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312. Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:   Nadia Bolz-Weber

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Theology, Christian

204 pages, published September 10, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint is a memoir by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran Pastor who started the Church of All Sinners and Saints in Denver and who took a very unlikely path to the clergy.  Bolz-Weber is a former standup comic, a recovering alcoholic, is heavily tattooed and regularly uses foul language.  In this book, she shares her theological insights and a personal narrative of a flawed, beautiful, and unlikely life of faith.

Quotes 

“God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word … it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace – like saying, “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be the good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

 

“Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.”

 

“The image of God I was raised with was this: God is an angry bastard with a killer surveillance system who had to send his little boy (and he only had one) to suffer and die because I was bad. But the good news was that if I believed this story and then tried really hard to be good, when I died I would go to heaven, where I would live in a golden gated community with God and all the other people who believed and did the same things as I did…..this type of thinking portrays God as just as mean and selfish as we are, which feels like it has a lot more to do with our own greed and spite than it has to do with God.”

 

“I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.”

 

“It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all. It just keeps us chained.”

 

“God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.

New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I’m right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming- never even hoped for- but ends up being what we needed all along.”

 

“Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.”

 

“This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.”

 

“Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive.”

 

“Forgiveness is a big deal to Jesus, and like that guy in high school with a garage band, he talks about it, like, all the time.”

 

“God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.”

 

“It happens to all of us,” I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. “God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”

 

“We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.”

 

“Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, we still make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.”

 

“The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in a single interminable moment, when we discover the bomb, absolutely everything changes. But when we recall it from our now forever-changed lives, when we start with the plain brown wrapping, it looks like every other package, every other morning, every other walk.”

 

“Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, ‘Screw you. I’ll take the destruction please.’ God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, ‘that’s adorable,’ and then plunked me down on an entirely different path.”

 

“God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My selfishness is not the end-all… instead, it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans as flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace—like saying “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be a good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

 

“This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is fucking offensive.”

 

“When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on their own, I just have no other explanation than this: God.”

 

“This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than “inclusion.” Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing “them” to join “us”—like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don’t own.”

 

“Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus’ baptism, when the devil says to him, “If you are the Son of God…” he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question.”

 

“When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life. And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, “I am baptized” or “I am God’s,” because nothing else gets to tell you who you are.”

 

“It was in those first couple months that I fell in love with liturgy, the ancient pattern of worship shared mainly in the Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Episcopal churches. It felt like a gift that had been caretaken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has flowed long before us and will continue long after us. A stream that we get to swim in, so that we, like those who came before us, can be immersed in language of truth and promise and grace. Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering; my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force.” 

My Take

Pastrix is a compelling, well written memoir.  Author Nadia Bolz-Weber is a strong writer has a lot of new and powerful things to say.  I also appreciated her explanations of how things work in a church.  For example, her explanation on the liturgy was very interesting and informative.  As a recovering alcoholic, heavily tattooed former standup comedian, she comes at religion for a different angle than books that I have previously read.  While I didn’t agree with everything she wrote, she certainly gave me a lot to think about and broadened my perspective on several theological issues.  Recommended.

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311. Educated

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tara Westover

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

334 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Educated is a memoir by Tara Westover, a remarkable woman who grew up in large family from a very small town in Idaho.  Her parents were Mormon survivalists and believed that public education was an indoctrination scheme by the Socialist government.  Consequently, Tara never went to school until she got into BYU after obtaining a GED and taught herself enough math to perform sufficiently well on the SAT.  She would go on to ultimately receive a PhD from Cambridge University.   Educated is her story of that journey and the pain she had to endure at the hands of her parents and a few siblings who actively tried to undermine all of her efforts and, in the case of her brother Shawn, physically abused her to keep her in her place.

Quotes 

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”

 

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

 

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”

 

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy. Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”

 

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”

 

“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.”

