Now, I realize it’s possible that Mark Zuckerberg did not create Facebook with the primary purpose of easing my personal grief over my dad’s passing.

I’ve seen the movie. I’ve read the articles. I’m willing to believe that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t sit in his Harvard dorm room all those years ago and move directly from nursing a wounded ego to wondering how he could make my life a little less dark in these days after walking with death.

But still, the man—whatever pettiness or disloyalty or greed he’s capable of, just like the rest of us— ended up creating more than the place where teenagers post a bazillion pictures of themselves in that uniquely Facebook-upload-ready pose, shoulders ratcheted unnaturally back and hips thrust toward the camera.

I know, I know. Facebook is a total black hole for time, and can’t be trusted to be glanced at during the work day, unless you want the presentation you’re supposed to give at noon to get sidelined by having caught up with your best friend from third grade, whom you last saw when her mom’s U-Haul pulled out for Des Moines. Facebook is a nuisance, too, with lots of business and artistic types— like, God help us, writers—promoting the fruits of our creative labors to our friends of friends of friends, and flailing about to fall on the warm, I’m-here-for-you side of commercial.

But honestly, though I guess I’ve never known it until now, Mark Zuckerburg has also given a great gift—who knew?— to the grieving.

Community. And connection.

Across the miles and graduations and career changes and relocations.

Across the years of losing touch and moving on.

“Only Connect” is the theme of E.M. Forster’s marvelous novel Howard’s End, and it’s not a bad motto for moving through mourning.

Beneath a grainy, scanned black and white of my dad, comments thread together from the most disconnected points of my life:  back door neighbors from childhood and kids I used to babysit—who’ve had the gall to turn grey at the temples— and colleagues from graduate school and friends from the high school newspaper staff, the youth minister from my teen years and the parents of my own children’s friends ….

They show up on my page with their little thumbnail profile pic smiles, some of them with arms around their spouses or kids, a few of them with arms around the parents that they themselves have just recently lost. They come with their offers of a favorite memory of my dad or their own, with wishes of comfort and God’s grace and peace. They tell their own stories of mourning, and of remembering well.

Their names and their words weave across and down and through, and the web of their kindness and time—such a gift in just a handful of lines— catches me this day from falling.

So, Mark Zuckerberg, from those of us who’ve ever mourned and have been startled to find comfort and solace in—go figure—the gifts of a blue and white page and a one-letter logo, I’d just like to say this:

Be a good boy and go back and give your co-founders their due if they’re due it, but also… hey, thanks. From the on-line grieving and grateful.

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The bad hair and baggy sweats were all my own, but the flannel shirt, faded blue plaid and quilted on the inside and cozy, had belonged to by dad. My dad, whose memorial service was less than forty-eight hours ago.

“Like,” she added, watching me, but also glancing away—as uneasy, I saw, as I’ve always been around grief, “you could write about it. Day by day or week by week. A new book.” She scanned my under-eye baggage and the frizz that spun out from my head like a chimney sweep’s brush, and gave me a look saying that, on the other hand, I might be beyond hope.

And then came her signature grin, the one that announces she’s decided to approach a crisis with humor. “You know, it’s been too long since the last book, and you’ve only got a couple of years to earn the big bucks so I can go wherever I want to for college.” And she snapped her fingers with a so-get-a-move-on flourish.

We laughed then, because we were both looking for a reason to laugh.

Great, I thought. A whole book of Today, soon after the funeral, I curled up in the tiled corner and sobbed in the shower. Followed by Today I wept while driving to work and nearly ran an old AMC Pacer, that unfortunate excuse for a car, clear off the road. And the next entry: Today, after going through my father’s old suits, I made it through the luncheon with the lovely arugula and goat cheese, but abandoned the peanut butter pie with the M&M sprinkles because I had to escape down the hall to be able breathe. Just breathe, and be alone. And maybe whimper a couple of times to no one but the walls.

Some book.

I didn’t expect to grieve like this, you understand.

Didn’t see it coming at all.

And, rationally, it makes little sense.

I know that.

My father was in the final stages of a terminal illness, and was suffering. He was a devout person of faith, and was approaching death with the expectation of a real going-home, to be met with love and grace and healing.

When he’d still been of sound mind, he’d made it clear he’d no desire for his body to linger on after his mind had left. Collapsing one evening last week with an intestinal obstruction, he’d arrived at the hospital with his Do Not Resuscitate order in my mother’s hand. Emergency surgery? Not an option.

So his organs gave up the fight one by one and he died, without pain.

And we gathered around his bed as he took his last, labored breaths and thanked God for his life, and for his release from suffering, and for his being welcomed to heaven.

