Of Mess & Moxie by Jen Hatmaker

I'm kind of late to the party with Jen Hatmaker. She's written 12 books and many people have known and loved her for years. I knew the name but had never read anything of hers until now. I had heard a little bit about the "fall from grace" that Jen experienced a couple years ago but did not know any particulars. (Jen said in an interview that she supported same-sex marriage and believed LGBT relationships could be holy. The Christian publishing company she worked with dropped her, and she was vilified by many of her previous fans.)

Anyway, I enjoyed Of Mess and Moxie. It reminded me a bit of Anne Lamott's writing, in that she is often hilarious. Three times before even getting halfway through the book, I had to run to the bathroom because otherwise I'd have peed my pants! (I've grown to accept that there are times I will be sitting on the toilet laughing my fool head off.)

Here is one of the stories that caused one of my fits of hilarity, I think because it strongly reminds me of myself:

Anyway, when Sydney was in fourth grade, she had a field trip to . . . something somewhere. Listen, I am good at other things. I knew driving parents had to follow the buses pulling out at 8:30 a.m. Great. I showed up to the school parking lot with all the other moms ... 

Two buses pulled out, and I got in line behind the other cars and put my mind on autopilot as we headed south down I-35. ... later, I started thinking, Good night! Where are we going? What was this field trip? Something about government? Or maybe astronomy? I pulled alongside the buses just to make sure I hadn’t lost the caravan, but sure enough, our school name was emblazoned on the side. 

After an hour and a half, we pulled into the San Antonio Zoo, which I surely didn’t remember as a pertinent detail. I parked, sauntered over to the buses, and watched the entire fifth grade contingency pile out. Which was delightful. For fifth graders. But my kid was in fourth, and I had inadvertently followed the wrong bus—not to the correct destination ten minutes from school, but to another city.

That is SO something I would do!

Jen is a very "regular" person, too. People call her "relateable." That's another way she is like Anne Lamott. She writes about Sandi Patty, a Christian singer, requesting prayer for a procedure on her vocal chords. Jen writes:

I hollered: "Not her voice, Lord! Anything but her voice! Take her legs!"

One should rethink asking me to pray for a person's needs.

She writes about how life can be hard, even for children, and says:

We can have it all in place, all in check, all under our thumb, and they are still not exempted from Jesus's statement: "In this world you will have trouble" (John 16:33). It is the most awful situation. What a horrible system.

We can relate, right?

I really appreciated what Jen wrote about forgiveness. 

Forgiveness.

Oh, it is so terrible, isn’t it? Just awful. It is the one thing we don’t want to give. Maybe it helps to discuss what forgiveness is not first. Let it be said: forgiveness is not condoning evil, not forgetting, not brushing something under the carpet, not a free pass. It does not mean minimizing the injury and, consequently, your pain. It doesn’t shrink an offense down, making it smaller in memory, in impact. It doesn’t shrug off loss with a “no real harm, no real foul” response. It does not mean conceding, surrendering to a different version, or yielding your right to dignity. It never communicates that this didn’t happen, it didn’t matter, or it didn’t harm. 

Furthermore, it might not mean reconciliation. Some breaches are restored and relationships mended, but some are not safe. They may never be safe. The other person may be entirely unsorry, and there is no path to harmony. Forgiving chronic abusers does not include jumping back into the fire while it is still burning; that is not grace but foolishness. Forgiveness operates in an entirely different lane than reconciliation; sometimes those roads converge and sometimes they never meet. 

Forgiveness is a one-man show. 

One last thing: forgiveness rarely equals a one-and-done decision. Very few decide one day to forgive and never have to revisit that release. In most cases, it is a process that takes months and sometimes years of work, and just when you think you have laid an offense down, it creeps back up in memory and you have to battle it anew. Just because this work is stubborn does not mean you are failing or will never be free. Forgiveness is a long road in the same direction.

I especially like that line, "Forgiveness is a one-man show." It's been free-ing for me to realize that. Like Hatmaker says, the person you forgive may not be sorry, and may not even think they need to be forgiven. I've had cases where it's not just that they aren't sorry, they don't even realize I'm hurt or upset with them -- I forgive them before they even know. And I don't mean to brag (in case that sounded like bragging), I just mean that the other person can be totally uninvolved in the act of forgiveness.

Another good line, which she quotes from Anne Lamott, "Earth is Forgiveness School." This also speaks to what Jen says about forgiveness not bring a "one-and-done decision." That is another thing I've discovered. Often, I feel greatly relieved that I've forgiven someone but, disappointingly, I find I have to keep making the decision over and over.

