A Story of Reconciliation and Healing: Convicted

When I was a freshman in small Michigan liberal arts college I asked a man where he was from. He said from outside of Benton Harbor. Where was that, I asked? He described the town in most negative terms and said, “if a bird flew from here directly west to Lake Michigan, and dropped a bomb just before the lake, that’s Benton Harbor.” Over the years I learned more about Benton Harbor and its affluent sister city across the bridge, St. Joseph.

I was moved to read Convicted: A Crooked Cop, an Innocent Man, and an Unlikely Journey of Forgiveness and Friendship by Jameel McGee and Andrew Collins with Mark Tabb because it was about Benton Harbor and a Michigan story.

Benton Harbor was once was a booming port town until the 1960s when manufacturing jobs disappeared and the white population moved across the river to St. Joseph. It has suffered forty years of racial tension, high unemployment, and the decay of city services and infrastructure. The murder rate per capita is one of the highest in the United States and drugs are rampant.

As in African American communities across the nation, the push to be tough on crime resulted in aggressive police tactics. Officer Andrew Collins yearned for recognition and success and became legendary for his narcotics related arrest rates and convictions. When he took short cuts and illegally manipulated evidence he justified it as part of putting away the bad guys. When he skimmed money off confiscated drug money, it was his just due for working for so little money.

Jameel McGee tried to keep away from drugs and criminal activities but was convicted for a crime he did not commit as a teenager. And then one day he asked a stranger to give him a ride to the store and his life changed forever. The police found drugs in the car and the stranger set Jameel up for the crime. The policeman who arrested him was Andrew, who manipulated evidence to ensure a conviction.

Convicted is the story of how these two men came to this fatal meeting, how it changed their lives, and how they each turned to faith and God. It is a story of how forgiveness is the first step in reconciliation and new life.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

The book is presented with first-hand stories by both Andrew and Jameel, which gives an immediacy and authenticity to the story. Jameel insists on his innocence, and Andrew professes that his using ‘short cuts’ was part of his wanting to do good by ensuring bad people were off the street. They both had to come to terms with their personal responsibility for their fate and to stop blaming others.

Jameel turns to God to help him let go of his murderous anger. Andrew turns to faith to find forgiveness.

Ten years after Andrew arrested Jameel they meet again. They must decide between vengeance and hate, or forgiveness and healing.

Convicted is an inspirational biography about Christian redemption. But the basic lessons shared are important and universal, applicable even for those outside of a faith community. Don’t travel the easy path, Don't justify your errors and choices. Anger corrupts. Admit your failings and ask for forgiveness from those you have harmed. Put aside hate and vengeance in order to grow into health.

He has told you, O man, what is good;And what does the Lord require of youBut to do justice, to love kindness,And to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)

America has created a police culture that corrupted Andrew, as I read about in I Can’t Breathe by Matt Taibbi and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, and the poverty that causes crime as I read about in Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick.  For people of faith, it is clear that we are called to do justice and to forgive and to be kind. 

There are many ways of telling the stories that we need to hear. Perhaps Convicted will reach people who would not otherwise read about the issues of institutional racism, the failure of the police and justice system, and the poverty that fuels crime.

I received a free book from Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Convicted

A Crooked Cop, an Innocent Man, and an Unlikely Journey of Forgiveness and Friendship

Jameel Zookie McGee & Andrew Collins & Mark Tabb

Publication Date: Sep 19, 2017 

Hardcover $21.99

ISBN: 9780735290723 

Ebook $11.99

ISBN: 9780735290730

Rumer Godden

Rumer Godden is one of my favorite 'forgotten' authors so I am thrilled that Open Road Media is bringing Godden's books to the reading public in ebook form. Two of Godden's Catholic novels were made available to me through NetGalley.

Five for Sorrow, Ten For Joy explores the role of the Catholic faith in the lives of women in a small, isolated community of nuns. The nuns bring baggage from their past lives, seeking refuge in the love and forgiveness of Jesus. Godden slowly reveals the journey of Sister Marie Lise du Rosaire in a series of backflashes and alternate voices.

Elizabeth Fanshawe has been in a series of prisons. As an orphan she lived with a demanding Aunt. Only 20 at the end of WWII, Lise is caught up in the wild celebrations. Drunk and lost, she is taken home by Patrice, a wealthy, older man. He takes her in, and she believes he loves her; this illusion is another prison since he wants her for his brothel--another prison.

