Customer Reviews

Common Sense Not Needed

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There are stories from this small book I was privileged to read once that still challenge and draw me in... Corrie writes about her work teaching a Bible class to mentally-handicapped children in Holland. She tells wonderful stories about how God revealed Himself very personally and simply to the children, how they understood and responded to His love, and how valuable they are to Him personally. She contrasts that with the Nazis' opinion of the mentally handicapped. There are children in that small book that I myself long to be more like, in the simplicity of their devotion and love for Jesus.

I read the one reader's opinion and could not disagree more. I read this book thirty years ago and still remenber the sense of it. I was just out of college and trying to teach developmentally disabled boys in a residential school. I made all sorts of mistakes. I confused learning with the intellectual acquisition of knowledge. That is whether the heart or the head is listening. The only scale the other reviewer knows is one with metaphorical on one end and literal on the other. Since they can only see that scale, then complex philisophical issues, they think, are beyond the disabled. I am not sure that is always true.

Dr. Mark Virkler has been investigating teaching based on early rabinical methods. He contrasts: heart(and action)learning with the intellect. Book learning is beyond the scope of many disabled children and adults. In my short stint as a special education teacher, I discovered the amazing strengths in relational learning. The developmentally disabled universe is often centered on personal relationships. (Certainly disorders of attention and connection like autism are an exception.)

The basics of the Christian Gospel are not as esoteric as the Gnostics or Zen. When one honors God as creator and loves one's neighbor as his or herself, Jesus says, we have fulfilled the whole Gospel. The child like teachings of kindergarden: repentance, forgiveness, sharing and love are often within the grasp of us all. Jesus said again, "...for of such is the kingdom of heaven."

I am not at all sure that the title exactly matches the deep wisdom of this book. For it is the "common sense" that is common to humanity. What we call our heart, our point of deep decision making, is what learns the best and remembers the longest. Heart learning is never frivolous or superfulous. Contrast the often droning voice of the intellect.

A few years ago I wrote a poem inspired by the book, read, so many years before. Corrie ten Boom and her sister were on a collision course with the most evil force of the twentieth century: Naziism. The Nazis could not leave the disabled alone. Their fragility and imperfections were an affront to their philosophy of perfection. Since there was no fall from grace and redemption (as preached by Christianity), they stole the role of God. Their vengeful version of God had to eradicate all of the imperfections in the human race. So, as I wrote in my poem, the Nazis, "could not leave them alone." Corrie ten Boom and her sister insisted on protecting their charges. Their family also hid the jews sent to them for help. Corrie and her sister went to Aushowitz rather than give them up. Her sister died there and she lived to write her tale.

The sisters were prophets in the main sense of the word. For many of the prophets did not just speak words. They acted out their word from God. Fr. Francis Martin preached a sermon on prophecy. Martin says: Jesus exemplifies the prophet, who backed up with his body, what he said with his words. The ten Booms chose to be a type of Jesus. This, they did in the crucible of the Holocaust. When one criticizes their teaching of the Gospel to the disabled, one must consider what it cost them.

I have to take issue most strongly with Mr Miller's "review". Anyone who has any knowledge of Ms Ten Boom's life and experiences will know that her books need no endorsement from those who are ignorant of such sacred and personal moments of understanding truth. Corrie stands head and shoulders above most of us in her simple faith and courage - anyone without respect for her personal (and therefore irrefutable) knowledge, whether they share her religious views or not, simply stands on the side of ridicule. The beauty and wonder of someone like Corrie ten Boom is that the nature of her life and her utter sincerity ensure that criticism can only serve to honour her still further, since such igorance informs us far more about the one who utters it.

This little book is about how Corrie ministered to adults with mental retardation, Down's Syndrome, etc. She talks alot about God's grace and how the gospel is understood by everyone. Any fan of Corrie's work will not be disappointed. It's a short book; I read it in one sitting.

Before you read this book, you have to know who Corrie ten Boom is, how she lived before and after the war, and what she survived. This is essential to understanding what she has to offer. Once you know these basic facts, then you'll understand that she truly is an authority on the subject. I STRONGLY recommend her book, "The Hiding Place" to every human with the capacity to read or be read to.

First off, I hope this book never happened. To ingrain philosophy to people with no choice in the matter is wrong, and it is impossible to ask someone's opinion if they don't understand your query. The mentally handicapped, especially autists, have trouble dealing with our world as it is, because they expect many things that we understand to be metaphoric as literal. You cannot teach them religion as Boom suggests using the same metaphoric language we use -- because they will beleive it the way we beleive in mathematics. This is as unfair as lying to children. We know that God will only help those who help themselves, and the reason mental handicaps are so terrifying is they make you unable to help yourself in many instances. If you tell people that only understand language literally that God will help them, they will expect this help in a tangible fashion. It's asking for trouble; it's asking them to give up whenever something seems hard. The justification for learning, for overcoming adversity, is no longer there.

Furthurmore, the books' conclusions are terribly paradigmatic. If you tell somebody something that they can only believe literally, you shouldn't be surprised and consider it amazing when they reiterate your points in a literal manner. To say that we can learn something from this level of idealistic regurgitation is foolishness; may as well feed lines into a computer, or train a parrot to speak aphorisms. It's sad that Boom doesn't try and understand these people, rather than just adapting their view of consciousness to her own. Surely, their perspective is important; after all, they don't doubt the way we do. It is lost in the messy prose and disjoined narrative of this novel, which in my opinion does nothing but degrade both the classical model of thought, the teaching of Christ and the pride of the mentally handicapped.