 

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

 

“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”

 

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”

 

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”

 

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”

 

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

 

“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.  You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education” 

My Take

Educated is an extremely well written, fascinating book that gives the reader an inside look at life growing up inside a Mormon fundamentalist, survivalist family in an isolated Idaho town.  Raised by tyrannical, crazy father who denied her any type of education and a mother who refused to protect her from an abusive older brother, it is truly remarkable that Tara Westover would go on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University in the UK.  While her story is incredibly impressive, I often grew frustrated by her continual, and I mean continual, efforts over many, many years to be a part of a family that so betrayed her.  When she finally, finally realizes that what she seeks is not possible, my response was, “well, it’s about time!”  Still, I highly recommend Educated, an engrossing book.

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309. Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Katy Fassett

Author:   J.B. West, Mary Lynn Kotz

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Memoir, Biography

398 pages, published June 21, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Upstairs at the White House is a behind the scenes chronicle of the first families during the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon administrations told by Head Usher J.B. West who served in the White House for 28 years.  West offers fly on the wall observations of the personalities, victories, challenges, and the times of each President he served as well as their wives, and children (as well as houseguests–including friends, relatives, and heads of state).

Quotes 

“The secret was loyalty to the White House and to the Presidency, rather than to whoever happens to be occupying the office for four years, or eight.”

 

“The staff did have a little difficulty adjusting to Mr. Churchill’s way of living. The first thing in the morning, he declined the customary orange juice and called for a drink of Scotch. His staff, a large entourage of aides and a valet, followed suit. The butlers wore a path in the carpet carrying trays laden with brandy to his suite. We got used to his “jumpsuit,” the extraordinary one-piece uniform he wore every day, but the servants never quite got over seeing him naked in his room when they’d go up to serve brandy. It was the jumpsuit or nothing. In his room, Mr. Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.”

 

“It took twenty big army trucks, jam-packed to the corners, to move the Roosevelts’ monumental twelve-year collection of possessions out of the White House. We packed night and day, for one entire week.”

 

“The next evening, Fields, his pride hurt, dumped two big splashes of bourbon over the ice and served it to Mrs. Truman. She tasted the drink. Then she beamed. “Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds!”

 

“There’s just one thing I draw the line at,” he said, “and that’s any kind of attack on my family. Any man can make mistakes, even if he’s trying with all his heart and mind to do the best thing for his country. But a man’s family ought to be sacred. There was one columnist who wrote some lie about my family when I was in the Senate and instead of writing him a letter I called him on the phone and I said you so-and-so, if you say another word about my family, I’ll come down to your office and shoot you.”

 

“The Trumans did not reserve fancy entertaining only for the great or near-great. They catered also to their old friends, who had never had an appointment with destiny.”

 

“I have but one career, and its name is Ike,” Mrs. Eisenhower once announced.” 

My Take

I found Upstairs at the White House to be a fascinating inside look at the personal lives of five twentieth century Presidents and their families.  The time period covered (World War II through the Vietnam war) was one of the most tumultuous in American history and West offers a unique, unparalleled view of it.  I especially enjoyed his description of Winston Churchill clothing habits while visiting FDR.  For Winston it was either his one piece jumpsuit or nudity as several unassuming members of the White House staff discovered.

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308. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mark Manson

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Psychology, Happiness

224 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In this original take on a self-help guide, prolific blogger Mark Manson provides the reader with his take on how to truly become a better, happier person.  Manson eschews positivity and affirmations.  Manson argues that because humans are flawed and limited, we should get to know our limitations and accept them.  Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, and start confronting painful truths, then we can find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek and need to be happy.

Quotes 

“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”

 

“Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.  Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.”

 

“Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.”

 

“Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”

 

“The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life. If I’m choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I’m rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn. The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X.”

 

“This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.”

 

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”

 

“But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.”

 

“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”

 

“It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.”

 

“There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. It’s impossible not to be. Choosing to not consciously interpret events in our lives is still an interpretation of the events of our lives.”

 

“To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action.”

 

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”

 

“Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.”

 

“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”

 

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

 

“Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.”

 

“Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”

 

“Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.”

 

“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.”

 

“Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room. Everybody wants that. It’s easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”

 

“Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.”

