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Editorial
Alwyn Thomson
Comment:
Politics: serving God and doing good!
Ethel White
From
the Director: Cultivating the common ground
David W Porter
ECONI
Statement: Confidence in God
October 2002
Postbag: Letters to the Editor
Why
vote?
Alison Laird
Communities
of hope
Lord Alderdice
Transformation 2003: Killing for God?
View
from the south
Patrick Mitchel
Church
& state
Esmond
Birnie MLA
Taking
the plunge
John Kyle
Faith
in politics
Interview: Rt Hon Paul Murphy MP
Your
kingdom come
Heather Morrow
ECONI
Statement: Forum for Peace & Reconciliation
January 2003
Bible
study series: Faith in the future
David
W Porter
Through
a glass, darkly
Changing Women, Changing Worlds Conference
Review:
A night in November by Marie Jones
Noel
McCune
Book
Reviews
Alwyn Thomson
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 3: Reconciliation
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 4: Peace
BOOKS:
PEACE LIKE A RIVER by Leif Enger &
THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT by Brady Udall
Reviewed by Alwyn Thomson
“REUBEN LAND, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe.” With these words Jeremiah Land gives life to his son – “a little clay boy” – that the doctor had given up on. So Reuben lived to tell the story of his family in Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. Edgar Mint too was given up for dead: “When I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.” Yet he too, miraculously survived.
On the surface Edgar and Reuben have little in common. Reuben is part of a family – motherless – but close knit and deeply rooted, held together by faith in God. Edgar’s life is spent in hospitals, care homes, with foster parents. Yet Reuben’s life and family are torn apart when his older brother, Davy, kills and then flees, and the family set off across the American Midwest to find him, bring him home and prove his innocence. Edgar, too, is both pursued and, ultimately in pursuit, his mission in life to find the mailman who ran over his head and let him know that Edgar survived.
For Edgar and Reuben the end of the quest is not what either expected or hoped for. Yet for both there is a satisfaction and an acceptance – a kind of redemption. Yet this is not a ‘perfect redemption.’ The past with its pain, confusion and hurt remains real in memory and in consequence. For Reuben and Edgar life can never be the same. Scars – physical and emotional – remain. Conversations that should have happened never happen. Conflicts are left unresolved.
But at the end of his story Edgar can write of emerging “into the bright day, blinking and holding my hand to the sky, amazed at the light, like a man raised from the dead.” And Reuben? “I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers.”
In a literary culture that hums with the bleak and the cynical, narratives of hope and redemption, of faith and family, of small mercies and surprising grace often rub critics up the wrong way – and such has been the fate of both of these novels, especially that of Enger. The presence of God and of miracles seems to cause the greatest offence, for both of these novels are shot through with the presence of God and the challenge of faith.
Jeremiah Land is a man of prayer and a worker of miracles. At the revival meeting he is laid out by the Spirit on the church floor: “How do you wake a man knocked cold by love?” For Jeremiah and Reuben heaven is real. For Edgar God is real, but his relationship with God is more problematic than Reuben’s: “I can see no divine purpose behind the tangle of this existence, no ordering hand...None of this will keep me from believing in God. I believe in Him, I just don’t know that I will ever have faith in Him.”
Both of these novels slipped out quietly – no awards, no prizes, no big publicity budget. But I recommend that you track them down. Start with one – if you like it, read the other; if you don’t, you have no soul.
ALWYN THOMSON is ECONI’s Research Officer.
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