First Reading of Cross Roads

My friend Linda lent me her copy of Cross Roads, by Wm. Paul Young, well known for his earlier book The Shack.

Young was enchanting in The Shack for how he presented the characters of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and the same is true here, though we never see Papa God in Cross Roads. What we are told about Papa God, however, is “despite everything you believe about him or don’t, and by the way, almost nothing you believe about him is true … regardless, Papa God cares for you with relentless affection.”

Young’s story is one of personal transformation, as was my own novel, Dancing on the Whisper of God. In my story, the transformation occurs in the context of choreography, ballet, and musical composition. In Young’s book, the transformation occurs as a result of a medical emergency that puts Tony, the lead character, in the presence of divinity, including an extraordinary pipe-smoking fellow from Ireland (an angel, I presume) named Jack.

I’m going to read the book again to clear up my understanding of Jack, but I especially liked Jack’s reassurance to Tony: “You must remember, Tony, that there is not one good thing, or memory, or act of kindness, not one thing that is true and noble and right and just, that will be lost.”

And the things that aren’t good? We all have those in our lives too – what about them? Jack explains: “… God is able to transform these into … icons and monuments of grace and love.”

       

Dancing on the Whisper of God

This blog site has offered very short reviews of a number of books in the past two years. This time the book is mine! Dancing on the Whisper of God is a novel just published by Trafford Publishing. The website for it is www.dancingonthewhisperofgod.com – where it can be ordered from the publisher, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

It appears on the surface to be a story about ballet, but ballet is the vehicle for a story about emerging faith. The story centers on a choreographer who receives a divine word: “We are going to make a new dance and the theme is prayer.” The choreographer is not a religious man and knows nothing about prayer, but he is compelled not only to try to create the ballet, but to do so in the mere 63 days he has before opening night of the new season. On top of that, the ballet will require commissioned music.

You will see on the book’s homepage (link above) that endorsements are cited from Kent Stowell, Founding Artistic Director and emeritus principal choreographer of the Pacific Northwest Ballet; Valerie Lesniak, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Spirituality, School of Theology and Ministry, Seattle University; and Rev. Dr. Kenn Gordon, Spiritual Leader of the Centers for Spiritual Living.

I’d love to hear from YOU think of the book!

       

The Rest Is Up to Us

One of the goals of everyday spirituality is figuring out how to live with grace, courage, and hope—no matter what life is handing you at the moment, even in the face of the most difficult situations. Fortunate are the people who have managed to identify for themselves the elements or thought patterns by which they can remain positive and strong.

The book Not Even My Name by Thea Halo offers this kind of perspective. For more than its first half, the book is often not an easy read because of the appalling, sometimes even atrocious, circumstances of the life of a young Greek girl named Themía. Most of her family members are annihilated, and the reader often wonders how she herself can survive.

But at the end of the book, when she has nothing from her original life except scars—not even her name—she is able to tell her daughter: “even in my darkest hours, I need only watch a flower tilt its lovely face to drink the rain, or hear my children laughing, to know that life is good. Breath is God’s gift. Life is our reward. The rest is up to us.”

This true story, which is not intended to be a story about spirituality, has a lot to teach about enduring faith.

       

Practicing Silence – Part 2

I closed the year 2013 with a reflection (see below) on Sarah Coakley’s essay entitled “Prayer as Crucible” in How My Mind Has Changed (Essays from the Christian Century, edited by David Heim, Cascade Books, 2011). Professor Coakley writes about what happened to her as a result of an ongoing practice in Transcendental Meditation—one very effective way of practicing silence.

She described her experience this way: “Underneath was an extraordinary sense of spiritual and epistemic expansion—of being taken by the hand into a new world of glorious Technicolor, in which all one’s desires were newly magnetized toward God, all beauty sharpened and intensified. Yet simultaneously all poverty, deprivation, and injustice were equally and painfully impressed with new force on my consciousness.”

I can imagine that many people would want the first half of that, but not so much the latter half, since we live in a world in which every newscast wants us to know about the very worst that is happening in the world. Presumably, it was the first half of Coakley’s experience that made the second part bearable.

