Good Friday, 2009

It has been almost a year since I've posted on this blog. A student in one of my writing classes said my blog was "pathetic."

Blogs are a kind of bane for writers, another mouth to feed. In any case, here's a bit of a homily I preached on Good Friday.

Biblical scholars, historians, archeologists all agree: The Jewish religious authorities did not execute Jesus. The Passion plays of Medieval Europe blamed "the Jews" for the death of Jesus, after which, we know, Christians who watched them slaughtered Jews by the thousands. This is a stain on Christian history and on our hearts.

But if the Jewish authorities were not responsible for Jesus’s death, then who was? And why? What was it all for? Why the torture, the beating, the cross ?

Why did Jesus die?

Knowing that there are many theories of atonement, as theologians say, I want to take a look at one in particular tonight: I want to look at Jesus’s life to shed light on why he died.
Jesus lived in occupied territory. Israel, Jerusalem, the Galilee were colonized by the great Roman Empire: builder of aqueducts, commander of the largest and most efficient army in the world, and inventor of that peculiar form of execution, one they saved for dangerous political terrorists, persons who were threats to the empire itself, charismatic leaders who attracted followers–crucifixion, the cross.

Scholars have studied Jesus’s relation to Rome and for them, neither the term political activist nor personal savior quite cuts it, but rather something or someone in between.
This ground is delicate: These days, we often make Jesus into only a personal savior. I don’t want to swing all the way the other way and make him into a political revolutionary. That limits him, too. But to remove Jesus from his political and historic reality is to deny him and us, his full story.

Trying to understand Jesus without knowing how Roman imperialism determined the conditions of life in Galilee and Jerusalem would be like trying to understand Martin Luther King without knowing how slavery, reconstruction and segregation determined the lives of African Americans in the United States.

Jesus grew up under the heel of an empire. And he saw, all around him, its cost. The Romans saw themselves as creating “a new world order.” To accomplish this, Roman soldiers burned villages, pillaged the countryside, slaughtered or enslaved those they conquered. Huge taxes were imposed on the people in the colonies. When the Roman governor Antipas built two Roman-style cities in Galilee, a rural countryside, the Galilean peasants had to provide the resources for this massive building project. They paid taxes unto Caesar.

We don’t know exactly how Jesus fits into this reality but to imagine that he was not influenced by his place in time, or had nothing to say about it, is more than far-fetched.
How does this speak to us, today? We know from his life that Jesus chose not to identify with those with power. There are no gospel stories about Jesus having drinks at the private clubs of Antipas or Herod.

We are all, every one of us, interested in having power. Some power is good: the power to speak, the power to live out your vocation, whatever it is; to have what is called “agency,” the ability to act. We speak of empowerment, calling out of others their own strength and creativity. But we also know, as the old adage says, that power corrupts. Even in the smallest ways, power can corrupt the work of love.

Many of us have been in the position of either the giving or on the receiving end of the corruption of power. We see it in the many CEO’s who have confessed to lying, cheating and stealing. Power unabated can become demonic: witness Stalin, Hitler, Rwanda. And, I think, we have all, at one time or another, collaborated in the abuse of power, small and large. At my workplace, I’ve made sure I kept my turf intact, nurtured my ties to the owners of the company. When we laid-off 20% of our workforce in the early nineties, I hid my face from those who got pink slips. I, like just about everyone else in America, want to identify myself with those who have more, not with those who have less. I said identify myself. I give to the poor; I taught in the homeless shelter, but I don’t identify myself with Them. The people I cozy up to are the one’s with the power. 

Jesus, too, faced choices between power and vulnerability. He was a man who over the short stretch of his life came into contact with power over and over again. He made choices. Once again, let’s not confuse power with agency. Jesus was no passive guy, no milquetoast. He had a lot of agency, and he used it well. Yet, tonight: Let us remember his life: Jesus took a blind man by the hand and restored his sight. He fed a crowd with loaves and fish. He helped a deaf and mute man find his voice again. He listened when a Gentile woman begged him to heal her daughter of demons. He did not even exclude persons who were collaborators with the empire: i.e. the tax-collector, Matthew. He bound himself to those in need.

His parables are as clear as water in regard to power: Don’t be absorbed in who is sitting at the head of the table.The last shall be first. The meek will inherit the earth. Before this Lent, I took these stories as difficult admonitions, slightly accusatory reminders of how I should always remember those on the margins. But what I am coming to understand is that Jesus meant to say these things to himself, as much as to me. He said these things to himself because he understood, that choosing the vulnerable path was the way to keep his soul alive, and protected, from the harsh realities of power. He sought out the vulnerable because they helped keep him vulnerable. And he finally came to identify with them.