 

“The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies—that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.”

 

“People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”

 

“I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.”

 

“Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.”

 

“Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”

 

“If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.”

 

“Because here’s something that’s weird but true: we don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much.”

 

“this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.”

 

“We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it.”

 

“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”

 

“My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.

The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

 

“Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.”

My Take

While I never use the “f” word and not a big fan of its constant use in this book, I was still very impressed with many of the sentiments and ideas articulated by Mark Manson.  Like 12 Rules for Life:  An Antidote to Chaos and The Happiness Project, this book is chock full of excellent advice on how to live a better life.

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307. Undermajordomo Minor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Kathy Hewitt

Author:   Patrick deWitt

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Humor

224 pages, published September 8, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Lucy (aka Lucien) Minor has been hired to work under the Major Domo in the dilapidated Castle Van Aux which is inhabited by a mysterious Baron who spends his time pining for his Baroness who abandoned him long ago.  While trying to figure out life in the castle and life in general, Lucy meets the beautiful Klara, a poor local girl with whom he falls deeply in love.  Things turn problematic when Adolphus, a brutish soldier, returns to the village and tries to claim Klara.

Quotes 

“I find the constant upkeep of the body woefully fatiguing, don’t you?”

 

“She wasn’t precisely sure what she was walking toward but she wouldn’t have turned around for the world.”

 

“As it happens, I’m chasing after a girl, Father. For it has come to pass that I’ve fallen in love.” Father Raymond leaned in. “In love, you say?” “Just so.” “And what is that like? I’ve often wondered about it.” Lucy said, “It is a glory and a torment.” “Really? Would you not recommend it, then?” “I would recommend it highly. Just to say it’s not for the faint of heart.”

 

“Easier asked than answered,” said Mr. Olderglough. “For our days here are varied, and so our needs are also varied. On the whole, I think you’ll find the workload to be light in that you will surely have ample free time. But then there comes the question of what one does with his free time. I have occasionally felt that this was the most difficult part of the job; indeed, the most difficult part of being alive, wouldn’t you say, boy?”

 

“Let us look within ourselves and search out the dormant warrior.” “Mine is dormant to the point of non-existence, sir.”

 

“We must try again,” said Lucy. “Must we?” Tomas asked. “Of course we must. Otherwise we’ll die here.” Here Tomas spoke gently, and with tranquil understanding. “That’s not how we see it, Lucy.” “How do you see it?” “We’ll live here.”

 

“You always bring God into arguments you know you’re losing, for the liar is lonely, and welcomes all manner of company.”

 

“A man accepts an inferior cup of tea, telling himself it is only a small thing. But what comes next? Do you see?”

 

“Walking away on the springy legs of a foal he thought, How remarkable a thing a lie is. He wondered if it wasn’t man’s finest achievement, and after some consideration, he decided it was.”

 

“And yet he held his tongue, wanting his farewell with Marina to be peaceable, not out of any magnanimity, but so that after Tor ruined her—he felt confident Tor would ruin her—and she was once more alone, she would think of Lucy’s graciousness and feel the long-lingering sting of bitter regret.”

 

“He wandered here and there over rolling hills.

He never saw the ocean but

dreamed of it often enough.” 

My Take

Much like his previous book The Sisters Brothers, Undermajordomo Minor is a peculiar, but fascinating book.  In his twisting of the fable format, Patrick deWitt explores such universal themes as the agony and ecstasy of love, man’s search for meaning, the futility of war, standing up for what you believe, and even sexual perversion (from an extremely bizarre section that came out of nowhere).  While it’s a strange brew of a book that mixes all of this together amidst the backdrop of a small village in 19th Century Europe, I found it to be a quick and compelling read.

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306. Warlight

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Michael Ondaatje

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

304 pages, published June 7, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Using a shifting time narrative, Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel as he attempts to piece together and make sense of the story of his past.  Also present in this shadowy novel are his sister unforgiving sister Rachel, his Mother Rose (a British spy during and after World War II) and the enigmatic characters nicknamed the Moth and the Darter by Nathaniel and his sister.  All is not as it seems as this novel of intrigue, familial relationships, search for meaning and forgiveness.

