Author Archives: Jim Honig

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About Jim Honig

Lutheran pastor in the western suburbs of Chicago. I'm a writer, a runner, an avid outdoorsman, and a curious student of people and the human condition.

Reflecting on the Flood, Part 1

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rushingwater1The story of Noah and the Great Flood has got to be one of the most iconic stories in the Bible. I went into a toy store over Christmas to get a present for my young nephew in a completely secular, high-end toy store and saw a wooden ark on wheels complete with animals, Noah, and a handy fold-up ramp to get in and out of the ark. Oh, and did I mention the Noah and the Ark lamp that I spied in a Cracker Barrel gift shop a while back?

Aside from the way the world of kitsch has exploited the story, I get equally frustrated at the the tendency to get hung up on the relatively insignificant details, about whether it happened or nor, about the dimensions of the ark, where the ark might have landed and whether it will ever be found, and a hundred other littles that distract us from the heart of the story. It’s not really about Noah, the animals, the ark, or the flood. It’s a self-revelatory story about God.

The story about God reveals something about God that is usually missed in the baggage we bring to it. The conventional plot line goes something like this:  humankind was wicked; God got mad; God destroyed everything.  Except that there’s not a single indication in the entire story that God acted out of anger. Really. Go look. It wasn’t anger. It was grief. The whole thing begins with God’s grief. God had concluded that the good world that God created had betrayed God’s intent. The decision and the will of God had been treated shabbily by a recalcitrant humanity. People had become wicked, evil, corrupt, and filled with violence. In a profound passage that piles on the extent of the corruption, “Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  (ESV, emphasis mine) Creation had refused to honor God as God.

The indictment is followed by God’s uncompromising resolve to destroy the creation that had refused to be faithful and obedient. God did, does, and always will take seriously God’s own purposes for creation.

Still, the overwhelming emotion the narrative attributes to God is not anger, but grief. It won’t do to picture  an angry tyrant who has a cosmic temper tantrum and sweeps all the dishes off the table, breaking everything to pieces. Instead, there’s the image of a troubled parent who is heartsick over the alienation of the her rebellious child. God is not enraged, but saddened.

That’s an extraordinarily important distinction to be made. The stereotypical, one-dimensional view of God seems to be embedded in our cultural DNA:  God as the angry judge whose sole vocation is to sniff out the sinners and punish them.

The God I see in this story (and not coincidentally throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures) is of a much different character; the image is much more nuanced and much more relational.  God’s heart is full of love for what God has created. In fact, God is persistent and determined to draw humanity, indeed, all of creation back into the reach of God’s purpose and will.  God does that through a determined, persistent, dogged pursuit of us in love.

I’m thinking about that view of God in light of the all too present and all too palpable evil in the world. There are too many examples to name, but the one that sticks in my mind is the image of the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians taken to the beach in Libya and beheaded. Surely God must be grieved, and surely we are grieved.

In my Ash Wednesday sermon, a sermon in which I introduced the theme of forgiveness that is the ground of our parish-wide reflection during these days of Lent, I raised the question of forgiveness for great and horrible communal evil like the beheading. Is it possible to forgive? Is it required to forgive? A parishioner made the comment after the service that our response ought to be to “bomb them back to the stone-age.”

I get that. It seems right. Tit for tat, eye for eye. It’s the human formula balancing the equation that begins with guilt and typically ends with punishment.

But what happens when we see a God whose heart is grieved at evil, rather than angry at evil. It means that the whole guilt and retribution formula gets turned upside down. And that’s good news. In fact, it’s gospel truth.

That’s where I’ll go in part 2. Come back next week and check it out.

Weariness in the Wilderness

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Confession 1.2

We’re about a week into Lent already, one of my favorite times of the church year.

This year feels different for me.

Normally, have some sense of anticipation about reengaging some of the disciplines of my spiritual life that may have gotten a little rusty or fallen into disuse. A day a week of fasting has been my practice for years and years and years. Experience has taught me to prepare mentally, physically, and emotionally for the ramped up activity and responsibilities during Lent. I know that by the time Easter arrives, I will be tired — a deeply satisfying weariness that says I have led a people through the wilderness of Lent to the promised paschal feast.

