Critics' choices for Christmas Traveling widely, reading closely (even eccentrically), and judging perspicaciously, our panel of Christmas critics has put together a list of titles that includes everything from an obedient Lassie to God's brilliantly wayward "biographer" And then there's the poetry and the theology Please share the good words
Pampusch, Anita M
Anita M. Pampusch Anita M. Pampusch is president of the College of Saint Catherine in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My bookshelf contains an eclectic assortment of vol-umes: philosophical clas-sics,...
...It seemed to be born of a fierce commitment to family, a strong sense of survival, and an appreciation for things of the spirit: books, art, music, ideas...
...The book ends, in fact, shortly after Mao's death when Chang receives a scholarship for study in England...
...The book is gripping, not only because it provides an insider's commentary on the cataclysmic events of twentieth-century China, but especially because it reveals the souls of three strong Chinese women who dealt personally with uncertainty, physical pain, and deprivation...
...She Who Is is an intellectual rather than a personal journey...
...Hampl quotes her spiritual director as speaking about the paths on which image and metaphor take us...
...astonishes, too, for its brilliance and depth of research...
...It is there that she begins to understand prayer, her own prayer, in her own "virgin time" (a phrase taken from Thomas Merton who describes temps vierge as "the point between darkness and light, ....full of potential...
...She Who Is by Elizabeth Johnson (Crossroad, $24.95, 316 pp...
...I found myself wondering about the inner life that sustained these women...
...There, she experiences a deep silence which envelops her and makes her aware of who she is and what her special "vocation" is...
...It was Become - Commonweal Associate surely not based on religion (at least for Chang and her mother, devoted Communists...
...Johnson uses her study of images, metaphor, and analogy in the naming of God to support the underlying thesis that using women's reality to illuminate understandings of the ineffable God can also serve to emancipate women...
...reflection on these symbols can also serve to ennoble and free us...
...Her gradual awareness that things were not as she had been told, and her willingness to let that awareness develop even when her thoughts had to be hidden, eventually led her out of China...
...Each was a survivor in her own way...
...Some readers might be caught off guard by the depth and significance of the concluding chapter...
...Perhaps the most fascinating was Wild Swans by June Chang (Doubleday, Anchor Books, $14,524 pp...
...My bookshelf contains an eclectic assortment of vol-umes: philosophical clas-sics, history, biography, travel, novels, mystery stories for light reading, and a set of contemporary feminist books in philosophy and theology which I read as part of a book club...
...It is wonderful reading...
...That leads me to my third selection, probably the most beautiful book I've encountered in contemporary theology, one which deals with images and metaphors for God...
...It's when the church tries to tame the metaphors that you get into trouble," she says...
...Virgin Time is beautifully written, full of sometimes humorous but always recognizable descriptions of a Midwestern Catholic upbringing, and with such astute observations of the human scene that one might enjoy it just for that...
...Having made the decision to stay in the West, she wrote the book after a visit from her mother who revealed much more of the family's stories...
...The traditional culture and the family culture shaped them as much as the commitment to communism so firmly embraced by June and her mother...
...Johnson goes on to establish that such a name is linguistically possible, theologically legitimate, and existentially and religiously necessary...
...Their styles and topics are widely different, yet each book (one by a Chinese woman, two by Americans) is a commentary on women's experience and suggests that reflection upon that experience can illuminate our understandings of the inner life, prayer, and ultimately, God...
...The task is universal, not individual, and the insights provide legitimacy and dignity to all women while they illuminate for all Catholic Christians the rich traditions around our understandings of God...
...Having rejected her "dead" Catholic past, Hampl was unable to shake the memory of a "mystical" childhood experience...
...Er Hong recounts a personal quest to define her own ideas and place in the world even while both were dictated to her...
...She argues persuasively that if the symbol gives rise to the thought, then while our experience can provide valuable images and metaphors for God (for example, as originator and sustainer, compassionate lover, etc...
...Chang, whose given name, Er Hong, means "second wild swan" (her mother was the first), recounts her own story in the context of her family, notably her mother and grandmother, whose combined experiences spanned most of twentieth-century China...
...She searches for the meaning of that experience in prayer, through spiritual direction, through visits to holy European places (in the company of believers and tourists), and finally through entry into the routine and community of a Cistercian monastery in California...
...The country moved from the Manchu Empire during her grandmother's childhood, through the Japanese occupation during World War II and the civil war between the Kuoming-tang and the Communists which marked her mother's developing years, to the author's own experiences during the regime of Mao Zedong...
...They showed themselves to be idealistic, creative, tough, and courageous over and over again...
...After several possible names for God are examined, she ultimately selects "She Who Is," a divine title signifying the creative, relational power of a being who evolves, suffers with, sustains, and enfolds the universe...
...As her grandmother remarked after her mother once defied soldiers threatening her, "You have your grandfather's blood in your veins...
...I have selected three volumes which I liked best...
...A seemingly very different journey, more consciously introspective and personal, yet, curiously, one that also helps her to understand her place in the world, is described by Patricia Hampl in Virgin Time (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $22,242 pp...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 21