I like Jen Hatmaker and plan to read more of her books. I admit I like Anne Lamott more. I admire many of the female theologians and writers. I love it that they have become a kind of band of sisters. Anne Lamott, Jen Hatmaker, Nadia Bolz-Weber (the Sarcastic Lutheran), Sarah Bessey, Shana Niequist, Brene Brown, and more. It's great!

Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church

I read this book because our denominational magazine, The Banner, reviewed and recommended it as a useful book about "the church in the world today." Our church has gotten quite small, and I have been praying, thinking, and reading about ways that I can possibly serve our church family and help to keep and make it a vital part of God's kingdom on earth.

This book is a fictional collection of letters between a pastor of a small-town church and its members. I did find parts of it meaningful to me and my own faith, but I don't quite see much helpful as far as building community and revitalizing a church like ours. All our members are spread throughout the Bay Area, miles from the church, many members travel a lot for business, it's very common for people to move in and out through the years, and nearly all our members either work full-time or are elderly. Mainly I felt like it did not speak well to a church like ours in a large city. Of course, that's to be expected when the title itself says it's about a "small-town church."

I liked many parts of the book, though. One was this:

As the church, we are the people (whenever we live true to ourselves) who will welcome you in to this world, who will join you in marriage and in friendship, who will bless your coming and your going. We will pray for you to prosper and know love's depths even if you think our prayers are foolish or offered in vain, and we will mourn you when you leave us. We will bless the land and the nations we share, and we will grieve together through tragedy and heartache. We will celebrate, with you, everything beautiful and good, everything that comes from the hand of mercy. And then, when your days conclude, we will bury you. We will return you to the earth and pray God's kindness over you.

That is who we are. This is who I hope we will be.

That is the hope for our church, too. Even with people traveling a lot, moving in and out, and so on, my church has been this for me and my family, and I know that's true for many others. I thank God for the people of my church who are all this to me and mine. That's a big reason I want to try to serve it and keep it vital.

In another part of the book, the letter-writing pastor talks about "making something beautiful" out of the church.

We're not trying to manufacture an idyllic life or an idyllic church. We're trying to be friends with one another, to speak to one another as people who have actual names. ...Whenever someone asked what vision our church follows, what we're making of our vocations and our loves and our friendships and our families, we could say, "We're making something beautiful, to the best of our ability."

I like this for mentioning friendships. I think that's what makes our church beautiful -- friendships with each other and with Jesus. I'd like us to nurture those friendships.

I also like its mention of visions. I'm a little cynical about vision statements right now. It seems like whenever we come up with them, they're true, but I don't really see them as very valuable. They kind of remind me of the horoscopes you can read based on your Zodiac sign. I once suggested a friend read some other sign's horoscopes for a while and see if those weren't true as well. Lo and behold, they were! We can make a lot of statements about our church's vision, but they're usually true of many churches besides ours. That's not bad, but I'd rather see us expending our energy, prayers, and thoughts on building our relationships, our friendships.

The pastor in the book talks about this, too.

In all my years attending the church..., I had never before heard anyone say, Hey, you know what we're about? Friendship. This is remarkable since Jesus himself gave us the model of his own friendship with us to function as our guide: "My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." The next time I find myself among a group of pastors debating the atonement and the precise rationale for Jesus' death, I'm going to say, "Jesus died because he's our friend." ...

It's the current rage to talk about creating community and being missional and pursuing incarnational ministry, but these well-intentioned notions somehow morph into lofty ideals or complicated strategies that inhibit us from simply being friends, being neighbors. ... We seek friendship. We desire and pray for friendship. We become a friend, and then we hope the other will become a friend to us as well....

What if we thought of ourselves in simpler terms: friends together in the Kingdom of God. We'd have much more patience with one another. We'd give each other a break. We'd follow Jesus' words in his sermon on the mount: Be easy on people. We'd laugh more often. ...

My brother has been talking a lot about friendship lately. I've been reading more about it, thinking and praying about it. Friendship is beautiful. A church full of friends is beautiful.

Dorothy Day - The World Will Be Saved by Beauty - An Intimate Portrait of my Grandmother by Kate Hennessy

I read this book because my brother Joel mentioned he had read it, and I was curious about Dorothy Day. I'd heard of her but did not really know who she was or what she did, other than she'd helped the poor with some kind of house for them.

Kate Hennessy, the author, and as you can see by the subtitle, granddaughter of Dorothy, wrote the book with her unique perspective of having grown up with Dorothy Day as her "granny" and Dorothy's daughter Tamar her mom.