This year I enter the season weary, but it’s not a satisfying weariness. It feels more like the beginning of a long slog. It’s like that time on the backpacking trip when you need to get through the next two miles of mud in order to start ascending the hill that will take you to the lakeside campsite that is the goal of the day’s hike.

Part of it is the time of transition that our congregation’s ministry. It has meant longer days and more responsibilities. And while I’m mostly energized by that transition, hopeful for the new thing that will emerge, there are also times and days when it feels like I’m a compatriot of Sisyphus, pushing that proverbial stone up a hill. I have heard that the effort of birthing is exhausting.

That’s where I am this year. Feeling like the effort of birthing is exhausting. In the background is the hope that comes from the promises of the same God who made astonishing promises to Abraham. And in the foreground is the difficulty of seeing how those promises will be made concrete. I feel the weariness of exile when the promised return to The Land has little to hang on to.

On Sunday, the sermon was proclaimed by one of our staff members who doesn’t preach very often. She said a few things that have stuck in my gullet the past few days. First, she invited us to embrace the wilderness as a gift. Is it possible for me to see these days of weariness as the necessary gestation period for what is to be born?

The other thing she said is how willing we are to let distractions keep us from actually engaging God in the wilderness. There are so many important things to do!

I feel the weight of distractions, especially the distraction of important things that must get done.

Which leads me to believe it’s time to get off this computer and sit in the quiet of the wilderness. To listen for the voice of the One who has called me and who has promised to love me and who has promised never to leave me. Even in the weariness of the wilderness.

Making Space

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Screen Shot 2015-02-05 at 8.36.36 AMDoes it require more than just the disposition to live the Christian life?  What happens if we have the desire and the intention, but not the space?

Social psychology talks about two difference classes of explanations for why people do what they do — dispositional and situational. The dispositional explanation relies on the fact that people are who they are; they have certain traits that at least in part, govern how they behave. Situational explanations recognize that certain circumstances in the moment contribute to a response and can override dispositional traits.

In his book, , Daniel Levitan recounts a famous study whose subjects were divinity students at Princeton Theological Seminary. The subjects were asked to come to an office to provide their opinions of “religious education and vocations.” After completing a questionnaire, the interviewer explained that the instrument they had just completed was a bit simplistic and that the second part of the interview would be a three to five minute recorded response to a reading they would be given. One group was given a reading on whether ministering is possible anymore; the other was given the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Here’s where it gets interesting. Half of each group was told they needed to hurry because the assistant in the next building over had expected them a few minutes earlier. The other half were told, “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head over.”

Between the two buildings the experimenters had placed a research assistant sitting slumped in a doorway in obvious need of medical attention. When each student passed by, the confederate coughed and groaned.

What happened? The students who were in a hurry were six times more likely to keep on walking and pass by the visibly injured person without helping than the students who had plenty of time. Even the ones who had just read the Parable of the Good Samaritan!

I know this experiment is not about the spiritual life, so I’m not going to suggest any scientific conclusions about the life of faith. But it does prompt some reflections.

What we believe about the life of faith is that the Holy Spirit, at work in us, continually shapes and molds us into the mind and life of Christ. With the daily remembrance of our baptism, we are called to daily conversion, leaving the old incurved life behind and embracing the life of service to the neighbor.

But what happens when we don’t make space for that? What happens when our lives are so full of tasks and self-satisfying external stimulation that we don’t even notice the injured one at the side of the road or the groaning student in the doorway. What I see around me (and also in the mirror!) are people who are working way too much, spending way too much time on devices and entertainment, carting kids around to a hundred different activities. When it’s all over, we collapse into bed exhausted, only to get up and start the same thing over again six hours later. Who can blame folks if they aren’t coming to church as often as folks did 30 years ago? Maybe Sunday morning is the only time in the week they don’t have to run off to something else — unless it’s a little league sports event.

No wonder the church is anemic in it’s mission. We members of the Body have filled our lives with so many things. The situation overrides the disposition. The slow work of paying attention to what’s going on around us, noticing the opportunities to be kind or helpful, stopping to listen deeply to someone, and caring for creation has become get pushed to the edges. There is no space anymore to live the Christian life.