A mercy, we said to the doctors.

A gift, our friends said to us.

Yes, we said. Yes.

And yet the grief that’s followed has startled me in its strength, its often knocking me flat.

So maybe my 16-year-old is right, as 16-year-olds sometimes—not always, please note, but sometimes—are.

Maybe I do need to do something with this grief….

So if, over the course of however many blog posts to come, I can help you laugh a little, or recall a precious, dusty old memory you’d overlooked until now, then the writing might be worthwhile.

If I can listen more closely, with more compassion, to other people’s journeys through life and through death, and learn from the wisdom they’ve gleaned along the way, then, the writing might be worthwhile.

If I can help us—you and me both—figure out how, smacked by one of those sudden waves of sorrow, you fork over the Mastercard to the sweet, bewildered Steak and Shake cashier when you really just want to snuffle into your napkin and camp out in your vinyl booth through the breakfast and lunch rush and be left alone, well, then, the writing might be worthwhile.

Whether you’re acquainted with grief yourself, or know someone who’s currently walking through that long valley, please know I’d love to have you and your insights and wisdom and stories along for the journey.

Wishing you comfort, wishing you peace….

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versus

The God of the Prosperity Gospel

Now, I’m not normally one of those bloggers who will accept free books in exchange for writing a book review, even when I’m assured it’s my honest opinion the authors and publisher want. If I’d wanted to become a book reviewer, I’d have done that, and missed this incredibly lucrative path of becoming an English professor and writer.  (Having worked as a waitress, journalist, sailing instructor, director of a food pantry for homeless families, a minister and now a writer/part-time professor, I often wonder how I seemed to have missed the whole portfolio-planning portion of professional life.)

But this book by David W. Jones and Russell Woodbridge intrigued me with its subtitle: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ?

And get this from the back cover:

46% of self-identifying Christians believe God will make them rich if they have enough faith

A frightening statistic if there ever was one.

Ah, I thought. So THESE are the people putting Joel Osteen’s face at the front of every Barnes & Noble these days. Will someone please, PLEASE spill coffee on that man’s keyboard?

So if you’re disturbed as I am, and as these authors are, that the God who promises to suffer with us, who cares for the poor and stands with the rejected, would be confused with a deity who dispenses sports cars at will, then you may well find this book helpful. Jones and Woodbridge walk through hundreds of biblical passages pertaining to wealth–and the lack thereof–and trace the rise of the Prosperity Gospel and its current spokespeople. There’s a study guide in the back for group use, as well.

I don’t know about you, but it’s been a challenging spring in my little world. No tsunamis or meltdowns or massacres here in my corner, so my share of troubles hardly moves the needle on any real meter of suffering. Still, the troubles have come in bunches and bundles and crates lately, as troubles so often do–to the extent that when a friend called recently to check on me, she listened to my litany of woes, punctuated with Wait, There’s More, and then she began to laugh. Yep. Just laugh. Which she could do and not be hung up on because she’s also the sort of friend who calls in the midst of disaster to see if she can drive six hours just to come do your laundry and dishes so you can pick up the pieces of life. She laughed because it was so odd, so ridiculous, all this coming at once–and I let her, because I so needed to laugh, right there in the middle of the Wendy’s lunch rush. Which cleared out quickly, I assure you, with the crazy blonde lady in the gray business suit, her clutching her cell phone and laughing till tears ran down her cheeks, mascara striping her chin.

All that to say, I’m grateful, so grateful for friends who come alongside when I struggle for air. And for hope.

And far more than that, I’m grateful, so grateful for the tender mercies of the God who is acquainted with grief, and walks with us through ours.

*I was provided a copy of this book from Kregel Publications in exchange for my honest opinion. No other compensation was given.

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A group of us had read the fifty-eighth chapter of the prophet Isaiah, and we had agreed upon how the celebration of Sabbath, the practice of worship, should happen: not by fancy displays and in-your-face fasting, but in feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked, and not turning away from our own flesh and blood, which is all humankind.

We knew just what true worship looked like. Basically, it looked like us.

These friends and I brainstormed what we could do in grateful response to God’s goodness: how we could worship inside―but also outside a church sanctuary. We’d noticed how pointedly Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus. How in life the rich man manages to keep his Italian leather unscuffed by stepping clear over beggars at his doorstep. But in death, this same man finds himself unable to cross into heaven. We’d observed how worship among the people hanging out with Jesus happened not in the places set out for worship―the temples, the Holy of Holies―but as they watch him in action. From shore to where his friends are fishing in the middle of a big lake, Jesus walks on the water to them. Despite the lack of firm footing. Despite a big wind and waves. Seeing Jesus coming, impetuous Peter leaps out of the boat, only to sink. And though Jesus rescues Peter, gets the two of them safely into the boat, everyone watching is shaken.  And Peter is soaked. The disciples drop to the deck in what Matthew calls worship, and I’m guessing it’s safe to read into the worship some terror there, too.

