a very peculiar education

The day after Fall for the Book Festival, I left for Australia with my sister Stephanie.  We were going to see my first grandchild, James Horatio, who was born in Sydney on September 1.

We stayed at an airbnb in Paddington and began each morning at the Ampersand bookshop cafe,  drinking flat whites, and surrounded by secondhand books.

My sister Steph with her morning coffee

Then we picked up pastries at the Trinity bakery further along Oxford Street, and took them to Alex and Katie's apartment where we had breakfast and worshiped the newborn baby.  Sometimes we held him and sometimes we watched him and sometimes we provided a little back up.  Sometimes all of us, baby included, ventured out to a pub for lunch or to a street festival or to take in the Sculpture by the Sea along the walk from Bondi to Tamarama Beach.  We walked through Centennial Park and into an Aboriginal sanctuary of flying foxes (the largest bats on the planet - they were up in the trees in the thousands, hanging there like enormous pods).

Alex walking the baby in Centennial Park

 My cup was running over, except that meanwhile I had a deadline approaching. The holiday newsletter at Politics and Prose back home was going to press, and as a result I was furiously reading and writing reviews for Karl Ove Knausgaard's Intermittent - Anne Tyler's Clock Dance -  and Tara Westover's Educated.

 I'm sure that by now you've heard quite enough on the subject of Karl Ove from me (and Anne Tyler too for that matter).  But it's the last book I want to tell you about now : Tara Westover's memoir Educated about growing up in Bucks Peak Idaho as the daughter of Mormon Survivalists.  This is the book that took up so much mental space while I held my beautiful grandchild in my arms. It made for a strange juxtaposition.

First of all, Westover's father was barking mad. He never sent her or any of her siblings to school or to the doctors, and she didn't even have a birth certificate until she was eleven. His world was his land, the church and his scrap metal yard. And in that scrap metal yard Tara Westover worked as a child,  all the while listening to her father ranting about the imposition of “west coast socialism on the good people of Idaho.”   She also helped her mother deliver babies across the county, and prepared her "head for the hills" backpack, full of supplies in case the End of the World came - that, or Y2K.    I mean, I've read Hillbilly Elegy - but this book goes way further in describing  the forgotten ones who live off the grid on the fringes of American society.

As I read Educated I found myself repeatedly drawing my breath in horror.  The odds were stacked so deeply against this woman - whose older brother liked to shove her face into the toilet and call her a whore, because her dance classes were part of Satan’s deception. They claimed to teach dance but actually taught promiscuity.  It wasn’t that she had done something wrong.  “so much," she writes, "as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.”

So while I held my six week old grandson in my arms, this pure little person with a lifetime ahead of him,  I couldn't help reflecting on human frailty.  How do so many of us make it out of childhood and into adulthood, I wondered, when we depend so entirely on others, not just for comfort, but for our survival. For mental and emotional health and balance. 

And yet, against all odds, Tara Westover turned her back on the life that was mapped out for her.  When she began her studies at Brigham Young University she was woefully unprepared.  She had never heard of the Holocaust and thought that Europe was a country. She had only vaguely heard the word Shakespeare.  But she wanted to learn “how the gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality.”   This hunger for knowledge and understanding led her to study at Cambridge University and from there to earn a PhD from Harvard - drawn to such “unwomanly” subjects as law, politics and Jewish History.

"Gosh Mand," said my sister Steph  as I gasped in horror at what I was reading, as Katie nursed James, and Alex prepared a risotto for our dinner.   "What's going on now?"  she asked.  Usually somebody was being abused - Tara was being beaten up by her older brother Shawn - or somebody had been severely burned at the scrap yard or had their teeth knocked out. Nobody cared. This was just life, and sucking it up was how you got by.

Let me just say here that Educated isn't the sort of thing you should read if you've just had a new baby.  I told Katie she couldn't possibly read it.  When you have a new baby you feel too tender for material like this.  I remember renting the film Nicolas and Alexandra  after giving birth to my daughter Rosalind. We were watching it on VHS in Caracas Venezuela where we lived, and when the part about Alexei having hemophilia came up, my mother asked, "Are you sure you want to watch this, darling?"

No - I didn't want to watch it.  I couldn't.  Couldn't bear to hear about children in danger, being neglected or abused. Such material was all but off limits for at least another decade.

Nevertheless, when I finished Educated I dearly wanted someone else to read it.  So I left my copy in Katie and Alex's apartment.  Perhaps Alex will pick it up at some point - or better yet,  maybe he will donate it to the Ampersand bookshop. That would make me very happy.

Ampersand Bookshop in Paddington

christian science and emily fridlund's history of wolves

 Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves poses some interesting questions.  What's the difference between what you want to believe and what you do? And what's the difference between what you think and what you end up doing?  I need to ponder these questions seriously. But when I chose History of Wolves for one of my book discussion groups this month, I had no idea it had anything to do with Christian Science.

You see, I was raised as a Christian Scientist, and was actively involved in the church for years. I know a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the religion, and although I left it definitively about fifteen years ago, I can see it from both sides.

Muslims feel that others just don't get it, when they judge the faith by extremists. Catholics  looking at the extent of sexual abuse in the priesthood, must wonder how the faith that guided their lives became so twisted and contorted.  There are terrible and tragic flaws in fundamentalism of any kind. I feel the same when I think about Christian Science.

