|
With Eyes To See : A Journey From Religion To Spirituality by Arthur Melville Book review by William B. Lindley
Atheists, Humanists, freethinkers: do not let the subtitle steer you away from this book! The meat of the book is the author's concrete, personal, in-this-world experience as a Catholic missionary priest in Guatemala. He was and is a human being first, professional helper second. He did not know this when he first arrived in Guatemala, but he soon found out. There was a clear mismatch between the teachings of the Church of Rome and the author's experience at the outset of his Guatemala stay, and his alienation from the church of his upbringing steadily increased throughout the rest of his six years there.He learned the hard way that the political and economic system of Guatemala, as with most of Latin America, is feudal, not capitalist or socialist. He learned that the landowners, a small fraction of the population, control the government and thereby the indigenous people, and that they are supported in this by the Roman Catholic church-his church-just as in medieval Europe. Human rights as we know them are virtually nonexistent. To his horror and ours, this feudal system also serves certain powers-that-be in the United States, so that our government has vacillated between full support of feudalism and weak attempts to encourage reform.Read this book and enjoy (and suffer) the experience of a kind, warm-hearted, emotional man miscast as a priest, interacting with other kind, warm-hearted human beings and with villains. The plot, though quite factual, is as rich as that of most good novels; the tension between his office and actual beliefs builds; the reader is constantly wondering what will happen next. It is an excellent read simply as an adventure story loaded with human interest. Yes, my fellow unbelievers, there is some "spirituality" that might rub us the wrong way. The author learns and accepts a mythical worldview from his "teachers," the people who live close to nature. I claim that there isn't enough of this to spoil the story for strict rationalists. Get this book and have a fine but sobering reading experience. Stillpoint Publishing, ©1992, paperback, 363 pages, $13.95. Box 640, Meetinghouse Road, Walpole, NH 03608. [phone 1-800-847-4014]
Table of Contents | 1993 Issues | Subscribe Credit card Orders call: 800-321-9054 or fax: (619)676-0433 Truth Seeker is published by Truth Seeker Co., Inc. (ISSN 0041-3712) © 1996 |