Quotes 

“Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.”

 

“When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.”

 

“I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in;”

 

“We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe.”

 

“a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.”

 

“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.”

 

“the lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out”

 

“We find ourselves in a “collage” in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….”

 

“Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?…Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to me become clear and evident when I look back?”

 

“Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery.”

 

“Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.” 

My Take

Warlight is a beautifully written novel by author and poet Michael Ondaatje, who also wrote The English Patient, another mesmerizing book.  While I enjoyed the story of Nathaniel, a young British boy who slowly discovers that his mother was a famed British spy, I was even more captivated by the self discovery Nathaniel engages in as the truth unfolds in a variety of ways.  It was also a treat to read Ondaatje’s lovely, poetic writing.

 

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304. Citizens of London: The Americans who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Nichole Birkhold

Author:   Lynne Olson

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, World War II, Foreign

496 pages, published February 2, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Citizens of London tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain.  It is told from the perspective of three key Americans stationed in London: Edward R. Murrow (a wartime correspondent and the head of CBS News in Europe), Averell Harriman (a millionaire who ran FDR’s Lend-Lease program in London) and John Winant (the shy, idealistic U.S. ambassador to Britain).  Each man formed close ties with Winston Churchill, including becoming romantically involved with members of the prime minister’s family.  The book chronicles the dramatic personal journeys of these remarkable men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and reluctant American public to back the British at a critical time.

Quotes 

“The fondness of Britons for the uninhibited pilots was reciprocated by most of the Americans. Even those who had no real interest in aiding the British cause when they first enlisted in the RAF found themselves admiring the bravery and determination of the public in standing up to Hitler. “They were, without a shadow of a doubt, the most courageous people that I have ever known,” said one American. “Although their cities were in shambles, I never heard one Briton lose faith.” Another U.S. pilot declared: “To fight side by side with these people was the greatest of privileges.” After the war, Bill Geiger, who’d been a student at California’s Pasadena City College before he came to Britain, recalled the exact moment when he knew that the British cause was his as well. Leaving a London tailor’s shop, where he had just been measured for his RAF uniform, he noticed a man working at the bottom of a deep hole in the street, surrounded by barricades. “What’s he doing?” Geiger asked a policeman. “Sir,” the bobby replied, “he’s defusing a bomb.” Everyone standing there—the bobby, pedestrians, the man in the hole—was “so cool and calm and collected,” Geiger remembered. He added: “You get caught up in that kind of courage, and then pretty soon you say, ‘Now I want to be a part of this. I want to be part of these people. I want to be a part of what I see here and what I feel here.’ ”

 

“In a small town in southern England, another convoy of American tanks and trucks came to a brief stop in front of a row of houses, watched by a crowd of townspeople. Suddenly, a woman emerged from a house carrying bowls of strawberries and cream. She handed one to a young lieutenant named Bob Sheehan, kissed his forehead, and whispered, “Good luck. Come back safe.” Galvanized by her gesture of kindness, other townspeople disappeared into their houses and moments later brought out tea and lemonade for the hot, thirsty GIs.”

 

“Indeed, in the midst of the devastation, most Londoners demonstrated a dogged determination to live as normal a life as possible: it was their way of thumbing their nose at Hitler. Each morning, millions of people left their shelters or basements and, despite the constant disruption of the train and Underground systems, went to work as usual, many hitchhiking or walking ten or more miles a day. Their commutes, which frequently involved long detours around collapsed buildings, impassable streets, and unexploded bombs, could take hours. Of the staff at Claridge’s, Ben Robertson noted after a particularly violent raid: “Everyone was red-eyed and tired, but they were all there.” The head waiter’s house had been demolished during the night, but he had shown up, as had the woman who cleaned Robertson’s room. “She was buried three hours in the basement of her house,” another maid told Robertson. “Three hours! And she got to work this morning as usual.”

