Well, Thanksgiving is past and I’m not quite comfortable yet with doing something on the election, so I guess I’ll start my idea of some books you might read for Christmas–but not necessarily the ones mostly recommended, not necessarily ones clearly definable as Christmas books (Maybe I’ll try a blog on Christmas movies later) My first book is Mitch Albom’s “Have a Little Faith.” If you’re not familiar with Albom at least a little bit, the title may sound corny and something you don’t want to bother with. Hey, maybe you’ll turn out to be right. But wait a minute first …

If you do know Albom’s work(which I knew previously only by reputation)you likely have some ideas of what a book, by him with this title would say. But, you wait a minute too …

Albom has done a number of books over about a decade and half of writing, some fiction, some non-fiction. He is likely best known for “Tuesdays with Morrie,” which was a huge best seller a few years ago. “Faith” is actually older, copyright 2009, and called to my attention recently by a friend. I was not familiar with it before that. It also was made into a TV movie a couple of years after its publication date, something I was also not aware of.

“Faith” is about his close friendship with a man of his parents’ generation, in this case a Rabbi. In that respect it resembles “Morrie.” But even to one who has never read the latter, it is obviously different in some significant ways. For one thing, it is really about his relationships with two men of faith, The Rabbi, Albert Lewis, and the Rev Henry Covington, an inner city minister in Detroit. The emphasis is on the former, but the latter plays an important role too.

Albom himself was a middle class Jewish kid from NJ who started out as a journalist, in fact a sportswriter. He also wound up living and working near Detroit, a city he learned to know well and which he describes vividly at some places in this book. He became a long-time Detroit person, but still with a lot of NJ in his mind as basically his home area. Through that connection he began to renew his relationship with Lewis who had been his Rabbi when he was a boy. Lewis told him that he wanted him, Albom,, to do his, Lewis’s, eulogy when the time came.

Albom had been raised middle class Jewish and became quite upwardly mobile. By the time he and Lewis got together again, he was already known to many people through his writing, and despite the depth shown in “Tuesdays” a few years later which moved many people very much, he was basically a non-religious or only incidentally religious Jew. His main values were work and success, although he clearly did not ignore the less fortunate or the unlucky, as his work with charities indicates.

He visited Lewis from time to time and watched him as he declined from being a fairly healthy and still somewhat active old man, to being a sick man, with little time left. Albom followed this decline and recorded it as he considered what he was sometime going to have to do. He also used the time to think and ponder his own faith or lack of it. And along the way he crossed paths with Henry Covington, whose story he learned and recounts along with that of Lewis.

Covington was another sort of man altogether. A black man from inner city Detroit, he had early in his life come into contact with the local drug culture, but also with the local faith community and the two mixed in his life. For a long time the drug culture won. Covington became a what most people would likely consider a gangster. A frequent breaker of the law, he was mostly a drug dealer and for sometime a wealthy one. But he fell victim to his own vice, became an addict and finally hit bottom, poor, homeless and without hope.

Albom chronicles Henry’s struggles with himself and his surroundings, and his slow climb out of depravity and back to decency. By the time Albom knew him Henry had recovered to the point of being “straight” in the old fashoined meaning of the term He had a church in a poor area of inner city Detroit and his people nearly all had serious problems–drugs, violence, poverty, the usual inner city mixture in our country which diminishes our country and demeans many of its citizens. We get to know Henry well through Albom’s visits with him in which we hear about the desperate lack of money in his church and his neighborhood and the overwhelming odds against the people who struggle.

Henry comes off as a genuinely reformed individual, a not common phenomena in our culture. He has genuinely forsaken his past and is now working for his and his people’s future.

So the book proceeds with a back-and-forth approach as Mitch examines the lives of these two men, one nearly over, the other fully engaged in struggle. Both of them come off as noble in their own way. Henry is selfless in his giving of time and support. So is Albert Lewis, but he is running down down and is also philosophical. He not only is willing to share himself, he reflects on his life, his faith, and the meaning of each. The juxtaposition of these views both creates a comparison of different kinds of nobility, but also provides a bit of dynamic tension, with two similar but not exactly the same approaches.

