Tuesday, November 6, 2007

'Peace Like a River'

Don’t get me wrong: I couldn’t survive my daily Metro trip without something to read. But there are certain times when reading a book on the subway is downright difficult—and it has nothing to do with the people around me.

Sometimes I just don’t want to put it down. I’ll be on my way to work and hit a critical, climactic point in the narrative and I just want to ride right on past King Street to the end of the line, wait for the train to turn around, and keep going, round and round.

Sometimes I’ll come across a passage that hits me hard, right where I’m most vulnerable. I’m not one for crying over popular culture (or weeping in general), but there are those moments where what I’m watching or reading reminds me of something that’s occurred or could occur in my own life, and that’s what gets to me—my real life reflected in the work. The mark of great writing. So there I am, sitting in the train, with a lump in my throat fighting off tears. The Metro is not a place for such behavior, especially sitting by yourself. That’s the stuff of freak legend.

And sometimes I’ll come to the end of a book on the train, but still have a few stops to go. That’s a disorienting situation, I can assure you, coming up for air from a particularly engrossing text only to wonder: now what do I do?

Today, all three of those things happened to me as I finished the final few chapters of Leif Enger’s remarkable 2001 novel, “Peace Like a River.”

“Peace Like a River” is the “To Kill a Mockingbird” for a new generation, and, no, I do not use that comparison lightly. Like “Mockingbird,” the novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of a pre-adolescent child as he begins to navigate the dangerous waters of morality, loyalty, love, manhood, and, most important, his belief in God.

To say much more would be to ruin what should be an enrapturing experience as you devour these easy flowing pages. On a personal level, it touched me deeply in multiple areas, most notably my own visual disability and my seeming lifelong struggle with one simple God-related question: “Don’t you ever doubt it?”

I finished “Peace Like a River” on my way home today, somewhere around Cleveland Park—meaning several more stops until I reached my final destination. Now what was I to do? I stuck an Entertainment Weekly in my bag this morning before I left the house preparing for this very instance, but the final pages of this wondrous manuscript gripped me too tightly to deal with such fleeting subject matter as the Holiday Movie Preview.

So I turned to what often helps me in such times of spiritual and emotional portent: the music of U2. More specifically, “The Joshua Tree.” I didn’t think it possible for “Where the Streets Have No Name” to take on any more meaning for me than it already has, but “Peace Like a River” puts this song into even deeper context. I dove in, closed my eyes, leaned my head back against the hard wall of the train, and prayed as I have these many years: for God to continue to make Himself real to me, as He has so many times before when I’ve asked (even as I so stubbornly forget or become desensitized to His answers). I prayed for Him to help me answer that question, to remove my doubt—or at least keep chipping away at it. When the song ended, I did the only other thing I could think of: went back and reread some of Enger’s closing passages, trying to lock those words and images into my brain.

Yep. Today the freak on the Metro was me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hope you're still praying. He's still listening. :)