Roger Barbee

By Roger Barbee

Death is all around us, but the death happening as I type these lowly words this early spring morning is unnecessary. It is happening because a neighbor is inconvenienced and has the power to create a patio with fire pit and grill less troubled by the roots and seed pods and leaves of a magnificent red maple tree. The man high in the bucket cuts with his chain saw and drops limbs that have taken perhaps thirty or more years to grow, and the modern machine grinds them into a mulch that will leave no history of their shade and vibrant fall colors. As Hopkins wrote of the Binsey Poplars-“Felled, all felled….” The crew of men will be gone in a few hours after removing what took years to become, but no matter-the tree, as my neighbor said, was messy and in the way. In our modern Lake Norman manner, we remove any in our way because we have the resources.

I understand that there are times that trees must be removed because, for instance, they pose a danger to a house foundation or septic system. However, it seems to me that on Isle of Pines Road, many owners are willing to cut any bush or tree that is, in their eyes, a hinderance of some sort. And, the reader may say, the tree belongs to the homeowner, and that is true, but in some way, if we are community, each tree belongs to all of us. In a community, what I do on my little postage stamp of land affects the community, and since that is true, I have an obligation to honor that commitment.

But for me, there is another commitment besides the one to my community on Isle of Pines Road. In my favorite story of creation, it is written: “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.” No words such as cut, remove, destroy are here, but words that imply stewardship are.

In 1879 Hopkins wrote these words in his poem Binsey Poplars,  “ O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew —/Hack and rack the growing green!”

To answer Hopkins, yes we think we know what we are doing because in our short sighted decisions, we are believing in the myth that man is in and can control.

By Roger Barbee

When younger, I never paused long enough to re-read a book because, charged by my youthful ignorance, I felt the need to rush on in an attempt to learn as much as possible. After all, as a child from the Mill Hills of North Carolina, I was a late starter and felt a strong need to catch up;  but recently I decided, for some unknown reason,  to re-visit some of my earlier, favorite reads. The first one that I removed from my library shelf holding special books was, All the Strange Hours, The Excavation of a Life, the autobiography of Loren Eiseley.  I was not disappointed in my re-reading and found much that I had forgotten and late in the book I read  Eiseley’s words that caused me to feel better about my decision. He writes in Chapter 23, The Coming of the Giant Wasps, “I  was getting old enough to want to rethink what I had learned when I was younger,” and “I have come to believe that in the world there is nothing to explain the world.” Perhaps those words resonate because they are late in the book, as I write, but nevertheless, I felt a bit of validation, and no less from such an intellect.

Having finished Eiseley’s great book, I must choose my next re-discovery. The  paperback copy of Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose’s grand examination of five Victorian marriages draws my attention, and I note that this copy is one purchased to replace the fine hardback that has gone the way of several books-given away or loaned to a forgetful friend. It carries no marks of mine, so it sits, waiting to be read as a new copy and studied.

However, because a sister and dear friend are engulfed in their own choice—how to live as they fight their personal cancers- I wonder if I should explore once more a well-worn hard back, Intoxicated by my Illness, which was published two years after the death of its author, Anatole Broyard. I thumb through the copy, seeing my margin tics and underlining and wonder if examining Broyard’s words will enable me better help my sister and friend? I think it may when I read this un-marked sentence of Broyard: “The important thing is the patient, not the treatment.” I may not re-read the book just now, but I’ll remember his wisdom as I try to form feeble words for her and him as poison cocktails are pumped into their bodies.

While Broyard writes of life and its shared end, Patrick Lane in What the Stones Remember, writes in this memoir how he, at the age of sixty,  spent his first sober year in his British Columbia garden. It would be easy to write that Lane’s garden is simply metaphor, but he writes, “My garden is a living place, not just a showroom for flowers and plants.” His memoir offers a poet’s prose examining life and how it should be lived. A good re-read for sure.

Yet across the room are two shelves from which several books, fiction and non-fiction, call. One that I used to teach to high school juniors and seniors is A Gathering of Old Men, by Ernest Gaines. The novel recounts the story of a sheriff who, upon arriving at the murder of a white farmer at his father’s Louisiana sugar plantation, encounters a young white girl, over a dozen old, Black men holding ancient shotguns, and a murder to solve. Over the course of the novel the reader hears the story of each of those old men that explains why he is the one who shot the young overseer. In an era when White Privilege is denied, it seems like a good time to re-visit Gaines’ searing story.

