Reading for incarnation
It's a Christian thing to do
Finally! This feels so good. Glad you guys are (still!) here. It’s been a while so I thought I’d share a personal message:
Before you read on, please observe today’s post is about books discussing issues that might be triggering. Full TW list below.
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TW: ethnic, racial, and sexual violence, domestic abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, rape, suicide, depression, mental disorders, infanticide, bestiality, concentration camps, World War II
Do you read?
Since you’re reading this substack, I assume you have more than functional literacy.
Reading is a (class) privilege. It’s become faddy in some circles to look down on people who “don’t read,” but the reasons for not reading are often environment-driven: overworking, fatigue, undiagnosed disorders, reading blur, no access to quality health care, lack of role models, disorientation in the bookstore/library aisle.
How would a grown-up start reading after years of not having done it at all? Where would they go for books? What would they pick up first? How would they fare with that first choice?
You, however, can apparently do quite well for yourself in the literacy department, so let’s go on. If you read (which is not self-evident even if you have a high level of literacy), then why do you do it? If you don’t, what are your reasons?
What kinds of books do you read, if any?
How do you choose your reading material?
Bestseller lists? Book clubs? Newspaper columns? Blogs? Internet algorithms? Apps? Recommendations floating around in your circle of friends? (Again, how would a person start reading if no one around them does?)
Why do you read in the first place?
For fun? Pleasure? (Obviously.)
For information? Answers? (Frequently.)
For belonging?
We all read for belonging to some extent. It’s natural, no? We’re drawn to characters and themes we can resonate with. We want to know we’re not the only ones going through this. We want to know if there’s a tribe. We like to see ourselves featured in books, articles, websites, and newspaper stories.
Here in Poland, people often repeat a line from the cult 1970s movie The Trip Down the River, a semi-improvised parody of life in the People’s Republic of Poland: “We only like the songs we already know.”
Reading for belonging really saved me, I think.
Elsewhere on this substack, I wrote that as a pastor’s kid, I grew up dogged by this feeling of having no tribe at all—misplaced among church members, misplaced in the world, misplaced in Catholic Poland.
(Timothy Snyder says nationality is solidarity with people you don’t know—if that is true, do I even have a nationality?)
I still remember the volume that told me there are more people like me: the evergreen handbook Crossing Cultures: Readings for Composition, the second edition by Henry and Myrna Knepler (there’s been like a zillion editions since then.)
It had excerpts from people like Richard Rodriguez, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, and many, many more.
A population growing up in disjointedness and dissonance, not exactly like me but so much like me.
Later in college, I managed to track down many authors anthologized in that volume, even though English books were hard to come by in Poland (this hasn’t really changed.)
The small church library that lent me the book soon closed down, and much of its stock was for picking. Crossing Cultures went home with me, and it is still in my collection.
The habit of reading may have impregnated me against some of the more inane indoctrinations heard in church.
I still took many of them in good faith—I didn’t know any better.
I still had crises of conscience.
I still made choices guided by these indoctrinations that I wish now I had not made.
Looking back is tricky, of course. It’s always hard to say how things would have turned out if.
But maybe the person I am now was always there within me, fighting for her life, swaddled with layers of dogma, feeding on breadcrumbs from Alice Walker and James Baldwin, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Steinbeck, and Coetzee, all the authors who have given her the language to resist, cast doubt, substantiate rage, tear down temples, and build sanctuaries of her own.
So, we read for fun and for pleasure, and for information, and for belonging. But do we read for incarnation?
We all tend to like the songs we already know. We all tend to flock with birds of a feather.
It’s been scientifically proven that spending time with people who think differently from us is more energy-consuming, and that’s why our brain will try to dissuade us from doing it too much (I heard it here, and it explained a lot—a great episode and podcast, by the way.)
Public Religion Research Institute found in 2022 that “[a]cross demographic groups, Americans’ core friendship networks tend to be dominated by people of the same race or ethnic background—particularly white Americans, among whom 90% of their friendship networks are also white.”
It’s not only about race, of course.
Eighty percent of white Evangelicals have no queer friends.
We let politics disrupt and preselect our friendships.
And so on. The PRRI site is sobering when you start browsing it. Not that we don’t know these trends; we just don’t know how pervasive they are.
These studies, in particular, were done in the United States, but the appeal of social bubbles is universal.
And it’s hard to fight this pull. Even from the logistics point of view, friendships with people similar to us have a way of just happening—we meet at school, at work, in circles of other friends who are similar to us.
There’s a synergy to those bubbles, a clarity and coziness embedded in the relationships right from the start.
And our brain can just coast.
After finishing Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and her two husbands in January, I decided to revisit Another country by James Baldwin. A volume of his collected works was part of an order I placed with Better World Books last year. Another country was among the three novels in the volume.
I read the book years ago in college, and I thought it was probably one of the best books I had read in my entire life.
My impression was quite different this time.
I read over a hundred pages in one sitting until I felt like I couldn’t take the violence anymore, went straight to bed, and in the morning, when I woke up, the reality of that book on my kitchen table assaulted me again.
If you don’t know this novel, you really don’t want to jump in uninformed into it.
There is ethnic, racial, and sexual violence, domestic abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, rape, suicide, depression, mental disorders, slurs of all kinds.
