Two books I've been reading recently:
I finished "Hallelujah Anyway" by Anne Lamott today, and I feel bad...but I have to give this book one big fat "MEH." It did absolutely nothing for me. I think she is lovely and witty, and clever and sharp...but I just can't with this book. I can't. I finished it, which was an act of mercy on my part...haha! I can tell that she often has beautiful things to say, but I am often too annoyed by her rambling, rabbit-trail tangent-built-on-tangent to be present enough to appreciate it by the time it arrives.
NO. Please. It's clearly a book written by an ENFP...haha. I need MUCH more linear thinking and facts than she provides.
There are two upsides to this book: It is very short, and it is a very easy read. :)
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| (one quick note: Don't read this book when you are tired. Walter writes for those of the scholarly persuasion. ;) ) |
If you could find someone who writes in the exact opposite style of Anne Lamott, it's Walter Brueggemann, so maybe it's not fair that I'm reading his book so soon after hers.
It's probably also not fair that this topic, and ones similar to it, are my favorite thing to contemplate, analyze, embrace, and be intentional about these days. He wins the topic jackpot.
I'm LOVING this book. Now, it's not a scientific measurement, I'm aware, but I know a book is close to my heart when I need to keep a highlighter and a pencil handy, and I can't stop pausing to highlight and mark up everything, along with making notes in the margins. This is that book for me. I basically highlighted the entire preface to the book before deciding I might need different standards for my notes. (Side note: I didn't highlight one single thing in Hallelujah Anyway. Yikes. That was probably just because I was annoyed by the half way mark, though. There likely was stuff I should have highlighted and just didn't, to SHOW HER. ;) )
A few quotes I loved, just from the preface:
"...we may consider the sabbath as an alternative to the endless demands of economic reality, more specifically the demands of market ideology that depends, as Adam Smith has already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly "rest-less," inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire. Those requirements concern endless predation so that we are as a society of 24/7 multitasking in order to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess. But the demands of market ideology pertain as much to consumption as they do to production. Thus the system of commodity requires that we want more, have more, own more, use more, eat and drink more. The rat race of such predation and usurpation is a restlessness that issues inescapably in anxiety that is often at the edge of being unmanageable; ..." (Bold and italics mine, not Walter's)
YES!!!! GET 'EM, Walter!!!! Haha. Love it. Endlessly restless, unfulfilled, in pursuit of the next best thing. Blah. Hard pass on that as my life, man. The way our culture teaches us, relentlessly, that achieving, accomplishing, performing and possessing are the true path to happiness? Dead on. That has to be intentionally un-learned and pushed back against, in a very real way. I'm game, Walter!
"In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It's resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. Such an act of resistance requires enormous intentionality and communal reinforcement amid the barrage of seductive pressures from the insatiable insistences of the market, with its intrusion into every part of our life from the family to the national budget. In our anxious society, to cite a case in point, one of the great "seductions of the Pharaoh" is the fact that "soccer practice" invades the rest day. Families, largely contained in market ideology, think of themselves as helpless before the requirements of such commitment. In context it requires (or "would require, " subjunctive, contrary to fact) enormous, communal resolve to resist the demand."
(Blogger is driving me nuts, here! It's won't let me edit the color of my writing appropriately in just this section! Grrrrrrrrrrrr.)
I love the phrase "seductions of the Pharaoh." Such a good visual of the ways we can cling to thing that actually are bondage, in our culture. Isn't that such a great way to describe the way we can easily fall into the "parent trap," these days? "Oh, this is what people do when they have kids? They sign them up for 5 million things that they 'need' in order to be well-rounded and have any chance of playing sports and getting a good education? Okay. Well, I guess we do that then." Yuck. It's easy to do, if you haven't first set what your immovable priorities are. For us, as a young family, having dinner time together is one immovable. If soccer practice were to happen at dinner time, or on Sunday...welp. Bummer. Guess you aren't playing soccer then. Decision made. It's nice to have that "wall of no" set up ahead of time to protect childhood and our most important priorities for our family. (Research, by the way, backs up family dinners as important. It does not back up soccer practice as crucial, especially at young ages, in highly competitive manners, and in an obsessive manner (i.e. more than a few times a week). Interesting, isn't it?)
I know the soccer practice thing is not Walter's main point here, I just latched on to it for a moment...don't worry. I'm still tracking with him. :)
"This book is addressed exactly to those who are "weary and heavy laden," made so by the insatiable requirements of our society--in its taxation for the sake of imperialism, in its social conformity that urges doing more and having more (now perniciously embodied in "teaching to test"), in its frightening intent that there should be no "free lunch" to anyone, in its assumption that there is a technological resolution of every human problem, in its pathologies of greed and control."
Gosh I just love this man. And I'm not even writing in the actual chapters yet...haha! BINGO.
I feel like pumping my fist into the air and then going and talking with like-minded people about this stuff. *swoon*