Not wanting to seem like a literary prize that publishes a long or short list, I will cease my ramble around my modest shelves. However, this musing has helped my decision. Eiseley gives good advice, and I will heed his words. I will, for the first time in my reading life, read two books simultaneously—one an old favorite and a few ones that are unexplored. Well, simultaneously is not quite correct: I will spend most of my time with the favorites and sprinkle in the new ones. After all, Eiseley warns that no explanation is to be found here, but I will enjoy the journey into what Rufus Jones describes as “the awe and the wonder of the beyond.”

By Roger Barbee

The ride on the stationary bike was damp and chilly this mid-February morning. However, what I saw in the world of birds on and around the feeders in our back yard confirmed a suspicion of mine formed last week.

Riding along, I saw more than one bird fussing with another, and not always for the sunflower seeds in the feeders and on the ground underneath them. It seemed that everywhere in the back-yard birds were glaring at each other or chasing another of the same breed or carrying on in a frenzy of, yes, spring. Perhaps the most dramatic display was by two brown thrashers: One would chase the other until the chased thrasher turned as if to scold the chaser who retreated a few paces. Then they would individually hunt for seeds, then the chase would begin anew. I finally lost sight of them when they disappeared into one of the large azaleas. The morning ride was easier because I watched the birds instead of the bike odometer, and the time of exercise was past.

However, as I later thought of the birds’ display of early mating, I thought of how the important cycles of the world go on, often without our noticing. We get so captivated by secular happenings we lose sight of the ageless cycles of life of our only planet. But the words of Solomon should be remembered and appreciated each day: “To everything there is a season….”

The natural world has much to offer. Yes, it is violent and harsh at times. Yes, it is beautiful and refreshing at times. But we are to be its stewards “to dress it and to keep it.” Yet, when we get too obsessed with the secular world we have made, such as the political one, we lose sight and appreciation of the natural world that surrounds us. When we become too self-important, we forget that we are just one of the many creations of Him. We are made in His image, yes, but if we allow that fact to “go to our heads” we run the risk of losing sight of our place in the totality of life.

All the birds are doing it—preparing for a new cycle of life. They, like the lily of the field, do what they do. Perhaps if we each got out more, leaving the cell phone in the house, and walk around our block, seeing the world as it is and not as some news channel reports it, we would see that we only have each other, all of us made by Him, who does not make trash.

By Roger Barbee

            In the epic poem,  The Odyssey, Odysseus returns to his home island after being absent for twenty years. Because the suitors have taken possession of his home, he must return unrecognized in order to attack them by surprise. He arrives home disguised by Athena as a beggar, and he goes to the hut of Eumaios, the keeper of pigs, in order to plan his attack on the suitors. Not knowing who the beggar is, Eumaios treats him with courtesy and feeds him and gives him a place to sleep. When the disguised master thanks his servant for being kind, Eumaios responds, “…rudeness to a stranger is not decency.”

            During the years that I taught Homer’s great poem, I required my students to memorize such lines as that of Eumaios and those of other characters from the poem.  The students then had to relate the chosen quotation to their lives by demonstrating a basic understanding of the quotation and explaining how it was still relevant in their post 2000 world. However, my students and I not only discussed what Homer had to say about hospitality to the sojourner, but also what other ancient writers such as Paul meant when they told followers to  “practice hospitality.” In the ancient world, sojourners needed safe and clean places to spend the nights because the few available inns were full of bandits, prostitutes, and vermin. So, for safety, a traveler looked for a kind person such as Eumaios to share the long, dark night. I suppose, as my students will attest,  in some ways we are all sojourners at times. At various moments in our lives, we have been that traveler looking for a haven for a night, a day, an hour even. And, oftentimes, we have looked for that friendly face to offer us warmth and kindness and understanding about our travels.

            Homer’s use of the lowly swineherd as one of two servants to help his long absent master is, I think, a choice of genius. As many readers may know, a pig parlor is not the most elegant place there is. Raven’s Rock, the home of Eumaios, was a smelly and rather vile place a long distance from the manor house. The swineherd undoubtedly would have smelled much like his charges. And, because of his position he would have held a low rung in the social order of his time. Yet, this low-ranking citizen, like the widow in the Gospels, gives out of his poverty, not his wealth. This seemingly low citizen is the one of the two servants who had remained loyal to his master and helps him rid the manor of the selfish suitors.