Which makes me wonder. Maybe the priest and Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan were not the callous, uncaring, cold-hearted characters we have portrayed them to be. Maybe they were just on their way to an important meeting, a few minutes late.

“Together” x 5; Building a Strong and Healthy Church Staff

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staffI’ve gotten the news in the past few weeks that a handful of my younger (much younger!!) pastoral colleagues are moving from their calls as associate pastors in a multi-staff setting to head of staff. The news brought to mind my own similar move 22 years ago.  It also got me to thinking: in the intervening years, what are the most important lessons I’ve learned about cultivating a healthy and productive staff team?

1.  Pray together.  Worship is at the heart of what we do as God’s people. At God’s invitation, we gather each week in the Sunday assembly to receive God’s gifts and to be sent into the world to live as God’s people and to be a part of God’s mission. But Sunday is not the only time for worship. Throughout the centuries, local assemblies have gathered for daily prayer, hearing the word, singing, and praying, keeping the cycle of prayer going around the world as the earth rotates in its 24 hour cycle. As a staff, we are a part of that ongoing rotation of prayer. Once a day, Monday through Thursday, everyone in the building gathers for a 15 minute service in which we sing, listen to the Word, share a reflection, and pray. Sometimes members of the congregation join us — we publicize daily prayer on our weekly calendar — but mostly it’s just members of the staff. In addition to being a part of the the larger church in our calling to prayer, praying together daily is a powerful means to staff cohesiveness. It’s hard to stay in conflict with the ones with whom we gather each day in prayer.

2.  Meet together.  There’s no substitute for meeting together. We meet together once a week. Every paid employee is attends our staff meeting. All church work is relational work, and to be in relationship, there must be time together.

Staff meetings are about more than just business. Years ago, I learned from a great mentor, Les Stroh, a model that comes from the world of organizational behavior; it’s known as the Task Team Development model.  Teams that are high functioning in terms of their task get that way because they also pay attention to the relational aspect of their team. Often work groups focus only on task, never achieving a high function because they never develop relationships of trust. Other groups only pay attention to their relationship and they never get anything done; they are essentially lifestyle groups of people who hold similar interests. The Task Team Development model suggests that working teams that pay attention to developing relationships of trust will become high functioning teams with regard to task.

To that end, our staff meetings always include an element of conversation that invites us to share something about ourselves apart from our work. We have a question for conversation in which each member of the staff is invited to share. Some examples: talk about a Christmas tradition from your childhood. Talk about a book or movie that you read or saw recently and what you liked about it. One of the most popular is the kindergarten game of show and tell. Each person brings something from home that is significant to them, tells the rest of us about it, and why it is significant. In addition to this relational time at the beginning of our meeting, every week’s agenda includes “Ministry Stories,” a time when we encourage staff to tell the times and places where they saw God at work in our ministry in the past week. Oh, and leadership of the staff meeting rotates each week. Everyone gets to practice being a leader.

3.  Read and study together. It’s important for pastors to continue to grow intellectually and vocationally. And I think it’s important for pastors to model that virtue for the congregation and for the staff. To that end, our staff reads together and talks about what we have read. Think in terms of a staff book club. I usually choose the book, though I have used suggestions from staff members. We meet every three weeks or so. We have shared the task of leading the discussion. Sometimes it’s a book of pretty serious theology — we’re just finishing Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination; a few years ago, we read one of Chip and Dan Heath’s books. The point is, it may or may not be anything directly connected to theology; it is always something that we can grow together with.

4.  Have fun together.  There’s just something irreplaceable about laughing and let our hair down together. Twice a year, we have day-long staff retreats. One is some kind of serious continuing education thing. And one is just plain fun. One of the best was the year we went to the Field Museum in downtown Chicago. It’s one of the premier natural history museums in the country. But instead of just walking around the museum, I formed the staff into two teams and asked them to come up with a story, using themselves as the characters, based on what they saw in the exhibits. Imagine “Night at the Museum,” but the characters are people you know and work with. Over lunch, we shared our stories and howled with laughter. We have taken architectural tours of downtown Chicago, rode through the city on a 50 year old fire truck, and drove to Springfield to experience the Lincoln Museum together. The staff that plays together stays together.

