Customer Reviews

Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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As a Quaker seminarian and fellow New Mexican, I'm more than a little partisan to Russell's latest book, but I'd recommend her beautiful lively writing to all who sense something delightful and disturbing in their experience of nature and spirit.
Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist is a walking meditation, faithful in its survey of pantheistic thought, yet grounded in its particular place and time. The book begins not with a creed, but with a map of the Nature Conservancy's Gila River Farm in southern New Mexico, where the author lives in a "little yellow house" not far from one of the few healthy rivers remaining in the American Southwest.
Her stories of Spinoza, Whitman, Quakers, and Hindus are interlinked by a refrain that counts blackbirds, flycatchers, grosbeaks, and wrens during bird banding season. Greek philosophers are accompanied by a chorus of sandhill cranes. Roman stoics and modern cell biologists find themselves at home among stories of the author's family, or the river's mosquito fish and loach minnows. "Everything is interwoven," writes the Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius, "and the web is holy."
"I am in love with Marcus Aurelius," admits Russell, two thousand years later, yet she paints her portrait of his brutal time and life with the same faithful linguistic brush, as she paints scenes of Coots pecking their baby nestlings to death. Russell has not written a sentimental book. Those looking for an idealized naturalism will not find easy comfort.
Yet the view from Russell's porch remains reverent. "Standing in the Light" is a Quaker phrase that captures both the immediacy of religious experience and the difficulty of its explication. The inbreak of the divine is heralded by the ordinary - by a sidewalk and porch step, pine tree and electric wires, by the gurgling call of a raven. By walking the landscape, Russell is able to walk through thousands of years of human life, pondering the relation of the natural and the divine. One doesn't so much learn history or philosophy in this book as breathe it, smell it in damp earth after desert rain, or watch it form and shift like clouds in the New Mexico sky.
"In my case, pantheism is a word whose back I ride like a man on a horse trying to get somewhere," writes Russell, "Or maybe a word more like a house, a place of shelter when it is cold and rainy, a house with big windows and a gorgeous view."

I highly recommend this book (that fifth star is saved for the next Moby-Dick). It is one of those books I read slowly. Don't let the smooth, plain-faced prose fool you. This book moves in deep water. I would read a few pages, or a few lines, or perhaps only one of Russell's finely crafted sentences then sip my coffee and contemplate my own world.
The book braids an often riveting history of pantheism with memoir and nature writing. Though the latter was enjoyable, I was most intrigued by the stories of history's pantheists and author's own intimate struggle with her spiritual place in this world.
The title might suggest a little fluff. The reality is quite the opposite. Russell is a scholar. A few moments with your nose in the bibliography offers a window into the extent of her journey. And just as the historical facts are well rooted in hard research, Russell's own personal journey rings with authenticity.
The highest praise I can give this book is that unlike many of its ilk, it offers no easy answers (if any answers at all) to our human struggle. It instead illuminates the landscape, offers the wisdom of one life's journey, and leaves us to face the day as we have faced all our others--though perhaps heartened, and with a more informed respect for the slants of light moving us all forward.

I never heard of Pantheism before this book. I don't know much about Quakerism, nor am I a literay scholar. But I do recognize something well-researched and well-written. I savored every page, sometimes re-reading parts to feel the richness of Sharman Russells words. I so appreciate the time she put in to sift through history and give the reader clearly-written excerpts on of past philosophers and their ideas. I especially enjoyed reading about more personal details about Marcus Aurelius's life and his love of family. I had no idea...
Sharman Russell has an amazing ability to weave the past and present together, like Marcus's web interconnected. This book is rich, deep and delightful. I plan to give copies as gifts this year to family and friends who are "seeking" the light in these dark times. Sharman doesn't gives answers, because she knows there are no answers. Spirituality is not a destination. It is a journey, and she bravely shares hers with us.

In our collective imagination, life-changing revelations are supposed to occur on mountaintops or in deserts or in similarly dramatic landscapes. Not so for Sharman Apt Russell. For her, the front porch will do just fine.

It was while sitting on her front porch steps in Silver City, New Mexico, she writes in Standing in the Light, that she finally realized what that word--Light--meant. She sets the scene:

In front of me on my porch step was a strip of grass, a sidewalk, a strip of asphalt, more sidewalk, a stone wall, pine trees and, higher above, electrical wires. Cars drove by. A raven gurgled. White clouds floated in the blue sky.