Shortly after reading Coakley’s essay, I picked up a copy of Jefferson Bethke’s book Jesus > Religion (Thomas Nelson, 2013), in which I found the amazing suggestion that what young people fear most today is silence. Bethke looks at how incessantly connected young people are to their iPods, social media sites, and cell phones, and concludes that the most intolerable thing must be silence.

I wonder if one reason young people might fear silence is that they know by some instinct that what awaits them through silence is a driving deep within themselves. Perhaps they sense that what awaits them, should they dare, is what Coakley found: a great, intense magnetizing toward God in which, yes, there may be tremendous beauty, but there might also be a too-terrible, too-painful encounter with the poverty and injustice in the world.

       

Obedience

We like obedience in our pets; we’d love it in our toddlers and teenagers. But how many of us like to apply it to ourselves? Most of us have grown up with “free will” and “freedom” as integral parts of our psyches.

Preachers know this, so it’s easy to see how they might not want to push on the Biblical texts requiring obedience. Nonetheless, those texts are hard to miss, since they are all over the place. I’ll include two or three at the bottom of this post for those in the mood for scourging.

So … how fascinating to find a novel built around the concept of holy obedience. Lisa Samson‘s 2009 book The Passion of Mary-Margaret relates the story of a religious sister whose focus her entire life has been the religious life – but then she receives the divine instruction to marry a man who had once been her childhood friend but had since entered into a sordid life involving prostitution and heroin.

What’s the likelihood that you would feel compelled to be obedient in that situation? Lisa Samson is a writer who knows her way around a difficult theme, and this is a book worth reading. Now for those few (of many) passages I promised:

Romans 2:13: “For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.”

Luke 11:28: “He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”

Job: 36:11: “If they obey and serve him, they will spend the rest of their days in prosperity and their years in contentment.”

       

Precious Reading Time

“Reading time, like writing time, is precious. Don’t waste it on mediocre books,” wrote Kate Southwood in a recent blog. Seems like I am always finding books that leave me thinking – books that I don’t consider mediocre – and the most recent of these is What Jesus Meant (Viking Penguin, 2006) by Garry Wills, emeritus professor of history, Northwestern University, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

The book discusses various ways that we have complicated Jesus’ message or tried to not hear what the Gospels report that he said. “More than any other teacher of nonviolence … he was absolute and inclusive in what he forbade,” writes Wills. Referring to the passage of specific instructions in Luke 6:27-38, Wills adds, “Tremendous ingenuity has been expended to compromise these uncompromising words. Jesus is too much for us. The churches’ later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from his ‘extremism.'”

Many people associate Jesus and religion as inseparable from each other, but Wills points out: “The most striking, resented, and dangerous of Jesus’ activities was his opposition to religion as that was understood in his time. This is what led to his death. Religion killed him.” Wills writes of Jesus’ active opposition to all formalism in worship, and as to what Jesus might think of religion today: “it would probably look all too familiar, perpetuating the very things he criticized in the cleanliness code, the Sabbath rules, the sacrifices, and the Temple.”

Wills declares at the outset that the book is not meant to be scholarly but to be devotional: a profession of faith. Jesus came to “instill a religion of the heart.” The test of whether we have lived our lives in accordance with what Jesus meant is simple: “Did you treat everyone, high and low, as if dealing with Jesus himself, with his own inclusive and gratuitous love, the revelation of the Father’s love, whose sunshine is shed on all.”

       

Book Review: Blue Like Jazz

An unusual book you might want to read is Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003). Miller calls his work new-realism essays. I’m not sure I know what “new-realism” is; I might have said that his essays work very hard to be unflinchingly frank about where he is in relation to his faith, his relationship with God, and his relationship with other people. That position, not always pretty, moves in the course of the book.

Humor comes through Miller’s writing often, as when he muses about calling God “Father”: “I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as ‘Father’ at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.”

Miller’s text can be hard-hitting, such as this confession early in the essays: “I couldn’t give myself to Christianity because it was a religion for the intellectually naïve. In order to believe Christianity, you either had to reduce enormous theological absurdities into children’s stories or ignore them. The entire thing seemed very difficult for my intellect to embrace.” The book is often critical of Christianity and church life, but no less critical of Miller’s own behavior and shortcomings as he struggles toward maturity.