"I was green as a lettuce leaf...I thought he loved me...It didn't occur to me I was a whore."

Lise became Madame Lise Ambard, working in a high class house of ill repute. Scared in a fight, she is reborn as La Balafree and at twenty-three manages the brothel for Patrice. She still is under the illusion that he loves her best.

Lise rescues a drunken waif, Vivi, a fourteen-year-old girl who had been living on the streets for two years. Her Papa had abused her and her sister; the sister secretly gave birth to a baby which they left to die. Lise found Vivi clutching a rosary in her hands. Lise hopes to sent Vivi to school but Patrice is stunned by the girl's beauty and takes her as his new favorite lover, displacing Lise. When Vivi lusts for a local boy, Lise assists her to run away with him. The results are disastrous. Lise's illusions bring her to murder thinking she is saving a former whore, Vivi, from reentering the brothel. She justly serves ten years in prison.

While in prison for murder, Lise meets the Dominicaines of Bethanie nuns whose message of love and forgiveness changes her life. Upon her release at age thirty-seven she enters the convent, intent on becoming a novitiate. When asked if the convent were not another prison with its rules and obedience, Lise replies, "Not prison, freedom. That's the paradox. I believe it will be such freedom as I can't imagine now.'

Lise's past catches up to her, meeting Vivi again. She is impelled to help the irredeemable Vivi, which results in another murder.

Although the novel is about faith and redemption, another aspect of the novel is especially relevant today: The treatment of women by men.

"There were, of course, the irrecuperables, the unrescuable, who seemed to have evil in their skin, as if the devil had sown the seed that made them bad through and through--but many, Lise was certain, were in prison not because of what they had done, but because of what other people, especially men, had done to them, and some of us, like me, thought Lise, were in prison for their illusions."

A fellow newly released prisoner, Lucette, follows Lise and wants to stay where she stays. Lise explains Lucette must have a calling. "It's as if God put out a finger and said, "You, " Lise explains. Lucette retorts, "God hasn't got a finger. He can't have because there isn't a God. If there were he wouldn't have let what happened, happen to me--or you." "That's what I used to think, but that wasn't God; it was us." Lise responds. "Us? Not us, it was them...I see you are going to escape here where there are no men..I don't blame you...I hate men, all of them."

Lise, Vivi, and Lucette were all victims of men who abused them. A side story of Jackie, a girl the Bethanie nuns tried to save, ends in suicide; the girl could not recover from a gang rape. Reading this book I was reminded of The Real La Traviata by Rene Weiss, how as a child Marie Duplessus was forced to trade sexual favors for food, was pimped by her own father, became a mistress and the inspiration behind Hugo's novel Camille and the opera La Traviata.

Lise and Lucette find solace in faith and the religious life, the community of women whose acceptance is transformative. It was prison that sets Lise free. She sees the divine spark in all lives, especially the wicked. Marie Lise is able to use her experience to help other women in prison. She never gives up hope for Vivi's redemption.

The novel has it's flaws. I wish there was more about post-war France and how it impacted the women who take refuge in the brothel, and Lise's role as Madam is given as historical fact but lacks authenticity; I can't imagine her as a procuress of young women. But Lise's story is compelling and the theme is still relevant.

Black Narcissus is Godden's most well known novel, especially because its the film adaptation starring Deborah Kerr.  The novel again concerns a group of women, Anglican nuns, in a closed, isolated community, struggling with personal demons and their commitment to God.

"They saw the great slope of hill and the valley and hills rising across the gulf to the clouds; then they saw what they had missed at first, because they had not looked as high. Across the north the Himalayas were showing with the peak Kanchenjunga straight before them."

The General's Palace at Mopu has been offered to the Sisters. The Brothers had been invited first but only lasted five months before leaving. The Palace had been built by the General's father, a country palace with the finest view in India; he installed his wives in the palace and it became known as the House of Women, from which light and music emanated all night. The current General is Progressive. He turned out the women and hopes the sisters will turn the palace to good--a sanctification. A Holy Man, once famous and rich, sits near the path, his eyes fixated on the god of the mountain, unmoving and detached from the world.

The General's agent Mr Dean warns, 'It's no place for a nunnery." But Sister Clodagh looks at the orchids on the terrace and the eagles flying in the clouds and cries, "It's an inspiration just to stand here. Who could live here and not feel close to God!" Sister Clodagh has been overconfident and authoritative, but Mr. Dean recalls to mind her youthful, unrequited love.

