Matt Cavanaugh
Book Review of Drops Like Stars by Rob Bell
Drops Like Stars is a book that deals, primarily, with human nature and how humans naturally construct paradigms. As described in this text, we can become calloused to the awe, beauty, and spiritual power of our world, due to the pressures of our surroundings, but we can also recapitulate said beauty. Bell suggests a six-tiered process for redemption: disruption, honesty, ache, solidarity, elimination, and failure.
The art of disruption
Factors encountered on a daily basis, such as time and location are known as insulators; they build a framework in which a person can view the world, view that event or object or person, or view something about themselves.
“If we went to the ballet and everybody in the audience was wearing snorkels or the musicians were all red-haired banjo players with no teeth or instead of being handed a program, we were handed a squirrel, we would immediately begin asking, “What is this?” But our real question would be, “Where is this? Where do we put this? How do we place it? Because our standard reference points – the usual insulators – wouldn’t be there to guide us” (28).
Bell begs the question, “What if we could break away from our insulators and begin to imagine a new tomorrow, something beyond our expectations or imaginations?”
The art of honesty
A major way in which our insulators are eradicated is through pain. Pain and suffering allow us to be completely humbled and forced to a new degree of honesty.
“The writer Frederick Buechner remembers a time in his life when he was a ‘twenty-seven-year-old bachelor.’ ‘[I was] trying to write a novel, which for one reason or another refused to come to life for me, partly, I suspect, because I was trying too hard and hadn’t learned yet the importance of letting the empty place inside of me open up.’ And so we’re polite and we play by the rules and when asked how we are, we answer, ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ just like we’re supposed to. And then we suffer. There’s a disruption and our boxes get smashed and the insulators are removed and the pretense is shattered and the empty place inside of us opens up” (44).
The art of ache –and The art of solidarity –
Bell furthers this concept into a communal concept. He claims that suffering is a common thread, an omnipresent undercurrent of everything – and it has the power to do wonderful, transformative things.
“Imagine being at a public event like a movie or game or play or religious service and before it starts, someone says to the crowd, ‘Please stand if you’ve been affected by cancer.’ What would you feel? Compassion? Empathy? Solidarity? Connection? Love? A setting of strangers and yet you mention cancer- a specific suffering – and there’s instantly a bond. If someone said, ‘Please stand…if you’ve been to Hawaii…’ or ‘Please stand…if you’ve had to fire your interior decorator…’ or ‘Please stand…if you drive a station wagon,’ it just wouldn’t have the same effect, would it? But suffering, suffering unites” (60-63).
The concept of the cross also is brought into this discussion. Bell postulates that Christians, especially earlier Christians, were proud to be represented by the cross, because it is proof of a God who suffers, just like we do.
The art of elimination –
In order to understand best who we are individually, Bell suggests we endure the suffering in order to expose our inner-selves, void of our layers of conditioned masks. One example he uses involves bars of soap. He gave bars of soap to his sculpture friends, who, in turn, cut away pieces of the soap to reveal sculptures of beauty.
“And yet these sculptures were in those bars the whole time. All these sculptors really did was remove. Sculptors shape and form and rearrange, but at the most basic level, they take away. And there is an extraordinary, beautiful art to knowing what to take away” (88).
Bell also personalizes this analogy:
“[Suffering] compels us to eliminate the unnecessary, the trivial, the superficial. There is greatness in you. Courage. Desire. Integrity. Virtue. Compassion. Dignity. Loyalty. Love. It’s all in there – somewhere. And sometimes it takes suffering to get at it. It’s in there.” (91)
The art of failure
A compelling paradox is presented, just after this part of the book. Bell focuses on the idea of possession: it is possible to possess something but not own it, and, conversely, it is possible to own something but not possess it. Essentially, people can buy into the paradigm of what the world at large deems “necessary for life” but never really be alive. Examples of this are social prominence and material wealth. However, when people are able to understand and appreciate the daily gifts at hand, a fascinating thing happens, where the concept of wealth becomes a relative, subjective entity, versus a quantitative, finite commodity.
The overall purpose of this book is to redefine our perspectives that we see the world through. Rob Bell closes Drops Like Stars with this:
“Several years ago, my three-year-old nephew and I were standing in front of a large window, watching it rain. He started saying, ‘stars, stars, stars.’ I turned to my sister-in-law and asked, ‘why does he keep repeating ‘stars, stars, stars?’ She answered, ‘He thinks that when raindrops hit the ground, for a split second they look like stars.’ I’d never seen it that way. May you see drops like stars” (130-133).
Bell, Rob. Drops Like Stars. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009.
