Koi to the world

It's been a busy day. Would you mind feeding the fish for me? Click them some food.

Teaser Tuesday ~ The Power of Myth

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along. Just do the following:

* Grab the book you are currently reading.
* Open to a random page.
* Share two “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
(Don't give too much away and spoil the book for others.)
* Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

My teaser sentences:

Moyers: After our youngest son had seen Star Wars for the twelfth or thirteenth time, I said, "Why do you go so often?" He said, "For the same reason you have been reading the Old Testament all your life." He was in a new world of myth.

-- from page 18 of The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, 1988

New Voices

Saturday evening I attended the New Voices Poetry Reading at Pasha's Coffee Shop and enjoyed some of the best poetry and music I've heard in a long time. Five poets were featured: Finn Bille, who is also an accomplished storyteller; Veronique Bergeron, who wrote one of her poems just today; Ray Zimmerman, who read from his collection of nature essays this time, rather than his poetry; Bruce Majors, author of The Fields of Owl Roost; and E. Smith Gilbert, who has published extensively in the United States and Great Britain.

During the intermission, The Undoctored Originals wrapped us in smooth and sophisticated jazz. The haunting voice of the soprano saxophone of Dr. Bob Vogt, pictured at left, drew my attention and held it. Dr. Jim Woodford was on keyboard, and Dr. Rich Fastiggi played acoustic guitar. I could have listened to them all evening.

Open Mic followed the jazz, when other local poets were invited to share. I didn't come planning to write a review, so I took no notes, but I did get a few of the poets' names: Billy Holton, an intense young man whose poem inspired me to say "wow"; Chuck Hamilton, who read "My Azizam"; and Ginnie Sams (at right), who read her poem "The Blue Pony," which I first heard when she was the featured poet at Rock Point Book Store in March. Excellent poem. Jim Pfitzer, who emceed this event, used the open mic period to relate the humorous story of how he lost his beard.

Thanks to all the poets and storytellers for their powerful presentations. (And apologies to those whose names I missed.)
__________

Note: I took a couple of photos during the "action," but the lighting wasn't good and I put away my cellphone. Afterwards, Ray Zimmerman asked me to write a review and I thought, If only I'd known ahead of time! I would have brought a good camera or at least gotten a lot closer to the subjects. Knowing I could have done better (much better), I still wanted something to illustrate this review of the evening, so please forgive the poor quality of these pictures.

Charlie Brown Eggs

When my friend Donna and I went to church this morning, she took deviled eggs for the potluck lunch that followed the service. On top of the Tupperware container, she had taped this note:

Charlie Brown Eggs:
a little "devil" in
a basically "good egg"
You're a good man, Charlie Brown. And you're a clever woman, Donna. I like your quirkly thinking.

The Heart of Christianity ~ by Marcus J. Borg, 2003

The Heart of Christianity : Rediscovering a Life of Faith ~ by Marcus J. Borg, 2003, religion

"Listen to your life.  Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks.  It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably." — Frederick Buechner, quoted by Borg (page 73)

Emerging Paradigm

More and more people are beginning to understand Christianity in a noticeably different way.   Borg calls these two ways of seeing Christianity the "earlier" paradigm and the "emerging" paradigm.  A paradigm is a way of seeing the whole, a large framework for understanding reality.  The earlier paradigm is centered on belief, but the emerging paradigm revolves around the need for transformation:  (1) transforming the self through a dynamic experience of God, who is not separate from us but a part of us, and (2) transforming society.  Religions are "communities of transformation" (page 215).

Metaphorical Language

Literalism is the problem.  Borg says we need to move beyond literalism and see that religious language is mostly metaphorical language, which can be profoundly true.

When children ask about a biblical story, "Is that a true story?" they may be asking, "Did it happen?"   But they are likely to be satisfied with an answer like, "Well, I don't know if it happened or not, but I know it's a true and important story" (page 195).

Metaphorical language is MORE than historical or factual and has a surplus of meaning.  As Borg said in a lecture I attended on March 11, 2006, "The Bible is true, and some of it happened."

Relationships

The really important issue is relationship and the transformation that flows out of it.  How do we experience God?  How are we supposed to "love" God?  We "grow" our relationships by paying attention to the beloved.

