While on camp last week I was greatly blessed by reading the amazing autobiography of Helen Roseveare, Give Me This Mountain.
Her writing and incredible life pulled me through the pages, but I was most affected by her spiritual insight: I learned, not only about her and about God, but about myself. I have only read it once, but I know that I will read it many more times.
I highly, highly recommend it.
Heard her in 1984 and was challenged to Serve jesus beyond middle class Austalia. Ended up in Subsaharan Africa involved in, among other things, AIDS prevention. That was before it reached plague proportions. Unfortunately, it was seen as an “American Invention to Discourage Sex.” Condoms were culturally taboo and even medical students laughed at the idea of retraint-”if you are hungry you eat”. The rejection of the warnings given from village to village was a tragedy that is still being played out (mostly in the lives of children).
On another note, Barbara Kingsolver wrote the bestseller “The Poisonwood Bible” (1998) a fictionalised account of a missionary family in the Congo in 1959. It probably sold 100x what Helen Roseveare sold( thanks to Oprah’s Bookclub). Although beautifully crafted, it makes a mockery of history and of the lives of those true servants of Christ who died or were raped alongside their African brothers and sisters in those desparate days. One wonders what level of responsibility a fiction writer has, when dealing recent history, to acknowledge those for whom it was a matter, not of pen and paper but of life and death.