No all-consuming fire. No pillar of cloud. No voice from heaven. Just ordinary life. And then, she continues:

I had my epiphany: "The Light is all this," I said to myself. The Light was the steps, the street, the raven, the sky. The Light was everything, the universe conceived-of-as-a-whole, mysterious and material and right here.

For readers familiar with mystics of any tradition, what Russell is describing is a "unitive experience," a transient certainty that one is part of a great whole. Occurring "out of time and space," the experience nevertheless conveys a sense of holy presence, a sacredness of place right here, right now. But that is only part of the paradox. Life-changing as it is, this mystical awareness is also ineffable; try as she might, the writer can find no words to describe it. And yet, she continues to try.

Part memoir, part spiritual autobiography, part history of philosophy, Standing in the Light might be more aptly subtitled My Life as a Seeker Who Wonders How Pantheism Developed and How It Fits into the Quaker Faith. Given the book's structure--its weaving together of personal narrative and history, both local and global--it's sometimes hard to see exactly where Russell is going. But after following her for a while, the reader doesn't care about that anymore. Like Russell, he or she learns to wait in silence for the Light. As the Quakers say in such times of uncertainty, "Way will open."

What is most surprising--and interesting--about this extraordinary book is its focus on Quakerism. Granted, Russell explains the connection in her Introduction, writing,

Quakerism is central to my experience, and I am grateful to belong to a Quaker Meeting that allows for pantheism as one of its beliefs. My title, Standing in the Light, comes from the Quaker phrase "to stand in the Light," a concept with many meanings, encompassing political beliefs as well as spiritual. In my case, it is very much related to the bright New Mexican sky.

That said, her explanation is very easy to miss.

Readers familiar with Russell's earlier work, particularly Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life In The Southwest, will know that she and her husband moved to rural New Mexico in the early 1980s, building a homestead outside of Silver City. Writing, teaching, and raising two children filled many of those first years, but Russell found time to begin her on-again, off-again relationship with the local Quaker Meeting. After 15 years, she and her family also tried city living for a while, ultimately realizing that she belonged in the country. It was as if a voice in her head was telling h er, "This is who you are. This is what you need. Pay attention." She did. With both kids in college, she and husband Peter Russell now live in the country again, very near the Gila River.

In Standing in the Light, Sharman Apt Russell is very clearly trying to sort things out. Living closer to nature, she says that she is ready to "go deeper" now. This time--referring to her move back to the country as a kind of second chance--she promises to pay closer attention and to "take along some friends," books she's allowed to gather dust for far too long. She writes,

I will take along my science, my neglected pantheism, my neglected Quakerism. If I know anything, I know that I do not want to live in a universe devoid of community, mystery, and awe. I do not want to be alone in my brain, my timid and lazy personality, unconnected to the rest of the world. I cast my lot with Spinoza, Thoreau, and Einstein. I want to live every minute in a holy universe, so pleased and grateful to be part of this existence.

It is an ambitious undertaking, but Russell's transparency and sheer desire to live with integrity and joy leave the reader feeling satisfied at the end. Russell answers none of her own questions, though she does finally make a firm commitment to her local Meeting. By the end of the book, she also seems content to treat this quest of hers as a continual process. Out in the Gila watershed, she writes,

I walk my sabbatical place. I let go of some of the busy-ness and rejoice in the Creation's goodness. Flow and merge. I can wear a Quaker hat, a scientist's lab coat, a Taoist pin with a funny saying, and the running shoes of a pantheist. This is the new syncretism, which is also the old syncretism. Revelation is ongoing, and our understanding of the spirit, the atman, the Middle Way, and the Tao is not yet over.

Russell's practice, "standing in the Light," will go on.

by Susan Hanson
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

I loved this book. Like a fresh stream, Ms Russell's words soothed my mind and excited my spirit. This author, like no other, dares to put her sincere exploration of a most difficult subject -religion;spirituality;belief;FAITH - right out in plain sight for us to ponder. She is not telling us what to believe, offers many options in fact, but rather she is asking us to witness her journey, and if our hearts, minds and souls are challenged and touched along the way, well lucky us. "Flow and merge" she writes. I took those words with me on my walk today, and found so much was illuminated for me that I might have missed before. I recommend you read this book, share it with a loved one, a child, a friend, tuck it under your pillow at night. "Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy," Ms Russell quotes Marcus Aurelius. That's a mantra I can live with.