5.  Break bread together.  A long-standing tradition in the congregation I serve is for the staff to go out to a local restaurant once a week and have lunch together. It’s always dutch treat, except when we’re celebrating a birthday. When it’s someone’s birthday week, they do not pay for their lunch and the rest of us split the bill equally. There’s never any requirement that anyone does this, but over the years, every staff member makes it a priority to be a part of this weekly gathering to break bread together away from the work place.

Two other things: don’t neglect the secretaries and custodians. The secretaries and custodians are essential to a fruitful ministry. Someone once said that God is in the details; these are the people who take care of the details. They typically hold an immense amount of institutional memory, and are often the first contact that members and folks from the community make with the church. You need their expertise and you need them to be on your side. While they may not be seminary trained or in some cases even college trained, they have an incredible storehouse of practical wisdom that will contribute immensely to good ministry. Pay attention to them.

Say thank you. In every way you can, say thank you. Write notes; compliment your staff to members of the parish; acknowledge them publicly. When they do something good, tell them specifically. In fact, we’ve institutionalized this public recognition in our staff meetings. The very last item on every staff meeting agenda is an item we call “Blessings.” It gives everyone a chance to publicly recognize the good work that someone else on the staff has done in the past week. And it’s a great way to end a meeting.

What have you discovered that contributes to the well-being and productivity of your staff?

Faith and Literature, a Vocational Intersection, Part 2

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Jim bestIn October, 2014, I was invited to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa to participate in the festivities for Homecoming Weekend, and for the inauguration of their 10th President, Dr. Paula Carlson. It was such an honor to be there. I had the privilege of preaching for the morning chapel service, and then serving on a panel for a symposium that President Carlson had called dealing with the relationship of faith and literature, a particular interest in her own research and writing.  I shared the dais with three esteemed academic scholars, Dr. Jacqueline Bussie (Concordia College), Dr. Peter Hawkins (Yale University), and Dr. Robert Schultz (Roanoke College). Each of us were to give some remarks with respect to our vocation and the intersection of faith and literature. What follows is the completion of my remarks.

Some novels help us to get at the big questions, like “Who is God?” “Is there a God?” “What is the meaning of life?” I’m thankful for those books in modern literature. I think of Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch, to name a few. I love Percy’s novel, The Second Coming. The aging protagonist of the story sets up an experiment to try to prove God’s existence. I think it’s a pretty clever premise, and Percy has my admiration for coming up with it. The whole experiment goes awry, as you might expect; the main character ends up falling in love and what plays out is a most unlikely romance where we get a glimpse into true compassion and care. Isn’t that enough of a proof of God’s existence?

There are lots of great novels out there that through story help us to work out what it means to live faithfully. I could give you hundreds of examples, but let me tell you about just one.

I have a sister two years younger than me. We had a very different relationship with our father. Dad died three years ago; as he grew older, my sister seemed to me more and more to engage in ancestor worship, describing him as a loving, doting father, whose children were always at the center of his life, and for whom he always made time. I have much more mixed, even more negative memories of my dad. Shortly after he died and as I was trying to process some of this, I read Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending. In that story, Tony Webster, retired and living alone, tells a story of a pivotal event when he and a close circle of friends were undergraduate students. He tells the narrative with great confidence. In the second half of the book, a letter arrives which provides documentation that he has created an entirely different narrative from what actually happened.

Reading and reflecting on Barnes’s novel gave me a window into the tentative reliability of my own memory. The moment of grace came when I realized that my own memories are mostly likely a shadow of what really happened, and enabled me to embrace the positive along with the negative memories of my father.

I want to conclude by saying a few words about my vocation as a writer.  Pastors write. That’s what we do:  newsletters, correspondence, weekly bulletin blurbs, sermons; that’s what we do. Through the years, I have become fairly adept at stringing words together coherently.

