When Books Hurt

I once met a woman who had lost two of her children. One had died in a freak accident and the other was killed in a drug deal gone wrong. She said that she endured her grief by a firm belief that everyone has a day to be born and a day to die. There is a plan, she said, and we all have to be OK with it no matter how crushing it is.

These are the kinds of stories I sometimes want to turn away from. Any tenuous faith I hold is deeply shaken by the awareness of cruel injustice. What kind of God would do this to someone, while the wicked seem to prosper? How could someone’s fate be to die from random falling debris from a construction site or from badly cut drugs? My mind can’t quite look into the abyss.

And, yet, I have occasionally read about horrific things only to feel a certain grace on the other side of it. Here are two books that were gut-wrenching but illuminating.

The author, a London economics professor, experienced hell on Earth. The day after Christmas, 2004, she was staying with her family – parents, husband, and two little boys – at a hotel on the southern tip of Sri Lanka. She saw a swelling wave through the window, not aware that in a matter of minutes, everyone in her family would be dead. She was a survivor of the horrific tsunami that killed 227,898 people.

This memoir is riveting. Deraniyagala has a spare style that works well with gruesome events. She doesn’t pretend to be noble. At the hospital after the event, she is awful to a boy sitting next to her. The scene is one of many in which the author is unafraid to make herself look ugly and entitled. Some readers have judged her for this, but I thought it was authentic to who she was and what she was going through. After she sells her parents’ home in Columbo, she becomes deranged with rage that someone else is living in her childhood home. She stalks the inhabitants, blaring her husband’s favorite Smiths’ music while contemplating killing herself by crashing through the heavy metal gates. (Damn you, Morrissey.)

Ultimately, the author learns that she must keep the memory of her family close in order to survive. Life does go on, but it isn’t pretty.

2.

The author, a theology professor at Princeton, came to her faith through agonizing circumstances. When she was a young mother, still in grad school, her six-year-old son got sick and eventually died.

This tragedy framed her academic work, as she saw parallels between the early Christians’ suffering and her own. She became quite famous (inside academia, anyway) for her books about the Gnostic Gospels. In the early days after Jesus’s death, hundreds of communities formed that were following his basic teachings. Many wrote down what they believed, although only four were canonized when the early Church formed. A fateful discovery in the 1940s unearthed gospels from a Christian community called the Gnostics. These were writings that were shunned from the official canon, but they showed that not all Christians believed the same things. There was a Gospel about Mary Magdalene, who was defamed by the official church as a prostitute. (The popular misconception may have been smeared a bit by The Da Vinci Code.)

The mystery of faith becomes central to Pagels’ academic work. Later, she is tested again when her husband dies in a hiking accident. I found myself bawling at times while I was reading this. Pagels has a gift for creating empathy in her readers. Her religious quest is intelligent and interesting. This was a difficult book to read, but worth it.