By Jeff Sharlet

The ordinary history of Christianity—not the wars fought in its name or the popes and martyrs and televangelists who bob along near the crest of its waves, but the faith as it is found and lost by everyday people—must be rife with instances of what might be called “scripture shock.” Abigail Hutchinson, a subject of Jonathan Edwards’s “experimental religion” during the Great Awakening of the 18th century, described such an experience for Edwards’s notebooks. Determined to work out the matter of her salvation, she plowed through the Bible as quickly as she could, racing from disobedience to flood to murder to the shame of a naked father, a banished mother, lovers speared like roaches, cities slaughtered, locusts, boils. Too much scripture, too fast. Abigail Hutchinson collapsed; she died not long after.

It’s usually not so bad. In Fort Riley, Kansas, I recently met three young Iraq veterans who described episodes of scripture shock of their own, but they considered it a successful treatment for an illness they called belief. For one man, a medic raised as a fundamentalist Christian, it was a particularly bloody passage of the Book of Numbers that he studied before entering the Army that overloaded him. He became an atheist. His two friends, one a lapsed Catholic, the other a North Carolinian who had joined to fight holy war against Islam, reported similar epiphanies of disbelief in response to close and rapid reading of scripture in a war zone.

Death and disbelief are only two of the possible outcomes. A third, by far the most common, is unquestioning belief. Scripture can drown doubt. All suffering begins to look the same; some simply call it sin, and declare themselves its enemies, a response every bit as reasonable, if reductionist, as the madness of Pip, the stow-away on Melville’s Pequod who loses his mind after falling overboard and treading water in a vast, blank sea for hours before rescue.

Peter Trachtenberg’s terrifying and wondrous new book, The Book of Calamities (Little, Brown), if consumed too quickly, might induce similar responses. There are more painful chronicles—anthologies of lynching, compilations of genocidal documents—but few that hurt on so many registers, from the mundane to the inconceivable, the personal to the political, the absurd to the outrageous to the stupid to the sad. A partial inventory: a friend with cancer; the author as junky; the Book of Job; the dead of 9/11; a martyr and a lion; Rwanda; the Holocaust; twins befriended by Trachtenberg who are afflicted by a disease that flays them alive, over and over, for twenty-seven years; Vietnam vets trapped in their own stories; victims of AIDS in Calcutta, trapped in Mother Theresa’s care; another friend of the author, his head stuck in a plastic bag.

And yet, The Book of Calamities never wallows…

Continue reading “The Suffering of It All” at Search, the new(ish) magazine of science and religion edited by Revealer contributor Peter Manseau. Highlights from the current issue include several stories from the Revealer/Killing the Buddha gang: Ashley Makar on “Visions of Birmingham”; Kathryn Joyce on fertility and fundamentalism; Peter Bebergal on mysticism under the microscope; and much more.