The essays reflect Miller’s growth in Christian spirituality over time as he comes to accept God’s pure and furious love: “I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you.”

A movie has been made from the book, but I haven’t seen it and so can’t comment, but the book was worth reading and worth using as a mirror.

       

Practicing Everyday Spirituality as a Detective

The First Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery, by Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay, is a fascinating work of fiction that does a surprisingly good job of combining a detective/mystery with a dharma-focused life. This sounds almost impossible. When I mentioned to a friend who is Buddhist that I was reading a novel about a Tibetan Buddhist monk who becomes a cop in Los Angeles, she said flatly: “No Buddhist monk would ever become a cop!”

Tenzing Norbu was reared in a monastery in Dharamshala, India, but his personal dream was to become a detective. He fulfilled the dream but never lost the impact of his years of training. When he needs to reach out to his childhood friends, who are still living as monks in India, he makes contact spiritually and receives their guidance. And when he gets into a tough spot, not knowing which way to turn in trying to solve a series of murders, he asks the unseen realm: “How can I discern what lies beneath … How can I use my skills and presence to ensure that the highest good is accomplished? … May answers come to me by easeful attraction rather than stressful pursuit, and may all beings benefit from these inquiries.”

Tenzing’s First Rule is that if you’re open to learning, you get your life-lessons delivered as gently as a feather, but if you’re defensive, stubborn, and refuse to pay attention, the sledgehammer will fall!

The book relays a full-blown mystery, is fun to read, and depicts a person living his spirituality despite being in a role not commonly associated with spiritual matters. Hay House published the book in 2012, and I hear that The Second Rule of Ten is on the way. Can’t wait!

       

Book Review: Same Kind of Different as Me

In case you’ve wondered how much sheer love can accomplish, here is a book to read: Same Kind of Different as Me, by Denver Moore and Ron Hall, published by Thomas Nelson, 2006. The book is a memoir and the “sheer love” is put forth by Hall’s wife, Deborah (also called “Miss Debbie”), who has a vision for helping the homeless through volunteering at a Fort Worth, TX, Union Gospel Mission.

Ron Hall is a wealthy art dealer who has grown accustomed to functioning amid rare art pieces, expensive toys, and extremely rich patrons. He can barely believe his ears when he hears his wife commit that he and she will spend every Tuesday serving food at the shelter, but he loves his wife enough to give it a try and at that early point he’s still hopeful that he can meet the commitment without actually coming into contact with the homeless. His wife has other plans, centered around one homeless man in particular, Denver Moore.

The book would be worth reading solely for the wondrous unfolding of Moore’s character, as we see him move from a stony-faced, poverty-stricken, illiterate man who earns respect with his fists, to a man who will stay awake all night in order to keep praying for “Miss Debbie” when she is dying of cancer. Even more than with Ron Hall, we see what can happen when unconditional love is showered upon an individual. No fictional account could have made believable the friendship that evolves between the two men.

Asked what message he hopes readers will get from the book, Denver Moore replied: “You never know whose eyes God is watching’ you through.”

       

Book Review: The Edge of Grace

Christa Allan’s 2011 book, The Edge of Grace, is a fiction approach to answering the question: Can a person be gay and a Christian at the same time? There are still plenty of people around who gasp at putting the two key words in the same sentence, but Allan takes on the job of depicting the subtly progressive movement of perspective and attitude.

The lead character, Caryn, is a recently widowed mother who has all she can do to grieve the loss of her husband, rear their young son, and operate a struggling catering business. Now, on top of all that, she suddenly has to adjust to the new information that her brother, with whom she had previously been close, is gay. Despite the moments of well-described heartache, the author applies many leavening touches of humor, as in this early glimpse at Caryn’s relationship with her next-door neighbor: “I must have looked like Martha Stewart, the prison months. But Julie looked me over and didn’t say anything about my stupor or my morning bed-hair, which probably poked out from my scalp like clusters of brown twigs.”

Caryn will need Julie’s level-headed support, and a good deal more, when the story takes a serious turn with the hate crime that nearly kills her brother. From there, the reader is privileged to share the twists and turns of Caryn’s process of growth and acceptance, forgiveness and self-forgiveness. For all of us, there is learning available at the edge of grace.