Review
Title: The Five Books of Jesus
Author: James Goldberg
Publisher: CreateSpace
Genre: Novel, Midrash
Year Published: 2012
Number of Pages: 330
Binding: Paper and Kindle
ISBN10: 1479271306
ISBN13: 978-1479271306
Price: $14.95 (paper), $9.99 Kindle
Review
Title: Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic
Author: James Goldberg, Ardis E. Parshall, Scott Hales, Merrijane Rice, Artwork by Carla Jimison,
Publisher: Mormon Lit Lab
Genre: History, Poetry, Essays
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 213
Binding: Paper and Kindle
ISBN13: 9798664628848
Price: $15.99 (Paper) $7.99 (Kindle)
Review
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Title: Why I Hate White Jesus
Author: James Goldberg
Publisher: Mormon Midrashim
Genre: Personal Essay
Year Published: Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Number of Pages: 5
URL: https://mormonmidrashim.blogspot.com/2020/05/why-i-hate-white-jesus.html
Reviewed by Harlow Soderborg Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
Several years ago, when The Five Books of Jesus won the Association for Mormon Letters’ fiction prize, James Goldberg announced that it would be available for a day or two as a free Kindle download. After a few years of occasionally seeing James on the FrontRunner train and thinking, “I have your book in my backpack,” I finally started reading it this past December. It was a wonderful, charismatic, peaceful book, a good friend after a hard day editing web content, and testing headlines for their SEO/emotional marketing value.
I found it charming and inventive, a wonder-filled midrash. I loved the origin stories of some parables, and how James dealt with troubling stories like that incident where Jesus scolds Martha, who is fixing food for him and his friends because she wants Mary to help her in the kitchen.
There’s a poignant look ahead in the life of the rich young man, and a scene suggesting that “Master, here are two swords” means something very different than we might think.
The compassionate portrait of Judas reminded me of Mahonri Stewart’s portrait in Yeshua: A Gospel Play, with more room to develop the character. (Incidentally, there is no note of a production for Yeshua in A Roof Overhead and Other Plays. I would love to see a production, with James Goldberg playing Yeshua.)
The Five Books of Jesus made me wish my evening commute was longer. In Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic that same inviting, compassionate voice made me wish my evening commute were not only longer but more frequent—that I was not working from home three days a week. But in this book, the voice is joined by the voice and research of Ardis E. Parshall, the guest voices of Scott Hales and Merrijane Rice, and the art of Carla Jimison to make a satisfying combination of history, poetry, devotional, and art and design.
And white space, lots of white space, reminding me of a phrase I read in a review once about giving poems “the dignity of white space,” but can be a bit disorienting in electronic formats where a full-page view makes the type too small to read. (I read this in a PDF on my phone, so it took a bit of thumbing to figure out that the title for each section appears at the top of a page, with nothing else on the page, followed by a blank page, so each section starts on a recto and ends on a verso.
This mosaic is in 22 sections, each starting with Context telling the story behind the poem and giving background to understand details in the poem (Leslie Norris used to give his poems that kind of context in readings), and ending with a Reflection.
Appropriately the first section is “The Road to Damascus,” and it’s not a metaphorical road, and the lights of war aren’t metaphorical. It’s the road the district president, Karim Assouad, takes once a month from Beirut, Lebanon to Damascus, Syria to take the sacrament to members there.
But it is a typological road (a road we come back to in “Triolet for the Caravan
from Manaus”). The background is a story about the Beirut branch that appeared in The Daily Star.
The reporter notes first
all she does not see: no
crosses on the walls, no
gilded ornamentation, no
vaulted ceilings and no
professional giving
the call to prayer.
(Throughout the book italics denote words from the original source.)
In a city of 1500-year-old cathedrals, how can you call yourself a church when you meet in an unadorned apartment?
We are almost in the
same condition as were
the early believers,
the early Christians
Assouad tells her.
That’s how. You imagine yourself replaying the lives of the first believers, you see their image in your experience.
If this first section is about the divisions caused by political conflict and war, the second is about a different kind of (Di)vision, a war of words, and “The Path to the Grove.”
This section continues the typology of seeing the present as a mirror reflecting the past: “Toward the end of the decade, [the Smiths] became environmental refugees—displaced, along with a tenth of the state’s population, after a distant volcanic eruption caused a temporary climate change.”
The section ends with a comment that maybe the First Vision was less about finding out which church was right than about finding harmony.
