Honest doubts, deep love keep Skin Boat afloat
At a time when it's fashionable to portray the Canadian Church as a quaint anachronism or a cauldron of scandal, it's a bold move for anyone to showcase it as anything else.
But John Terspstra has given us all—Christian or not—a refreshing new perspective in his new book, Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations. A poet who was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for his book Disarmament, Terpstra writes a string of short memoirs and personal meditations that are honest about his doubts, transparent about the failings of Christians—yet profoundly smitten with a can't-shake-it love for the Church and for Christian faith.
Skin Boat revolves around Terpstra's experiences as a member of St. Cuthbert's Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, Ontario. We glimpse a congregation coping with the pastor's treatment for a brain tumour and dealing with ghosts of an old conflict. We hear snippets of Terpstra's respectful, often humorous conversations with agnostic friends and those who have given up traditional faith. We hear echoes of his rigid upbringing in a different church. We see Terpstra encountering the holy in worship and in the arts, and listening to the Bible on CD on a road trip across the Prairies.
Throughout, Terspstra steers clear of clichéd expressions of faith. He avoids traditional names for God (spelling it "G-d"), and, as if to underscore the fact that our story is really about God's work, refers to Jesus as "the one who won us over."
And beware—even though the book is in prose, it is full of the contemplative flights into metaphor and image and ambiguous twists that poets are prone to, but which make this book such a delight to read. Terpstra takes traditional churchly metaphors such as "body" and "shepherd" and kneads provocative postmodern meaning into them. Like sheep grazing over the minefields of former battle zones, for example, the Church lives in age that is beautiful and risky at the same time. Like the five-drawer dresser that Terpstra builds in his day job as a carpenter, the Church is something that is made.
The interweaving of medieval legends of St. Cuthbert and St. Brendan sheds poignant light on postmodern questions and affirmations about life and death, faith and doubt. The cowhide boat by which Brendan and a band of monks are said to have reached North America in the sixth century is an apt image of the fragility of today's church. But it also symbolizes the flexibility and tenacity the church always seems to find in choppy seas.
In the end, Skin Boat functions as a kind of apologetic for the Church and its faith—but unlike so many apologetics, it is graced with a rare combination of humility, personal struggle, tolerance for ambiguity and a keen reading of the times.
Here's a quote that captures the paradoxes and affirmations of this book:
"Traditionally, for those who believe in the existence of, there is a tension between a G-d conceived as transcendent, that is to say, above and outside of the world, or imminent, within all and everything.
"It is as though the human mind cannot juggle two balls at once.
"Today I have been won over by something that is both here and now, and out of this world."
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