JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

I order it and it takes a while to come. An email says it will be slow. I keep the email in my inbox, keep the order in my mind. I’m waiting. Watching. Where is it? When will it get here? Then Friday morning I swing open the little door with the key and find it there in the mailbox, beneath all the envelopes a brown paper package (but not “tied up with string”, sealed with staples instead) and I come home carrying children and wondering how soon I can open it.

At lunch I sit down with the stack of mail and fingers migrate to the package. I tear it open to see the angel’s marble face on the cover. It’s in my hands now. Thinner than I thought. Bluer than I thought. The Foreword’s mystery writer is revealed: I am delighted, exclaiming and reading aloud the provocative prose to my lunchtime companions. I wonder how long it will take me to read the whole thing. How much time I should set aside. Even though books are sacred in our house and must never be baptized, I find myself flipping through the pages with salsa fingers, risking stains. I am hungry.

I’m tired today from our activities. And I’ve been taking time to read this book I so desired. Therefore posts today will be a bit brief. But I want to mention another book…

Jay McCarthy today summarized a book he read. It is a book I have read many times. I’m surprised I can’t find it on the shelf above my desk, but I remember the cover of the paperback copy I owned: white with drawing in purple, blue and black (barbed wire).

I feel strong fondness for this book. I’m not sure if it is because it is one of the books I remember seeing my father read when I was younger. Or if it is because it was one of the books that my favorite teacher in high school (perhaps my favorite teacher ever) assigned us to read in his class. Or I think that it is the book itself, rich in its rawness, honesty and stories of suffering. I wish I had my copy. I remember what it said about faith and fear, how precious were pieces of bread or Bible in the gulag.

After we read the book, my teacher assigned us the author’s commencement address at Harvard in 1978: A World Split Apart. I’m grateful for Jay’s reminder of this book and author. Although the speech is old, 25 years old last June, it is worth reading again today.

truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter

[…]

This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man — the master of the world — does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society.

[…]

After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music. All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.