Albert has his doubts now and then when it comes to religion, but his answer is always his faith. He does believe in God though he may not always understand Him perfectly. But he has learned from his faith and his life, that what he needs to do is to take care of people, to make the badly off better off(economically or otherwise)and to lift the minds and hearts of his followers, his congregation to a higher level where they can perceive the pain of life, but go on. And, find it worth the effort.

As he approaches 90 and his body weakens, his faith never varies. God is Love is, though not spoken or written exactly that way, the basis of his faith. You can serve God only by serving man, by relieving suffering and offering hope. And his congregation loved him and respected him for decades including toward the end when he was able to do very little except talk.

Mitch describes this all with the story-telling talents of a novelist, which he also is(look up his novels on the internet–some of them sound terrific). He admires the fight each of these good men has made against pain, depression, drugs, and whatever. His last chapters are intensely moving and leave you tired, in a mostly good way. They also may leave some unconvinced aand therein lies the one weakness I perceive here.

Mitch goes sometimes a little too far in the love will win assertion, even in the ghetto sense, in the sense that God’s love will lift all who turn to Him(and maybe some who don’t). He also may lean a little too heavily into the idea that poverty-stricken people are necessarily morally superior to richer people No, of course he doesn’t put it that way and maybe that’s not at all how he meant it. But some of his words are, if I may risk sounding pretentious, susceptible of that interpretation. Mitch says little about the questions of why misfortune seems to fall equally on the good and the not-so-good, about why misery is the constant companion of so many people regardless of economic standing.

But I will say this for him. The end of the book is so uplifting, that it just may cure some depression and some hopelessness merely by being read. And Mitch does “get it” in the sense that if there is anything to monotheism at all, then the idea that “God is Love,” though not quite the whole story, is the best starting place and for some a good enough place to end. Though I am a religious person, I may not quite fit into Mitch’s system perfectly, I may want a bit more argumentation and discussion. But his is a place I might fit at times, and most of those who do I think are better for it-particularly if they keep in mind that not everyone will agree all the way, though few will find much to criticize in Mitch and many will praise him highly–including, come to think of it, me.

Very near the end of the book, Mitch quotes in full his eulogy for the Rabbi. I am tempted to just repeat the whole thing here., but that doesn’t seem quite right and to take a few parts of it would fall short of doing it justice. It begins on p 235 of the Hyperion edition and can be read in a few minutes.`

I will quote, partly, and otherwise reprise the Epilogue from pp 248-249. Here it is–

In one of their last conversations the Reb was talking of heaven and Mitch had an idea. He asked the Reb about what it would be like if everybody got five minutes with God before moving on to whatever came next. During that time you could ask whatever you wished.

The Reb responded that first he would ask God to show the way to members of “my family” who need help. It is not clear whether he meant his congregation family, his personal family or both. “Guide them.”

And Mitch said OK. that’s a minute.

The Reb said he’d ask God to give the next 3 minutes to someone who is suffering and “requires your love and counsel.”

And in the last minute? Mitch wondered. And the Reb replied that he would tell God he thought he had been a good and loving man who had helped many people and he wondered what his reward would be. But, he thought, God would say, “Reward? What reward? That’s what you were supposed to do.”

Mitch ends the book with “the question gets answered. God sings, we hum along, and there are many melodies, but it’s all one song–one same, wonderful human song.

I am in love with hope.”

There are some of us who won’t be able to go quite the whole way with Mitch’s answer. We will want to talk more and reason more and tease out the meaning behind the words. Any maybe some of us will. But regardless who does or doesn’t, maybe we all end up the same place. In fact, I think we do. Try his book-this Christmas.

My second “Christmas book” is Krista Tippett’s “Becoming Wise–An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.” This is like Mitch’s book in that it is basically saying that postive and joyful living is possible, but first you have to get through and/or deal with the crap. Neither of them would be crude enough in their elegant writing to put it that way. but that’s about what it comes down to, so I will.

