Here’s my review of Richard Rodriguez’ “Persian carpet of a book” in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, it’s a rave.

No, I’ve never met him.

Yes, I’d love to:

On rare occasion, a writer makes a reviewer’s life hard. Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography has to be celebrated as one of those occasions.

The deep pleasures of such a book defy the usual capsule account. Instead you want to read sentences and whole passages aloud as I’ve been doing over cafe and dinner tables the past few weeks – “Listen to this!” You want to press “Darling” on others as a gift of friendship, judiciously picking whom to share it with lest you expose Rodriguez to pedants who can’t fathom the way his mind works.

“I did not intend to write a spiritual autobiography,” he writes in the foreword, and I’m glad to say that despite the subtitle (an editorial addition, I suspect), he hasn’t. This is something infinitely more supple – a rich tapestry, a Persian carpet of a book. True, it’s framed as an exploration of his own Catholicism post-9/11, when he realized that “Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light,” and began to wonder how he and the “cockpit terrorists” could worship the same Abrahamic God.

But Rodriguez’s faith is light-years away from the deadening dogma of “mitered, bearded, fringed holy men.” As he investigates “the ecologies of the holy desert” – specifically the Judean desert – what he creates instead is more like an ecology of the soul. And unlike the desert, it teems with life.

St. Francis, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Pope John Paul II, Cesar Chavez, Keats, William Randolph Hearst, Moses, Warhol, Herbert Hoover, Dorothy Day, Shelley – a short list of the roster of personalities jostling shoulders as they wander in and out of the virtual salon of Rodriguez’s mind, where San Francisco is “the mystical, witty, sourdough city,” Las Vegas is “disarmingly innocent,” and Jerusalem’s multiple archaeological layers are “vertiginously sunken – resentments and miracles parfaited.”

His writing is suffused with such little epiphanies, words and images springing to fresh life: His Mexican mother’s ojalá, “God willing,” as a Spanish borrowing from the Muslim inshallah; yellow tulips “closed and as thumpable as drumsticks” outside a Vegas hotel as a friend dies of AIDS in a nearby hospice; Picasso’s division of the female face “into competing arrondissements – one tearful, one tyrannical – like the faces of playing-card Queens.”

But at the heart of this book are women. Rodriguez – gay, Catholic Rodriguez – loves women. Not the way many men say they do, with a sexual twinkle in their eye, but deeply and gratefully. The stand-alone masterpiece of the title chapter starts with that “voluble endearment exchanged between lovers on stage and screen” (Noël Coward‘s “sequined grace notes flying up” like “starlings in a summer sky”), touches among other things on the use of habeebee among Arab men (“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues … men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality”), and builds to the central take on how much the three “desert religions” need women to survive (“Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.”).

Rodriguez depends on women “to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.” It was women who stood against the arid maleness he sensed as a child: “Outside the Rodriguez home, God made covenants with men. Covenants were cut out of the male organ. A miasma of psychological fear – fear of smite, fear of flinty tools, fear of lightning – crackled in God’s wake. Scripture began to smell of anger – a civet smell. Scripture began to smell of blood – of iron, of salt.”

He writes movingly of his schoolteachers, the Sisters of Mercy – movingly, yet with a wry, clear eye. A single sentence evokes a whole Irish immigrant world: “Most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind.” That wry eye notes their “burqa-like habits” – perfect! – which “lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of romance.” These women in teaching and hospital orders, he writes, were the forerunners of feminism, “the least sequestered women imaginable.”

The specific “darling” here is a newly divorced friend, and the whole chapter is in a way a conversation with her – an extended love letter, really – leading up to this stunning conclusion: “I cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils. Women in red Chanel. Women in flannel nightgowns. Women in their mirrors. Women saying, Honey-bunny. Women saying, We’ll see. Women saying, If you lay one hand on that child, I swear to God I will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters; women and girls. Without women. Without you.”