Jesus’s compassion for those who suffer because of the powerful is , as the theologian Walter Brueggemann puts it: “a radical form of criticism,” a radical form of criticism for it announces that, “the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

Jesus in his compassion says that the hurt of those who are hungry and poor, and taxed beyond their means is to be taken seriously: It is not normal for people to be without food; it is not normal for someone who is blind or deaf to beg on the street.

Injustice has a price and it’s paid in human flesh. Many of the men who came to our soup kitchen here at Trinity were homeless because the parts of town that had once been their sanctuaries were gradually “redeveloped” into places for time-share condos, fancy beach-side hotels. The single room occupancy, cheap hotels downtown were sold, and renovated, and became boutique spas. The people in our parish who work at the Faulding Hotel, one of the last single room occupancy hotels in town, know this story. Or we can just as well imagine the sweat shops where our T-shirts are made, or the pesticides that migrant workers have to breathe so our strawberries look nice, or the bombs and shrapnel that fall, as we speak, on civilians in Iraq.

Brueggemann continues, “Empires are never built nor are they maintained on the basis of compassion…” Empires, like Rome, like the United States, live by keeping their own citizens distracted with “bread and circuses.” The Roman rulers expected their citizens to remain silent in response to the human cost of war; mute in the face of the human cost of greed. And they kept those in the colonies in check by systemic terror: the price of prophetic witness was death.
But Jesus speaks up. He acts. By and through his compassion, he takes the first step in revealing the abnormality that has become business as usual.

This led him, finally, inexorably, to the cross. To the place where power and vulnerability, where power and Reality, intersect or , more accurately, collide. The cross stood at the end of a long series of choices. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who decided to return to Germany from a safe haven in the United States, like Rosa Parks who finally sat down at the front of a bus, like Martin Luther King, Jesus did not suddenly make a choice between power and vulnerability. He put his foot on a path, and years later he looked back and saw where that path had led him.
I remember thinking as I worked in the soup kitchen that I didn’t want to know what I was learning. Because then my life couldn’t go on in the same way as it had before: driving around in my nice red Volvo thinking about what new linens to buy. What we learn we cannot unlearn, what we see, we cannot unsee.

Jesus doesn’t call us to live in a soft cocoon, distracted and undisturbed, allowing others to pay the costs of our comfort.

When it comes right down to it, Jesus followed where compassion led him, and he bore the cost of what he found. Jesus asks us to follow where compassion leads, and bear the cost of what we find.

He calls us, as Nicholas Cage says in the movie Moonstruck, “to ruin our lives, to break our hearts, to love the wrong person and to die.” We are invited to ruin the old life of silence, to break our hearts with compassion over suffering, to love the wrong person–that would be Jesus–and to die. As a friend of mine said once, “ to get resurrected ya gotta get dead.” Because we know, from Jesus’s example, and from our own lives, what lies on the other side of this death. The other side of silence and distraction , of the deadly life of business as usual, is new life, resurrected life, born of compassion-awake and broken-hearted, and, yes, dangerous. Take up your cross.