Tippett’s book is altogether more the ambitious of the two as it breaks down such an approach to the world into five different(more or less)categories and these five plus the introductory chapter are the book. I took a quick look at what readers and critics had said about the book and my impression(based upon an admittedly short study)was that the professional critics liked it more than the public. In fact, the two I read were almost totally positive with no criticisms at all.

I understand some of the criticims the readers made but on the whole I’m with the “real” critics in this matter. It is true, that the book has an uneven feel as it jumps from one interview subject to another, which was the basis of much of the readers’ criticism. But the overall theme, never stated quite as much as in Mitch’s book, is love and openness to experiences of the day to day world and experiences of a more spiritual nature. And I think she does a very good job of connecting these two.

I found it worth the trip to travel through so many minds. She talks to so many people and they come from many different backgrounds. Many of them are scientists with varying degrees of interest in or belief in a spiritual realm of human existence. Many are religious leaders or at least religious people. Many are accomplished leaders in “secular” endeavors but relate to one or both of the other two, The main thing that she seeks is their views on how to be a complete person, or to make the world better by your presence(whatever your occupation) and how to live joyfully(mostly)amid the miseries of the world and the clutter of our flawed, imperfect lives.

I will not attempt to give you a final answer from Ms Tippett. I cannot as there is none, at least in the specific didactic way so many expect. But if there was one basic statement I think would apply here, I guess it would be that we need to live with generosity and an open mind–open to other cultures, both worldly and what most people would consider “spiritual” feelings, open to other types of pesonalities and beliefs, and always ready to be surprised by something new or at least something we had not recognized.,

In a book that is mostly interviews with people the author found fasicinating, one meets, well, interesting folks. It is perhaps well to keep in mind that not everyone in the world is capable of this kind of thought, or, more importantly, interested in pursuing it. Also, there is this– Mitch’s book is dedicated almost entirely to the message that love of others and sacrifice to help them are the main points of a good life. I don’t think Ms Tippett or any of her contributors would object to this or deny it in any way whatsoever. But I also think they search for something more–the reason behind such a view, a reason that may go beyond the compassion nearly all decent people feel at one time or another. And through so much of the book, we find stated or implied, the importance of stories. True stories about people which have defied them at times and defined them at others, and made-up stories which were made up purposely for explanation when nothing else would explain them.

I think the best further explanation I can give you is to offer some direct quotes and/or summations of the author’s conversations which I found particularly important.

For openers, the author comes as close as, I think, she is comfortable with, to a personal statement of faith with “If God is God–and that in itself is a crazy shorthand, begging volumes of unfolding of the question–he/she does not need us craven.

“He/she desires us, needs us, grateful and attentive and courageous in the everyday.”

She adds, “That fear of the religion of my childhood was about measuring up–about moral perfection, and the eternal cost of falling short. For me now, faith is in interplay with moral imagination, something distinct from moral perfection.”

This is about as close as I can get to a statement of faith on her part and I find it quite attractive. And so do most of her interviewees, whose contributions go mostly to support at least indirectly, this point of view. for example–

Psychiatrist Robert Coles said, responding to Krista’s question about children and mystery, “Mystery is such an important part of it. And mystery invites curiosity and inquiry.” A few lines later he invoked Flannery O’Connor–“She said …’The task of the novelist is to deepen mystery.’ And he adds “We can’t let it be. …mystery is a great challenge. It’s an invitation and it’s a wonderful companion, actually.”

And this to some degree set the tone of the book. Nearly all of the interviewees celebrate mystery, that is unknowing and trying to learn, to explore. Of course this happens in different ways. She evokes one of the more formal thinkers of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr, who began one of his best known books, “The Nature and Destiny of Man,” with “Man is his own most vexing problem..” And the vexing takes place in many ways and all cultures, and in nearly all cultures and religious traditions someone tries to deal with it. The same is true of nearly all philosophical/psychological traditions, though sometimes these get mixed up together so much it’s difficult to differentiate among them.

