10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ambiguity and God, June 1, 2002
Most writing about God in America falls into one of two camps: the pluralistic God of car bumpers that declare "In God We Trust, United We Stand" and the principled God described by the Chuck Swindolls, James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons of the church who believe that God is an understandable God who is best approached by bringing "biblical principles" into play to create a clean, friendly life. While the pluralistic God has no definition because too many people mindlessly believe in "it," whatever "it" is, the principled God does little more than to anesthetize our worries and make us nice, good people.
Gabriel Black, the protagonist in Hollon's book, runs headlong into the ambiguities of measuring God's goodness or badness. The God File is Gabriel's collection of stories written while in prison. The file is intended to gather the evidence of God's existence: "I set out... to put together a file, to look for God in the tiny details, the corners of my days in this place, to find out for myself." Gabriel is not content with nor interested in an amorphous feel-good God and neither is he interested in an understandable God who wants people to live according to categorical, simplistic rules. He is interested in knowing a God who can exist within his messed up, paradoxical yet thoughtful life.
Far too often, each of us takes decisions and judgments about God's goodness based on the same inconsistent, self-focused ethic that enable us to assault the character of a person based on a rude traffic maneuver or writing a check at the grocery store in a debit card age. Our ethic is one that revolves around whether the action of another personality - human or deity - is convenient to the unobstructed pursuit of our expectations of how life ought to be. Very rarely do our expectations involve pain, disappointment, injustice, the stupidity of our own actions and the damage against us invoked by others. Yet these very things happen in our lives.
Life, and therefore, by association, God, is ambiguous. There is paradox and tension in any human life. We are inconsistent, selfish, suffering people. Over the course of many years, Gabriel Black struggles to come to terms with the ambiguities of the God of his experience and the God he reads about in his Bible. He sees his own inconsistence, his own suffering, the absurdities of other people, and the insane criminality of his prisoner peers. In short, he sees broken, confused people. At the same time, *and often in the same situations of pain*, Gabriel sees beauty, wonder, love, mystery and yes, even goodness.
Though it takes time for him to settle into and accept the ambiguities of God's goodness, Gabriel eventually finds himself coming to terms with his own self-imposed prison sentence, his broken relationships and his deep longings for beauty and goodness. The excellent part about Gabriel's acceptance is his willingness to squarely face God's ambiguity and paradox and is willing to say God is good.
... I think Gabriel accomplished what is so difficult for humans to do: to accept and absorb spiritual ambiguity into his heart, soul and mind and to say that life and God are good. Gabriel approaches a place of perception that enables him to stop defining the goodness of God and life in terms of his personal convenience and understanding. Instead, he shifts his notion of goodness from the fulcrum of himself to another fulcrum that brings more meaning to life.
Of course, Gabriel Black is a human being and so his practice of this perspective is inconsistent. The ending of the book makes this plain. The ending and much of the content will make this a difficult book to read for the God-as-a-body-of-principles followers who attach near-canonical weight to Dobson's writings and who judge a movie by the number of swear words in the script. But for the God-seeker who is willing to wrestle with the timeless issues of God's existence and goodness in a world that can undeniably be disappointing and evil, the message of The God File is strangely encouraging.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'll Never Be The Same........., June 25, 2002
I sat in my office hunkered over with my head in a file drawer on a ho-hum Tuesday afternoon like hundreds of others when a shaft of sunlight suddenly blazed across my stack of filing. I looked up and out the window and saw the blue sky above the dingy warehouse next door and noticed white, fluffy clouds skittering across the sky. A mimosa tree was gently waving in the breeze. I paused for a minute or two and was totally present in the moment.
The only reason I noticed all of this momentary splendor was because I read this book last night....in one sitting....I couldn't put it down or stop reading once I got started. It changed me, I think, forever.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fragile and beautiful work, April 26, 2002
The prison genre has often been used in novels, memoirs, and film as a stripped-down, bare-bones symbol of an uncaring, overpowering, and alien universe and humanity's reaction to it. Frank Turner Hollon's THE GOD FILE is a fresh and compelling addition to that tradition.
THE GOD FILE is structured as a collection of vignettes, letters, and essays by Gabriel Black, a man sentenced to life without parole in an Alabama prison for a crime he didn't commit. During his 22 years in prison, Gabriel Black structured his life around a search for God in the most soul-crushing environment. THE GOD FILE is the evidence Gabriel finds both for and against the existence of God.
While I have read a few other prison memoirs during the last year (for example, NEWJACK, and YOU GOT NOTHING COMING), THE GOD FILE did more to capture the bleakness and hopelessness of prison and to relate it to everyday life than those supposedly true accounts. Each vignette is delicately and movingly written, and, taken as a whole, paint a picture of Gabriel Black's life and his stance to his unjust circumstance with artistic economy.
A terrific book that should provoke deep thought even among us atheists.
Dav's Rating System:
5 stars - Loved it, and kept it on my bookshelf.
4 stars - Liked it, and gave it to a friend.
3 stars - OK, finished it and gave it to the library.
2 stars - Not good, finished it, but felt guilty and/or cheated by it.
1 star - I want my hour back! Didn't finish the book.
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