Why I support Barack Obama

As many of you know, I have supported Obama from the beginning and now I see that he has a real chance of winning. But he is up against a very well organized Clinton campaign. I urge you to volunteer, send money, do whatever it takes to help Obama win the Democratic Party nomination.
Here are my reasons for supporting Obama:
1. Because he is both African-American and Caucasian, and spent at least a few years in Indonesia, he represents a new face to the world. We are no longer a superpower, or the lone superpower. It is essential that we show the world that we are no longer governed by a narrow-minded minority who have very little knowledge of the real world and are only interested in world domination.
2. He is inspirational. The Clintons and much of the media have done everything to make this seem inconsequential, but inspiration is not a small matter. If you create cynicism in a democracy, which is what Rove and the Clintons do regularly by nasty campaigning, you create more than minor trouble. You undermine the essence of democracy, which is that people will believe in their ability to vote, elect and participate. Inspiring people as a leader means causing people to believe in themselves and their ability to create a movement independent of the candidate. Obama is not creating a “cult of personality,” as one pundit put it, but instead is creating a movement of persons, especially young persons, who are entering and revitalizing the political process.
3. Obama grasps how to lead and he has plenty of experience. I have never bought H. Clinton’s “experience. Being the spouse of a president is not at all the same as being president. My husband was VP of a major clothing company. Does that make me qualified to do that job? I don’t think so.
Mike Huckabee said about why people are voting for Obama instead of Clinton: "People don't want someone who can fix the carburetor. They want someone who can drive the car."
4. If Hillary Clinton is elected, we will never know what part Bill is playing in the presidency. This is dangerous. Gail Collins wrote an excellent column in the Times about the “chaos” of their relationship.
5. I attended a wedding last summer of one of Obama’s young staff persons and the daughter of an acquaintance. Lest you think I have a personal connection to the Obama campaign, you would be wrong. I was only there to help serve the Eucharist in this particular Episcopal church. Obama’s staff person is African-American, and the bride is Caucasian. I was moved beyond anything I had expected by these two persons and their families, especially his family. His father had raised him and his brothers by himself. His aunts were there, and one of them read the passages from Amos about justice flowing down like a mighty stream. I saw, in those moments, why it is more important to elect an African-American man than a woman. We have not healed from the years of segregation in this country, in every part of this country. We have the right candidate. Now is the time to begin.
6. If you want to know more, I urge you to read his books, but especially his first book, written before he was running for office: Dreams from My Father.

Changing Light in Vintage Paperback

Changing Light is out in a gorgeous paperback from Vintage, on sale February 12. I'm working on a screenplay, my first, an adaptation of the novel. I now watch movies with the script in mind. Juno is partly such a good movie because the script is very tight, and the characters do not so much change, as reveal more and more of themselves as the film goes on. The Good German is a bad movie for many reasons but among them, the script is very bad. Words are placed in the characters mouths as if they were robotic history lessons. But I don't really know what I'm talking about.

Martin Luther King Day

Some thoughts on The Rev. Dr. MLK:

Isaiah: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

He was 5” 6 ½” tall. When he was 26, he weighed 166 pounds. That year, 1955, in early December, Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech that turned out to be a sermon at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, calling for a boycott of the Montgomery buses. It put him on the map. He had only twelve years and a few short months longer to live.

Toward the end of that speech, he hit the cadence that would make him a famous orator:

“And we are not wrong; we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight
until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Martin Luther King took the words of the prophet Amos and brought them up into the 20th century, into Montgomery Alabama in the year 1955, and made them new by making them the foundation of his actions, the underpinning of his moves. “Until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream,” would be so familiar from his mouth that by the end of his life they may as well have been his words He gave those words breath by betting his life on them.

The news spread to the corners of the earth: a young American man who had gone to India to find out about Gandhism, read about how the sprit of the Mahatma was breaking out back home: a band of Negroes were refusing to ride segregated buses in a small American city. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement.

A little over a month later, on January 26, King was arrested in Montgomery for the first time. He was taken to jail, terrified. A crowd of his supporters surrounded the jail that night and King was released. That night, there were seven mass meetings in Montgomery, because so many people wanted to hear King speak. The pressures on King were enormous: his phone rang all day and all night. African American callers wanted to know about his arrest or to complain about how the strike was going. At least one white caller threatened his life.

King got up in the middle of the night and sat at the kitchen table, his face buried in his hands. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left. He said out loud, without speaking the name of any God, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” And then he heard an inner voice telling him to do what he thought was right. He felt he said relief and a new kind of courage. It was the first transcendent moment of his life. It was, says his biographer, Taylor Branch, for King, a moment that confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not “a grand metaphysical idea but something personal and grounded in experience.”

On that first evening at the Holt Street Church, and in the next years of his life, Martin Luther King preached nonviolence.

“I want to be known in Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people,” he said. “The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. ...There will be no crosses burned at any bus stop in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled from their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.”

Martin Luther King understood something that I think is the very essence of Christianity. An essence that many of us have lost or forgotten over the centuries when we, as a church, have collaborated with the powerful: at the heart of Christianity, at the heart of Jesus’s words and life, is a complete, sophisticated, unnerving and undeniable understanding of power from the point of view of those under its heel.

"To substitute violence for power can bring victory,” said Hannah Arendt, “ but the price is very high,”

The powerful make the same mistake over and over again: they believe that violence and the threat of violence are power. But they are not. Violence is only a poor substitute for power. The more violence you need, the less power you have.

