáš Halík, an enigma of a man. Halík, a Czech author and theologian, was secretly ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in East Germany and ministered “clandestinely” as part of the underground church in Czechoslovakia during the difficult final years of the communist regime there. He’s survived a lot; he’s not afraid to provoke.
Halík’s latest work, newly translated into English, is Touch the Wounds: On Suffering, Trust, and Transformation (Notre Dame). I know some people skip prefaces and forewords and the like, but the preface to this English edition—dated “Easter 2020”—might be the most moving thing I’ve read all year. Writing during that season of such obvious vulnerability—the initial stages of a pandemic with no end on sight—Halík, a pastor to hurting people, sensed it was necessary to remind us that the risen Jesus was identified not by some kind of superhuman buoyancy, but by his very wounds.
“The wounded Christ is the real, living Christ,” he writes. “He shows us his wounds and gives us the courage not to conceal our own: we are permitted our own wounds.”
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