The Hiding Place: It is All of Our Stories

We were living in Houston in the mid-1970s when I first heard of Corrie ten Boom and the story she had to tell in The Hiding Place. The book had been recently published, and a movie of the same title was released in 1975. It starred Jeannette Clift as Corrie, Julie Harris as her sister Betsie, and Arthur O’Connell as their father. I read the book but didn’t see the movie.

Forty years later, the story has stood the test of time. It is still a good story. It is still a heartbreaking story. And it is a story that keeps begging the question, what would I do in their situation? What question the story does not beg is could this happen here?

The answer to the second question is obvious – yes, it or something like it could happen here. Never underestimate the darkness of the human heart. We saw the same human lunge toward evil on Sept. 11, 2001. We see it in Syria and Iraq and Libya. We saw it in the killing fields of Cambodia, and with the tribal warfare in Rwanda, and in Bosnia. But this isn’t a problem limited to radical Islam or people in faraway countries. The same desire for authoritarian power and control can be seen all too close to home, and it isn’t an impulse limited only to governments.

In the Epilogue to the book, we read that Corrie and her family learn that her teenaged nephew Kik died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He was caught helping an American parachutist escape to the Dutch coast. In 1959, Corrie herself returned to the Ravensbruck camp, where she was imprisoned and where Betsie died. And she learned something both familiar and profound. A Nazi guard or commandant or functionary had mistakenly released her late in 1944. She was supposed to have been killed with all of the other women her age the following week, but someone had made a clerical error.

A bureaucratic mistake.

Or the hand of God.

Perhaps both.

We often hear people ask, if there is a God, how could he allow so much evil in the world? The real, and perhaps surprising, question should be, why isn’t there more evil than what we see? My answer to that age-old question is simple: if there was no God, if there is no God, then our world at best would look much like what Corrie ten Boom experienced during World War II. That impulse to evil exists within each of us.

What also exists within each of us is the impulse to reach for God.

The Hiding Place is the two of two sisters in a small city in Holland, caught up in a gigantic turn of history. Because of their faith in God, they embark upon a course of helping Jews hide and escape from the Nazis. That course eventually leads to their arrest. Betsie comes through the story as something of a saint, the believer giving thanks in all things, in all circumstances. Corrie questions and kicks against what happens. She is the most recognizable of the two, the most familiar, at least to me. She gets angry at God, she shakes her fist at him, she refuses to believe that she should give thanks for fleas, of all things.

Corrie survives the horror of imprisonment and the concentration camp. She survived with a purpose. She knew what God would have her do. And her path started with forgiveness, as difficult as it was.

In so many ways, the story of Corrie ten Boom is all of our stories. Perhaps not as extreme, bit it is – and can be – our stories.


Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we've been reading The Hiding Place. This concludes the discussion. To see more posts, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: A scene from the 1975 movie The Hiding Place, with Julie Harris as Betsie (left) and Jeannette Clift as Corrie (right).

Poetic Voices: Joan Murray and Ellen Kombiyil

When I think of poets who tell stories, I think of Chaucer, Milton, Dante, Tennyson and Longfellow. Storytelling isn’t something I usually associated with contemporary poetry. Two recent collections by poets Joan Murray and Ellen Kombiyil, however, both utilize storytelling, although they do it in entirely different ways.

Murray has been publishing poetry for the last 25 years, and this year has an expanded volume, Swimming for the Ark: New and Selected Poems. In addition to new poetry, she draws upon poems from four volumes published between 1990 and 2015.

Her poems tell stories. In fact, given the poems included in this new volume, Murray has been a storytelling poet from the beginning.

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

Louise Penny's "A Fatal Grace"

C.C. de Poitiers isn’t the most likable of people. She bullies her husband and overweight daughter. She bullies the photographer she’s having an affair with. She’s deliberately hurtful and cruel to her new neighbors in Three Pines in Quebec, where she’s recently moved and occupied the largest house in the village. She is planning a major push for her book, Be Calm, in which she articulates of a philosophy of never showing emotion, and no one is going to get in her way.

But someone does. Someone devises and implements death by electrocution, with dozens of witnesses around who are watching a local curling match (a winter sport popular in Canada). The problem is that it might be easier to eliminate the few suspects who didn’t have a motive.

A Fatal Grace is Louise Perry’s second mystery novel featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Homicide Division of the Montreal Surete, and it is a psychological treat.

