Books like Abide with Me

An outstanding and moving portrait of the quiet courage of a minster and his community in rural Maine in the 50’s. This is a time when the Cold War, crass commercialism, and the insights of Freud about hidden sexual motivations were undermining spirituality in the American populace. The Congregational minister, Tyler Caskey, is having trouble inspiring his flock or taking their problems seriously as he is still recovering from the death of his wife one year before. His four-year old daughter Catherine has mostly stopped speaking except to say hateful things like “I hate God” and his other infant daughter has been taken into the care of his bitchy, judgmental mother. Yet his frequent epiphanies of God immanent in nature and the model of courage set by Bonhoeffer’s faith in the face of imprisonment and death by the Nazis keeps him on the path. He comes to rise above all the vicious gossip and petty concerns of his parishioners and church board and tune into the ones who really need his help and as a result reap the help he needs himself. Just when the lack of dramatic action and the pathos of Tyler’s condition begins to weigh you down, certain personal breakthroughs on his part and some in the community stun you with surprise and joy over the resilience of the human heart and the power of love to redeem. This second Strout novel had a lot more warmth and cohesiveness than the other I read, “Olive Kitteridge”, which features a series of vignettes about a middle-aged curmudgeon. It yielded up a lot of the same pleasures and uplifting tears that I got from the portraits of rural life in the works of Kent Haruf and Marylynne Robinson. Highly recommended and effective in audiobook version. Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;When other helpers fail and comforts flee,Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.