Loving God means paying attention to God and to what God loves.  The way we do this is through "practice" (page 187).

In other words, it is something we DO, not something we believe.  Modern Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, has not made practice central.  Other religions do:  Judaism is primarily about following the way of Torah.  Buddhists follow the eightfold path.  Four of the five pillars of Islam are about practice, one of which is praying five times a day.  Borg says:

I have been told that the five prayers together take about forty minutes, and I have often wondered how we as Christians would be different if we spent forty minutes a day in prayer (page 188).

Practicing our relationship with God is all about "beloving" God.  Christianity is a way of life.  To love God and neighbor, we must love what God loves -- and that means not only loving the people (neighbor, self, enemy), but loving all of creation.  Have you practiced compassion today?  Have you done justice today?  Have you cared for the earth today?  Oops, now I've quit preaching and gone to meddling!  I'll end with something Borg said, when I heard him three years ago:  "Practice is how we actualize grace."

Rated:  10 of 10
I mentioned this book a couple of years ago, here:
http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2007/09/buttonhole-books.html

Update:  On Sept. 2, 2009, I wrote about this book again, here:
http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2009/09/fifteen-books-4.html

Teaser Tuesday ~ The Time Traveler's Wife

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading, which I found on Marg's Reading Adventures blog. Anyone can play along. Just do the following:

* Grab the book you are currently reading.
* Open to a random page.
* Share two “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS. (Make sure what you share doesn’t give too much away. You don’t want to ruin the book for others.)

* Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

My teaser sentences:

As I wrap my hair in a towel I see myself blurred in the mirror by steam and time seems to fold over onto itself and I see myself as a layering of all my previous days and years and all the time that is coming and suddenly I feel as though I've become invisible. But then the feeling is gone as fast as it came and I stand still for a minute and then I pull on my bathrobe and open the door and go on.

-- from pages 150-151 of The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, 2003

(Today's not Tuesday, you say? Ooooh, you caught me, didn't you? But today's the first I'd heard of this great idea, and I simply couldn't wait. I'll try to do this on Tuesdays from now on.)

NPR's 100 Best Beach Books Ever

I saw NPR's list of the 100 Best Beach Books Ever (almost 16,000 "book-loving NPR-types" cast some 136,000 votes in their poll) at Alisonwonderland's So Many Books, So Little Time. I haven't posted a list like this in a long time, so here it is, with the books I've read in bold:

1. The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling (I didn't read all of them)
2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
3. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
4. Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding
5. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
6. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells
7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
9. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg
10. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

11. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
12. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
13. The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
14. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
15. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
17. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
18. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
19. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
20. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

21. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
22. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver
23. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith
24. The World According to Garp, by John Irving
25. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
26. The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy
27. Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
28. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
29. The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler
30. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer

31. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
32. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
33. The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant
34. Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
35. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
36. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier
37. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
38. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
39. The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough
40. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

41. Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
42. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
43. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
44. Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
45. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo
46. Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes
47. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
48. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins
49. I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb
50. Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

51. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
52. The Stand, by Stephen King
53. She's Come Undone, by Wally Lamb
54. Dune, by Frank Herbert
55. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
56. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
57. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
58. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
59. The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
60. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

61. Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver
62. Jaws, by Peter Benchley
63. Good in Bed, by Jennifer Weiner
64. Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
65. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson
66. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
67. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
68. Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
69. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
70. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

71. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
72. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
73. Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns
74. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
74. Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe [tie]
76. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
77. Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon
78. The Shell Seekers, by Rosamunde Pilcher
79. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
80. Eye of the Needle, by Ken Follett

81. Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
82. The Pilot's Wife, by Anita Shreve [tie]
83. All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
84. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
85. The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
86. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
87. One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich
88. Shogun, by James Clavell
89. Dracula, by Bram Stoker
90. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera

91. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow
92. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
93. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
94. Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris
95. Summer Sisters, by Judy Blume
96. The Shining, by Stephen King
97. How Stella Got Her Groove Back, by Terry McMillan
98. Lamb, by Christopher Moore
99. Sick Puppy, by Carl Hiaasen
100. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

That's 45 for me, with several others on my TBR list. Which of them have you read? What is your favorite "beach book"?