Category: Life

Mary Doria Russell had a problem.

She was teaching anthropology and came to stories of the massive mistakes explorers from the West sometimes made when they first encountered different people groups around the world. Often death, pillaging, and slavery resulted.

Inevitably, students would say something to the effect of, “Oh, I would never make a mistake like that. How could they have done something so stupid?” 

But Russell knew that even though it seemed simple, it wasn’t. How could she adequately explain that first contact is just much more difficult than we can imagine? That’s what motivated her to write her profound, wonderful, absorbing novel The Sparrow.

She imagines a group of intelligent, well-meaning, goodhearted, skilled people who make an effort to meet a species from another world. One reason I especially like the novel is that this is just a great group of people. If I were to go on a multiyear journey, these are absolutely the kind of people I would love to travel with. 

Despite this team having far more gifts, abilities, and experiences than her students or most of us, things go wrong—terribly wrong. Even the most benign actions like trying to improve nutrition for those they meet had disastrous effects they had difficulty anticipating.

Should we never try to help people in other cultures? Should we never try to fix things that seem wrong? That’s not my point.

Rather, when we do, we should approach such efforts with a maximum dose of humility. We need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who act in ways we find wrong or unenlightened. We need to learn as much as we can before we act.

Why? Because we just don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t adequately appreciate the finite, limitations of human knowledge or of our own perspective. Nor do we appreciate enough how our fallen, sinful nature can unconsciously skew our opinions about what is wrong with the world and how to fix it.

What can we do when we encounter people we think are strange or just wrong?

• Remember how fun it is to learn new, surprising things.
• Don’t automatically dismiss information or ideas that are contrary to our viewpoints.
• Remind ourselves that we are finite and that our motives or emotions may be skewing our outlook in ways we aren’t aware of.
• Ask those we are trying to help what they think would be the best ways we could be of assistance.
• Remember that all of us—the people we are trying to help as well as those we disagree with—are people with God-given value and dignity.

Try to help others? By all means, and always with great humility.

In A Matter of Death and Life, Irv and Marilyn Yolam offer a beautiful, heartbreaking book. In alternating chapters this husband and wife of 65 years write about Marilyn’s final months of fighting cancer. In the last half Irv alone tells his story.

Because this is very much a memoir, they give little advice on how to cope with death and sorrow. They simply relate their own experiences and reflections. For that reason, I find this much easier to read than many books on the topic. I can enter into their story, remembering my own, and grieve with them. 

Irv, being a career therapist, brings a unique double perspective as both one who suffers and one who walks alongside others. Not surprisingly, he honestly tells how hard it is sometimes to follow his own counsel. His reflections on sex, memory and its loss, and facing our own death during grief are also worthwhile.

During the course of all this, he reads some of the books he has published and finds his own past case studies illuminating. I was especially struck by “Irene” who refused to accept counsel from someone like him who had not (at that time) suffered loss. Though the two continue to meet, they hit something of a stalemate. In retrospect Irv now believes his own grieving would make him a better therapist with her even if his counsel wouldn’t change.

Though I give the book a warm recommendation, I did find two things a bit concerning. First, a couple times Irv says most of his clients moved to a healthier place after a year, maybe two. Second, he comments that those who had a good marriage are often able to move forward more quickly than those who have not. I just hope that readers who don’t fit these patterns will realize they are his generalizations. Not everyone experiences grief in these ways. And there may be nothing wrong with those who don’t.

This warm, honest, insightful book movingly intertwines two stories of facing our own death and grieving the death of a loved one.

When I first read Amor Towles marvelous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, I was immediately struck by this:

“A man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them.”

I don’t think Towles means men and women should exert power over our environment and relationships, forcing them to conform to our will. After all, the hero of his novel, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, is forcibly under house arrest in the hotel he is staying at. He cannot leave without threat of death.

Rather I think Towles is focused on the attitude, the mindset we have when we face challenges, disappointments, tragedy, or injustice. But it’s an attitude that shapes our actions and ultimately our character. We can become victims of our circumstances, letting them force us into their mold, or we can rise above them.

That is exactly what Alexander does. Instead of falling into despair, he makes the most of his new situation. Rather than seeking revenge, he looks for how he can contribute to the life and people of the hotel—both guests and staff. He takes a job in the hotel restaurant. He becomes guardian of an abandoned girl, and then the girl’s daughter. He falls in love. Over the course of decades, he makes a profound and lasting impact on the lives of many people—even though he is imprisoned!