The emotional charge of this book hit me now much harder than fifteen years ago.
Back then, I probably thought that what Baldwin wrote about rested firmly in the past—the book came out in 1962. I took it for a historical novel.
But Another country is anything but a slice of the long gone past. You could change a few details, tweak a few settings, update the language a little, and retell the story as if it had just happened.
The frank title is not even cryptic anymore—it’s a statement of fact.
Baldwin’s New York is a fauvist refuse-filled landscape where the only dreams that are realized are the dreams of somebody else.
“Why are you doing this?” asked my roommate several times when I put the book down to come up for air, squirming.
It seems to me that we often select our books just like we select our friends—we like what we already know.
I invite you to Google lists of banned or challenged books around the world. It’s a fascinating rabbit hole.
There are some usual suspects listed (Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, Satanic Verses), and some whose exclusions are bizarre—you would think you would want your child to learn about race relations, especially if they are white.
There are also flashes of unintentional humor, when, for example, you realize that the reasons for banning Toni Morrison’s Beloved (11 different bans in 2021-22 alone!) include bestiality, infanticide, sex, and violence—slavery, however, is not found very objectionable.
Fun fact: in Polish high schools, you devote an entire year to reading concentration camp literature. While browsing the lists of banned books, I thought how hilarious it would be to challenge, for example, the required reading of This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. “Contains gratuitous violence,” well, I’ll say!
But joking aside, it’s not all black and white (sic!).
When you read the lists of banned books, especially the recent ones, it all gets very political, and you have to ask yourself the same question, again: Why do we read books in the first place? What is the point? (Why do we write books in the first place? What is the point?)
And then, since many of the banned books are teenage and children’s books, What do we want to tell our children? What don’t we want to tell them? Why?
And finally, since how we treat our children is a reflection of what we do to ourselves, What is it that we don’t want to read? What is it that we don’t want to know?
What is it that we don’t want told?
I don’t advocate ignoring triggers. We all should be mindful of our limits.
Neither do I advocate for the radical freedom of speech (Christopher Hitchens style). Although I’m drawn to this idea in theory, I recognize that a lot would have to change in our societies (access to quality education, freedom of information) for this stance to do more good than harm.
At the same time, I am extremely wary of people asking, “Why talk about it?”
In 2013, British-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski made a film called Ida. It caused quite a stir in Poland, especially in conservative circles, because it talked of parts of Polish history that some would like to whitewash.
I remember my lifelong friend throwing this question at me. “Why talk about it?”
I had come to see her in her new apartment to see pictures of her wedding day. She was a gorgeous bride.
We were in her living room, airy, open concept, plenty of light and leafy hipster plants. Translucent blue-green Italian tiles in the foyer. Their first apartment together. With any luck (luck is all we have) we would never have to deal with the kind of liminal situations Pawlikowski touched on in the movie, neither she nor I.
Why talk about it, indeed?
The interracial relationships portrayed in Another country are a vehicle for Baldwin to discuss identity and otherness more broadly.
“Maybe nothing can be stopped, or changed,” says one of the protagonists, “but you’ve got to know, you’ve got to know what’s happening.”
This is one of the book’s most hitting indictments. Time has only sharpened its relevance.
Ignorance is still the preferred stance of those who profess themselves to be tolerant.
Reading for incarnation is one way of pushing back against this attitude. It’s one way of fleshing out the knowledge we already forefeel.
“If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?” – asks, coolly, the author of Proverbs.
Reading for incarnation is a mindset, not a realizable goal. Reading about the Black, female, queer, or Jewish experience will never give us this experience if this is not what we are.
Reading for incarnation is more like having that person—that inscrutable being who is not you—sit across the table from you and talk to you on their own terms. As many pages as they want to. As many pages as you can take.
Reading for incarnation is not a quest for understanding.
Gurevitch (1989) has rightly observed that the drive to understand the other is inherently oppressive—it’s an exercise in self-reflexivity.
When we desire to understand the other, we want to translate them into our own terms, build them into our own framework, give them names of our own choosing.
We want to ponder the riddle and announce it solved.
Reading outside of your comfort zone should be a regular practice.
We should all be doing it as often as we can afford it—reading authors we disagree with, people who think differently from us, characters who stump us, identities that are alien.
Ultimately, reading for incarnation is a Christian thing to do.
Christ-likeness can obviously be practiced outside of our reading abilities or preferences. But reading for incarnation is as good a start as any when we get round to that pesky business of loving our neighbors—and our enemies.
Love is skin-deep if one side can’t be bothered to ask questions.
In a recent post here, I explained how the doctrine of incarnation might well be the only doctrine I would save from the burning building of Christianity.
The doctrine tells the story of a Person who willingly sheds their privilege, leaves themselves behind—and inhabits “another country.”
Without the incarnation, any talk of a loving God falls flat.
A loving God who doesn’t want to know what’s happening is a lying God.
A follower of Christ who doesn’t want to know what’s happening is a cheat.
Apart from the sources linked directly in the article, I used the thought of Gurevitch evoked in Volf’s analysis of embrace (both highly recommendable):
Gurevitch, Z. D. 1989. “The power of not understanding: The meeting of conflicting identities,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 25(2): 161-173.
Volf, Miroslav. 1996. Exclusion and embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Love this perspective, Carolyn. Thank you for sharing!!