            All of this and more has been on my mind as I watch many concerned citizens try to build support in our country to help those in the caravan.  These last few days of damp, cold wind have, for me, been a reminder of the need to help. However, I worry that too many church attendees will choose to turn away from this need. I know that some church groups have stepped up and offered to help by word or deed or both.  I appreciate that some church groups are helping the hungry and homeless in other ways. What I can’t understand is how some church groups find reasons not to help.

            Practicing hospitality causes inconvenience. It means changing routines. It means inviting strangers who may be downtrodden into our spaces. It means being empathetic. Practicing hospitality means sharing time and talk with people who are in need of a hand up. Practicing hospitality can cause you to, as I heard a pastor say last June, “think of what you can give instead of what you don’t have.” Practicing hospitality is an opportunity for personal growth in a faith walk. Practicing hospitality means that we Christians step up and take care of the less fortunate. To do otherwise means that we are just “pew sitters” who attend service to feel better about ourselves. Are you the Christian more worried about the new floor in the fellowship hall or the one who cares about some homeless child?

            Early in The Odyssey, the sage Mentor speaks to the citizens of Ithaca (Odysseus’ home island) about the suitors taking over the manor of Odysseus and the injustice of their action. Mentor laments

the violent plundering of the great leader’s home, but he then goes on to say, “What sickens me is to see the whole community/sitting still, and never a voice … raised.” 

            There is a need in our community. If you choose, you can find many reasons not to help end that need. However, I offer you one good reason to step up and help. Again, the answer comes from ancient literature written by a tax collector turned disciple: go read Matthew 25:35-40. Then ask why you should not step up and help.

                                                            By Roger Barbee

            The hand-mixed concrete sidewalk at the front of our past Edinburg  house leads to a gently sloped bank that ends at the road. At the top of the bank is a row of large boxwoods. One does not need to be an archeologist to surmise that at one time the sidewalk met the old road, which was of gravel, and the boxwoods were a border between it and the front yard. But in the 1950’s the gravel road was modernized at the request of its property owners and asphalt replaced the gravel; however, some owners were not fully aware of what modernization was bringing, according to my friend Gordon.

            Mr. Wolf, who farmed at the end of the country road next to the North Fork, had the habit, according to his daughters, of stepping on his “lucky rock” each time he would walk to town. His “rock” was a piece of limestone that protruded above the gravel where the country road met Route 11. When the state paved the road, his lucky rock was scrapped away, and the bed of the road no longer followed the contours of the land. Small rises were cut out and dips were filled in to make the road more level. So, the bank in front of our house was cut lower, causing the sidewalk to lead to a small cliff, and other modern engineered changes to the land altered the contour of Old Bethel Road. What had been a sort of safe, old path for feet, hooves, wheels, and the occasional tire was now a road of modern means.

            Wendell Berry describes a path as “…little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity.  As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.” The new road does not follow the landscape, but altered it. The new road, which allows much higher speed than the old one, so people may not see the landscape. The new road covered Mr. Wolf’s lucky rock and other familiar objects created from experience. However, many people will see the paved road as cleaner, safer, and easier to maintain. Those are good reasons to pave a gravel road, but I want to see the old and new road as a metaphor for our present culture.

            Recently I read an interview with a cancer survivor who decided to create a new line sympathy cards. Emily McDowell wanted to create cards for people who “did not know what to say” to a friend who was recovering from a serious illness such as cancer or just going through one of life’s tough times. She received good feedback concerning her honest cards, and she soon teamed with Kelsey Crowe, an empathy scholar who founded an organization called Help Each Other Out where she teaches people how to empathize in times of illness or difficult times. My question: Have we become, as a culture, so void of valid emotions that we need a book to guide us on how to feel for each other and how to express that feeling? 

            I argue that we need more paths in our lives. It seems to me that we have literally and figuratively built so many roads in our lives that we do longer see the landscape and have lost familiarity with its intricate features, such as a projecting piece of limestone that becomes a “lucky stone.” We move so quickly and are so busy that we have forgotten how to express sincere empathy for our fellow humans. We have such a need for so called success that we pack the lives of our children with too many activities thinking that more is better, but they may not see the landscape of their childhoods. We even pave our walking trials as if packed dirt is to be avoided at all costs.