Gamache and his team, along with the same dysfunctional detective sent by Gamache’s superiors in the first mystery novel, Still Life, are dispatched to investigate. But this is more than a murder; the death of C.C. de Poitiers becomes a prism through which the characters examine themselves and others. This is even more true for Gamache, who is still struggling with the aftermath of a case that ended in a mess, and actually didn’t end at all. Penny uses this story to expand upon what happened in that case and what role Gamache actually played.

Louise Penny

The investigation leads back to Montreal, where the death of a homeless woman seems connected to the electrocution, and then returns to three Pines, for it is in this quiet village of writers, artists and antique shops where the truth lies buried, and lies buried in the distant past.

Penny weaves the two deaths, Gamache’s professional struggles, police department politics and the personal politics of the local townspeople together in an intriguing mystery. Particularly noteworthy is how she develops the physical setting as part of the story – a brutal Canadian winter.

A Fatal Grace is a winner. (And there are several more of the Gamache novels to read.)

Related: My review of Louis Penny’s Still Life.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Purple cloth

After Acts 16:6-15

I deal in purple

I deal in purple cloth

the purple of nobility

the purple of wealth

the purple of position

the purple for the people

who want these things

I sit with the women

talking, in prayer

the river flowing by us

like tears

the two men come and

sit, and then speak words

that turn tears to sobs

my heart opens like love

unlike any I have known

Photograph by Maliz Ong via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

Tim Challies finds words from some 1,800 years ago that seem just as real today. Mick Silva finds ways to outsmart distraction when you’re writing. Every day matters to Scott Todnem. The world’s current version of the “Monuments Men” – saving priceless relics from barbarians. John Blase poetically sends a son off to school, while Maureen Doallas tells us about storytelling.

And at a school in Buckinghamshire in the U.K., they surely do know how to serve schoolchildren their lunches.

Faith

The Heart of a Stranger – Ryan Dueck at Rumblings.

Be Kind to Your Little Children – Clement of Alexandria via Tim Challies.

Sunday Review: Cassian Folsom – Kate Murphy for The New York Times.

Just a cup of water – Winn Collier.

Writing

Planting for the Future – Cynthia Ruchti at Novel Rocket.

Three Ways to Redeem Time – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

Outsmarting Distraction – Mick Silva.

Photography

Cabbage Whites – Tim Good at Photography by Tiwago.

Pennsylvania Avenue, Tower Grove East – Chris Naffziger at St. Louis Patina.

Poetry

Love, herself, lay dying: A Sonnet – Kerry O’Connor at Skylover.

Lilting light – Troy Cady at T(r)oy Marbles.

Martha Serpas – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

Storytelling – Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

The Mark of Adam – John Blase at The Beautiful Due.

Poetry and Religion - Richard Rohr (Hat tip: J of India).

Life and Culture

Every Day Matters – Scott Todnem at Life is the Future.

The Stranger and the Ring – Tim Butcher at BBC Magazine (Hat tip: J of India).

The Pot Hole – Lancelot Schaubert.

Unnecessary Goodness – Corey Poff at Torrey Gazette.

Why Whole Foods is Wrong to Eliminate Prisoner-Crafted Food - David Rupert at Red-Letter Believers.

History and Literature

Shakespeare’s London: when all the world really was a stage – The Spectator.

The men saving Syria’s treasures from Isis – Jeremy Bowen at New Statesman.

Lunchtime at a school in Buckinghamshire (Hat tip: Gail Kerber)

Top photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A city full

Then:

A city full of idols

is a city of idols

and the business of idols

is big business an industry

employing thousands to serve

and bow, to chase and worship,

to bend the knee to the creed

that wood and stone and paint

control all things.

Now:

We are too educated and insightful,

too learned and informed to bend

the knee to wood and stone and paint;

instead we worship knowledge and

education and celebrity and power

and the pixels we hold in our hands

and the images we see in our mirrors,

too intelligent and advanced to worship

wood and stone and paint.

Now we are superior

to then

aren’t we

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” Wins Forward Poetry Prize

In March at Tweetspeak Poetry, I had a series of articles on the poetry collections nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of those collections was Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, a series of prose poems on what it means to be Black in contemporary America.

Claudia Rankine

Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best poetry collection. Monday night in London, Citizen was also selected as the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for best poetry collection. The prizes kick off the London Literary Festival, which goes on for two weeks and includes readings, lectures, book signings, and other literary events.

Rankine’s work is powerful. As I said in the review at Tweetspeak Poetry, you don’t read a collection like Citizen and remain unchanged.  

Related: My review of Citizen at Tweetspeak Poetry.