My foray into writing fiction came almost accidentally. I had come through a very painful conflict situation in my parish in which I was at the center of some parish convulsions. We came out of it and began a very positive and fruitful time of ministry at that congregation. One of the things I learned was that my whole identity had gotten too wrapped up in my role as pastor. I needed to have something to engage my time, my energy, and my creativity apart from work and even apart from my family. About that time the Naples Daily News advertised a class that was being offered at the Naples Philharmonic Center the Arts. A novelist and former film critic for the New York Daily News was offering a class in short story writing. I took a couple of classes from Hollis Alpert. More importantly, he became an informal mentor, encouraging me to keep writing, and even encouraging me to work on something larger. My first novel was a way for me to practice that craft, and also to tell some truth about the church and life in the church as a pastor, and of the complexities of human relationships.

I continue to work on my fiction writing.  I also blog. As Christians — or, really, any people of faith — we have to be actively engaged in the world. We have to let our faith speak about what’s going on around us, about life and about how we act and react. My blog is one more way that I can do that.

Thank you for the opportunity to share with you a few reflections on important things.

Faith and Literature — A Vocational Intersection

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Jim bestIn October, 2014, I was invited to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa to participate in the festivities for Homecoming Weekend, and for the inauguration of their 10th President, Dr. Paula Carlson. It was such an honor to be there. I had the privilege of preaching for the morning chapel service, and then serving on a panel for a symposium that President Carlson had called dealing with the relationship of faith and literature, a particular interest in her own research and writing.  I shared the dais with three esteemed academic scholars, Dr. Jacqueline Bussie (Concordia College), Dr. Peter Hawkins (Yale University), and Dr. Robert Schultz (Roanoke College). Each of us were to give some remarks with respect to our vocation and the intersection of faith and literature. Today I offer the first section of my remarks. I’ll follow with the second installment on Thursday.

I suppose we all have a variety of ways we could frame our vocational journeys. Here’s one for me:  my vocational journey has been one of seeking the truth, seeking after The Truth, trying to understand the truth, and how we can live truly before God, with each other and in the world.

Having lobbed that opening salvo, let me step back for a minute and tell a little about myself. I grew up as the oldest child of Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod (LCMS) parents; my grandfather was an LCMS pastor. I came to this institution (Luther College) at age 18 intending to be a musician. I discovered that music was much more an avocation for me than a vocation. In other words, I didn’t want to work that hard or practice that much. I felt like I had to figure out quickly what I wanted to do with my life — a misplaced notion, to say the least. I determined pretty quickly to pursue a vocation as a pastor in the church. Because I had been raised to observe a sharp distinction between denominations, I transferred to an LCMS college, eventually attended an LCMS seminary and entered pastoral ministry. I was very much steeped in the notion that theology was a set of propositional truths. My job as a pastor was to make sure people knew the truths necessary for their salvation.

The first 15 years of pastoral ministry was a long journey of discovery towards authentically engaging the scriptures, the church, people, and what it means to be a pastor. I discovered through experience that story is fundamental, basic, and essential to human existence. We eat, sleep, poop, have sex — but mostly we tell stories. When we talk to each other, that’s what we do. Some of us tell stories exceptionally well. Those stories help reveal the truth — about life, about God, about being human, about how we relate to each other.

Wallace Stegner is one of my favorite novelists. For years, he was the chair of the Creative Writing program at Stanford University.  He used to tell his students, “We have no agenda but to tell the truth.  Of course, what I’m getting at is the deep truth about human life that is not always accessible through mere facts.”

Jesus told stories.  His parables are known far and wide both inside and outside the church.  When we try to understand Jesus’ parables, we have to know that they tell the truth slant, to use a phrase of Emily Dickinson. They evoke rather than prescribe. That’s true also of literature and the way it speaks to matters of faith and life.

An important discovery and a really life-changing vocational moment was when I came to see that the Christian faith is fundamentally relational; it is not propositional, it is relational. The mystery of the Trinity is a relational mystery, not a propositional truth. Throughout history, God has interacted with people relationally, not propositionally. God bids us to live with one another relationally. Relationships don’t rest very well on propositional truth. It just may be that the only way to even begin understanding anything true about God is to tell stories about how God is and what God does, which is exactly what the Hebrew and Christian scriptures do.