            Of course roads fill a need in our modern world, but can we not create literal and figurative paths in our lives that show us our landscapes while offering us a chance to become familiar with our physical surroundings and neighbors. A path will slow us down on occasion, and that will help us know how to relate better with our surroundings.

By Roger Barbee

            Non-public schools reserve the right to expel a student for a rule infraction, be it one of a discipline or honor violation, or both. Also, poor academic performance may lead to a student being expelled. It is hoped that all such schools print a clear and simple set of expectations and possible consequences for their breaking in some forms for students and parents to follow. As difficult as it is for a student and school, sometimes the best action is for a student to be expelled. But, in my opinion and experience as an independent educator, expulsion should be the last recourse.

            Earlier today when I read the following in an ABC on-line article, I was disappointed: “A Christian school in Kentucky is accused of expelling a freshman student after seeing an image of her celebrating her 15th birthday with a rainbow cake and multi-colored sweater. Kimberly Alford said officials at Whitefield Academy in Louisville sent her an email last week with the image of her daughter, Kayla, and informed her that Kayla was no longer a student.”

            Whitefield Academy, like all non-public schools, maintain its right to expel a student as mentioned earlier. Fine. Yet what I cannot understand, if the mother is correct, why did the head of school notify the student and parent via an email? I understand that the photograph of a student can cause alarm for a school when the school sees the picture as going against one or more of its core beliefs. Alford says that the head of school told her when she called that the cake and sweater represented gay pride, not a core belief of Whitefield.

            On its web page, Whitfield lists its Core Values. Two of them are: Compassion and respect for all people. Whitefield Academy believes each individual is uniquely created by God and endowed with specific gifts and abilities. These gifts and abilities, encourage mutual respect, promote Christian love and provide motivation to resolve conflict in a peaceable and Biblical manner (Matthew 18:15-35). Commitment to family values. Whitefield Academy exists to serve Christian families in the process of education. As such, the school is supportive of family issues and concerns. We exist to strengthen the family through a balanced educational program that considers the academic and relational needs of the family (Psalm 127).

            As a Christ follower, I am aware of the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality. I am also a reader of the Gospels, and as I understand them, especially Luke, I appreciate the two Core Values of Whitfield that I quoted. But, how can the head of school believe in them, if a student is expelled via an email. What kind of compassion/respect and commitment to family values does that demonstrate? Shame on that type of Christianity.

The question is not the policy of Whitfield, but the procedure it followed in expelling its student. I hope it will look at its Core Values and follow them the next time a student breaks a rule.

By Roger Barbee

            Robert Fitzgerald, the highly regarded translator of Homer, writes in his postscript of The Odyssey: “… It [The Odyssey] can no more be translated into English than rhododendron can be translated into dogwood. You must learn Greek if you want to experience Homer….” Not a reader of any foreign language, I am glad to have such a translator as Fitzgerald who admits that his craft is not sufficient to do justice to the original.  I recently encountered David Bentley Hart’s new translation of the New Testament which I enjoy and use. In our Sunday School, we are reading and studying The Forgotten Jesus by Robby Gallaty to better the Eastern Rabbi, Jesus.

            Reared as a Southern Baptist, I grew up reading or hearing the KJV translation of the Bible. As an adult I wandered– sometimes a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Brethren, and sometimes a none. Yet, as an English teacher, I read and sometimes taught stories from the KJV. No translation I read had its poetry and grace. We memorized the 23^rd Psalm and Lord’s Prayer and knew what the archaic words meant. And out of the KJV I held to certain beliefs, such as from Matthew 13:55: “Is not this [Jesus] the carpenter’s son?” Then last week I read in Gallaty this: “Read aloud Matthew 16:18; 21:24; and 1 Peter 2:4-5. If Jesus likely grew up working with stones as His father did, ….” I thought Gallaty had made a huge mistake or the printer did, but when I asked Pastor Steve about the passage, I learned that my understanding of Josephs’ craft was wrong and came to realize that I had been a lazy reader of Scripture who accepted Church tradition. As if to follow that experience, this past week in Wednesday night Bible study, Pastor Jerry taught about sheep and shepherd. Another enlightening followed by my friend Mike who directed me to my favorite commentator, William Barclay, and his view of Mark 6: 1-6.