New Testament worship often goes hand in hand with a good shaking up, or gorgeous acts of absurd faith and near felonies, like guys lowering a sick friend down through a hole vandalized into a roof because Jesus is surrounded by crowds underneath. Pleading for the healing of her daughter, a desperate Canaanite woman collapses in a posture of worship, right down to the kneecaps she drops to the dirt at both the unpredictable power and the always compassion of this Jesus.

In fact, when Jesus does show up in official houses of worship, he’s more likely to be wielding a whip at the money tables of those abusing the poor than he is to be carting a hymn book.

My friends and I had studied all this, and we’d served in soup kitchens populated primarily by homeless men, and helped break up fights there. We’d discovered, by experience and by research, that safe, comfortable venues for homeless and low-income women and families were lacking in Cambridge.

My only leadership qualification in this area being a slight deafness to all the explanations of what couldn’t be done, I became the director, soon joined by my friend and co-worker Kitty. You have no funding, no space, no staff, people insisted in that slow, too-patient tone reserved for the not-very-bright. But Kitty shook hands with hostile neighbors, invited them in, and soon they were hauling boxes down the steep stairwells of our church.

We collected cash and canned food and khakis and down coats from our congregation, and we tunneled out a portion of the church basement that had been used in the nineteenth century for trash and coal dust disposal. Interestingly, no one objected to our taking this space. So we planned and we gathered canned goods and clothes, and we harassed local merchants into donating free stuff. We advertised all over town that a new food pantry was opening, targeted specifically for women and families, and that we would be a reliable source for emergency child-specific needs. We prayed and we spoke of that day when the grateful masses would gather.

Being a church with a strange demographic of primarily university students and singles and young married couples, we’d been given mountains of nearly-new clothes from the Gap and Ann Taylor―but no infant clothes. We had only the diapers we’d bought at full price from the grocery, and a grand total of two sets of baby clothes. Gorgeous and warm and recently hand-knitted, but numbering only two.

We did have, though, towers of jarred baby food and canned goods and bread and  day-old bakery pastries. We could feed half the city, at least for one meal.

We told and re-told each other how Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes,a miracle that led to surprise and confusion and wonder―and worship that day, and still does.

The big moment arrived to open for the very first time: an historic day.

We marched to the imposing, heavy-arched doors, built to match our church’s imposing, fortress-like architecture, as if built to keep those riff-raff peasants at bay.

Here to save our city’s suffering poor from further socio-economic oppression at precisely ten o’clock on a frigid, gray November day, we flung open the doors. To a grand total of . . . no one waiting there.

No one.

We checked our watches. It was indeed ten o’clock. We strained our necks for the long, snaking line that should be there.

Not one single soul.

This was followed by wonder. Not the worshipful wonder we’d planned, but rather a what-the-heck wonder: where had the hungry, clambering masses gone?

Then at the corner, a woman pushing a baby carriage appeared. Teri helped haul the stroller up the church’s steep steps. Her husband, Rick, scrambled to join her.

They warmly welcomed the woman, even as they bent both their heads down toward the stroller, cooing softly, “Ohhhhhh,” for the baby they couldn’t wait to see.

Followed by another “Ohhhhhh,” this one thinner and weaker, a kind of tinny, time-staller sound, Teri and Rick’s backs bent down toward the carriage, their faces frozen.

Then came a last “Ohhhhhh!” their heads lifted now, facing me with alarm.

I joined them at the stroller, holding my hand out to the woman. She introduced us to her baby, whose name, she informed us, was Garfield.

Which I could see for myself.

Because it was, in fact, a stuffed orange cat.

The baby was Garfield. Our first customer of this grand opening day. This holy moment of justice, mercy, and worship.

Over the course of the next hour, we offered the woman every kind of food we had in the pantry―and we had hundreds of kinds. Tuna? Gefilte fish? Peanut butter? Won’t you sit down―you and Garfield―and rest? Cream cheese croissant while you―the two of you―sit?

But first off, the woman insisted, she needed warm clothes for Garfield.

Teri and Rick, two of the most compassionate souls ever to hand out a can of green beans, looked at me. The three of us looked at the two, only two, hand-knitted baby outfits we had on the shelf.

“May I have both?” the woman wanted to know.

Which was when my compassionate co-workers completely bailed out and left it to me.