"We call it Kanchenjunga and we believe that God is there. No one can conquer that mountain and they never will. Men can't conquer God, they only go mad for the love of Him. ..You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you'll turn a little mad."

Each sister is drawn to worldly joys, gardening or becoming too attached to the children, slowly forgetting their commitments, order seeping away. Beautiful young people enter their doors for education, the young heir scented with Black Narcissus, dressed in silks and jewels, and the wayward beauty Mr. Dean hoists upon them when he tires of her pursuit. Oh, the ever present Mr Dean, so unsuitably dressed, with such a bad reputation, whose very presence arouses memory and inspires jealousy and desire. Especially in Sister Ruth, a troublesome nun who seeks 'self-importance'.

The novel ends in a whirlwind of disorder, with a thrilling Gothic climax.

Open Road Media has acquired twelve Godden titles and I am thrilled to think of her rediscovery. I have been collecting copies of her titles for years...

I especially love her novels set in India and her wonderful portraits of children and the young.

Learn more about the remarkable life and career of Rumer Godden at
http://www.rumergodden.com/index.php

Rumer Godden, 1947 portrait for Vogue magazine
http://www.rumergodden.com/biography.php

Black River by S. M. Hulse: Faith Quakes in the High Plains

A wife's dying request is to hear her husband bow, one more time, his tune Black River, the one he had been perfecting for years. Wes holds the violin, unable to play; his shattered, disfigured fingers long ago forgot how to find those sweet notes. The music which had saved him had been taken from him. Has Claire forgotten?

I want to go to Black River, she had asked. Belatedly Wes takes her ashes and goes back to Montana, to the place where they fell in love, the place of the 1992 prison riot that changed his life, to Claire's son who they had left behind at age 16. Where the mountains seemed like the hands of God.

With memory comes fear.

Thirty nine hours held hostage by a sociopath has haunted Wes his entire life and his torturer Williams is up for parole. Williams claims to have found faith and become a different man.

Can people change? Does 'bad blood' go from father to son? Is it enough to be right? Do we 'deserve' God? How do we find faith? Do we deserve forgiveness? What does justice have to do with forgiveness?

Hulse's first novel is a marvel, tackling existential questions through characters so richly imagined and rooted in life it is hard to believe a young woman spun them out of her imagination. The back stories are revealed in their time, woven into the story line and adding to the drama. The final meeting between Wes and Williams includes a surprise twist. The questions raised in the novel will engage you long after you close the book.

I received the ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

To learn more about the author visit: http://www.smhulse.com/

Black River by S. M. Hulse
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication January 20, 2015
ISBN:9780544309876
$ 24.00
$3.99 Kindle

+++++

To Wes, the violin sang like the human voice. It had been his voice and it brought him as close to God as anything else in his life. He had a gift with the fiddle and had played with a bluegrass  band for nineteen years. His father had loved classical music; his favorite work was the Chaconne from Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor and he started each day with listening to it the way some men read the Bible or a devotional. He made Wes his violin in 1966. 

Claire, the agnostic, loved old hymns. She loved her husband's tune which she had named Black River.

Wes tried to bond with his stepson Dennis by teaching him the violin, and later he teaches troubled teen, and natural musician, Scott. 

Music plays a role in the lives of most of the main characters. 

Hulse learned to play as part of her research for the novel as well as studying and listening to the music Wes loved. I can imagine the book made into a movie where music pervades every scene.

Tunes mentioned in the novel (with audio links) include:

Salt Creek (Also known as Salt River)

Devil's Dream

Mary Morgan

Angelina Baker

Cripple Creek

Hop High Ladies (perhaps same as Hop Light Ladies?)

Old Joe Clark

Blackberry Blossom

++++

Addendum Jan 11: Hulse has shared an interview about music related to her book found on Largegearted Boy: Book Notes: 

http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2015/01/book_notes_s_m.html

+++++

An quilt made by Claire is on Dennis's childhood bed where Wes sleeps after his return. Claire had made it from red and blue scraps, finishing it when Dennis turned 12. Wes thinks that touching the soft quilt is like touching Claire, the stitches like writing, or scars. She was nimble with the needle, Wes remembers. After the riot Claire quilted only when Wes was away, embarrassed by her deft fingers and knowing what Wes had lost. 