            I faced my arrogance and re-read and listened. I discovered the various meanings of tekton. I learned about the relationship between a 1^st century shepherd {poimen) and his sheep, I felt like some of the disciples who asked Jesus to explain certain parables. For a brief and silly time, I felt as if I had been betrayed by my cherished KJV. But as I listened to my two Pastors, I came to realize that, just as I had told my students of literature, I had to be an active reader of my text and commentaries. I had to see the wisdom of Gallaty and his guidance into the life of an Eastern Rabbi during the 1^st Century.  It was then that I came to see Joseph and Jesus as craftsmen (Hart and Barclay’s word) or carpenters, or handymen and could grasp the idea of Jesus as a shepherd over His flock. Then I came to a deeper understanding of foundations and shepherds.

            And perhaps I will try to lean Greek. Then I will not be dependent on any translator.

By Roger Barbee

One advantage for me during the pandemic is that there is more time for reading. While it is true that I, as a retired person, did  not have the pressures of a job and young family before the pandemic, there was time for outside activities, such as church and meals in restaurants. The pandemic has caused those activities and others to be curtailed, so more reading has filled the slot.

One day this past week, I decided to re-read A Month in the Country, the delightful and powerful novel by J.L. Carr. The author states in the foreword that he was trying to write  “a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree.” Carr accomplishes that and more in his story of Tom Birkin’s brief time in a remote Yorkshire village after the Great War as he restores a church painting depicting the apocalypse and his own re-healing seen through his eyes years hence.

In 2000 or so a fellow teacher recommended Carr’s short novel, and since then I have read it several times, given copies as gifts to fellow teachers and friends, and even owned a signed first edition. However, I gave that copy to my friend Druin who lives near Oxford, England. I had introduced Druin to Carr one summer while working in Pembroke College, and he is the one who pilfered my copy of The First Saturday in May, Carr’s nostalgic remembrance of a cricket match in 1936. Over the years, every time I mentioned First Saturday, Druin admitted his taking of the book while refusing to return it; so when my wife and I visited him and his family in 2010, I decided since he had one he might as well have the other, so I gave him my signed first edition of Month-one pilfered, one gifted.

Another friend that I shared Carr with was Joy, a lady and poet who I worked with at NCS for ten years. She was quite a literary person who enjoyed a strong poem, a well-crafted story, and chocolate. She was my best editor until her death, at age 90, in January 2020. (I often think that her death from heart failure was a foretelling of the dreadful year to follow.) Years ago I had introduced Joy and Druin via email and read many of their literary discussions with awe. One, a writer in Northwest DC and the other in Oxford, England, both sharing their delight in writers such as Carr and many more. Druin and I enjoyed Joy’s pleasure when she received, unannounced, a copy of Druin’s latest book, The Shape of Things to Come.

Now here I was removing the thin paperback from a bookshelf before I settled in to read a bit before the urge to nap took control. But I quickly became puzzled  by what I saw on the insider page when I opened the book,  However, the puzzlement soon evolved into a pleasing appreciation for life’s unannounced moments.  In the upper right-hand corner was a pasted label with Joy’s full name and address. A neat, diagonal line crossed through the label and below it in Joy’s neat hand was written: “From Roger B. 2/14/01” but below that line was written: “To Roger B. 9/23/15.” I had given her this copy of Month not long after I had “discovered” it, and she returned it for some reason fourteen years later. I flipped through the book and noticed pencil highlights that I had made during some reading but stuck between pages 22 and 23 was a bright colored piece of paper on which Joy had written these words from the novel: “And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart, knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.”

I am writing this on Christmas Eve afternoon and wondering at how good literature and good friends intertwine in our lives. This past year, such a difficult one that has been full of toil and trouble and death, is also the one of Joy’s death. But the lines she copied onto that sheet of paper tell much about her and all of us. James, the brother of Jesus,  writes, “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

I did not nap, but instead placed Joy’s copy of Month beside my signed copy of Carr’s What Hetty Did in the class bookcase.. No longer will the small paperback sit on the shelf for reading copies.  Once in her last year, Joy told me that she was having too much fun living to die. That was all! No fear of death. No tugs of her heart.  Just a recognition and appreciation for life’s “precious moments.”