I thought of the long, snaking lines of single mothers with shivering infants who had probably already queued up by now outside the door. I thought of the temperature, below freezing, and of the long New England winter before us.

I laid a hand that was meant to look tenderly sympathetic on the woman’s shoulder. The truth was, I was embarrassed and not at all happy. Here we were prepared and well-stocked to bring hope to the hopeless, and thanks to the recent deinstitutionalization of so many mentally ill patients, and thanks to this woman’s showing up now of all times, here we were dealing with not cold, hungry women and families, but a stuffed cat. And only a stuffed cat.

I explained in the most reasonable of tones that since other real babies would be needing warm clothing this winter, perhaps she could take only one outfit for her . . . um . . . Garfield.

The next thing I knew she was leaving–without a single can or loaf for herself. And she informed me she’d have her lover hunt me down with her lover’s knife.  Kept sharpened, she added

So this was true worship?

Because, with all due respect to the prophets and Jesus, I felt in no mood for adoring the Alpha and the Omega, Maker of Heaven and Earth. I felt slimy, angry, annoyed, and in need of a personal body guard.

Our faithful experiment with worship-through-loaves-and-fishes seemed to have rotted right there in the tunneled-out basement.

Aware that we had no funding to speak of, and that our opening day had been reason enough to close the world’s finest Food Pantry for Homeless Families altogether, I walked home in despair.

I was not meditating on the word worship. Or how it derives from worthship, the th only being dropped in the fourteenth century. Or how it’s because God is worthy of our adoration that we worship, and because those made in the image of God are worthy of our respect that we serve. And the -ship of the worth/worship: the understanding that this is something we’re on board, together. This same ideal caused the architects of medieval cathedrals to build sanctuaries in the long shape of a ship―even naming these main sections “naves,” from the Latin, navis, for ship: all of us on journey together, with God, to God.

All this I’d managed to forget in one single morning―just me, on journey alone.  Sulking.

I drowned my sorrows in perm solution.

Now a $6.98 home perm kit may not be the best route to spiritual recovery to begin with. Nor is it necessarily the best route to an Extreme Makeover. Given its chemical harshness, it is absolutely imperative, the directions stressed, to wash out the solution within the allotted time. Otherwise, the hair will burn, and the manufacturer cannot be held responsible for the ensuing fuzz.

Vile-smelling solution all over my head, a far cry from the incense of worship I’d intended to offer that day, it occurred to me I might turn to Scripture for comfort, and to return to a spirit of worship.

Instead, I found a newspaper, and then the phone rang. Clearly, I should not get it, since the solution was ready for wash out.

But the voice on the answering machine was our church treasurer, Laura, who’d championed the Food Pantry from the beginning.

I could hear her smiling on the other end of the line.

I picked up, explaining I had to get to the shower in thirty seconds, or there’d be fuzz to pay. “The Pantry’s grand opening,” I then volunteered, “was a disaster this morning.”

“I know. But that’s not why I called. Are you sitting down?”

I wasn’t. Too busy sulking.

“I have a check here,” she went on, “from an anonymous donor. It’s designated for the running of the Food Pantry.” She told me the amount.

I sat down.

And there was another check too, a grant I’d applied for that we’d assumed we hadn’t gotten.

One of us stunned, then both of us giddy, Laura and I both talked at the same time, my trying to wheedle the donor’s identity from her, her refusing to budge, our both dreaming of the Food Pantry’s future.

A good forty minutes later when I set the phone down, I smelled something peculiar, something spoiled and charred and swamp like. . . .

Fried hair.

It took four years for fifteen inches of fuzz to grow out, but it served as a vivid reminder.

As it turns out, one can worship quite well with a headful of blonde wires.

The Food Pantry began to grow, and then thrive. Over the years, God brought snaking lines of clients from all over the world, often with no coats or jobs or food for our long New England winters, and bread, mountains of baked goods from a local bakery, and money, checks flowing in from the strangest of places, often unsought, and towering stacks of food and racks of clothing, often designer labels never worn, and hundreds of volunteers.

Nearly twenty years later and now under different and no doubt more able leadership, the Cambridgeport Clothes Closet/Food Pantry lives on, now called Harvest. Despite our pathetic beginnings and shortcomings and stumbles, we clung to the hope that God could somehow work even low-level, B-movie wonders from what meager offerings we showed up with.

Here was God’s power, God’s abundance―far more than we would ask or imagine.

Still, it was often a hard road to worship, with casualties along the way: my hair, for example. Our in-the-trenches experience also destroyed a too-easy innocence, our ability to spout slick, One-Size-Fits-All answers to urban poverty. As we watched the crowds come, we wondered each week if the food and the money and the clothes and free labor would keep coming too. We found ourselves frequently fearful, frequently fretful, but always amazed.