 

“we’re inclined to say what we think, even when we have not thought very much.”

 

“In Europe, Murrow observed to his wife, people were dying and “a thousand years of civilization [were] being smashed” while America remained on the sidelines. How could one possibly be objective or neutral about that?”

 

“There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes. Indeed, while the standard of living plummeted for the vast majority of Britons during the war, many if not most Americans lived better than ever before.”

 

“Adding to this uninhibited atmosphere was the heady new sense of freedom and independence experienced by young British women. Having grown up in a society in which few women worked outside the home or went to college, they had been expected to remain primly in life’s background and to demand little more than the satisfaction of having served their husbands and raised their children. That staid and predictable existence was shattered, however, when Britain declared war on Germany. Hundreds of thousands of women, even debutantes like Pamela who had never so much as boiled an egg, signed up for jobs in defense industries or enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and other military units. As one former deb recalled, “It was a liberation, it set me free.” Women began wearing slacks. They appeared in public without stockings. They smoked, they drank, and they had sex outside marriage—more often and with fewer qualms and less guilt than their mothers and grandmothers. The few American women in the capital were infected with a similar sense of freedom. “London was a Garden of Eden for women in those years,” recalled Time-Life correspondent Mary Welsh, “a serpent dangling from every tree and street lamp, offering tempting gifts, companionship, warm if temporary affections.”

 

“[Ed Murrow]would remark during a BBC broadcast: “It is difficult to explain the meaning of cold to people who are warm, the meaning of privation to people who have wanted only for luxuries…It is almost impossible to substitute intelligence for experience.”

 

“As they left, Anglican vicars in the area pinned a notice from their bishop to the front doors of their evacuated churches. Addressed to “our United States allies,” the notice read in part: “This church has stood for several hundred years. Around it has grown a community which has lived in these houses and tilled these fields ever since there was a church. This church, this churchyard in which their loved ones lie at rest; these homes, these fields are as dear to those who have left them as are the homes and graves which you, our Allied, have left behind you. They hope to return one day, as you hope to return to yours, to find them waiting to welcome them home.”

 

“MAY 10, THE day that Roosevelt issued his nonresponse to Churchill’s plea for U.S. belligerency, German bombers returned to London. As devastating as the previous raids had been, none came close to the savagery and destructiveness of this new firestorm. By the next morning, more than two thousand fires were raging out of control across the city, from Hammersmith in the west to Romford in the east, some twenty miles away. The damage to London’s landmarks was catastrophic. Queen’s Hall, the city’s premier concert venue, lay in ruins, while more than a quarter of a million books were incinerated and a number of galleries destroyed at the British Museum. Bombs smashed into St. James’s Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and Parliament. The medieval Westminster Hall, though badly damaged, was saved, but not so the House of Commons chamber, the scene of some of the most dramatic events in modern British history. Completely gutted by fire, the little hall, with its vaulted, timbered ceiling, was nothing but a mound of debris, gaping open to the sky. Every major railroad station but one was put out of action for weeks, as were many Underground stations and lines. A third of the streets in greater London were impassable, and almost a million people were without gas, water, and electricity. The death toll was even more calamitous: never in London’s history had so many of its residents—1,436—died in a single night.”

 

“AN ESTIMATED 1,100 Londoners were killed during the April 16 raids—the most devastating night of the Blitz thus far. But it held that distinction for only three days; on April 19, German bombers hit London again, killing more than 1,200 persons. Almost half a million London residents lost their homes in the two attacks.”

 

“In being able to learn from his mistakes and grow, Eisenhower “was transformed from a mere person into a personage.”

