I'm spending a couple of days up north, on Lime Lake, with a friend talking philosophy and theology while we fish and I help with some stuff around his cabin. I have read a number of books recently that I would like to review... this is one of them.
Scott Russell Sanders, A
Private History of Awe (New York: North Point Press, 2006), 322 pages.
This is a beautiful book.
Sander’s writing is graceful and eloquent, even though I did not always
find myself in agreement with his theology.
It is evident that Sanders has left his childhood faith behind. Yet, and it may seem strange for me to
suggest this from a man who questions the deity of Christ, his writings appear to
me to be incarnational. Sanders experiences
the Creator’s hand throughout the world and especially in other people. In this memoir, Sanders weaves together the
story of his first twenty-five years (up to the birth of his daughter) with the
present (experiencing the world through his granddaughter and the decline of
his own mother).
Although born in the rural South, Sanders’ family moved
north when he was just a boy. His father
took a position at the Arsenal, a huge military compound in Ohio where they
build bombs for the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
Later, the family moved outside the Arsenal, to a home with land along a
creek (that would later be dammed for reservoir, requiring the family to move
again). Here, Sanders began to love
nature. Sanders’ father often drank and
could be abusive, especially to his mother.
As a young boy, Sanders hated his father for how he treated his mother,
but in later years he seems to have made some peace and realized there were
good characteristics to his father. For
one, his father challenged racial assumptions that were common in America
during the 1950s and early 60s. The
contractor he worked for also saw this and when Sanders was older, they sent
his father to Louisiana to help foster peace between African-American and white
workers. Sanders himself grew up
admiring Martin Luther King, and he relates much of what was happening in his
life to national and international events including the Civil Rights movement,
the Cold War and Vietnam.
As a high school student, Sanders attended a camp for students
who showed promise within the sciences where he met a girl named Ruth, from
Indiana. The two of them struck up a
close friendship that lasted through their senior year in high school and
through their college years. (Ruth
stayed back in Indiana for school while Sanders headed to Brown University in
Providence, Rhode Island). While in
college, Brown changed majors, leaving science behind for English. After college, Sanders had a scholarship to
study in Great Britain while Ruth had a scholarship for graduate study at
Harvard, but they ended up marrying and both going to Britain where Sanders
earned a PhD, focusing his dissertation on the writings of D. H. Lawrence. Coming
back to America, the couple decided to settle in Indiana, with Sanders teaching
at the University. This decision went
against the suggestions of many of their friends who questioned such wisdom of
attempting to become an established author in the Midwest. However,
the decision reflected the role of place and the importance of family in the
Sanders’ lives.
This book contains many wonderful stories. We learn about how Sanders first encountered
and later dealt with racial issues, with the Vietnam War and the possibility of
being drafted, with the two-sides of his father, with his place in the created
world and awe for nature and a desire to do no harm. Grace is seen throughout these pages. Sanders may have moved away from the
childhood faith of his parents, but he retains the awe and is disturbed that
awe is often missing from churches today.
There were two places where Sanders got me questioning his
understanding of nature or remembrance of an event. Both are minor mistakes, but I will note
them. He speaks of the seed heads of
poisonous sumac turning brilliantly red in the fall (92), but that plant doesn’t
have a seed head and its berries don’t turn red don’t turn red but a grayish
white. I think he is referring to
staghorn sumac. On another occasion, he
tells about going to a room at the university (in Great Britain) to watch the
first man on the moon. As they walked to
the building, the clouds parted long enough for him to see the waxing crescent
of the moon… Early that next morning, as
he’s walking back from having spent most of the night watching the moon
footage, he also sees the crescent moon setting. If it
was truly a crescent (new moon), it would have long set when he headed home. As a said, both of these are minor and really
don’t distract from the power of Sander’s prose.
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| "A moment of awe" before sunrise at Lime Lake |
