Review of Searching for Sunday, by Rachel Held Evans
I loved Rachel Held Evans’ blog, and I was heartbroken by her death last year.
Searching for Sunday is Evans’ story of her Christian upbringing, her eventual disillusionment with religion, and the long journey that brought her back to the Church. In the book, Evans explores the sacraments as a vehicle for her journey.
She brings up the hard questions that many Christians struggle with: are some denominations right and others wrong; whom do we exclude from fellowship; whom does God exclude; are we limiting God, misrepresenting God with our creeds and beliefs?
The Evanses participated in a church startup that ultimately closed. As heartrending as the experience was, Evans learned a lot from it, and she shares what she discovered.
One of the pleasures of reading this book is Evans’ beautiful style of writing. Here are a couple of verbal images that touched me deeply:
The difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that a labyrinth has no dead ends.
The famed eleven-circuit labyrinth inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France has just one path, which takes the pilgrim in and out of four quadrants in a spiraling motion through dozens of left and right turns, before reaching its rosette center. Such a pattern invites meditation, the mystics say, and reminds the pilgrim the journey of faith is rarely a straightforward one.
And
Jesus said his Father’s house has many rooms. In this metaphor, I like to imagine the Presbyterians hanging out in the library, the Baptists running the kitchen, the Anglicans setting the table, the Anabaptists washing feet with the hose in the backyard, the Lutherans making liturgy for the laundry, the Methodists stoking the fire in the hearth, the Catholics keeping the family history, the Pentecostals throwing open all the windows and doors to let more people in.
Posted in Book reviews, Christian Living, Church
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Toilet Training Breakthrough
You know when you think your kid is perfectly capable of using the toilet, but he’s still having accidents, and you think he’s doing it on purpose or out of laziness?
Back 30+ years ago when I was going through this with my kids, my friend Vivian had the perfect cure.
Underpants.
Now, back in my day, we didn’t have pull-ups, but we had “training pants,” thick underwear, sometimes terrycloth, that theoretically would absorb liquid. But they leaked.
Vivian’s answer was REAL underpants. Nice ones. In fact, she believed in it so confidently that she took my middle daughter shopping and treated her to several gorgeous pairs. She never ever wet them.
It worked so well that after we moved to Arizona and Vivian came out to visit, I asked her to take my younger son shopping for some. She enthusiastically complied, and he came home with cool Underoos, which also never got wet.
This memory just came back to me, and I’m sharing it because some other mother might be facing this transition in her life. I think part of the magic of this solution is that it was administered by a beloved family friend rather than Mom. For what it’s worth—take it or leave it.
In Memoriam: Donna Clark Goodrich
I met Donna Goodrich about thirty years ago, probably at the now-defunct Tempe Christian Writers Club. She was well-known there, as she was a sought-after speaker at Christian writers conferences across the United States. She had a reputation for helping beginning writers. Donna founded the annual Arizona Christian Writers Conference in 1981, which she led for seven years and taught at for many years thereafter.
She was also a wonderful freelance editor and proofreader, as well as the author of twenty-four books and over 700 published articles and poems. For more than twenty-five years, she met weekly with Tuesday’s Children, a critique group I was blessed to be a member of.
She was one of the original bloggers for Doing Life Together; she also maintained her own writing blog, A Step in the Write Direction from 2012-2015.
Here are some of her books:
In the last few years, she’s been struggling with multiple health challenges. Early Thursday morning, she passed away, four days before her birthday. Today she would have been eighty-two years old.
Many writers got their starts with help from Donna. If you are one of them, please leave a memory in the comments below.
Review of Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship by Gregory Boyle
My son gave me Boyle’s first book, Tattoos on the Heart, a few years ago, and I loved it. When I heard he’d written a second, I knew I had to read it.
Barking to the Choir is more of the same. I laughed and cried on nearly every page.
Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, founded Homeboy Industries, part business and part ministry, in 1988 as a way to reach out to gang members in Los Angeles. It is the largest gang intervention, rehab, and reentry program in the world, and it’s wildly successful. Boyle sees the homies as noble, compassionate, and valuable and treats them as such without judgment. Over time, he learns each client’s story, and always finds deep childhood damage, such as abuse, abandonment, neglect, or witnessing murder. He says no one joins a gang for the camaraderie; they might tell you that, but they join because they see no other alternative—they join because they are ready to die.
Boyle recruits many of his clients from prisons. He visits, and hands out his cards to the convicts, telling them to come see him when they get out. After an intake interview, he tells them they start their eighteen-month program the next day. They will get paid better than minimum wage. They will also be working alongside members of rival gangs.
Everyone starts out in the janitorial division. From there, they can move on to the bakery, the café, or the tattoo removal service. They learn skills; they create products; they earn a living while being of service; they are treated with dignity and treat others with respect. By the time their eighteen months are over, the placement department has connected them with a new employer. And they’ve cut ties with their gang and had their gang tats removed.
The book contains stories of experiences that Boyle has had working with the homies. Some are poignant, some are humorous. But in each, Boyle sees the transformational power of acceptance. Jesus befriended people on the outskirts of society—the tax collector, the prostitute, the cripple, the poor. Doesn’t he call us to do the same?
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Doing Life Together 