 

“In its first ten months of operation, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and some 1,900 crewmen; those numbers would skyrocket over the next year and a half. By the end of the conflict, the U.S. air operations in Europe would suffer more fatalities—26,000—than the entire Marine Corps in its protracted bloody campaigns in the Pacific. “To fly in the Eighth Air Force in those days,” recalled Harrison Salisbury, “was to hold a ticket to a funeral. Your own.” The savagery of the air war was not due solely to the ferocity of German defenses. Early in the war, when the Air Force brass in Washington were touting the advantages of high-altitude flying, they failed to realize that the extreme atmospheric conditions experienced by the crews could kill as effectively as a Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf. “There are apparently little things that one doesn’t think about prior to getting into operations,” commented Dr. Malcolm Grow, the Eighth’s chief medical officer. Little things like oxygen deprivation, which could cause unconsciousness and death in a matter of minutes, or extensive frostbite, caused by several hours of exposure to temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees below zero. Until early 1944, more airmen were hospitalized for frostbite than for combat injuries.”

 

“In early 1941, the United States was a fifth-rate military power, its armed forces ranking seventeenth in size compared to other world forces. Long starved of financial support by Congress and the White House, the Army had little more than 300,000 men (most of them just drafted), compared to Germany’s 4 million and Britain’s 1.6 million. Not a single armored division existed, and draftees were training with broomsticks for rifles and sawhorses for antitank guns. The Army was in such bad shape, according to one military historian, that it would not have been able to “repel raids across the Rio Grande by Mexican bandits.” Although the Navy was in better condition, nearly half its vessels dated back to World War I. The Army Air Corps, meanwhile, could boast only about two thousand combat aircraft.” 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed Citizens of London, a terrific book that transports the reader to London and the United Kingdom during World II.  I gained a new perspective on the conflict and increased my appreciation for the brave and unflinching Britons who could not be cowed by Hitler despite immeasurable suffering.  It was disappointing to read how reluctantly America came to the aid of this crucial ally, but encouraging to see how wholeheartedly we did once we committed to fighting in this terrible war.  The four men at the center of the book (Churchill, Harriman, Winant, and Murrow) are fascinating characters who were truly indispensable men of their time.  Highly recommended.

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303. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Annie Duke

Genre:  Non Fiction, Psychology, Self Improvement, Science

288 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, lays out the case for treating your decisions as bets and how to improve the odds of making a better decision.  Duke conveys her message with a compelling mix of scientific research, interesting anecdotes from the domains of business, sports, politics, poker and her own personal experience.  She counsels that we should avoid “resulting,” i.e. evaluating a decision only on the basis of the result rather than the process that went into making the decision.  Even the best decision doesn’t result in the best outcome every time. There’s always an element of luck that you can’t control and there is always information that is hidden from view.  Her approach is to ask several questions:  How sure am I?  What are the possible ways things could turn out?  What decision has the highest odds of success?  Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time?  Is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making?

Quotes 

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”

 

“Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”

“Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.”

 

“In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.”

 

“…thinking in bets is not a miracle cure. Thinking in bets won’t make self-serving bias disappear or motivated reasoning vanish into thin air. But it will make those things better. And a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives.”

 

“Certainly, in exchange for losing the fear of taking blame for bad outcomes, you also lose the unadulterated high of claiming good outcomes were 100% skill. That’s a trade you should take. Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good. We are in a better place when we don’t have to live at the edges. Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between, is not a very self-compassionate way to live.”

 

“As Nietzsche points out, regret can do nothing to change what has already happened. We just wallow in remorse about something over which we no longer have any control. But if regret happened before a decision instead of after, the experience of regret might get us to change a choice likely to result in a bad outcome.” 

My Take

Thinking in Bets is a page turner of a book with some valuable content to get you thinking about how you make decisions. Annie Duke has done her homework which is reflected her discussion of the current scientific research.  She is also a strong writer and this book was hard to put down. My biggest takeaway was to try to avoid “resulting,” that is, the tendency to evaluate decisions solely on the basis of the result achieved.  Sometimes we get lucky or unlucky.  We shouldn’t take too much credit with the former and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much with the latter.  Appreciating the role of luck and our ingrained biases help us to make better decisions and live with both the positive and negative results of our decisions with greater equanimity.