Speaking for herself, Krista says, “Once upon a time I took in mystery as a sensation best left unexamined. Now I experience it as a welcome.” And a few lines later, “spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity–taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty a well as its ravages…In this sense, spiritual life is a reasonable, reality-based pursuit. …it is … about befriending reality, the common human experience of mystery included.” And I felt I had just been made to remember something I already knew but to which I paid too little attention. And the whole book tends to do that to the reader.

Perhaps you have heard of the people known to demographics as the “Nones.” These are the Americans, mostly young, who, if given a multiple choice of religious preferences, check the block that says “none.” Krista gives attention to a point long known but seldom appreciated in my opinion. “Nones” are not necessarily anti-religious. They are people who find the versions of religion, particularly Christianity, with which they have become acquainted not accept able. And, frankly, though I don’t consider myself a “None,” I frequently sympathize with them

Krista says, “I don’t find it surprising that young people born in the 1980’s or 1990’s have distanced themselves from the notion of religious declaration …

“More to the point: the growing universe of the Nones –the new nonreligious–is one of the most spiritually vibrant and provocative spaces in modern life. It is not a world in which spiritual life is absent. It is a world that resists religious excesses and shallows.” Krista doesn’t actually say this, but I will add that the “excesses and shallows” are what you usually see of religion on TV and therefore the only(or anyway almost the only)experience of religion many Americans have.

And it is important to note that this spiritual searching extends to people often considered by many in the academic community AND the larger public automatically non-religious. Arthur Zajonc, “is a physicist and comtempletive”–a combination which, if mentioned a generation ago at a faculty party would likely have led to laughter in many places. He says to Krista, “It’s possible to have a spirituality that is not simply about faith … but that actually understands itself as committed to knowing. The practice of meditation and contemplation, which has been an important part of my life since my 20s, has led me to the conviction that there’s an experiential domain in contemplative spirituality which can become in some sense scientific–in the sense that it’s a repeatable basis of human experience.”

Though I have no wish to compare myself to a man of this guy’s depth or spiritual/scientific experience, I have had similar feelings for a long time. I have felt that secularists who sneer at spirituality should investigate it carefully and apply their own “scientific method” before deciding to reject it.

The last chapter is on hope and myraid examples of different hopeful expressions are there, too many to try repeating. But I wish to end where Krista does. There was a young woman, a doctor apparently or at least an employee of Doctors Without Borders who was taken hostage by ISIS and a year and a half later died in their hands. Krista was granted the right to look at the letters she had sent to her parents, and to at least some of her blog writings. In one of the latter she had written “This really is my life’s work, to go where there is suffering.” And in a letter to her parents while in captivity, she reminded Krista of “mystics and saints across the ages,figures like Julian of Norwich and Mother Teresa.”

But Krista got to asking herself about the fact that her beautiful writings and many others would never have been read by many others if they had escaped, returned home safely. It was only the finality of what had happened that brought them to peoples’ attention. And she struggled with this and its implications.

She does not, after all this and all that she has experienced and observed and read or talked about, offer any all-satisfying final answer. Pat answers are not her style. But she does say this-

“Humility is a final virtue …woven through lives of wisdom and resilience …Like humor, if softens us for …beauty and questioning and all the other virtues …Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but approaching everything and everone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart.”

She concludes that the mystery and art of living are “as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species …as close as beginning quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that.”

There is great wisdom and some great comfort in this book and I think the above closing statement says it as well as anything I could add. I am hesitant to compare the books, but compare I must if I’m to fulfill what I set out to do in this little exercise. Mitch’s book is the basic book of being good and living the good life for yourself and for those around you. Krista’s does not in any manner contradict him. She merely expands her thinking and her readers to higher and more difficult levels, as she acknowledges the nuances and contradictions of the world and of what we perceive as goodness and happiness. She is not afraid to ask the great questions and to give us a plethora of answers from which she more or less distills a partial answer of her own.

We do not know everything and never will. But many of us are capable of learning a lot, and if we followed the dicates of the consciences and consciousness we meet in Krista’s book we would be better off and the world a better place. What more could we ask of her? Merry Christmas, though I hope to get back before the day with a friviolous sounding(and therfore seriously imoportant)reflection on Christmas movies. I think Krista would approve.