Anthony Ray Hinton is a true-life example of this. Wrongfully imprisoned and placed on death row for decades, he transformed from a cauldron of anger to a beacon of light for those around him. As chronicled in his astounding book, The Sun Does Shine, he mastered his circumstances long before he was finally exonerated and released.

The examples Towles and Hinton give are ones of shaping our circumstances not with force but with goodness, sacrifice, and generosity. Thus Towles memorable line about circumstances may need a slight alteration. The point is not to control our situation or ourselves in any way we wish. Rather it is a choice between two masters:

“We must allow grace to master us or we will be mastered by our circumstances.”

In many ways, Fierce Attachments, a memoir of a daughter’s relationship with her mother, is a sad tale. After the sudden and early death of the Vivian’s father, her mother is consumed by her grief, using it to shield herself from others. Though Vivian wants to connect with her mother, she has difficulty. Her mother—a strong, intelligent, capable, and opinionated (!) woman—cannot see her daughter or the world through any other lens than herself.

But we should not judge her mother too harshly. Even many of us who have not experienced a sudden, traumatic loss, still live like this. We are simply focused on ourselves and have difficulty getting out of that frame to see people from their own viewpoint.

Vivian and her mother can’t connect and can’t separate. What makes this raw book even more tragic is that while Vivian criticizes the narrow path her mother has taken, almost inevitably it seems, Vivian ends up doing the same. She has relationships with men, but she can never really attach in a deep and lasting way. She even wonders if she intentionally picks men who are incapable of that kind of connection.

In How to Know a Person, David Brooks mentions Gornick’s memoir as a cautionary tale. While there are practical ways to know a person better, he says, we also need to be alert to the many paths which can prevent that from happening.

This memoir, however, is a cautionary tale in another sense. It highlights that while grief can be healthy, it can aslo bind us if it becomes the consuming fact of our life. Grief is a dreadful and necessary journey through the valley of the shadow of death, but the valley is not the destination.

I was sitting around a table with some friends. How did the topic come up? I don’t quite recall.

We were talking about World War II, and Ralph said, “You can’t trust the Germans. Look what they’ve done in two world wars. And don’t say they’ve changed because skinheads and nationalism are on the rise there. We just should never have let them become an independent nation again. We should have carved up the country for good.”

I was a bit surprised to hear such ideas about a group of people who have little malice thrown at them these days. He didn’t sound angry. He wasn’t loud. He was outwardly calm, but I sensed there was emotion underneath.

I responded evenly by saying it seemed helpful to have them as allies, as a force for economic and political stability in central Europe. Clearly he still disagreed.

Then I remembered what I had just read in David Brooks’s new book, How to Know a Person. He told a story of being on a panel discussion with someone who had a very different view of the culture wars. Brooks responded not with anger or diatribe but by stating his side with a bit of cool dispassion.

Later Brooks realized this was the wrong approach. Instead he should have at least asked more questions about what the other person thought and why.

Taking Brooks’s lead, I decided I too was wrong and that the important thing in this moment was not to try to change Ralph’s mind, not to correct him, however wrong his attitudes might be. My job first was to listen to him, get to know him, and maybe love him a little better.

So I started asking some questions, genuinely wanting to know more: “What’s behind your thoughts here? When and how did you first start to think this way?” And quietly he began to tell us more of his story.

His father and uncles had been in the war. What they saw and went through was terrible. And his wife had been born in central Europe. Her family had suffered at the hands of the Germans for multiple generations.

Ralph was not speculating on geopolitics. For him, this was personal.

Brooks is a consummate journalist who is excellent at summarizing the best research of experts while telling stories of others and himself that move us and create understanding. While offering excellent material on how to get to know people as individuals, he reminds us that everyone is situated in a group, in a history, in a place. We also have to explore and appreciate those to truly hear others.

In a day of hyper reactions and extreme tribalism, we seem to have lost the vital art of conversation, of making friends, of connecting with others more than superficially. Brooks tells us how with practical, sensible wisdom.

I don’t remember the last time I had put the ideas of a book into practice so quickly as I did with Ralph. Before I would have just sat in stunned silence. But now I knew how to respond positively. How to Know a Person is that kind of book, a book worth rereading.