A summer read from Pastor Tuula

Summer is here, and with it the lure of vacation, recreation, or at least a little free time. It’s a great time to reacquaint yourself with the pleasures of a good book. But, what to read? There are so many pages out there, and not nearly enough time.

 Maybe I can narrow your list a bit. Let me share with you what I am reading this summer, and the reason why I am rereading a book from several years ago.

This week I visited the office Etobicoke Centre MP, Ted Opitz. I wanted to learn more about the neighbourhood around St. Philip’s and assumed he would know.  'Who are our neighbours?' was my main question. I learned that the area around our church ranks # 8 in the number of senior citizens in Canada. The suggestion was made for the church to provide programs, even spiritual ones, to the seniors. When I inquired about the community housing around the corner, I was informed that many of our newest neighbours live there. Many of them come from Somalia. “But you might not want to reach out to them, because their beliefs and customs are quite different from yours”, the staffer said. I insisted that we would very much like to get to know our neighbours, if they would like to know us. The MP’s office promised to find out, and then arrange a meeting of introductions. 

The year my daughter started her university studies, the New Student Orientation committee at her school, Wagner College in Staten Island, instituted a reading-in-common program for incoming students. New students were encouraged to read a selected book before arriving on campus, and the book was discussed in orientation groups and used as a source of conversation for early residence hall activities and first year class meetings. Parents were encouraged also to read the selection. The book chosen that year was Honky, by Dalton Conley (Vintage, 2005), a memoir of the author’s childhood as one of the few white boys in a neighbourhood of mostly Black and Puerto Rican housing projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His portraits of people caught up in a vortex of race and class in America explain more about life along the colour line, notes one reviewer, 'than does a shelf load of sociologies'. 'There is an old saying that you never really know your own language until you study another,' Conley writes. 'It’s the same with race and class. In fact, race and class are nothing more than a set of stories we tell ourselves to get through the world.'

As I await the meeting,  I will reread this book.