Which leads well to worship―of a not terribly comfortable sort.

In a more sweetly, immediate sense, here’s what feels more like worship to me.

Just south of Nashville, where I currently live, the hills are alive and well-watered by the sound and economic trickle-down of music. The music industry, that is.

When dining out in New York, chances are your waiter is an aspiring actor, and in Boston, the person who serves up your pizza is more than likely an angst-ridden, wanna-be writer. Here in Nashville, the young lady who ladles out your lasagna is either a songwriter, strings player, or singer. Music City is flooded with musical talent, so deluged in fact that any given nightclub, hotel bar, tavern, and church, no matter how seedy or mind-altered its listeners, can play host any given week to unbelievable, platinum talent.

In Nashville, in churches, we call some of these performances worship.

When last I checked, the kind of person who both enjoys and benefits from something and then condemns it is called a hypocrite, so let me be clear. I admire and celebrate an enormously talented person’s giving her best straight to God. And I appreciate getting to be there to watch, especially when there’s no cover charge―not counting the tithe.

But I’m aware that there are many weeks when my own heart defines worship according to the crescendo of the live orchestra, or the name recognition of the faces upfront. In some local churches, the pianist may also play keyboard for Disney. A random guest soloist might have just cut a recent Top Ten in Country Western or Gospel or Hip Hop. Worship services here often bring me to tears for their artistic beauty, for the sheer power, the towering risk of the trumpets’ high notes, the white water rush of the harp, the lyrics that assure me of God’s mercy toward me, against all the odds and the neighbors’ predictions.

So I quite cheerfully show up for worship services here, not just dragging myself as a noble example for the impressionable small people who live in my house. Worship here is often full of wonder and awe, and of professional polish.

And as a spectator, I’m grateful.

Except that sometimes, even in the midst of feeling soul-fuzzy and worshipful, as the trumpets reach their trill, high and clear, I wonder if this is more about my feeling good than it is about God. I don’t doubt the trumpeters’ gift to God in playing. But some days, I do doubt how much of a gift I’m giving God by showing up to listen, and going away with my spiritual carbonation re-bubbled.

Because, all Garfields aside, there’s no getting around this whole thing of worship as defined by the prophets and the behavior of Jesus and the Gospel writers depicting just what he was about. Their definitions, quite frankly, I find disturbing.

As best I can make out, the assumption seems to be that the first step in preparing our insides for true worship of God, is to start by examining our external, the supposedly non-spiritual parts of our lives. How we treat workers and widows and orphans, how we handle our jobs and our banking, our dealings with those who have less influence than we do. Real worship in Jesus’ life had more to do with the hungry and hurting, about mercy and compassion than about traditional worship in a particular setting on a particular day.  In the first recorded time he reads from the Sacred Scriptures in the synagogue, Jesus chooses Isaiah: I’ve come

to proclaim good news to the poor,

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted

to proclaim freedom for the captives. . . .

Then he lets his listeners know that the Messiah the passage describes has arrived.  In the flesh.

With this, Jesus slaps the would-be worshipers right out of their half-listening slumps. Suddenly, they’re paying attention. And they’re enraged.

Worship is sacrifice, Isaiah argues, not of calves on the altar, but of who we are, and how we deal with the world. Jesus takes up and lives out the theme.

In his letter to Rome, the apostle Paul picks up the baton here when he urges the faithful “in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship.”

Like Isaiah and Jesus, this sounds good on the face of it―just and admirable.  Good at a safe distance, that is.

I have my own clear and bracing lesson on becoming a living sacrifice for a purpose outside myself.  And in the interest of full disclosure, let me just say that I did not handle it with grace or style. Or dignity.

One reads of women who glow when they are pregnant, who will tell you straight-faced they have never felt better in their lives. I was one of the other kind, whose waistline reaches such monumental proportions that small children, large dogs, and the unwary in wheelchairs are in danger of being smacked in the face. I was the kind whose hair goes limp and whose skin goes sallow and veins go varicose, the kind whose maternity wardrobe comes from the makers of Coleman tents. The creature to whom I’d apparently turned over full control of my mind, schedule, and physical person had decided to conduct extensive renovations inside my body, on which the creature hammered away all night every night.

Still living in Boston, I was thirty when I became pregnant with my first child. “So,” I said to my doctor, “my body will spring back to its original shape. Right?” The doctor was busily writing notes to herself. But I still wanted my reassurance.“I mean, after . . . all this. I’ll fit in my old jeans again.” She wasn’t answering quickly enough. “Right?”