 .

Last Things

As we prepare to retire at the end of June we are facing the 'last things'. Today I was liturgist for the last time in a church pastored by my husband. I read from 1 Corinthians, Chapter 3. A lady told me it was the best Corinthians reading she'd ever heard. I hear Paul's voice in my mind. I am merely a conduit for his words.

The prelude today was a wonderful rendition of Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, one of the first hymns I learned after I joined my husband's denomination. I could hardly stem the tears when I stood to offer announcements and lead the call to worship.

We will spend this next week packing. It is the last time I will pack to move from a church parsonage, and God willing, we will not need to pack to move again for twenty or thirty years. We have lived in four states, eleven cities, ten parsonages. And we both moved once in childhood.

The sound of the tape ripping off the tape dispenser upsets our Kamikaze. She hates loud or unpredictable noises. But our Suki, who we adopted five and a half years ago, has already lived in three houses and she takes it in stride. They love our retirement home, and soon will forget they ever lived anywhere but there.

My husband has a vacation due and we are going across state to prepare our retirement home for moving in. Things that belonged to my folks, or that Dad bought after Mom's passing, will have to go to make room for our stuff. We carefully consider what we need and what we can give away, what goes into storage and what is sold. Heirlooms I have owned for twenty or thirty years are passed on to other family members. Antiques we collected but can't keep need new homes. We imagine a new environment for our new, permanent home. Furniture that fits, new things, permanent things.

Next month will be my husband's last worship service, his last communion served to his assigned church, and the last good-bye celebration as we leave a church. There will be a farewell dinner for all the retiring pastors in the conference, some of whom served in neighboring communities or who served churches we were also at.

1971 the year we met at college

Service in ministry is hard, and the itinerant ministry is even harder. I married  young, full of idealism and with a great faith in humanity. I did not believe then in evil. I had to encounter its many forms before I capitulated and accepted that evil does take residence in human hearts and contort relationships and corrupt institutions.

I have seen faith in action, how people can become the hands of a higher power and bring health and healing, wholeness and grace into lives. And both of these, evil and good, reside in each person waiting for our weakness or strength to loose them into the world.

Nearly forty-two years my husband and I have traveled this rocky road. Next month we reinvent the world. There are a lot of decisions to be made. The one thing I know is that I will, first thing, join that quilt guild in town and continue to explore the creative possibilities that quilting has offered me for twenty-three years. The creative process has grounded me when I needed it, invigorated me when I was down in heart, and offered me a therapeutic dose of happiness when around me was chaos.


We face many last things, but other things are 'forever'. And I thank God for those forever things in my life, especially for my best friend and partner, my husband and the father of my child.

God, Faith, and Onions

I finished reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, considered one of the best novels of all time. Several months ago I finished an equally thick book, American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. It has won the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Dostoevsky is a favorite writer of Pope Francis. The Brothers Karamazov was cited in a recent New York Times article as an example of literature that teaches readers to better understand human nature. Gaiman is a contemporary fantasy writer, and American Gods is considered his masterpiece so far. People either love it, or they hate it.

Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov is a family drama about a man and his three sons. The father is murdered, and the eldest son is accused of the murder.

Father Karamazov is a reprehensible drunk and womanizer who married two woman and raped another, fathering four sons. The women died of neglect, and his children only survived because maternal relatives rescued them. He does have a way with money, but has no intention of sharing it with his sons.

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As a girl I loved the character of Alyosha, the youngest brother who leaves the monastery to serve the needs of his troubled family. He knows he shares his family's tumultuous character and does not hold himself above them.

Some of the most beautiful language in the book surrounds Alyosha's mystic transformation when he grapples with his faith. His spiritual father, Father Zossima, has died but his sainthood is questioned when the corpse begins to smell.

Alyosha's faith crisis leads him to Grushenka, who had been seduced as a girl, abandoned by her family, and taken as a mistress of an older rich man who teaches her the money lending business. She had planned to corrupt the high minded young monk. Alyosha calls her sister, an act that begins her redemption. She tells him an old Russian folk tale about sufferers in Hell crying for release. They are asked what one good deed they had ever done. A woman says she once gave an onion to a starving person. The angel holds the onion to the woman, who grasps it and is raised from her torment. Grushenka tells Alyosha he has held to her an onion and has saved her.