Even the most flinty-hearted reviewer could only melt at that.

“A tough-minded, deeply political book” — my review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Reza Aslan’s best-selling ‘Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth‘

‘Zealot’?  A biography of Jesus could have no more provocative title.  But it turns out to be the perfect one for Reza Aslan’s unearthing (or should that be un-heavening?) of “the Jesus before Christianity.”  As he cogently demonstrates, the real Jesus — the radical Jew who preached, agitated, and was executed for his pains — was a far more complex figure than many Christians care to acknowledge.

The zeal in question is both religious and political.  At a time when this kind of zealotry is associated predominantly with Islamic extremists, it’s fascinating to see similar processes at work in first-century Jewish Palestine, which was occupied territory – occupied, that is, by the Romans.  In opposition, messianic nationalist movements created what Aslan aptly describes as “zealous warriors of God who would cleanse the land of all foreigners and idolaters.”

This is the historical and political context Jesus was born into, one that takes us beyond the Christ figure created by his followers after his death to the actual man, “a revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of his era were, in religious and political turmoil.”

Given that turmoil, it should come as no surprise that “the Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence” than is usually assumed.  Gentle shepherds don’t have much place here.  Aslan reads the admonitions to love your enemies and turn the other cheek as directed toward relationships between Jews, not between Jews and foreigners, and especially not between Jews and occupiers.  “The message was one of repossessing the land,“ he writes, “a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed.”  A kingdom, that is, very much of this world, not another.

This historical territory has been explored before, by biblical scholars such as Richard Horsley and Dominic Crossan.  But in Aslan’s hands, it gains broader resonance.  He brings to bear his expertise in the volatile territory of politics and religion (his earlier book Beyond Fundamentalism analyzed the root causes of militant religious extremism) as well as his deep background as a scholar of religion, renowned especially for the most readable history of Islam yet written, No god But God.

As in those earlier books, not only does he get the full picture, but he can also write – sometimes irresistibly, as when he drops into a kind of tongue-in-cheek interfaith slang, mentioning Herod’s “nebbish sons,” for instance, and Herod himself as “King of the Jews, no less!”

But cherished legends, watch out.  Aslan can be scathingly dismissive of such episodes as Salome dancing for John the Baptist’s head, or Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.  Prepare for words like “nonsense” and “fairy tale” as he traces what holds up historically (and geographically), and what’s been elided, even deliberately disguised, in the gospel accounts.  Which is not to blame the gospel writers.  Aslan points out that the concept of empirically valid historical reality is a relatively modern one.  “It would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers, for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.”

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Zealot, then, is the analysis of how Jesus was tamed by his own followers, and why.  Soon after his death, the early Jesus movement split between the “Hebrews” who stayed in Jerusalem under James’ leadership, and the Hellenists abroad led by Paul.  The bitter infighting between them would be resolved by force majeure:  the disastrous failure of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which led to the torching of Jerusalem in the year 70 and the expulsion of surviving Jews from what remained of the city.  With the ‘Hebrew’ faction thus in disarray, the Hellenist appeal of Paul’s Christianity won out, and Jesus’ specifically Jewish revolutionary fervor would be toned down to suit a much larger audience:  the Roman empire itself.

This entailed absolving the Romans from responsibility for the crucifixion, instead blaming the unruly (and unrulable) Jews, and thus laying the basis for two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. Where the early Jesus movement was Jewish, Christianity would now be anything but.  As Aslan notes, the gospels are, in this sense, a radical break with history – a wiping out of the specific past to be replaced by a universal future.

Yet Zealot itself is testament to the fact that they didn’t quite succeed.  Aslan’s insistence on human and historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology, and certainly more intriguing and exciting for any modern reader not piously devoted to the idea of gospel truth.  This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.

(Seattle:  I’ll be talking about the book with Reza Aslan in the auditorium of the downtown Central Library on Monday July 29, 7-8.30 pm.  Free admission.)