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297. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Summer Youngs

Author:   Dalai Lama XIV, Desmond Tutu, Douglas Carlton Abrams

Genre:  Non Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Self Improvement, Theology, Happiness

354 pages, published October 18, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In The Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu (both of whom are winners of the Nobel Prize,  spiritual masters, moral leaders, and are close friends), meet in Dharamsala for the Dalai Lama’s birthday and to discuss the concept of living a life of joy even in the face of adversity.  As narrated by Douglas Abrams, the book has three layers:  their own stories and teachings about joy, the most recent findings in the science of deep happiness, and the daily practices that underpin their own emotional and spiritual lives.  While both the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu have been experienced significant adversity, they have found a way to use that struggle to be joyful and to spread joy to others.

Quotes 

“The three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous.”

 

“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience.”

 

“The Dead Sea in the Middle East receives fresh water, but it has no outlet, so it doesn’t pass the water out. It receives beautiful water from the rivers, and the water goes dank. I mean, it just goes bad. And that’s why it is the Dead Sea. It receives and does not give. In the end generosity is the best way of becoming more, more, and more joyful.”

 

“Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.”

 

“Marriages, even the best ones—perhaps especially the best ones—are an ongoing process of spoken and unspoken forgiveness.”

 

“We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.”

 

“When you are grateful,’ Brother Steindl-Rast explained, ‘you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and respectful to all people. The grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people. A grateful world is a happy world.”

 

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

 

“I think that the scientists are right,” the Dalai Lama concluded. “People who are always laughing have a sense of abandon and ease. They are less likely to have a heart attack than those people who are really serious and who have difficulty connecting with other people. Those serious people are in real danger.”

 

“Much depends on your attitude. If you are filled with negative judgment and anger, then you will feel separate from other people. You will feel lonely. But if you have an open heart and are filled with trust and friendship, even if you are physically alone, even living a hermit’s life, you will never feel lonely.”

 

“We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another. We shrivel when we are not able to interact. I mean that is part of the reason why solitary confinement is such a horrendous punishment. We depend on the other in order for us to be fully who we are. (…) The concept of Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.”

 

“You show your humanity by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others.”

 

“One of my practices comes from an ancient Indian teacher. He taught that when you experience some tragic situation, think about it. If there’s no way to overcome the tragedy, then there is no use worrying too much. So I practice that. (The Dalai Lama was referring to the eighth-century Buddhist master Shantideva, who wrote, “If something can be done about the situation, what need is there for dejection? And if nothing can be done about it, what use is there for being dejected?”

 

“What the Dalai Lama and I are offering,” the Archbishop added, “is a way of handling your worries: thinking about others. You can think about others who are in a similar situation or perhaps even in a worse situation, but who have survived, even thrived. It does help quite a lot to see yourself as part of a greater whole.” Once again, the path of joy was connection and the path of sorrow was separation. When we see others as separate, they become a threat. When we see others as part of us, as connected, as interdependent, then there is no challenge we cannot face—together.”

 

“Joy is the reward, really, of seeking to give joy to others. When you show compassion, when you show caring, when you show love to others, do things for others, in a wonderful way you have a deep joy that you can get in no other way. You can’t buy it with money. You can be the richest person on Earth, but if you care only about yourself, I can bet my bottom dollar you will not be happy and joyful. But when you are caring, compassionate, more concerned about the welfare of others than about your own, wonderfully, wonderfully, you suddenly feel a warm glow in your heart, because you have, in fact, wiped the tears from the eyes of another.”

 

“If you are setting out to be joyful you are not going to end up being joyful. You’re going to find yourself turned in on yourself. It’s like a flower. You open, you blossom, really because of other people. And I think some suffering, maybe even intense suffering, is a necessary ingredient for life, certainly for developing compassion.”

 

“There are going to be frustrations in life. The question is not: How do I escape? It is: How can I use this as something positive?”

 

“Discovering more joy does not, save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreaks without being broken.” 

