Dear All Souls Book Group,

Enclosed are a couple of items, the first being the Summer Schedule for the All Souls Book Group, the second being the poem and prayer read at last Monday's very fine meeting about Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge.  Thanks to everyone who was there.  

I.  Summer Schedule for the All Souls Book Group

The Book Group has made its “Group Pick” summer selections, and they are 1) John Steinbeck's 1952 novel, East of Eden and 2) Mary Gordon's Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels (2009).

East of Eden meetings:

• Monday, June 28, 7 p.m., the Warner Building: Meet to discuss first half of the novel
• Monday, July 12, 7 p.m., the Warner Building: Meet to discuss all of the novel

Reading Jesus meetings:

• Monday, July 26, 7 p.m., the Warner Building: Meet to discuss Part I of Reading Jesus
• Monday, August 9, 7 p.m., the Warner Building: Meet to discuss Parts II and III of Reading Jesus

A word about Reading Jesus for those of you who don't know the book:  I have read Reading Jesus and think it excellent.  Gordon is a fiction writer who was raised as a Roman Catholic, and who, as a Roman Catholic, was "discouraged" from reading Scripture.  Writes Gordon in the introduction to Reading Jesus: 

“Brought up as a Roman Catholic in the 1950s, I did not grow up reading the Bible.  We weren’t forbidden Scriptural reading, but it was certainly discouraged: that was something Protestants did.  Protestants, who didn’t realize the danger of individual interpretation, the rich safety of ex cathedra pronouncements, worked out by a body of ordained men over centuries of inspired time.

And so I didn't read the Gospels.  Rather, I heard the portions of them that were read out from the pulpit each Sunday.  This was a singular way of knowing a text: fragmented, chopped up, interpreted before I had a chance really to digest what the words had said.  And yet I have always been able to say with certainty that the figure of Jesus and the words of Jesus have been at the center of my ethical and religious imagination.  This struck me, suddenly, as very strange indeed."

And so Gordon sets about to reading the Gospels.  The result is a 200 page book organized into eight-to-fifteen page sections, some sections treating individual episodes from Jesus’ life, and/ or his parables, others looking at a concatenation of Jesus’s teachings which Gordon see as pursuing the same question/ challenge/ offering.  Each section begins with the gospel text (s) under consideration—-which is great, in that you don’t have to be shuttling between Gordon’s book and the Bible—-then opens out to Gordon’s reflections on those texts.  The brevity and discreteness of the sections let you meditate on the given gospel text for however long you want.  Perhaps you too would like to write out your own questions, as has Gordon, and so you keep a journal with Gordon’s book, engaging in a conversation both with the gospel story and with Gordon’s response to the story.  Gordon’s book lets you experience the Gospels freshly again, and with a friend—-a clear-eyed, brave, articulate, patient, strong-minded but unobtrusive, friend.  Some of you may remember Mark Jarman, the wonderful poet who read at All Souls as part of the Kay Falk Literary Project two years ago.  Well, he has a blurb on the back of Gordon’s book, which says:

"A fresh and humane take on the Gospels.  Gordon's approach is aware of, but not burdened by, doctrine.  Her many insightful questions give expression to thoughts which have, for many readers and for many years, been waiting to be asked aloud." -- Mark Jarman

And here’s Publishers Weekly on the book:

“Gordon tackles the power and puzzle of the Christian gospels with measure and imagination, providing welcome relief for those left cold by scholarly or fundamentalist parsing. . . Her savoring of particular lines is poetic and amplifies the beauty and sometimes ambiguous challenge of the language, stories, and injunctions of the gospels.”

Both East of Eden and Reading Jesus may be purchased at Accent on Books, at reduced cost, thanks to parishioner Lewis Sorrells. 

And what will we be reading/ discussing in late August, early September?  True to my idiom, "I haven't decided yet."   Either we'll be reading a Philip Roth novel, American Pastoral; a novel by Toni Morrison--and I don't know which one yet; or a collection stories, compiled by me, by writers Anton Chekhov, William Trevor, Alive Munro, Deborah Eisenberg, Tobias Wolff, Peter Orner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander and Z.Z. Packer.  Or we may do a course just on the stories of A. Chekhov.  I should know which of these it will be in a couple of weeks, and when I do, I will e-mail you. 

II.  Poem and Prayer read at last Monday's meeting

The following poem and prayer were read at last Monday's (May 17th) meeting.  The poem was supplied by yours truly, the prayer by Theresa Prymuszewski.  Thank you, Theresa.

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

--RICHARD WILBUR (b. 1921)

Hopi Prayer

Hold on to what is good
even if it's a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe
even if it's a tree that stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do
even if it's a long way from here.
Hold on to your life
even if it's easier to let go.
Hold on to my hand
even when I've gone away from you.

(This prayer is one of many in an anthology called Giving Sorrow Words: Poems of Strength and Solace, ed. by Karen vanMeenen and Charles Rossiter, with Kathleen Adams.  The book is a selection from all the poems and prayers that "poured" into the National Association for Poetry Therapy in the wake of 9/11.  Thanks, Theresa, for bringing this book to our attention.)

I will miss you all this summer...VERY MUCH!!  And please, if there are any questions about any old thing, e-mail me: I will be checking e-mail daily.

All best,