If anyone understood this, it was Jesus. Recently, I watched Bernard Scott, a scholar of parables, interviewed in the Saving Jesus series, unpack the line in Matthew in which Jesus encourages his disciples to “Go the extra mile.” Scott says that Jesus was probably referring specifically to a Roman imperial command that if a Roman soldier was walking on the road carrying his gear, he could, at any time, conscript a local resident to carry it for him. But only for one mile. This was of course oppressive, infuriating and disruptive to the lives of the citizens of the Galilee. But, as Scott points out in Saving Jesus, Jesus said to his disciples, not only should you agree to carry the gear, you would insist on carrying it yet another mile. On the face of it, this is a very stupid idea. Why, when you are already oppressed by being forced to carry a heavy Roman shield for a mile, would you make it worse by adding another mile? But, here’s the really interesting part: when you offer to go that extra mile, you are suddenly in the driver’s seat. It is your decision to carry the gear another mile, your active choice. Likewise with giving “the shirt off your back.” Someone demands you give him your coat. Oh, certainly, you reply. And how about my shirt, too? Do you see the subtle shift in authority?

King and Rosa Parks and the other leaders of the civil rights movement, took a similar approach in Montgomery. If you won’t let us sit wherever we want to on a bus, then we’ll simply stop riding the bus. And this, not unexpectedly, will push the city bus system to the brink of bankruptcy. It’s a way of turning power upside down.

Until Bernard Scott pointed it out, I had not seen this. I had understood that non-violence had Biblical roots of course, but I hadn’t understood how specific were Jesus’s words. I thought giving the shirt off your back and going the extra mile were about being nice to people who hurt your feelings. I’d turned them into platitudes. But now I see that Jesus, who must have known quite a lot about oppression, had figured out a creative way to face down those who oppress and bully. Turn the tables, Jesus suggests, but oh so subtly. Take back the ground that has been ceded. Because the goal is not to win, but to free. The goal is to free yourself, and everyone else, too.

And always, always, stay on the side of nonviolence. Because the alternative is all too familiar to us: violence for violence, anger for anger, shackles for shackles, death for death. I once asked a private detective who found himself in very sketchy places why he didn’t carry a gun and he replied, “Because I would use it.”

To refuse to resort to violence is actually more dangerous to an oppressor than to violently react, because nonviolence changes the rules; nonviolence cuts at the very heart of what oppression rests on. We have before us thousands of examples: from Gandhi to the Danish resistance of the Nazis during WW II. To Nelson Mandela’s years in prison. To the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of my favorite stories about creative nonviolence is about Rabbi Abraham Heschel who marched in Montgomery with Martin Luther King in 1965. Being Jewish in the South at that time, and wearing a full beard and yarmulke was almost as dangerous as being African American. Heschel arrived at the Montgomery airport, exhausted and hungry.
He asked a waitress for breakfast. The woman said snidely, “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.”
Would you have some water? the rabbi asked.
Yes.
Would you have a few eggs?
Yes.
Well, would you heat up the water and cook the eggs in it for me?
Why should I?
Because I have done you a favor, Heschel said.
What is that?
I’ve proved to you that there is a Santa Claus.
She broke into laughter.

Given many choices in this situation: anger, a snide retort, or backing down with seething resentment, Heschel chose another route. The essence of his gentle, creative and non-violent exchange is not only a subtle turn of the tables so that he had the authority but also an acknowledgement of that waitress’s fear in the face of his otherness. Yes, he said. I am like Santa Claus (at least to you), and she broke into laughter. And so non-violence frees not only you, but it may possibly free your oppressor. She made him the eggs.

And non violent resistance doesn’t mean being a wus, as you can see from Heschel’s example. And it doesn’t mean sitting around chanting “give peace a chance.” It demands that we be active, creative, innovative . Because someday us nice liberals are going to be faced with a real live dangerous dictator and we’d better be ready with more than a smile and a cupcake.

I am not suggesting here that we all take to the streets today, as King and his followers did in 1955. It may be the time for civil disobedience and it may not be. That is another story. What I am saying is that we have in Jesus’s words and in his way of living, a text for the nonviolent resistance of oppression. It’s time to reclaim it.

Martin Luther King Jr followed Jesus. He reclaimed non-violent resistance for us in the fifties and sixties, and added to its weight and dimension. I have a dream, he said. I have been to the mountaintop. As he lay dying on the balcony in Memphis, he said to Ben Branch, a musician, “Make sure you play Take My Hand.” So, take his hand, folks. Have a dream. Go to the mountaintop. Becuase, if he was wrong, then Jesus was a Utopian dreamer who never came down to earth. If he was wrong, justice is a lie, and love has no meaning.


























