The rhetorical finish

After Acts 7:1-60

It’s the peroration, the end

of a long speech, a lesson

in how human nature remains

unchanged. He punctuates

his rhetorical finish with words

with words designed to punch

the point home. Stiff-necked.

Uncircumcised. Resist the Spirit. 

Persecute truth. Kill. Betray.

Murder. Violators of the law.

He flipped the charges back

on them, using the history

they knew so well, the history

they believe they overcome

because they’re smarter and

more devout than those 

who came before, because

they know better, their minds

are free, they are liberated.

What he’s saying, of course, 

is that they are no better

than those who came before.

And before the day is done,

they will prove it.

Photograph by K. Mitchell Hodge via Unsplash. Used with permission.

English Heritage: "Eight Ghosts"

Give eight writers an assignment, and you never know what they’ll come up with. 

The English Heritage organization cares for more than 400 properties, buildings, and monuments, ranging from Roman forts and medieval castles to Cold War bunkers. To help raise funds for conservation work, it asked eight English authors to choose their own English Heritage site, spend time there, including after hours, and write a ghost story involving the site.

 

The result is Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories. It’s a small gem of book, with some cracking good stories that each pack at punch.

 

For “They Flee From Me That Sometimes Did Me Seek.” Sarah Perry (After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent) selected Audley End, a house built on the site of an abbey in Essex. She tells a tale of a young woman who joins a team restoring an old tapestry, who soon finds out that the work will figuratively and literally absorb her. In “Mr. Lanyard’s Last Case,” Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney, Devil’s Day) visited Carlisle Castle, and spins a historical story of an attorney prosecuting the rebels who fought and lost the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

 

In “The Bunker,” Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Pier Falls) selected the York Cold War Bunker, telling the story of a woman caught between present and future. Kenilworth Castle is the setting for Kamila Shamsie’s (Burnt Shadows, Home Fire) “Foreboding,” in which a new guard starts his job and finds what he’s not looking for.

 

Stuart Evers (If This is Home, Ten Stories About Smoking) goes to Dover Castle for his story, “Never Departed More,” about an actress who stays there to soak in the atmosphere and soaks in a bit more than expected. Housesteads Roman Fort is the setting for “The Wall” by Kate Clanchy (Meeting the English, Antigona and Me), in which a mother and father takes her truant teenaged daughter for a day trip – and little is what it seems. 

 

Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) selected Pendennis Castle for “As Strong as Death,” about in impending wedding haunted by a ghost of woman who disguised herself as a sailor. And Max Porter (Lanny, Grief is the Thing with Feathers) used Eltham Palace to tell his story “Mrs. Charbury at Eltham,” about an elderly woman who returns to the place where her sister disappeared.

 

The volume also includes a short essay by Andrew Martin (The Somme Stations, Soot), which explains how the castles, abbeys, and houses of England inspired the ghost story. Also included is a gazetteer of English Heritage hauntings, a detailed list of all the places said to have ghosts. 

 

Eight Ghosts is both a collection of some really good (and scary) stories and a clever way to raise funds for a worthy cause.

 

Related:

 

My review of The Porpoise by Mark Haddon.

 

My review of The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry.

 

My review of Lanny by Max Porter.

 

Top photograph by Joakim Honkasalo via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Faces: A Love Story" by Roger Hutchison

“I am the painter of stories and dreams. I am the Artist of all that is.” 

So begins Faces: A Love Story by author and illustrator Roger Hutchison, a beautifully simple and beautifully illustrated book about us, all of us, and about God. It’s a picture book for adults, although it could easily be read by and to children as well.

 

It’s a simple book for a divided time, when we work so hard to pull away from each other, when suspicions fuel our perceptions of each other, when we objectify people because of whom they vote for. Christians who should know better fall into this same divisiveness with each other, forgetting that the Artist was very clear from the outset as to how we would be known – by our love.

 

Faces: A Love Story explores this theme of love in a time of divisiveness, but a very specific kind of love – that of God for people. The narrative is written like a letter from God, reminding people who he is, who they are, and that we’re created by his hands. And he doesn’t make mistakes. But we do.

 

“We are separated by all of our assumptions,

preconceptions

misunderstandings,

even a pandemic of fear.

So much mistrust.”

 

Roger Hutchison

And yet we are made for community, to be with each other, to touch, to feel, and to come alongside.

 

Hutchison is an artist and author, and also director of Christian Formation and Parish Life at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas. He is the author of The Painting Table: A Journal of Loss and Joy (2013), Under the Fig Tree: Visual Prayers and Poems for Lent (2015), and Jesus: God Among Us (2018). He and his family live in suburban Houston.

 

Perhaps what we need is a little more of Faces: A Love Story and a little less of social media, cancel culture, anger, and outrage. 

 

Related:

 

My Favorite Color is Blue. Sometimes by Roger Hutchison.

Poets and Poems: Chandra Gurung and “My Father’s Face”

When he was a child, poet Chandra Gurung left his native Nepal to attend school in northern India. His father was a soldier in the Indian army, and the boy’s school was near where his father was stationed. While it was an opportunity for his education, it was also a separation from his village and his family. 

Those themes of opportunity and separation resonate through the 47 poems of My Father’s Face, written originally in Nepali and translated into English by Mahesh Paudyal. The poems reflect the seeming contradictions of hope and regret, love and loss, patriotism and resistance, and a longing for home and the almost welcomed separation from it.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Gerta” by Katerina Tuckova

Gerta Schnirch is a teenager living in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Her mother is of Czech heritage, her father of German. Her focus in life is her friends, her school, and especially her art class. It’s the late 1930s, and Gerta will never know another tranquil period in her life. 