The book explores the relationship and lives of both these remarkable women. They were very different. Dorothy Day loved to talk and she participated fully in the world. She was arrested several times for participating in walks and marches. She gave and gave and gave -- her time and her money and her care. Tamar, her daughter, had what I would call a rather rough childhood. Dorothy loved her, but Tamar was in and out of schools and also lived in various homes at different times, as Dorothy went on speaking tours. Day was sometimes quite critical of Tamar. And Tamar was resentful that her mother did not encourage or help her to get a degree. Day felt that degrees were "bunk," and even though she encouraged others to pursue education, she did not encourage Tamar in that way.

Tamar had some resentment towards Day but a huge, steady love. Tamar married early and had seven children. Day stayed with Tamar and her family for many long visits, becoming a vital part of the children's growing up, as well as of Tamar's life.

I found this book engaging. When I was a kid and my mom would take us to the library, as I chose books I would often open several spots and see if the book had lots of quote marks -- conversations. It was a good sign if it did that it would be interesting. This book has lots of conversations. It's not just narration of what happened, but a story of the lives of Dorothy, Tamar, and Kate, the author, herself.

Day started the Catholic Worker, a newspaper. She reported on strikes, lynchings, the life of sharecroppers, Hitler's persecution of the Jews, and more. "She wanted a paper not only for blacks and whites but written by both, to impress on her readers that the paper was for all workers."

The first house, in New York, inspired many more. It was a home for people who were on the fringes - homeless, poor, sometimes mentally ill. The house (this and its other iterations throughout the years) was called the Catholic Worker, like the paper, and it was a kind of by-product of the paper. Once people started reading the Catholic Worker, people who were inspired by her ideas came and took on various jobs for the paper. Others in need showed up and Day could not not help them. The houses were ramshackle and often beyond poor - commonly infested with rats and bedbugs. But it was a community. Tamar said she grew up in the Worker. Although her life was hard, she said, "It was the world that taught me that people weren't always so kind and hospitable. Growing up at the Worker, I thought everyone was good and kind."

One of the things that kept coming to my mind while I was reading this book was the fact that there is a movement to make Dorothy Day a saint. Having grown up a pastor's daughter, I knew that people called by God were truly "ordinary" people like me (although I did think of my dad as rather saintly, too). This book made that clear again. Dorothy Day made mistakes, she lived a rather rough and ready life, her daughter both loved and resented her, she was not some kind of superhuman saint, in the way the stories of saints can sometimes make you feel they were. Recently, having learned of MotherTeresa's struggles of faith, it brought that fact home again. The saints are people. I guess it is their dedication to God's work that makes them saints.

As I wrote this, I thought of the parallel truth of Jesus as fully human and fully God. Those statements can't really be facts in the way we think of facts. Yet they are true. One of the things that makes Jesus the central figure in my life, my Savior, is the fact that he was human. I can turn to him with anything and he understands, because he was human, too. Yet, he must be God, too.

For Day, her faith was vital. She went to mass every day. "The church was the community, she felt, and Mass became a time to stop and take note of the sunlight and of her fellow humans, to take a breath and feel God touching the heart and the mind. In such moments of peace and stillness, all her fears and questions would fall away, the path would rise up to meet her, and the calling would feel so clear it was as if it had all been taken out of her hands."

Dorothy Day came to the end of her life surrounded by her family and friends. She spent some years in a simple cottage by the beach, which she loved. Her final days were in an apartment in the city. Throughout her last days, she still tried to answer correspondence but was often confused. She told stories to her loved ones and read.

The subtitle of the book is "The World Will be Saved by Beauty," a quote from Dostoevsky's book, The Idiot, that Day often quoted. I purchased the book but have not read it yet. I've read some online articles about the quote and the book. I feel like there's a lot to these words, and I need to think, read, and meditate on them. I like this quote from one article, by Michael D. O'Brien:

The beauty that will save the world is the love of God. This love is both human and supernatural in character, but it germinates, flowers, and comes to fruition only in a crucified heart. Only the heart united with Christ on the Cross is able to love another as himself, and as God loves him. Only such a heart can pass through the narrow gate of the Cross and live in the light of Resurrection. The good news is that this resurrection begins here and now.

Some of what I read reminds me of what people say of Flannery O'Connor, who is a greatly revered writer with a strong faith. In her stories, there is a seemingly broken person (like the "idiot" in Dostoevsky) who is actually like Christ. In turn, this reminds me of the Biblical verse that says, "For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength." (I Corinthians 1:25). Maybe these all get at what Dorothy Day was saying when she quoted, "The world will be saved by beauty."