Book Review: A Gentle Spirit

A Fair Trade Book (?)

Title: A Gentle Spirit

Author: Ashleigh Bryce Clayton

Date: 1999

Publisher: Barbour

ISBN: 1057748-503-3

Length: 365 pages of text, 8 pages of acknowledgment

Quote: “This daily devotional book provides...helpful Scripture passages and Godly wisdom from dozens of well-known, Spirit-led Christian women, such as Joni Eareckson Tada, Ruth Bell Graham, Amy Carmichael, Elisabeth Elliot, Hannah Whitall Smith, Corrie ten Boom, and many more.”

That’s what it is all right...a Bible verse, and a paragraph or two (full-sized type, pocket-book-sized pages) from a vintage Christian book that relate to the Scripture in some way, for each day of the year. If you buy this book you’ll be celebrating Women’s Spirituality every morning or evening.

In, of course, a very gentle, bland, uncontroversial way. The selection here sacrifices scholarship to nondenominationalism, so don’t expect to learn more about the Bible than you’d learn by skipping through it at random. Each Bible verse is paired with a nice, uncontroversial reflection on, basically, niceness. 

Meditating on these pages should leave you in a pleasant emotional mood—and that’s as far as it goes. I’ve read it myself, and enjoyed it, but when I reread through it as a book I thought, “Could be used to support the claim that all religious practice is is coping, or trying to cope, with mood disorders.”

Because that claim is false, I feel free to recommend this book. Most Christian women are sane—even the ones who’ve bought into the cultural myth that controlling your emotions means concealing them, that if you say firmly and unapologetically “Don’t throw your trash in my back yard” (or "My body is my own") you are, horror of horrors, an Angry Person. Many of us do have some emotional hang-ups caused by erroneous thinking—for example, we may continue to belong to churches where we’ve been told that we’re supposed to not supposed to show anger. Nevertheless, basically, we do know whether a message that boils down to “Hush, lie down and go to sleep, there’s nothing you can do so just relax and feel good about it” is a nice thought to feed into our brains at bedtime or a thought to put out of our minds before getting to work.

During the daytime I would, of course, suggest to anyone who’s worried that she’s not always calm and bland that God gave some of us hyperthyroid metabolisms and the gift of passionate intensity for good reasons. We don’t fit into groups that move at a slower pace, and shouldn’t try. We work more efficiently on our own. The sooner we recognize that, when we’re told to "concentrate on social skills" rather than "wear ourselves out" finishing a job in the time it takes, we’re being told that Incompetence is the crucial “social skill” we lack and we should stop trying to climb the ladder in that organization, the better off we’ll be on our own, or as assistants to other people who think life’s too short for sitting around trying to look busy. In any corporation that has a Human Resources Manager with a degree in Business Administration, self-employment may or may not be worse on a résumé than a prison term. If God wired us to get things done when we’re awake and sleep when we’re asleep, that kind of absolute bar to future employment in an office where everybody sits around trying to look busy is not a bad thing, at all...and Cat’s Eye is a very valuable book for train and lunch reading.

And, in the case of "My body is my own"...if you say that and the other person doesn't leap back to a decent interpersonal distance, from which you have to reach out at the same time for him or her to shake your hand, but instead insinuates that you might be mistaken for an Angry Person, I say you're successfully intimidating the person--which is what it's going to take--and should run with it. Your next move is to shout, so the whole city block can hear it, "I SAID, HANDS OFF!" This will probably cause the person to jump back and shut up, but if it doesn't, slapping the offending hand may be what Jesus would have done, or it might better serve the good of all to strike harder at a more sensitive area. It is harmful to other women to pretend we're not angry about physical violation of our bodies.

So what happens at the end of a long day's activism? This soothing little book is ideal for bedtime reading, or, if you’re blessed with a commuter bus or train on which reading is normally possible, reading on the commute home from work, when it is appropriate to put the day’s unresolved problems in a box, mentally, and stamp “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” on the box, and stow it away somewhere out of consciousness.

Is that soothing quality really what “gentleness” means? (Christians can and do quibble about this.) Turning to the dictionary, we find that the original and “true” meaning of “gentle” was “having inherited land.” English “gentlemen” were, at one time, expected not to work except as military officers, but they were expected to spend much of their leisure time hunting and participating in peacetime “sports,” such as jousting, that weren’t intended to kill anyone but often did. Time and technology allowed the English gentry to expand into “the professions” as clergymen, scholars, and lawyers; it took a while for medicine, and even longer for writing and The Arts generally, to be added to the list of things gentlemen and –women could do without being accused of stealing jobs from the working class. In the nineteenth century we find people tending the injured or sick “gently,” but it’s hard to determine at what point the shift occurred from this phrase meaning “like a military officer, calmly, without panic” to meaning “with a soothing touch.” The feminization of “gentleness,” in general, can be traced to the Romantic School of French Socialism. In any case gentleness is not the same thing as blandness or softness, or what used to be called tenderness, and if some of the selections in this book didn’t specifically mention the distinction between what most translations of the Bible call “meekness” (and others call “gentleness”) and weakness, I’d say that “A Soothing Spirit” might have been a better title for this book.

"Soothing" verbiage has been used to oppress and discourage active women, in our time, just as some ideas that used to be accepted about "gentleness" were used to discourage people with vocations to medicine, arts, or crafts, in previous centuries. That didn't mean that there was no good use for the ideals of gentleness, or even of gentlemanliness; nor does it mean that there's no good use for soothing and relaxing. If you can find a use for "soothing" verbiage that doesn't trigger angry memories of those who've misused it, then you can find a use for this book. Gently used copies cost $5 per book, plus $5 per package (at least six more small paperbacks would fit into one $5 package with the copy I have) and $1 per online payment, from the appropriate address at this web site.

But is this a Fair Trade Book? Hard to say. People who spell the name "Ashleigh" are usually young, but I'm not finding information about Clayton in cyberspace. Is she still a living writer who just prefers to stay out of cyberspace? (To what extent is the compiler of an anthology a writer, anyway?) Is "A.B.C." a pseudonym, perhaps for "A Barbour Committee"? If you buy the book here, I will take the time to write to Barbour and find out whether Clayton is a real writer and, if so, whether she prefers to receive $1 from each sale of this book or forward it to a charity.