Nazi Germany gins control of the Sudetenland, effectively disarming Czechoslovakia. Shortly thereafter comes the invasion and the establishment of the German “protectorate.” Her father and older brother are jubilant; this is the triumph for the country Germans, who have been a large minority in the nation since World War I. Her father raises the salute to Hitler; her brother joins the Hitler Youth. Gerta has a different experience – the loss of friends, her beloved art teacher, upheaval at school. 

 

For a time, there are benefits to the being German under the new regime. Gerta’s brother joins the army, supposedly headed to the Eastern Front. Her father continues to bully her mother, Gerta, and non-Germans. And then comes the turn of the war’s tide. Greta’s mother dies, leaving her alone with a father she doesn’t care much for. Gerta becomes pregnant; the baby Barbora is born shortly before Czechoslovakia is overrun by the Soviet Army. Life becomes increasingly bad. German citizens are imprisoned, taken off in labor gangs, brutalized, and worse in what seems like an orgy of revenge. 

 

Gerta is forced to join thousands of other women, children, and the elderly in what becomes a death march toward the Austrian border. Thousands are raped, brutalized, die from disease, and are killed outright. Gerta is determined to survive for the sake of her child. 

 

Katerina Tuckova

Gerta by Katerina Tuckova (translated by Veronique Firkusny) is the little-known story of what happened to Czech citizens of German ancestry after the war. It is a story surpassed only by what happened to European Jews and other people at the hands of the Germans. The period after the surrender of Nazi Germany was a time of chaos; mass movements of refugees, former prisoners and concentration camp survivors; and ethnic peoples forcibly moved from one country to another. 

 

Much of the novel focuses on the period between 1938 and 1947, but it continues to include the early communist period, the Prague Spring of 1968 (followed by the Soviet invasion), the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, and beyond. It’s told through the life of one woman who does what she has to do to survive, both for herself and her child. 

 

Tuckova is a Czech playwright, biographer, art historian, and author. She’s won several literary awards in her native Czech Republic and Europe. Her books have been translated into 19 languages, but Gerta is the first to be translated into English. She lives in Brno and Prague. Her research for the novel included interviewing survivors of the 1945 death march from Brno.

 

Gerta is not an easy story to read. It’s filled with the violence of the time, violence that was often undertaken as official and unofficial government policy. The character Gerta Schnirch becomes a prism to view some of the worst humanity has to offer, and how the human spirit can survive in spite of that. 

A history lesson

After Acts 7:1-60

The charges are false,

the witnesses paid to lie,

and the judges ask

only one question

a simple question:

Is this so?

A simple if long answer

to a simple if short question,

but a simple if long answer

to turn the falsity and lies

on their heads and reverse

the charges to present

mirrors to the judges.

And the answer moves

backward fifteen hundred

years, back to the man

first called to the land.

And it makes perfect sense:

this is where the story begins,

this is the seminal event,

the backdrop to the corruption

of the law called this trial.

And what he implies,

and what he says in this lesson,

this recitation, of shared history,

is to make a point, the point:

what they are doing in this trial

is what they have always done.

Photograph by Tanner Mardis via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

Sylvia Schroeder and her husband have three grandsons. She’s discovered that when the “feet-a-saurus,” aka Grandpa, arrives to visit the boys, they scream in delighted terror. Who know grandpas could behave like this? Read “What’s Wrong with Grandpa?” 

I know the English Victorian writer Wilkie Collins as (1) the author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone and (2) the good friend and often collaborator of Charles Dickens. But he was also the author of several lesser-known classics, including Basil, No Name, Jezebel’s Daughter, and The Evil Genius. Steve Goble at has the story at CrimeReads. 

 

Chris Thomas has a son who’s almost a teen. The boy has had a rough go from the get-go; his brain was damaged by an alcoholic mother when she was pregnant. Every night, he and the boy play a game of hide-and-seek. And Dad talks about what he’s learned about hiding.

 

More Good Reads

 

Poetry

 

The Tango Argentine – Daniel Kemper at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Stained-glass Man – Donald Catchings at An Unexpected Journal.

 

Mysterious Encounters in Life and Art: A Conversation with Dana Gioia – Caitlyn Doyle at Literary Matters.

 

Life and Culture

 

Let It Be: Have we passed the golden era of the rock ‘n’ roll memoir? – Alexander Larman at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Miseducation of America’s Elites – Bari Weiss at CityJournal.

 

Celebrities Don’t Get Enough Love – Seth Lewis.

 

The Campus as Factory – Jacob Howland at CityJournal.

 

Recovering Old Age – Joseph Davis and Paul Scherz at The New Atlantis.

 

Maoism in America? The Uses of the Capitol Hill Riot – Habi Zhang at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Writing and Literature

 

The middle ground of fiction – John Steele Gordon at New Criterion.

 

Balancing Productivity and Art – David Farland at My Story Doctor.

 

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marilynne Robinson – Kevin Brockmeier at Literary Hub.

 

Faith

 

The Dangers of Doomscrolling – Jeff Mingee at The Gospel Coalition. 

 

The Luck O’ the Hobbit – Keith Mathison at Light in Dark Places.

 

Uprooting Evil in the Fields We Know – Griffith Gulledge.

 

The Gospel Animated: The Greatest News in the World in 2 Minutes – Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition.

 

The Numbing Down of the Church: Part One. The Dung Beetles – Larry Chapp at Gaudium et Spes 22.

 

His Reaction When She Sings: Allie Sherlock and Cuan Durkin sing “Unchained Melody”

Painting: Man Reading a Newspaper (1941), oil on canvas by Russell Drysdale (1912-1981).