This week over at the day job we released the short film I’ve worked on throughout the year. It’s called This is Home and it features Araceli, who invites us into her story of finding a place to belong—and of extending that sense of belonging to those around her.
I’d be honored if you’d set aside five minutes to watch it. (And heck, it sure wouldn’t be a crime to pass it along, if you’re so moved.)
Going behind the scenes, I wrote here about what Araceli’s story means to me and why I’m grateful to tell these kinds of stories, and to tell them in this way.
What I didn’t say there, but I’d like to say here, is that Araceli’s story means a lot to me on another, more personal, level as well. Like Araceli, I know what it’s like to have happy memories from a place that’s far away. I know what it’s like to leave, to say goodbye, and to move somewhere totally new as a kid. I know how hard it can be to find and build a new community in a strange new place.
I also know that we humans are resilient creatures. We’re resilient creatures who need one another, who need our stories to be told, and—just as important—who need these stories to be empathetically received by other human beings.
Getting to know Araceli this year and being entrusted with the telling of this story has been a tremendous gift to me. I hope the film is a gift to Araceli, and to you as well.
Now, onto the books.
What I’ve Read Recently
Shane McCrae’s memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun (Scribner) is a difficult book to read and a tricky book to review.
It’s difficult to read because it’s the true story of a kidnapping—namely, the kidnapping of the author, by his white grandparents, when he was three years old. They kidnapped him because his father was Black and because they were the kinds of racists who say the quiet parts out loud—and act accordingly. His grandparents wanted to “save” him, in some twisted sense, from his blackness. Even if it meant lying to him about his father. Even if it meant beating him into submission until he started calling them “Mom” and “Dad.” Even if it meant stealing his childhood.
So yes, this book is difficult to read for all these reasons. But it’s also a challenging book to review because of the author’s audacious literary choices.
McCrae is an accomplished poet who teaches in an MFA program at Columbia University. I’ve read enough of his work to know he uses words with greater intentionality than most of us. He deserves our trust in that regard. But there are some long, very long, sentences in this book. Many of these sentences contain repetitions and contradictions, as if he’s editing himself (second-guessing himself?) in real time.
These bold choices do, in many cases, serve the book well; McCrae knows what he’s doing. Indeed, a boy who is kidnapped as a toddler and raised by abusive, deceptive grandparents—such a child is eventually going to grow into a man who carries complicated and confusing burdens wherever he goes. And one of the ways childhood trauma quite often reveals itself is in a fracturing of the memory. In a memoir about such a childhood, then, it would be one thing to explain this fracturing; it’s another thing entirely to demonstrate it.
A taste of McCrae’s profundity as well his capacity to bewilder:
“An occasion of terror is fundamentally unlike other occasions, and what makes an occasion of terror remarkable enough to be remembered also makes it seem as if it doesn’t belong in one’s memory; a remembered occasion of terror is a transplanted organ the body constantly tries to reject, or does reject, sometimes the body does reject it, and a hole where the memory of the original occasion of terror was or might have been is left, a space seems to be hollowed out for the memory even if the memory never occupies a space in the mind, and the hole where the memory was or might have been becomes itself an occasion of terror, but slower, but slower than the original occasion, and longer than the original occasion, boundaryless, unending, but one can turn one’s attention from it. I only notice it when I look at it, terror as the background noise of undifferentiated voices in a large crowd, the thousands of conversations in a stadium, terror as the inability to isolate a voice and comprehend it, that one can be in a stadium in which one’s memories speak, but neither to one nor to each other, and incomprehensibly, so that the noise of one’s memories is in some ways silence, but a silence of varying shades” (pp. 114-115).
Sentences like those can be a lot to handle—especially when they appear on page after page after page. But by book’s end, patient readers will be rewarded for their trust.
What I’m Reading Now
Right now I am reading and loving A Century of Poetry: 100 Poems for Searching the Heart (SPCK) by Rowan Williams. Besides being a rich collection of poems from the past hundred years, the reflections by Williams on each of these poems are what really set this book apart. This is someone who has clearly steeped himself in poetry, paying attention to poems over many years and letting them do their slow, mysterious work on him.
He makes clear right up front that this is not some compendium of the “One Hundred Best Religious Poems of the Past Century” (as if such a collection were even possible). Nor are these necessarily his favorite poems. Rather, Williams writes, “the principle of selection has been simply whether or not they open the door to some fresh, searching and challenging insights about the life of faith: do they present the language of religious belief, the images and connecting patterns in what people of faith say about their world, as something worth thinking about, worth thinking with, and capable of leaving the reader with an enhanced perception of their humanity and all that surrounds it?”
Employing that “principle of selection,” here we do find a few of the usual twentieth century suspects like Auden and Eliot. But many of the poets here are new to me, and likely will be to you as well. Williams tells us that he intended “to balance much anthologized authors . . . with less familiar names” while being intentional about including non-Western and non-Christian poets as well. His instincts are good.
As I have savored the poems in this book, I’ve thought of Pádraig Ó Tuama’s “Poetry Unbound” project. In each episode, he provides a very brief introduction to a poem—usually some autobiographical tidbit that connects him to it—before reading the poem itself slowly and carefully and with all his Irish heart. He then offers some reflections on the poem, peeling back the layers of the onion, as it were. Finally, he reads us the poem one more time. Always, the poem sounds different to me the second time around. (My all-time favorite episode is this one.)
It seems to me the Poetry Unbound method is a good way to approach this book. To first read the poem, then the reflection, then the poem again. And then to go about our day with the poem as some kind of mysterious companion.
What I Might Read Next
With Advent soon upon us, I have two books in mind for this season of holy waiting.
The first is Every Breath a Birth, a new (and apparently already sold-out!) chapbook of fiction, poetry, and art from the Image journal archives. From the introduction: “Advent and Christmas ask us to see the darkness for what it is: all-encompassing at times, even frightening, but a night that shows us a North Star. This season calls us to gather around a manger, to witness that the one who was once ‘a luminous rumor’ is now lovingly proximate and fleshed.” Amen to that.
A second book I’m planning to read during this season is Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery (Eerdmans) by John West. We are told this is a “genre-bending memoir” about addiction and recovery that takes its name (and possibly its form, somehow?) from the beloved Anglican service that alternates stories and songs. Beyond that I really don’t know what expect. People I trust speak highly of this one, though, so here we go.
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
Loved the video!!