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On the road 2/14-2/23

Book tour blogs often whine: the delayed airplanes, the small turnout, the moving from city to city at speed not meant for a human soul. But that's just part of it. Here's my last week: took the train from New York to DC last Wednesday to speak at the National Cathedral. (That's the big church on the hill, the one that seats something like 4,000--did you see President Ford's funeral?). Previous day was horrible winter storm (I had not experienced sleet before, having grown up in the west. I called Vincent to say that it was ice falling from the sky). Many Knopf authors unable to get off the ground at JFK for gigs in LA. DC a sheet of ice when I arrived. Smaller turnout than expected (no shit, Sherlock--one woman told me the next day that she couldn't get out her back door because the snow was so deep and had to toss her dog out the window.) But such a fine crowd, with great comments and questions about Hiroshima and the decision to use the bomb. A woman there who grew up in Oak Ridge, the "other" secret city besides Los Alamos.
Bookseller: Cathedral Bookstore (beautiful displays by Gabby.)
Taught writing workshop the next day for 60 women as part of Sacred Circles, a gathering of women now in its tenth year at the Cathedral. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (A Human Being Died that Night) gave talk the next day on the Forgiveness and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Read her book.
But the real subject of this blog is the men who have been driving me around, in taxis and in limos. In DC, most of the taxi drivers were from the Middle East and all of them had the radio tuned to NPR’s coverage of the hearings in the Senate about Iraq. A man from Turkey, in his forties, fine featured said he could no longer say to his family and friends at home that the United States believed in democracy because they just laughed. He added that he was now afraid here, that he might be picked up, just because of his looks or accent, and not charged and not allowed out of prison. The other taxi drivers were from Pakistan and Ethiopia.
Left DC on Sunday morning for Asheville, NC where I was met at the airport by Emilie White who heads the Kay Fowler Literary Project at All Soul Cathedral (Episcopal) in Asheville. Emilie is a thoughtful reader and writer and she brings writers into the cathedral to read and talk. Great crowd, almost filled the church, and very fine questions. Bishop of W. North Carolina, Porter Taylor, is also a fine writer and serious reader, so it’s a literate place. I was again struck by the story-telling, literate culture of the South. So many people elsewhere in the country completely miss this. And its sophistication about Christianity. So many of us from the North or We have a one-note view of the South and Christianity (read: right wing fundamentalist) but it is, as Flannery O’Connor said, “a Christ-haunted land,” and the folks I meet, in the liberal-left, are very well educated and highly nuanced when it comes to Christianity.
Bookseller: Accent on Books.
Back to New York on Monday afternoon. Dinner early with buddy at Bright Food Cafe on 8th, fell into bed. Day of dry cleaning, laundry, catching up on email, gym. New York warming up. Slush in street. Dogs still with boots on.
Wednesday morning to Chicago. Driver was a man from Sudan, Darfur. Travels extensively to alert world to genocide. Was recently in Chad were he heard stories, he said, that made him “turn away.” If American President would condemn the murder, it would end.
Briefly toured The Cradle in Evanston, an adoption agency my grandmother, Eleanor Gallagher, helped to found. Many photos on the walls of parents and children, each one a gift. Most memorable” a seventy-two- year- old man with his birth mother in her nineties, just after he found her.
Spoke at Seabury Seminary in the afternoon with Gary Hall, dean of the school, man who reads everything and writes beautifully. Kathy Hall reads everything, too, and runs the most hospitable household. Students and I talked about being bored in church (taboo word) and what to do. Preached at Ash Wednesday service on “rewriting our stories during Lent.” (Will post on Web site: noragallagher.org) Read later in the evening. I think Seabury must have been thoroughly sick of hearing from me by end of day.
Bookseller: Seabury bookstore
Next day to Lake Forest for bookstore lunch. Sue Boucher, who owns Lake Forest Bookstore, gathers women with an author. Very smart idea. Great group of thoughtful women. Hannah Gretz, local powerhouse, had gathered up a bunch of friends and brought them. Hannah has five children, sits on the board of Ragdale artists colony (director of Ragdale was there), and lives in beautiful renovated house with gorgeous long windows everywhere. After lunch, she took me on small tour. Both of my parents grew up in the area.

