Rachel Starr Thomson

Every year at the end of the Passover Seder, when Jewish people around the world remember the deliverance from Egypt and the thousands of years of captivity, exile, return and exile again that have since ensued, they close the ceremony with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.” For many years those words were a poignant expression of longing by an exiled, often persecuted people.

Exile is an acute form of suffering, though not one we often talk about; it is estrangement, unsettledness, a knowledge that what you have is not your own. An exile cannot go home and yet can never entirely settle away from home. And though most of us have not been forced out of our homes, there’s an exiled spirit inside every human being. Our first separation from God came when Adam and Eve were exiled from Eden; in some ways, I think we’ve been trying to go home ever since.

Christians are in a unique position. We feel the pain of exile, too: exile from a perfect world, from a life where mortality hung over no one’s head, where strife and illness and sin did not exist. But we alone have a hope of going home someday. In the meantime, we live here, doubly estranged because earthly society will not accept us either — ironically, because of our hope — and trying to live as best we can in a world where we don’t belong.

My most recent Boundless article, which I have neglected to post here far too long … you can read the whole thing here.

On another note, I am thinking about retooling this blog. Again. Turning it into something more personal and perhaps artsy, something that might even include snippets of fiction sometimes.

We shall see.

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

I thought this essay was hilarious–and informative. Read the whole article, “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness” by Clark Whelton, here.

Jack Wilson’s life is marked by disappearances. First, his entire world disappeared in a moment when the bombs fell and Americans were taken to plastic-wrapped, regulated cities where they’ll be safe from radiation, poisonous air, and freedom. Ten years later, just before his nineteenth birthday, his best (and only) friend, Lori, disappeared when she was reassigned to another city and some unknown job in it.

Six months after that, Jack’s family staged a disappearance of their own, as he and his parents exited the city by stealth and never looked back. As Jack’s father had known for months, everything about the world is a lie, and escape leads to a better life.

But Jack is in love with Lori, and his obsessive need to find her eventually sends him and his father back to the city. When tragedy puts his plan into a tailspin, Jack finds himself alone, wearing a dead man’s uniform and identity card, and searching desperately for Lori before his time—four days—runs out.

With him is a long letter from his father that will reveal, with transformative power, the secrets of one’s man past, his heart, and his quest for love.

Wake Up, O Sleeper! by Jed Wright is set in the familiar dystopian landscape of Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver, though its focus on the sinfulness of the individual human heart makes it distinctly Christian. Jack struggles with faith; his father is a believer, while Jack responds to the sentiment that “Jesus loves you” with a wry, “Probably not.” Though I found it slow to get started, by the end it had become a page-turner. Its central love story is surprisingly powerful.

I was a little put off by the book’s marketing (its cover and endorsements), which push the book’s “message” more than they do its story. In this, the marketing is far more heavy-handed than the book itself. Yes, readers may take away some strong messages from this book, but it is a story first, and quite a good one. I hope we’ll see more from Jed in the future.

Recommended for adult readers.