This is an inspiring and beautifully written account of one woman's spiritual journey. Highly recommended for those who find meaning in Nature and in everyday life. Many of us will discover that we, too, are pantheists.

The author reflects on her life and her search for meaning. She shares with us her love for the land (especially the mountains of New Mexico) and her joy in the complexity of nature. Her personal experiences - which are interesting in themselves - are integrated with an idiosyncratic history of pantheism. She has the clearest summaries I've ever seen of Eastern religions and the works of poets, novelists, and philosophers. (There are detailed end notes for those who want to read the original material that inspired her). She faces unflinchingly the evil that we humans do, and yet sees the humor in both everyday and unusual events. She pulls this all together with a style that is both clear and lyrical. Strongly grounded in history and reality, skeptical and unwilling to settle for easy answers, she still finds her way to hope and joy in life. Well worth reading again and again.

What is the meaning of life? How do you want to live? What is our relationship to the world around us? These are the questions S.A.Russell's new book tries to answer. Personal, intellectually rigorous, and well written. Not as self-indulgent as "Eat,Pray,Love" Sharman's book contains more research, reflection, political acuity, and science. Highly recommended.

In Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist, Sharman Apt Russell invites the reader on a quest to resolve the tensions inevitable to one who proposes to live consciously: living in the nature of the beautiful Gila Valley, New Mexico versus maintaining a job and children's activities in Silver City; being a good Quaker when Quaker Meeting is on Sunday morning, one of two days left to be outside town; the pantheist belief that the universe as a whole is sacred and the existence of evil ; and the comfort of a personal god compared to possible "ontological loneliness" experienced by the pantheist.
Apt Russell does not offer any pat answers. What she does is a weave of topics from her life history with a chronicle of one year, November 2005-November 2006, the definition of pantheism and its 2500 year old history, biographies and philosophies of a number of historical figures in the tradition (many persecuted for their thought and lifestyles), bird banding in the Gila Valley, ecological activism, Quakerism, its history and her own current group, her friends in the ecological movement and those in the Sanctuary Movement, and more.
She moves so seamlessly that the reader hardly needs transitions. Discussing Marcus Aurelius' conclusion that evil is just a name for something misunderstood, she cuts to herself and her daughter talking a walk in the Gila Valley at the end of college winter break. Her daughter will be graduating, and Apt Russell writes of her parental concerns for her daughter who will be going out into the dark streets where there may be real evil. Despite the double space between the sections signaling the changing in time and characters, clearly there is no change in topic, and the questions the author ponders aren't just intellectual games.
Nearing the midpoint of the book, Apt Russell recounts a long hiking expedition that helps her clarify her goals. "I want rapture and living communion. I want to play like a child. Above all, like everyone else, I want to find my compassionate heart." Though she allows no simplistic answers to the questions she poses or to the goals she sets, the books ends with her rapturous witnessing of the dance of the sand hill cranes, a rare sight that early in the memoir she mentions hoping to see.
The year that she is chronicling seems to be a transition point in her and her husband's life. Early in their marriage they lived "in nature," but family needs occasioned the move into town. Now they have bought another plot of land and anticipate the time when they can return to more permanent residence there. She says she will be better prepared this time and will take her "friends," books. I received the publisher's postcard announcing Sharman's book, and when colleagues gave me a gift certificate to our local independent book store as a retirement present, this was the first book I purchased to take on my journey. I was not disappointed.

Mary Ruth Donnelly

Thanks to this wonderful work by Sharman Apt Russell, I have found a name for the beliefs that have always resonated with my common sense. I now know that I am a scientific pantheist, and many of the many people I've met along the way are too. They just haven't figured it out yet. Thanks, Sharman.

I think I can honestly say I understand pantheism because Sharman Apt Russell has done a marvelous job of presenting the history of this concept, or spiritual viewpoint. Her research is both deep and broad, reaching back to early thinkers like the Greeks and Marcus Aurelius, and extending outward to writers like Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, and Robinson Jeffers, and the wrapping luxuriously around scientists who manage to find the sacred in the work they do. The narrative is set against the backdrop of Gila River and Valley in New Mexico, part memoir, part nature writing, part travel story.

This is the 3rd book I've read by this author and with each successive book, Russell's skill becomes more and more apparent. This is truly fine writing, prose that is understated and exquisite, while also offering a truly thought provoking investigation. I hope Standing in the Light gets the recognition it deserves among those who award prizes for works about spiritual exploration.