43, NG15, F17, E41 / WG28, M24, MF2, D2, B1, C0, NA1

Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

Anfangs tat ich mich zugegebenermaßen etwas schwer in das Buch einzusteigen, aber nach ca. einem Drittel hatte mich die einmalige Story gepackt. Witzigerweise ging es hier auch um Transplantation, aber natürlich unter völlig anderen Gesichtspunkten - das einzige, was in beiden Geschichten am Rande angesprochen wird, sind vielleicht die Bedenken der Organempfänger einen Teil von einem fremden Menschen in sich zu haben. Picoult geht - wie immer - noch ein paar Schritte weiter, bis die Story wieder diese typische Intensität und fast unerträgliche Problematik erreicht. Das ist auch der Hauptgrund, warum ich ihre Bücher nur in längeren Abständen lesen kann, jedes für sich nimmt mich einfach zu sehr mit, so dass ich danach immer erst eine Pause brauche.
Wie fast immer bei Picoult gibt es jede Menge zitierenswerter Sätze. Vor allem wenn es um Religion geht, fühlte ich mich immer wieder angesprochen.
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I knew exactly how she felt. When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the one person who doesn't.
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Here's my take on it: I don't think religions are based on lies, but I don't think they're based on truths, either. I think they come about because of what people need at the time that they need them. Like the World Series player who won't take off his lucky socks, or the mother of the sick child who believes that her baby can sleep only if she's sitting by the crib - believers need, by definition, something to believe in.
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Religion gave hope to people who knew the end wasn't going to be pretty. It was why inmates started praying in prison and why patients started praying when the doctors said terminal. Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn't die alone - but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if what you believed became more important than the fact that you believed.
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Why would God choose to inhabit any of us?
What if it was the other way around ... if we were the ones who inhabited God?
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The rabbi laughed. "And you were around the first time to know this for sure?"
"I know what it says in the scripture."
"I never understood people - Jewish or Christian - who read the Bible as if it were hard evidence. Gospel means good news. It's a way to update the story, to fit the audience you're telling it to."
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Some once told me that when you give birth to a daughter, you've just met the person whose hand you'll be holding the day you die.
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Out of the blue I remembered the Latin words that had been combined to create religion: re + ligere. I had always assumed they translated to reconnect. It was only when I was at seminary that I learned the correct translation was to bind.
Back then, I hadn't seen a difference.
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"You know why I think we still execute people? Because, even if we don't want to say it out loud - for the really heinous crimes, we want to know that there's a really heinous punishment. Simple as that. We want to bring society closer together - huddle and circle our wagons - and that means getting rid of people we think are incapable of learning a moral lesson. I guess the question is: Who gets to identify those people? Who decides what crime is so awful that the only answer is death? And what if, God forbid, they get it wrong?"
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(Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart, 2008)