Emily Fridland's description of the Wednesday evening testimony meetings really made me laugh. The old fashioned colors in the church sanctuary, the little old ladies, the long silences.  In other descriptions of how her characters follow their faith, she does use a lot of buzz words. But she uses them like a foreign language, in a way that tells me her understanding of Christian Science is superficial.   She cannot possibly know what it has meant for those who have grown up in it and been transformed by its precepts.  I have been on my knees in gratitude for many a healing - physical healing but mostly metal, psychological and emotional healing.

There are universal truths in all religions, I find. And I recognize the universal truths I loved in Christian Science when I read such books as Letting Go by David Hawkins, or The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer,  The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle or The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. In these books - not to mention in the Bible and the Koran - I have found spiritual guidance and buoyancy which has directed my life. 

Emily Fridlund writes about a child who dies as a result of Christian Science treatment - or rather - who dies because the parents don't recognize his symptoms as serious enough to take him to the doctors.  I know there are such cases, they've been highly publicized, and they are terrible, unnecessary tragedies.  But the pat dismissal of pain as unreal is a gross oversimplification of Christian Science treatment.

Not to get too far into it, I will say this.  In England where I was brought up, the law mandates that children be taken to doctors if a sickness continues for more than a short period of time. Thus, Dr Morgan treated me for ear ache,  and when I had the chickenpox, and once when I had an infected finger. Those were the days when doctors made house calls.  Christian Science practitioners still make house calls today.

I would also like to mention a little known fact. There's a whole branch of the Christian Science church devoted to nursing.  Christian Science nurses delivered all my siblings and cared for my father in a Christian Science nursing home when he was in the final stages of dementia.  I cannot imagine more practical, loving and solicitous care than what he received.  He even had a private nurse!  And when he died, I will never forget those in attendance. The genuine love and care he received couldn't have been better.

So why did I leave the faith, you may wonder?  Well frankly - it was the church I left, not so much the spirit of Christian Science teachings.  I became fed up with the busy work of church organization in sparsely attended services that sucked up hours of my time and ultimately was neither spiritually uplifting nor rewarding as a community activity.   Even so, it was another member of the church who had herself left for many years who gave me a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi. In that book we both found echoes of Christian Science - in the Hindu concept of a causal, astral and physical plane of experience, for instance. He uses different terminology, but the essence is the same.

"The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with Divine Love," writes Mary Baker Eddy. Elsewhere in her book she explains that the Spirit comes only in small degrees, and that without Love,  "the letter is but the dead body of Science, pulseless, cold, inanimate."  

So, only those who misinterpret her message (and yes, I acknowledge that many do seem to get the wrong end of the stick) would behave like the characters in History of Wolves.  And I have to say here, that although it might seem clever to call the first part of her novel Science and the second part Health, I didn't see a connection between the narrative and these subheadings in History of Wolves.

Of course there are funny and sometimes quaint practices which Fridlund alludes to, connected with the church. They make me smile when I recall them now. The many little old ladies with benign smiles, the phrases like "animal magnetism" and "knowing the truth" and all the references trotted out to Mrs Eddy's church manual. Even the fact that we always called her "Mrs" Eddy makes me smile. It's so Victorian!

 I do have tender memories though.  Every Sunday afternoon after church, my father would sit with his books - his Bible and his Science and Health - and he would clean out the markings from last week's lesson and mark his books with blue chalk - outlining citations in next week's lesson -which comprised six sections - Bible verses and correlative passages from Science and Health.  Many a weekend my father visited prisoners in various correctional facilities.  He also spent hours ministering to people in nursing homes. Nobody could have known the Bible better than he - and he made it come alive for me. He made me think about it every week - and put Jesus's Sermon on the Mount into practice.

And this brings me to another point.  The Bible (King James translation) was the most important book of my childhood.  I know it inside out.  I read it not only weekly in the Bible lessons we studied but from cover to cover twice!  Yes  - all those rules in Leviticus - all the wars in Joshua - all the begats....who begat whom ad infinitum. But I also read the book of Ruth, Song of Solomon, the Psalms, Isaiah and the gospels... and the inspired passages in those books are living and breathing in my heart today. I can call them up any time I need them.  They offer comfort, guidance and support.  I have Christian Science to thank for my knowledge of the Bible. I firmly believe that most people who follow a faith - any faith really - are simply trying to lead good lives. 

Did the practice of Christian Science leave me with any lasting damage?  Maybe I'm too tender hearted with those who behave badly or have been unkind.  I'm too susceptible to charm.  Too willing to see the good in people. I can be naive. But hey, maybe that's also just my personality.

These days I practice Bikram yoga several times a week.  Like Christian Science it is always challenging.  Often when I go into the studio and lie on my mat, I'm reminded of going into church because I have that same sense of community at my yoga studio. It's a gathering of people who have little in common except for the practice and yet because of the practice they share what matters most.  We used to call it a practice in Christian Science as well. 

Am I aware that Bikram Choudhury has been charged with sexual misconduct? Indeed I am.  Am I appalled by his behavior?  Of course.  But am I put off the practice of Bikram yoga because of  these allegations? I believe that whatever his personal shortcomings,  Bikram Choudhury founded a practice which touches every part of my body and spirit.  And like Christian Science it is a practice which helps me grow, so long as I follow it with humility, and so long as I practice it honestly. So long as I don't try to walk on water before I am sure I can swim.

I just discovered I still have a Bible with chalk markings in my library!