My Take

I really enjoyed The Book of Joy, especially its focus on gratitude and kindness as the cornerstones of a joyful life.  I completely agree with this sentiment.  In fact, I believe that you cannot be happy unless you are grateful and that envy is a killer of joy and happiness.  I also appreciated that both the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu emphasized that suffering is not the enemy of joy.  In fact, suffering allows us to gain compassion for others and, in the end, can increase our own joy.  A thought provoking book with lots of practical applications for increasing your own joy and happiness.

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295. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Betty Lipstreu

Author:   Timothy Keller

Genre:  Non Fiction, Theology

293 pages, published February 14, 2008

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Throughout his life, Tim Keller, a prolific Christian writer and the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has encountered many skeptics and doubters who have posed questions to Keller about the existence and nature of God.  Why is there suffering in the world? How could a loving God send people to Hell? Why isn’t Christianity more inclusive? Shouldn’t the Christian God be a god of love? How can one religion be “right” and the rest “wrong”? Why have so many wars been fought in the name of God?  In The Reason for God, Keller addresses these challenges and provides well reasoned, thoughtful and compelling responses.

Quotes 

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”

 

“The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.”

 

“The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”

 

“It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.”

 

“If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.”

 

“When we look at the whole scope of this story line, we see clearly that Christianity is not only about getting one’s individual sins forgiven so we can go to heaven. That is an important means of God’s salvation, but not the final end or purpose of it. The purpose of Jesus’s coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it. It is not just to bring personal forgiveness and peace, but also justice and shalom to the world. God created both the body and soul, and the resurrection of Jesus shows that he is going to redeem both body and soul. The work of the Spirit of God is not only to save souls but also to care and cultivate the face of the earth, the material world.”

 

“We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’ miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.”

 

“To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense?”

 

“…the basic premise of religion—that if you live a good life, things will go well for you—is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet he had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.”

 

“It is not enough for the skeptic, then, to simply dismiss the Christian teaching about the resurrection of Jesus by saying, “It just couldn’t have happened.” He or she must face and answer all these historical questions: Why did Christianity emerge so rapidly, with such power? No other band of messianic followers in that era concluded their leader was raised from the dead—why did this group do so? No group of Jews ever worshipped a human being as God. What led them to do it? Jews did not believe in divine men or individual resurrections. What changed their worldview virtually overnight? How do you account for the hundreds of eyewitnesses to the resurrection who lived on for decades and publicly maintained their testimony, eventually giving their lives for their belief?”

 

“Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others. The God of Jesus and the prophets, however, saves completely by grace. He cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance–he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power. If we are saved by sheer grace we can only become grateful, willing servants of God and of everyone around us.”

 

“God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.”

 

“The Hebrew word for this perfect, harmonious interdependence among all parts of creation is called shalom. We translate it as “peace,” but the English word is basically negative, referring to the absence of trouble or hostility. The Hebrew word means much more than that. It means absolute wholeness—full, harmonious, joyful, flourishing life.”

 

“There is, then, a great gulf between the understanding that God accepts us because of our efforts and the understanding that God accepts us because of what Jesus has done. Religion operates on the principle “I obey—therefore I am accepted by God.” But the operating principle of the gospel is “I am accepted by God through what Christ has done—therefore I obey.”

 

“The popular concept–that we should each determine our own morality–is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after each of the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the auditorium for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was that ‘Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.’ I always responded to the speakers by asking, ‘Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?’ They would invariable say, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I would ask, “Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is “there” that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?’ Almost always, the response to that question was silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.”

 

“Certainly we should be very active in seeking God, and Jesus himself called us to ‘ask, seek, knock’ in order to find him. Yet those who enter a relationship with God inevitably look back and recognize that God’s grace had sought them out, breaking them open to new realities.”

 

“Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality […]

[it is] impossible […] to stay fully human if you refuse the cost of forgiveness, the substitutional exchange of love, and the confinements of community.

[…] We believe the world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made.”

My Take

While I have previously completed several Tim Keller bible studies and liked them, I found this book to be far more compelling.  Keller has an easy to read writing style and is very adept at directly addressing numerous challenges to Christianity.  If you are a Christian with doubts (as so many of us are), I believe this book will strengthen your faith.

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