She sized me up unsympathetically over her clipboard. “If you were sixteen, maybe.” She rose to leave.

“But . . . wait  . . what about my internal organs? I can hardly breathe, and I have weeks to go. Where exactly do my internal organs . . . go?”

“Wherever,” she snapped, “they have to. They’ll squeeze up behind your ribs, behind, around—under your chin, if they have to. The point,” she turned on her heel to be sure I was paying attention, “is to make room for the baby.”

“Yes, I mean, of course, but . . .  that is, I would like to think that at some point by the end of all this I could still, you know, like . . . breathe.”

She was already at the door, and only tossed this back over shoulder: “You breathe when you can   . .  if you can. Your job is just to make room.”

Living sacrifice equals true worship, we learn, which means first making room.  And sacrifice involves what we have, what we hold, what we’d like to hoard. It’s inside and out. The whole shebang. Available for additions and renovations. Prepared for total gutting, if necessary. Braced to be used as a center for spiritual birth, our own and others’.

All that we are, turned over to God, for God’s use. Our job, to make room.

Which brings us back, whether I like it or not, to Garfield.

Some time after it was clear I would probably not be jumped in a dark alley by a stuffed cat’s mother’s lover wielding a knife, I called my sister-in-law. Beth is a chaplain who once worked at a psychiatric hospital. I reported the scene of our pantry’s opening day to Beth, omitting the ending.

“It’s really important,” Beth told me, “in dealing with this kind of thing not to contradict directly the person’s delusion.”

“You mean, like, if I were to have said something along the lines of ‘Let’s leave these warm winter clothes for a real baby?’”

“Exactly. You would never want to say something like that.”

“Right,” I said. “Good to know.”

“So what did you say to. . . ?”

“Golly, would you look at the time! Listen, thanks for the help. Oh, and . . . just for the record, any idea what causes this kind of delusion?”

“Sometimes these things are rooted in some kind of trauma, and the person’s mind gets stuck there.”

“Like. . . ?”

“Like, for example, maybe this woman lost a baby in a tragic accident. So she’s transferred that pain and that loss to. . . .”

I suddenly felt sick at my stomach. “To her baby. Her . . . Garfield.”

“So,” Beth asked again, “how did you handle the situation?”

I’d like to tell you that I saw the woman again, that government funding had restored her access to psychiatric meds, that our congregation enveloped her in restoring compassion, that I had the chance to apologize for being annoyed by her presence, for my not understanding . . . anything.

The truth is, I never saw her again, except in a couple of dreams―nightmares.  My husband and I had researched the history of our quirky old farmhouse, built in 1811, and had discovered that the first owners, parents of seven, suffered their youngest child’s death in a fire in the house. Which explained the charred wallpaper on the bottoms of basement floorboards some economizing soul had torn out after the fire and reused.

So in the nightmares I had of the Cambridgeport Food Pantry’s first guest, I pictured her frantically fighting flames to get to her baby. I’d wake, shaken, sometimes in tears, and years later, feeling frantically for the crib at the foot of my bed.

In any case, I can say categorically I did absolutely no good for this woman at all.  Except that sometimes I prayed for her, and still do.

And I can tell you that the Cambridgeport pantry that opened to so inauspicious a start did indeed soon see lines that snaked down the street before the doors opened each Saturday morning. That these families taught me, taught all of us a good deal about the nature of God. That hoards of Wellesley and Harvard and Tufts and MIT students who spoke an array of languages showed up over the weeks and the years to help us translate, and do intake and pack grocery bags and sort clothing donations, including baby outfits.  I can tell you that more able hands than mine eventually took charge of the ministry, and expanded and bettered it.

I can tell you that, having cradled three babies now of my own, I find it perfectly sane that the loss of a child might freeze one’s mind in one single place. That the most reasonable thing in the world would be never, never completely moving past that wasteland of loss.

I can tell you now that I am still learning about worship. About sacrifice and compassion. About the ways we offer ourselves up to God. And the ways we do not.

The writer Annie Dillard suggests that if we took this idea of approaching holiness more seriously instead of our pathetically low expectations, we’d all wear crash helmets to worship.

Or maybe, I’d add, pith helmets, as miners do, for danger and going down deep.  Pith helmets with a light on the front, for when we can’t quite make out what we’re seeing.

Like our own flesh and blood. Disturbing as that may be.

To worship is to prepare for the uncomfortable. For God’s showing up, often not when and how we expect.

To dig out, make room for change and birth and re-birth.

Worship with cymbals and the clatter of clothes closet racks. In stained glass cathedrals and dank basements.

