Never more true than in this case. It is partly for the fulfillment of this resolution, for example, that we have instituted Family Reading Night each Sunday night. Janelle especially has put in extra effort here, keeping the baby happy and reading aloud to Alida while Kali and I concentrate on our reading. As such, it felt immediately unfair, in my favor. I reasoned that if Janelle was going to labor thusly, the least I could do was to open up the choice of reading material to our family decision-making process. If it was going to be a family effort, I wanted them to have some more noticeable return on investment.
Since the beginning of March, the chosen book has been The Holistic Orchard by Michael Phillips. The goal here is for me to acquire some of the necessary knowledge for our family to grow satisfactory fruits here at home...clearly a useful choice if ever there was one. The trouble has been that so thorough and thoughtful a treatment of the topic took me much more than one month's worth of Family Reading Nights to chew my way through. As April Fools Day loomed, Janelle began to stress out that I was not going to make the deadline. She suggested I find a book I could cruise through to satisfy the March requirement. And so I did, with the graphic novel Persepolis, a family report about which I believe appeared in an earlier edition of Encounters with Sustenance. By the time May Day crept up on us, I was surprised to discover that I was still not within striking distance. Again the "quick read" strategy. This time I selected Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. It was not quite the breezy trip that Persepolis is, but one evening and two or three good baby naps had the lion's share of it done.
Despite their having been used so expediently, neither of these reads are in any way light material. The Power and the Glory and Persepolis are both set in revolutionary contexts, which tend to bring out the grotesque extremes in human behavior. Both also deal in themes of spirituality and violence. The Power and the Glory is intensely focused on these topics, and on the confluence and interplay of political and religious dynamics. It is known as one of Greene's "Catholic novels"; it was fascinating to see how he wove in questions of goodness, redemption, sacramentalism, responsibility, spiritual mystery, and wealth and poverty into a setting of an atheistic communist revolution in Mexico. I will refrain from a complete report here, but would encourage anyone who wants or needs to wrestle with these elements of the human condition to pick up this classic and get involved. But brace yourself. Graham Greene is not one to soften the blow, and he makes excellent literary use of the deeply uncomfortable situation. It was my second time through this novel, the first having occurred as required reading for a college course. Probably "British Fiction." But I found the intervening years had opened and softened me sufficiently that the impact was far more stirring; the ponderings probably closer to the intended. I found also that what the author probably thought of as redemptive often felt hollow to me this time through. I probably read parts of his narrative as hopeful that he disregarded or intended to render as sidestory. I found myself perplexed about details that seemed incongruous to me, and it was at those moments that I was forced to unsuspend my disbelief and remember that this was a work of fiction, which allowed me to accept it as an extension of his mind and perception. Then I was able to be even more grateful, because it was a courageous and inquisitive mind indeed to which I was so ably exposed.
Maybe this was not very directly applicable to our family life...but I'm still glad to have read it!
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