I have long wanted to share a book with you: Peace Like a River by Leif Enger.
It was recommended by John Piper; so I read it.
While Peace Like a River is fiction, it is important in ways that fiction should be. Many classic works have this same quality, both engrossing and readable, but spine-tingling important. This is one of them for me.
I have been trying to write this post for three weeks, but just can't seem to do it justice. I'll try.
The setting is 1962 Minnesota, small town. The narrator is an 11-yr old boy, Reuben Land. He reminds me of Scout Finch. The language has a poetic, earthy quality to it, one of small town America. His words sometimes are funny, youthful and sincere....and his sister's words are overly dramatic as only a young girl's can be.
Trouble is about to enter the lives of Reuben, his father Jeremiah, his older brother Davy and sister Swede, but it isn't the plot which drives the story. It is the characters and how they dealt with each other and the plot which remain with me, now several weeks after reading the book. While the father, Jeremiah, is uncompromising,he is fascinating. He leads his children as no father I know; he seems both smaller and larger than life..... I wish I'd met him. I think he'd see me, really see me and...I'd want to follow his instruction.
The narrative begins with Reuben's birth;
From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with....think about your own first gasp: a shocking wind roweling so easily down your throat, and you will slipping around in the doctor's hands.....
..."He isn't breathing Mrs. Land."...
...."nothing could be done; perhaps it was for the best."...
I was lying uncovered on a metal table across the room.
Dad lifted me gently. I was very clean from all that rubbing, and I was gray and beginning to cool. A little clay boy is what I was.
"Breathe," Dad said."
I lay in his arms.
Dr. Nokes said, "Jeremiah, it has been twelve minutes."
"Breathe!" The picture I see is of Dad, brown hair short and wild, giving this order as if he expected nothing but obedience.
Dr. Nokes approached him. "Jeremiah. There would be brain damage now. His lungs can't fill." Dad leaned down, laid me back on the table, took off his jacket and wrapped me in it - a black canvas jacket with a quilted lining, I have it still. He left my face uncovered.
"Sometimes," said Dr. Nokes, "there is something unworkable in one of the organs. A ventricle that won't pump correctly. A liver that poisons the blood." Dr Nokes was a kindly and reasonable man. "Lungs that can't expand to take in air. In these cases," said Dr.Nokes, "we must trust in the Almighty to do what is best." At which Dad stepped across and smote Dr. Nokes with a right hand, so that the doctor went down and lay on his side with his pupils unfocused. As Mother cried out, Dad turned back to me, a clay child wrapped in a canvas coat, and said in a normal voice, "Reuben Land, in the name of the living God, I am telling you to breathe."
......It made Dad my hero, as you might expect, won him my forgiveness for anything that he might do forever; but until later events it didn't occur to me to wonder just why I was allowed, after all, to breathe and keep breathing.
The answer, it seems to me now, lies in the miracles.
Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week - a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards. I'm sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word.
Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: they rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.
I wish I could go on and share the whole book. I myself think Spring and babies are miracles...but I get the point!
Let me say this: Peace Like a River is about life, full of trials and family and hope and work. It helps cut to the chase of life, winnowing away all the chaff that we see in our ordinary days and think of as life.