Everything we have and we are on the altar, laid down with awe for a God whose ways are not our ways but whose face is all around us.

With gratitude for a God whose love flows like the deep end of the ocean, and whose power is bound to catch us up short, knock us clear to our knees.

This is true worship.

The above reflection on Worship is from the author’s book

Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith

“If we are spiritually prepared, we are able to see God’s face in a stranger.  That what Joy’s book is about”

–from the foreword by Dr. Tony Campolo

Blasting the facade that sometimes makes Christianity into pretty promises and plastic grace, Joy Jordan-Lake considers the often uncomfortable path of genuine faith.

Jesus offers grace and mercy, but he’s also ratcheted up all the rules. Nice as it would be to frame him simply as a hip, mercy-dispensing kind of Malibu Ken with long, sun-streaked hair, good teeth and dark skin, the stories we have about him are a lot more disturbing than that. We hear about celebrations that begin with a wake, about people who don’t use their talents well being bounced clear out of the club, and about how it’s not nearly enough just to not avoid murder, stealing, committing adultery, or telling lies.

In this unconventional, sharp-witted, challenging book, Joy-Jordan-Lake explores ten reasons that Jesus makes her nervous-and why that nervousness is such a good thing! Each chapter examines one commonly tossed-about term (such as Resurrection, Blessedness, Community) and explores the potentially alarming, even dangerous implications of actually living out these words. Tossed-about terms with real meaning can reveal a Jesus worth living and dying for, and together this understanding can become our greatest source of hope and purpose.

Publishers Weekly review:

“In this collection of meditations on some of the themes that undergird and define the Christian spiritual life, Jordan-Lake confronts what it means for believers to experience the difficult and disconcerting and, frankly, appalling teachings of Jesus. A professor at Belmont University and a former Baptist chaplain at Harvard University , the author mines her personal history as a pastor, mother, social justice activist and friend to illumine and interpret ideas such as resurrection and hope. Sometimes wry, occasionally stern, Jordan-Lake, with a touch of Southern gothic sensibility, argues that foundational concepts of Christian living, like worship and blessedness, may often be disruptive, disturbing, frequently joyful and often deeply life-changing experiences. …[S]he has a gift for welcoming, lucid and insightful prose….”

To order now: Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith

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In the interview below, Quindlen discusses writing, reading (including her own favorite authors), winning the Pulitzer Prize, how she became a novelist, why she began writing nonfiction first as an Op-Ed columnist, and what happened in the national furor over being uninvited from a university commencement address.

Reading, she remarks here, is transgressive. How, you ask? Take a listen!

And if you’ve read or are reading Every Last One, let us know what you think.

Tell us your favorite passages.

What is this novel teaching you about the craft of storytelling?

And what insights do you learn from Anna Quindlen herself, speaking below….

Click here to view the embedded video.

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–Anna Quindlen, from a Short Guide to a Happy Life

Though she’d wanted to be a novelist since childhood, Anna Quindlen, raised by a practical, hard-working Catholic family, needed rent money as a young adult and found a steady paycheck as a journalist. By 1992, she had made her name as an Op-Ed writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992 for her “Public and Private” column in The New York Times. (For a sample of her nonfiction insights rich in historical and political understanding, see Quindlen’s reflection here on Mary Todd Lincoln.) In 1995, she left full-time work as a journalist to become a novelist, the decision partly inspired, she says, by the early death of her mother at age 40. Quindlen was only 19 at the time. That loss significantly shaped who she became, reminding her to live into her dreams, and never to take life for granted.

Next week, I begin teaching a class on The Novels of Anna Quindlen, and it’s been a gift–in that harried, have-to, I-don’t-have-time-for-this way that many genuine gifts in this life arrive–to begin learning more of the author’s life, and reading more of her work. I’m learning so much myself about the craft of writing, and the art of seeing into the human soul. I find both her critique and her celebrations of modern American culture thought-provoking, intelligent and often prophetic.

Whether or not you’re officially taking the Anna Quindlen class through Belmont University’s Liberal Studies program (adult degree primarily with non-traditional hours), know that I’d love to have you join our conversation here on this blog over the next eight weeks.

So let me ask:

Which of Anna Quindlen’s published works, nonfiction and fiction, are your favorites?

If you have a link to a favorite NYT or Newsweek column, by all means share it!

And what do you think of her first novel, Object Lessons?

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These are the words I’m supposed to be typing into forms describing a writing workshop this summer.

It’s cold and gray outside, still bleak.

Winter appears still to be winning. So does despair.