From this they both experience a new found self-identity and faith. Alyosha returns to the monastery and in prayer vigil over Father Zossima has a dream. He wakes and runs outdoors:

 "...his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars..."

Alyosha throws himself to the earth in sobbing and rapture, an ecstasy from experiencing "threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over "in contact with other worlds." He longed to forgive every one and for everything and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and everything." 

Father Zossima had told Alyosha his place is in the world, helping his brothers. Alyosha leaves the sanctuary of the monastery and puts on European dress to find his true calling.
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Ivan is Alyosha's elder brother. Their mother turned to a fervent faith in her despair over her husband's treatment. Ivan is a nihilist, influenced by European thought of the time, and believes that 'everything is lawful'. Ivan and Katrina, Dimitri's fiance, fall in love. But she is too proud to admit it, and sticks to Dimitri even when he rejects her for Grushenka. Her 'love' for Dimitri is only pride, for when she had offered her body for his financial help to aid her father, he gave her the money without exacting the payment of her virginity.

Ivan's 'poem' The Grand Inquisitor, told to Alyosha, is the most famous scene in the book. Here is Sir John Gielgud as the Inquisitor  performing the scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om6HcUUa8DI. The message is that mankind does not want freedom or free will, but only to be fed, and so God/Jesus Christ chose a path to failure. Ivan grapples with his complicity in his father's murder, and lapses into brain fever, conversing with the Devil. 

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Dimitri is the oldest brother whose military career has been curtailed by his proliferate life and anger management problems. He shares his father's appetites, yet holds a high sense of honor. After his mother's death he is rescued by the family servant Grigory who takes care of him until his mother's cousin takes him in. Dimitri only meets his father again when he comes of age and returns to claim his mother's inheritance. He meets his father's business partner Gruskenka and falls in lust for her. But his father offers Dimitri's inheritance to Grushenka if she comes to his bed. Gruskenka toys with them both, holding on to a girl's fantasy of her seducer returning like a white knight to rescue her. An epic battle begins.

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The last brother, Smerdykov, is an illegitimate son fathered on the village idiot and brought into the household by the childless servant Grigory. He has epilepsy, as did Dostoevsky. He tries to gain Ivan's approval, and covertly suggests a plan to kill their father and steal the money set aside for Grushenka's favors. 

The father is murdered, and all evidence points to Dimitri who had publicly raged his hate against his father. His brothers and the two women who loved him waffle over their belief in his innocence...except Alyosha who totally believes Dimitri could not have murdered his own father.
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The book is about the trial and outcome. It is about the inner souls of these brothers. It is about women who prefer self-laceration to love. It is about faith and God and the church. It is about big ideas.

One of the street boys tells Alyosha, "God is only a hypothesis, but...I admit that He is needed...for the order of the universe and all that...and that if there were no God he would have to be invented." Alyosha chides that he has only repeating what he has heard. 

"Come, you want obedience and mysticism, " the boy answers, "You must admit that the Christian religion, for instance, had only been of use to the rich and powerful to keep the lower classes in slavery." 

"You know, Kolya, you will be very unhappy in your life," Alyosha warns.
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If the Grand Inquisitor believes humans create their own preferred gods, Neil Gaiman's book asks what happens to gods when people no longer believe in them.

The main character, Shadow, is an ex-con with nothing left to lose when he agrees to be chauffeur to the god Odin, who is trying to organize the Old Gods from Europe and Native America for an epic battle against Mr. Town and the New Age Gods.

"Religions are, by definition, metaphors after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you--even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world...So, none of this is happening." So says the authorial voice before the battle.

But Shadow thinks, "People believe...It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. people imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen."

Odin asks Shadow to undergo a self sacrificial ritual after his death, where he is hung on the World Tree. Shadow learns that his whole life was orchestrated for this purpose. He was born and raised to be the sacrificial son for the father's resurrection.
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These books move us to consider what we believe individually and corporately as a country or a religious community. What gods do we worship, and keep alive by that worship? The new mythologies change--Nihilism and Science to Psychology to Consumerism. Have the old gods died? And what is faith, what people want, a temporary and changeable commodity? Is Free Will a stumbling block that eclipses God? Or do we yearn for certainties and blind faith as a retreat from the horrors of our choices?
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Father Zossima sends Alyosha down from the mountaintop communion with God into the world. The novel ends with a rallying cry that we may become the most degraded of people, but that one moment of true love for another can be our salvation.

All we need is to give one onion.