So the first two sections are linked by road and path, vision and division, and the third section links to the second by vision and persecution, but the persecution comes from another member of the church, leading to a reflection on how we treat each other, and how we respond to “poor treatment of fellow members of the Church.”
Which links to the next section, where we meet the couple in Carla Jimison’s lovely cover art. “Slant Villanelle for William and Marie Graves” begins,
We found the right Church, all right
but found the wrong people, she said:
(in Atlanta, they wanted her skin white)
The next section, “Song for Abel Paez” reflects on sustaining leaders even in their imperfections and links back to the first, where church members were also isolated because of political circumstances.
After that, we meet Gurcharan Singh Gill who, like multi-generational Lebanese saints fleeing Beirut after more than a hundred years there, faced persecution with other Sikhs after the partition of the Punjab, and came to California to study.
In the reflection, his grandson talks about gathering moments from Gurcharan’s life. “They are like pearls to me: To keep them, I am happy to trade away any chance I might have had for full identification with the western world.”
James Goldberg’s writing is full of such phrases and imagery gathered and dropped in like pearls strung together like ghazal couplets, or generations linked in temple sealings.
But the linking of generations is not just a linking of ordinances, it’s a linking of stories, and in one of the reflections, Ardis Parshall writes we learn that the stories in the book are not just interesting stories she and James have come across in their research.
“I sometimes—not always, but sometimes—know beyond doubt that the people I am researching are aware of my interest, and want to be known, and do all they can to help. Once in a great while, as with Indiana Mary Maybert, they simply will not let me alone until I have done what they need me to do.”
Other highlights of the book include “God and a Circus Bear,” Scott Hales’ poem about a man fighting a bear in a circus ring and tithing his earnings, and Merrijane Rice’s “Gifted” about missionary work among the wave of German immigrants to Brazil and Argentina in the 1920s.
The poem and the reflection on it are the book’s benediction, closing out a lovely mosaic of history, scholarship, spirituality, poetry, and reflection.
And that ought to be the end of this review (my wife has a large project for me). But there’s a bookend for this book.
About the time I started it I came across James’s essay, “Why I Hate White Jesus.” I had wanted to read the essay since my niece Heather Clark told me about it at the Clark-Cox Christmas sing along, but I assumed it hadn’t been published. James had presented it to their writers’ group, something he was writing for Sunstone. I read the first several sections on the bus ride home and finished it after finishing Song of Names.
If Song of Names is a gentle polemic about preserving the stories of the least of these, our sisters and brothers, “Why I Hate White Jesus” is a raw, full-throated cry to see the image of Jesus in people other than the descendants of Nordic immigrants like myself.
The essay has too many resonances for me to explore in a short review, so I’ll settle on one that seems particularly apt:
“When I was in high school, a team of researchers worked with a bunch of 1st century Galilean skulls in an attempt to reconstruct what the average man in Galilee from the time of Jesus looked like. They hired a forensic artist to create a digital image of a living face, filling in details on things like hair length and skin tone from other evidence from the era and region. The Columbus Dispatch, which we faithfully skimmed in my household, shared the project with some kind of proto-clickbait title about revealing what Jesus actually looked like. My dad loved the picture. He said it looked like me.
“An editorial later that week criticized the image. The writer correctly pointed out that a composite of Galilean skulls mixed with an artist’s informed speculation doesn’t give us hard evidence of what Jesus as a historical individual looked like. The writer then asked what possible, probably anti-religious motives there might be in portraying such a revered figure as Jesus as such a brutish Neanderthal.”
“Anti-religious motives,” a resonant phrase. Several years ago, in a visit to southwest Washington, I came across Adam Nicolson’s article “The Bible of King James” in the December 2011 National Geographic. My evangelical brother-in-law told me I was welcome to keep the magazine as the article was ungodly (or did he say it was written by an ungodly man?).
I told him I found the article very respectful towards the Bible, and he said he hadn’t read it, but I was still welcome to keep it.
I’ve thought about that a lot. What was behind his assumption that the article was ungodly? Did he just figure that any secular source was out to destroy religion—no, to destroy his religion?
I have been fortunate to have friends and teachers and mentors (and a patriarchal blessing) to teach me not to fear for my faith as I explore the vast body of scholarship and art without the Church, but within that circle that circumscribes all truth.
And as a culture, we are fortunate to have the voices and visuals in these pieces to turn to for peace and joy and expansion of the circle.