By Roger Barbee

Soon following our move to Lake Norman almost five years ago, my wife Mary Ann looked for a representative for a particular beauty product she used. Scanning a long list of saleswomen, she randomly chose one and called her. After their long conversation had finished, Mary Ann came to the library to tell me how pleasant Terri the saleswoman was and how much she looked forward to working with her. It was then that her phone rang, and Terri asked, “Did you say your husband’s name was Roger?”

In 1823 the English Romantic poet, Lord Byron, wrote his poem, Don Juan, in which he writes: “‘ Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; /Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,…” Over the years many other writers have expressed the same idea in various words, but no matter what version is written, all readers eventually learn the truth of Byron’s words.

There it was for me: Strange but True;  Life not Fiction.  The husband of Terri and I had wrestled against each other in high school. Mike wrestled for Mooresville High School, and I for A.L. Brown in Kannapolis. We competed in the same weight class for two years over fifty years ago and now we meet again, just not on a wrestling mat.

We four had the obligatory lunch to meet and talk and explore. Mike and I then continued sharing lunches, coffee in my shop, and he guided me around our new home, Lake Norman, which he knew well because his career was with the power company that built the Lake.  We soon discovered that we had much in common.: Both of our hometowns had been textile towns when we were wrestling against each other; our parents had worked in the mills; we lived in mill houses, and both of those houses are still family occupied. So much, besides wrestling, shared.

Each week he would call and ask, “Want a coffee?” then in a few minutes he would appear with a soda for himself and the promised coffee for me. Each weekly visit found Mike helping me with some project in the yard or my shop. He is most responsible for the deck that expanded my small shop– giving me much needed work space. A trained engineer, he made certain it was correct and safe. Exact, even. He would rake the abundant pine needles fallen from the 42 pine trees in our yard to use for mulch in his gardens.  Our weekly visit often included lunch, and when we ate at his favorite fast-food eatery, he would pull a rash of coupons from a pocket before paying and say, “A poor man spends money like he is rich, but a rich man spends it like he is poor.”  Then as we ate, some finer points of theology or politics would be discussed. I will always remember how he once looked at me during one of these “discussions” and asked, “Are you that naïve?”

When I work with a project on the deck that Mike more or less built or move in my wheelchair around the yard gleaning pine cones, I see his presence. The bluebird nesting-box with the red roof still graces the pine tree where he fastened it after I “mentioned” to him how it needed to be there. When I admired a long row of irises in a neighbor’s yard, I asked Mike one day as we returned from a road trip to knock on the unreachable (for my wheelchair) door to inquire if I could have some. The kind, elderly lady must of approved of Mike because she gave me permission to take any irises I wanted, and now next to the back garden gate is a small, varied-colored growth of purple irises that Mike and I planted; and, like our friendship, it grows and thickens and blooms.

Both our lives, like all lives, have had their dips and twists and failures and mountaintops. But for two boys from the mill hills of small, textile towns, we have been blessed and have done well. And as I share life with Mike long after our competitive days, I appreciate more and more the odd, interesting, and fulfilling paths that we all travel, whether planned or not. Mary Ann and I moved to Lake Norman not knowing that the “Stranger than fiction” of Byron would happen, and that a friendship would be forged out of a time long ago when two scrappy, mill-hill boys competed against each other. Byron also writes that “…truth is always strange.”  He’s right, of course, but not always in the way it may appear. It’s not strange that Mike and I respected each other as wrestlers. Nor is it strange that there is something deeper now.

By Roger Barbee

(This is a book review by Roger. This is a topic that needs our prayer.)

The Face of Addiction: Stories of Loss and Recovery

Joshua Lawson

Quoir,  $7.95 softcover

A dozen voices from southern Ohio along the Ohio River reveal the humanity behind addiction. These dozen daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, and others speak honestly to Joshua Lawson. In their sharing, they show that they are not to be shunned, but to be loved and valued because what they have is an illness, a disease like any other.

As a culture, we too often agree with a sheriff’s words that the only cure for an addict is “a tall tree and a short rope.” In making the users of the “opioid crisis” invisible faces, we make them enemies and losers and worse. But they are, as shown in these interviews, victims of sexual abuse, parental mistreatment, emotional trauma, and other ills. Being addicted to any drug, we learn over and over from these interviews, is not a choice but a result.

Lawson brief book is a testament to St. Paul’s words in Romans 7:19 and because of those words, we need to love the addict and help each of the many of them in our midst realize that they, too, are a child of God. Blaming is not a cure, but validating is.