A few weeks ago I got an invitation from The Triad Institute, via Adam Walker Cleaveland, to read and review David James Duncan’s latest book. I didn’t read the invitation closely enough, however, to see that the book was called God Laughs and Plays, and had both “sermons” and “fundamentalist right” in the subtitle. I thought I was signing up to read a novel. Since Christians and I don’t generally use “God” to refer to the same thing, and since sermons and fundamentalists continue to be things I mostly try to avoid, you can imagine my horror, some days later, when the book arrives and I see the cover alone contains all three! Ack!

Luckily I looked closer this time. The real title reads God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons In Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.

Now, we can argue about whether the title accurately sums up the book, or whether I will ever get totally comfortable with it, but we can’t about this: I just sat here weeping after reading the whole thing through. I cried the kind of tears you only do when some deep, deep need you didn’t even know existed in you gets offered to you gently, lovingly, on the very platter that the grandma you’ve only ever dreamed of having owns—the one on which your imaginative matriarch of all-will-be-well serves you up cobbler and roast beef and sweet rolls and every kind of homemade Christmas treat. The one the mere glimpse of which reminds you, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you’ve always belonged somewhere, nestled deep into a clan, and that words like slick and posh and edgy and cool don’t apply here, never have, and therefore cannot touch your sense of being fine and loved and safe and known, all the way to your core. Normal, even.

He served me up these things, this David Duncan, middle-aged, writer-activist-comic-mystic-angler that apparently he is.

God Laughs and Plays is a collection of essays. It’s taken from talks, interviews and writings from Duncan’s recent past, and together is a kind of No! to any worldview—fundamentalist or otherwise—that would flatten or feign capable of stuffing our world into known and owned and heavily controlled commodities, things separate from holy, and therefore freely trampleable and disposable and looked past for finding God. It’s a Yes! to anything that expands wonder, which is to say love. Duncan writes:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love—and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly old word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder, but it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (8)

So it’s a love letter to Life, you could say, in the deepest, all-encompassing sense of the word Life, and a mama-bear growl toward anything that would defame Her…that would defame God.

Lest you fear an embittered tirade of equal, though left-handed, barb to the kinds of rants the fundamentalist right can make, however, listen to what he says early on:

There is a self-righteous knot in me that finds zealotry so repugnant it wants to sit on the sidelines with the like-minded, plaster my car with bumper stickers that say MEAN PEOPLE SUCK and NO BILLIONAIRE LEFT BEHIND and WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?, and leave it at that. But I can’t. My sense of this life as pure gift—my sense of a grace operative in this world despite, and even amid, its hurts and terrors—propels me to allow life to open my heart still wider, even if this openness comes by breaking. For I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has ever struck me as more beautiful. (xxv)

This is the kind of heart you will find beating behind and inside of all the teeth this book can bare.

So what about this heart, and the brains and words and quirks attached to it? How did it serve me up such grounding, grandmotherly kindness?

Though my past might say otherwise, I am not religious. I am not a churchgoer. I confess that most religious people and places do little by way of opening my heart to God. They don’t expand my sense of wonder, to put it Duncanly. I am, however, deeply hungry to sense my (our) union with God. And I’m seized by this—by wonder, by love—as I ponder so many things: people, trees, planets, stars, nutrinos, animals, carpentry, music, color, the texture of almost anything I touch. I see things, too, with a deep, inner eye. Visions, if you want to call them that.

So I am a mystic, even as I’m hopelessly tethered to my rational, knowledge-based side.

And in all of this, in this crazy mix of rational and irrational…metarational; in my love of all things known and unknown and my thirst for ever more of them flowing into me; in the kinds of feelings and images evoked when they do; in the echoes of wisdom and truth I see and study across religious traditions, and my chafing at claims to the contrary, I have felt alien. There’s a stamp in the shape of woowoo spiritist and a stamp in the shape of religious adherent and a stamp in the shape of rational ponderer or crazy right-brained mystic, but none of these alone has ever fit my forehead well.

But along comes Duncan, whose book I blindly and then resistantly and then with gusto stumble into, and he’s speaking my language! He’s talking my talk! Were I born twenty years earlier, and in Montana, and raised by fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventists, I’ve no doubt I would be his best friend. Maybe sister. I swear I’d know how to fish.

So he normalized me, is what I’m trying to say. And in having lived that much longer, pondered that much more, engaged that much more actively in resisting religious and political wonder-kill machines, he has blazed a kind of trail for aliens like me. Like us. Or lifted up the veil that’s hidden the existing paths surrounding us thus far.

So what does the trail he’s blazed by this book look like?

Real, for one. With or without intention, the essays of this book outline a man who feels rage and fear and pride and grief and indignation, but likewise joy and mirth and hope and gratitude and humility. He toots his own horn, but in the next breath, or essay, disappears into a kind of egoless sage, connecting with the best in all of us. I’m drawn to his aliveness to all of these parts of being human, and to the way his activist hat, and tragic/comic masks, and aged teacher of youth voice, and philosopher’s pipe, and wild prophet hairdo, and scientist’s coat, and druid’s staff, and mystic’s eyes, and any other garb or sound for any of the roles he owns aren’t glued on permanently tight. He dances, at least in this collection, within a full range of humanness. He feels real, in the very best sense of the word. And he’s funny, too.

Surely this is a trail we aliens would do well to follow.

But his trail is more than real. It winds an almost impossible path of attentiveness to detail—to place, to land, to people, and even the smallest grain of sand—but stretches that attention out beyond the scope of any single person’s sight. Politics—again local, but also national and international—get his trail’s time. Religion, of course. And cosmic things, too. One feels the pan in reading this of an intoxicated-with-life cinematographer, whose alternate delight and alarm at the interconnectedness of everything—galaxies all the way down to fundamentalists and writers and dying dogs and salmon—has his camera swinging ever out and in. But the swing is elegant, and unhurried, so by the time you reach the climax, all you can do is…all I can do is…weep. The very best, most fulfilled kind of tears.

If every book with God and fundamentalist and sermon in the title were like this one, I suspect aliens would feel alien no more. Our world would be inhabited and inhabitable by far less war, on every level, and far more kindness, far less senseless death and dying and far more life that stretches through and beyond both things. Wonder would be more like the air we all breathe.

[edited to turn off comments; getting lots of spam on this post for some reason]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Books and Art, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.