Hope of beauty after a youth of confounding pain
Review of "Shattered" by Arthur Boers.
Post-war immigrant Paul Boers built a hugely successful greenhouse construction company in the Niagara region, throughout Canada and overseas. As his son Arthur testifies to in this unsettling memoir, though, there is far more to this man’s story than business success; their father-son relationship suffered through years of painful failure. With every book Arthur Boers has published, he has grown into a well-known, respected and deeply sensitive spiritual writer. This often painful, not fully resolved, story offers Boer’s latest and deepest exploration of pastoral issues, the more gripping and significant because of its autobiographical roots.
In their respective fields, both father and son suffered. Paul lived through World War II, immigrated in straitened circumstances, and worked six days a week for decades, pausing only for Sunday morning worship at Maranatha Christian Reformed Church in St. Catharines. All knew him as a mercurial man. He fought with his wife, intimidated his two children and often terrorized workers who cleaned up after his rages of throwing things through greenhouse windows. Though Paul twice beat his son brutally, he never talked about it or recognized his own deep emotional and spiritual scars or the wounds he caused others.
For decades, Arthur bottled up his sufferings in his tender, God-seeking soul. Only in recent years did that agony percolate constructively into profound courage to put into words his experiences growing up in his materially successful, sadly dysfunctional family. Boer’s touching, sometimes stream-of-consciousness vignettes harness that aberration of emotional and physical violence. Literary expression provided Arthur his only hopeful antidote for partial healing. Nearly every page in this heart-rending memoir evokes readers’ questions and reflections about their own upbringings. I can hardly imagine the emotional spasms that Arthur might have endured as he relived experiences of his father’s cruelty.
Yet even though Paul Boers went to his grave without facing or acknowledging his raging violence, Arthur never stops attempting to comprehend, if not redeem, the seemingly unresolvable father-son relationship. The book-long conceit of shattered glass ties the book together. Often describing the physical dangers of broken glass, Arthur also gradually limns in a touching, delicate and partial resolution. The rare possibility of glass shards falling together unpredictably into a kaleidoscope of muted beauty is no vision through rose-coloured lenses. Rather they offer a tender hint into how Christ’s wounds and resurrection can conquer death here and beyond.
Readers even vaguely familiar with St. Catharines’ Christian Reformed community might flinch at some of Arthur’s descriptions of his early education at Calvin Memorial Christian School – now Beacon Christian School. As a sensitive boy, he was mocked because of his disinterest in athletics. Academics didn’t even mildly attract him until grade six. By no means, though, does Boers create a whipping boy of the Christian Reformed community.
In the preface, Boers notes that he has changed the names of many characters. Yet he kindly mentions Pastors Jaap Kuntz and Martin Geleynse as formative, if not fully understanding, spiritual mentors. The most affectionate, almost hilarious sketch portrays Arthur’s first male teacher, Gerzinus Hoekstra, long-time church organist and Paul Boer’s summer employee: “[M]elodramatic Mr. Hoekstra . . . attacked the piano with manic passion, sucking his beard into his mouth, longish hair flailing…. His keyboard pounding resembled a classical composer or mad professor.”
Most significantly, a parent-teacher meeting proved a turning point in Arthur’s life. Hoekstra told Arthur’s parents, “Arthur will never be a businessman.” The next morning, the parents reported the comment to the boy who had been expected and obligated to join his father as “and Son.” Arthur’s fulsome and grateful response: “[O]ne contrary sentence, casually dropped by my teacher, opened possibilities for impossible, unhandy me…”
After years of spiritual and denominational pilgrimage – from his Christian Reformed youth to pastoring in Mennonite, Methodist and Anglican churches and teaching at Tyndale Seminary – Arthur Boers has left us with this remarkable, devout book. Its many episodes of shattered glass mirror much of his youth, yet constantly and finally remind us of the many mysterious, frequently painful paths down which God accompanies – if not always clearly leading – his searching children.