Book Tour Begins

I start tomorrow on my book tour, and I'm at once grateful and horrified that somehow I've agreed to something like 15 cities and counting. Today, good reviews in LA Times, SF Chronicle and Boston Globe. Writing about Los Alamos, an idea I had in the mid-nineties, having grown up in New Mexico, has been an amazing ride. I have been thinking lately of the relationship between fiction and the theological idea of the "scandal of the human particular.

As some of you know, I have written two memoirs, Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection. They are about my own wrestling with faith inside and outside the Episcopal church. In writing these memoirs, I discovered that there are aspects of the memoir that are like the novel: you must have “characters,” you must have a “plot.” I learned the arc of a three- part plot from the Greeks: things get bad, things get worse, things are resolved.

I learned the hard way that a memoir must be about something more than the author’s life, as of course the novel must be about more than the sum of its characters. Moby Dick is not “about” whale hunting. Whale hunting is the circumstance of Moby Dick; the novel is about obsession. Lucy Grealy’s great memoir Autobiography of a Face, is the story of woman disfigured from repeated cancer treatments to her jaw. That’s the circumstance. What is it about? A human person coming to terms with who she is. We have all read memoirs that were like awful, narcissistic train wrecks in which the writer never figured out that the subject of a memoir cannot be the writer himself, and we have also read memoir that divulged the most secret and painful things about a life that were not at all embarrassing but instead connected us more deeply to the human condition.

I found another similarity between memoir and fiction: This wonderful phrase: the scandal of the particular. The idea is that God, this enormous creative force that “hung the stars” and created “that great leviathan just for the sport of it” would care about one of us. The idea that the God of Creation–Aristotle's Prime Mover or Plato's Divine Source– would stoop to join us in the mundane details of every day human life, would care even if a single sparrow fell to the ground. This "Yahweh" was completely low-brow to the Greeks, a scandal: from Greek skandalon ‘snare, stumbling block.’

And yet, it is a beautiful scandal, isn’t it? That God would care about one singular, particular life. Where would we be, how would we understand our human story, without it? “The first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman,” writes Rabbi Richard Friedman. “The story’s focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family.” One family: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.

When I worked as a journalist, I was drawn to the stories of individuals in the shadow of history-making moments. After the Berlin Wall came down, I went to Prague and interviewed families about what their lives had been like under the regime. I wrote about daily life in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in power. This may be the same impulse that makes me religious: that is, here we are working out our own lives, making mistakes, trying to discern one path from another, while waves of history ebb and flow, causing everything to change. I am interested in the waves–who isn’t– but it’s the human particular that captures me.


I never meant to write fiction. Fiction, novels, were in a category saved for the great masters: George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford. I was a journalist. But one day, I was visited by an idea.

I grew up in New Mexico, a short distance from Los Alamos, where Robert Oppenheimer and his team built the atomic bomb. Guard towers were still in place, and the city had an aura of secrecy, isolation and guilt. From my college dining room, St. John’s in Santa Fe, I could see the lights of Los Alamos suspended in the sky.

One day some years ago, I was walking on a piece of land I owned near the Rio Grande not far from Santa Fe. I looked across the river, and the steep mesa that rose up on the other side, and realized that just on the west side of that mesa was the city of Los Alamos. And all at once I wondered what would have happened had one of the physicists working on the “gadget,” decided to jump ship. What if he had left the secret city under cover of night, and swum across the river. Who might have found him and what would have been their story?

So, the idea for the novel came to me all at once as if dropped from the sky. I did what many of us do with gifts: I put it away in a drawer. I wasn’t ready. Fiction was for the big boys and girls.

But it kept calling out to me from the depths of the desk. A little voice, and finally, several years ago, I pulled it out. It lay on my desk, breathing.

I started researching the time, filling in the things I didn’t know. I found out all these surprising and wonderful things about Los Alamos-particulars: the scientists who were asked to work on this secret project in the New Mexico mountains often did not know where they were going. Some of them were handed train tickets and only read of their destination as they walked toward the train. Others did know more or less: At one university, a librarian noticed that suddenly lots of professors of physics were checking out books on New Mexico. When Los Alamos ran out of water one hot summer, they brushed their teeth with Coco-Cola. Oppenheimer made punch with 200-proof lab alcohol. He named the place in southern New Mexico where the first experimental bomb was tested, in July of 1945, Trinity site. Where the heat from the blast was so extreme that it melted the sand to green glass. “Those men who built the bomb,” said a girl from Hiroshima, “what did they think would happen if they dropped it ?”