Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist

by Sharman Apt Russell

Book Overview

"Everything is connected, and the web is holy." So wrote Marcus Aurelius, the starting point of Sharman Apt Russell's wise and haunting new memoir about her life as a pantheist. Perhaps no other... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465005179
• ISBN13: 9780465005178
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Refreshing and insightful

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.

Inspiring and unusually well written

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.

Going Deeper

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 fir

A beautiful walking meditation on the web of everything

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."

Standing in the Light, L. Blauner

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.