Why is it, I wonder, that I’ve often found my way back to hope in reading poems that should take me anywhere but back to hope, poems that show a world entirely without hope or direction or purpose?

Having spent more time in the woods and at Friday night football games than with poetry prior to college, I was introduced to T.S. Eliot for the first time by Stanley Crowe, a Romantics specialist in the English Department of Furman. And though Eliot became a person of faith later on in his adult life, my favorite of his poems is his earlier “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its haunting insecurity and desperation.

Here’s the beginning. No doubt you’re already familiar with it, but I hope it helps jump-start your own writing or composing or painting or creating today….

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

by T. S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question…

Oh do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap….

Read the rest of the poem here.

And let us know if T. S. Eliot helped spur YOUR creative process….

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Ever wondered…

What makes a good song

so incredibly moving

or catchy

or memorable?

“It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.  The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.”  ~Joan Baez

What is it about the words, for example, of “Bless the Broken Road” (lyrics by Marcus Hummon, Bobby Boyd and Jeff Hanna) that gives us no choice but to pull the car over and have a good sob?

Click here to view the embedded video.

For those of us  in Nashville, it’s THE topic of discussion. The guy who serves you your pizza on weekends spends his midnights with his guitar trying to crack the code. The Target cashier who seems a little spaced out has just jotted down on a napkin the lyrics she is sure will be her big break. It’s all around us. The question, that is; the answers…they’re more elusive.

Particularly since moving here six years ago, I’ve been far more aware of what lyrics catch my attention and the All Important WHY–as well as the gifted songwriters behind them, quietly strumming at the Bluebird Cafe while Rascal Flatts and Faith Hill make their words famous.

Unlike those of us (non-song) writers of us who have whole books to fill with our words–a luxury that can lead us into temptation of being long-winded and slow to get rolling–songwriters operate with a tight limit to their number of lines –and must make every word count.  Images have to be painted in a handful of words; stories must run their full arc in a matter of three minutes.

Whether you’re a songwriter or song-lover-listener, tell us what you think ALL writers could learn from your favorite lyrics about storytelling or capturing and holding someone’s attention or….

Please feel free to comment with video or audio links to singer/songwriters whose lyrics have something to teach other writers about the craft of a story arc:

Here, for example, is singer/ songwriter Kyle Matthews‘ powerful “Been Through the Water,” put with visuals by an unnamed individual:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s a peek into one of Nashville’s legendary songwriting watering holes, The Bluebird Cafe, with “Let’s Go to Vegas” (lyrics by the funny and always insightful Karen Staley and made famous by Faith Hill) being performed:

Click here to view the embedded video.

For an ongoing discussion of great lyrics (as well as books, food, faith and friends, be sure to see Milton Brasher-Cunningham’s wonderful blog Don’t Eat Alone.

What insights do YOU have?

What can good songwriters teach every writer?

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“Look,” said the girl, “I need the Visa and the keys to the Volvo. And I’ve been meaning to mention, Mom, it’s time we talked early inheritance.  Here’s how it is: I’d like to see this dusty old town in nothing but my long-term memory. Need a place that’s got more to offer on Sunday mornings then Baptist preachers and  monster truck pull, a place  where banjo’s not the only beat to move to. But I’ve got this cash-flow problem, see, and people say you’ve got more money than god. And I figured if you divided the estate… So what about it, hmm?”

Please find the rest of the story below, from Grit & Grace

To order: Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman’s Life (Wheaton Literary Series)

The Chicago Tribune described Grit & Grace: “Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman’s life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising.”

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Meet–if you’re not already intimate friends– poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).

This was the Victorian era, of course, a time when conventional poetry kept to precise, predictable rhythms and rhymes (think of big, bush-bearded Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his galloping “Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Half a league, half a league,
  Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death....

Hopkins would have none of it.

Instead, he played with what’s known as “sprung rhythm,” which was both a throwback to early Anglo-Saxon poetry and also allowed for all kinds of new and original acoustic sensations.

And there’s what he does with imagery, too, taking two objects that seem to have nothing in common and comparing them, or grafting them into one word. Inscape, he called his way of examining all the complex characteristics that makes a thing unique, and seeing straight into its heart.

A person of passionate faith, Hopkins was no stranger to doubt or depression–suffered, in fact, from both. But if you’re like me, his poetry will leave you changed and re-charged. Will make you see a fallen leaf or a bird’s flight or a trout differently from now on. Will loosen your own seized-up frustration for words.

“The Windhover”

Inventiveness, surprises in its patterning, sounds that mimic the sweep of the falcon, alliteration, vivid imagery… it’s all there.

May you write today–compose, teach, type and tell stories–with originality and passion.

And keep in touch

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