Living word by word

my year in books

I love lists, and every year I resolve to read some of the top picks from the New York Times Book Review list of “ten best.” I am usually a year or two behind on these “best of” books (as you'll see below), and I don’t read nearly enough to justify generating my own list of top ten recommendations. But here are the ones that resonated with my year. (I feel churlish, of course, leaving out some of the best fiction, but in terms of influence on my life, this is where I was this year. . .)

 Winter:
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The beginning of 2007 was marked by a number of deaths, many of them tragic, touching me, my congregation, and my clergy colleagues.

Joan Didion’s memoir of her husband’s sudden death and the ensuing grief is the best window I’ve seen into what death does to the heart and mind of a mourner. Absolutely a must read for anyone trying to understand the grieving.

Spring:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan

I’ve long been a fan of Michael Pollan’s journalism on food production and its political and environmental implications, but this book blew me away. I learned more than I ever wanted to about what is wrong with our relationship with food and farms in this country, but I also felt affirmed in taking a basically human approach to what I personally eat. Yes, what we eat is political. But we are cultural, social beings as well, and Pollan never loses sight of the many roles food plays in our lives. This book was a tremendous comfort as I sorted through some new health issues in my life and experimented with some nutritional solutions for them. Pollan has some spirited defenses of food as food (which I expect we’ll hear more of in his new release in January), not as a list of nutritional elements, and his writing kept me from feeling like I’d stepped out into a netherworld of supplements and ingredient lists.

Summer:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

What can I say? Our high school youth mission trip departed the morning after Book 7 was released, and I spent a week with teenagers absorbed in a 700-plus page book. I didn’t get around to reading it myself until August, but I enjoyed it and look forward to the day my own kids will read these books. Rowling is no J.R.R. Tolkien, but ultimately her tale is also one of redeeming love. What’s not to like?

Fall: 

Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion by Sara Miles

I’ve been itchy at work lately, trying to move my congregation to think about its mission differently, and struggling to help Baby Boomers understand that their own issues with faith don’t necessarily resonate with younger generations. Sara Miles’ memoir of her own conversion to Christianity and involvement in food pantries is one I’ve been passing around. For socially concerned Christians who usually find themselves reacting against the fundamentalisms of their own childhood, Miles’ fresh lens on the church brings new clarity about the treasures and the pitfalls of life in community that we so take for granted. Here is a woman who wasn’t put off by Holy Communion, but actually drawn to Christianity by it, and saw in it a calling to share bread with all God’s children.  Her account of her marriage to her partner at San Francisco’s city hall, though a sidelight to the main narrative, brought me to tears.

What's next for 2008? Expect to see more fiction (I have a sabbatical coming up!) and something about China, where I'll be traveling in July.

Matthew chapter 1

Our congregation is doing a series this Advent using the Gospel frontispieces from the St. John's Bible. Yesterday the focus was on Matthew' s gospel. I'm excited about this series because I'm increasingly convinced that the way through the postmodern dilemma in the future is a focus on beauty, not truth -- or at least not "Truth" in the rational, hyperhistorical sense. There are many folk in my congregation -- mostly Baby Boomers and older -- who are taken with the work of the Jesus Seminar and writers like Bishop John Shelby Spong. I understand their feelings that the wool was pulled over their eyes in their early years, when they were encouraged to think of every word of the Bible as historical truth, but I'm not sure the path Spong shows them is all that helpful. The hermeneutic of suspicion that results often ends in a dead end of unimaginative conversation that leaves no room for mystery. In fact, the critique often seems to be a mirror image of fundamentalism -- all work and no play, no room for a living God to break in and surprise us.

The illumination of Matthew's first chapter in the St. John's Bible, on the other hand, is riddled (God, I love that word!) with mystery. Instead of a dull list of begats it becomes a wondrous diagram -- an illumination, indeed --of God breaking in all over the place, in a family tree shaped like a menorah, in Hagar's place in the family tree, a mandala at the center and faint gold lines of a DNA double helix. And over it all the irony that this is Joseph's genealogy, who according to tradition has only adoptive status as Jesus' father anyway.

The print makes me stare in wonder, which is the best possible response to a text like this. Is the text "true?" Insofar that it is beautiful, absolutely.

10 years later

I've had two opportunities in two days to speak about my first call to Spirit Garage. I haven't done this nearly as much in recent years as I did between 1999 and 2002, and by now it feels a little odd, given that I'm now in a much more traditional setting (though ECLC folk might be offended to hear themselves called traditional!). The first gathering was a group of United Methodist ministers convened by my friend Michelle Hargrave, who pastored her own new ministry during the same time I was working with SG. Her own reflections on our gathering are worth reading.

The second gathering was a class of seminary seniors. With them I gave the nutshell version of my CC article on this subject ( and had the Power Point gods wreak vengeance on me for my Congregations article).  There is so much about this kind of ministry that still calls me, intrigues me, troubles me, and the week's  young adult consultation only convinces me further that this conversation is urgent and critical for the church.

Brian MacLaren's review of Robert Wuthnow's latest tome, After the Baby Boomers, puts into relief many of the questions I'm still struggling with, trying to bridge the gap between "traditional" congregations and emergent ministries. Wuthnow argues, and my experience bears out, that marriage and children are greater divides than age when it comes to determining whether a person attends church or not (which may explain why there are more young evangelicals going to church than mainliners: in my limited experience, evangelicals marry younger).  Places like Spirit Garage, by catering to single young adults, make space for people who feel that their lives are too nomadic to fit into a more settled congregation. I now sit within one of those more settled places and constantly ask myself, why can't we do better ministry with nomads? I still don't have an answer.

article link

Friends have pointed out that my link to my Christian Century article didn't work. And under the current front page of their website, it's not easy to find. So here's the link directly to my article, which the editors re-named "Off road." John Buchanan also commented on it in his editor's note, which is here.

Mercy Seat

We had lunch yesterday with the 3 pastors and a musician from Mercy Seat, a new church start in Northeast Minneapolis. It's one of those great convergences -- a Baptist from House of Mercy with a PhD. in philosophy joining forces with a couple Lutherans and our Minneapolis Area Synod to start a new church for the "critcially orthodox." And they've found a home at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, where my co-pastor here at ECLC was pastor for 10 years. It made me a little itchy for that new church development excitement. But there's plenty of new stuff on the horizon here at ECLC to keep me busy. It's great to be in a town with so many creative, gospel-grounded ministries.