ISBN 0-687-02405-6
Roberta C. Bondi’s book is subtitled A Family Memoir of Grace. This is a biography, and while it deals with her life, she uses the technique of telling family stories, describing family living, working and worshiping patterns to paint the background which brought forth the individual she has become. Using this warp and woof, she weaves together what becomes the family portrait.
One can read this book on two levels: Bondi is interesting in her own right, and second, this technique is a roadmap from which one can generalize from Bondi’s experience into one’s own experience and thereby see one’s own self or family portrait. This is like a gift the author gives the reader and that is reason enough to read Houses.
When one comes to the close of Houses, one knows a lot about the background and culture of a woman who has become a professor of church history at Chandler School of Theology, Emory University. But more thrilling, one has learned more about one’s self.
It has been said that one must completely understand and know a subject in order to be able to reduce it to its most common denominators and thus be able to teach it to others. Bondi understands herself, her spiritual journey and her family and their spiritual journeys. The later chapters discuss the history of God as seen through the writings of church theology and practice. Her book teaches the reader to be able to ponder the same questions which arise from recognizing the tension between teachings and happenings.
Specifically, Bondi deals with family issues, often based on church or moral standards, such as Is it more moral to work hard? Is divorce immoral failure or not? Is it better, as a woman, to be “worn out” from housework? When does the cultural language of a family using silence or nuance become problematic even though it is the family’s shorthand developed over years of being close together? Does humiliation and embarrassment bring on rage? Is sympathy a sign of weakness? What happens when family authority figures bring on so much resistance that poor decisions are made by other family members?
Not only are Bondi’s issues interesting, so are the members of her family, which is what one would expect when Roberta Bondi is one of the end products of that family.
Not only are family members’ personalities placed on a full spectrum of types, so are the houses in which they live. The question arises in the readers’ minds, Are our dwellings also a description of our lives? While spirit and imagination need know no boundaries, one’s ability to function on a day-to-day basis is defined by the walls of “acceptable” behaviors and the roofs of shelter.
Bondi has puzzled this out in a delightful page-turner that hovers back and forth across the Mason-Dixon Line. Houses is a good and useful read.