We can treat relationships clinically; when this happens do this; when that happens, do that. There’s some value to such exercises. We learn a lot and we learn differently through story. In the Wendell Berry story, Jayber Crow, Jayber, an introverted, balding bachelor-barber, has a deep affection for Mattie Keith Chatham, an attractive neighbor-girl. Mattie grows up, marries the local all-American boy,  bears, rears, and begins burying their children. When he realizes that Mattie’s philandering husband Troy will never be faithful to her, Jayber breaks off with his own girlfriend, and vows to be the husband Mattie deserves, even though his relationship with her will always be one-sided.  As Jayber’s one-sided passion for Mattie grows, so does his compassion, and he is able share in the sufferings of all his neighbors. In this story, romantic longing becomes the seed not only of a deep and broad human love but also for salvation itself.

(In the next installment, I offer more examples from a few of my own favorite authors, and reflect briefly on my vocation as a writer.)

Of Lila, Love, and Misfits

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lila.jpgBrian was one of the most interesting parishioners I have ever served. A blue collar guy in a community and congregation of the wealthy, Brian often turned heads. He’d come roaring through the parking lot on Sunday morning on his big Harley, black boots, black jeans, black leather jacket, long streaming blonde hair and beard. He’d park the Harley next to the wide portico leading to the entrance to the church, and before shutting the engine off, he’d give it one last twist of the accelerator, making sure the loud roar of the engine reverberated under the cover of the roof, startling those poor souls who somehow hadn’t noticed his arrival.

Years earlier, Brian had been on the street for a while, his life a mess as a result of alcohol and drug addiction. By the time I met him, he had found sobriety and was making a good living working in his father’s manufacturing business. He was an odd evangelist, but evangelist he was, telling everyone he knew — and often those he didn’t — about how Christ had turned his life around. He’d often bring new friends with him to church, sometimes guys, sometimes his new girlfriend.

When Kristy (not her real name) started coming with Brian, her presence turned a few heads. Her dresses were quite a bit shorter, her heels quite a bit taller, and her hair quite a bit more dazzling than what we were used to. Turns out Kristy was a dancer at a gentleman’s club (an oxymoron if ever there was one), and Brian was trying to rescue her from that life and get her a “real” job. She came with him pretty faithfully. I had a few conversations with them about church and Jesus and getting on the right track. Kristy decided she wanted to be baptized; I was never very sure whether it was something she really wanted to do or something Brian was pushing for her to do. I’m guessing it was some of both.

She showed up that morning in her Sunday best — actually her Saturday night best. Short skirt, tall heels and a top with a deep v-neck. It was quite a thing to have to decide where to have Kristy stand as she bent over the font to be baptized, a choice between having the congregation look up her skirt or down her sweater. Made me long for the old days of baptismal gowns. Regardless, it was a day of great joy and celebration. We didn’t do a lot of adult baptisms.  And we didn’t do a lot of baptisms where the contrast between the life behind and the baptismal life into which Kristy was being born was so sharp.

We didn’t see Kristy much longer after her baptism. After talk of marriage, Brian and Kristy suddenly broke up. Brian didn’t want to talk about it. I’m not sure what happened. She came a few weeks by herself and then nothing. When I asked, Brian told me she had moved back north, went home, he said. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. Did that short connection with the church mean anything, have any impact at all on what came later?

Kristy came to mind as I’ve been reflecting on Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Lila. Once again the story takes us back to Gilead, Iowa and to the characters we’ve already met in her previous two novels, Gilead and Home. In the first two novels, we encounter Lila as the young wife of the aging minister, John Ames. Now, we learn her story and the unlikely meeting and marriage of John and Lila.

Lila is born into a family on the very edge of survival in depression era middle America. She is taken from that family of neglect and abuse to be cared for by Doll, a loving and resourceful drifter. Doll is the only one she can trust, the only from whom she experiences love. They are virtually inseparable until Doll runs into trouble and lands in jail. Lila then has to fend for herself. While living in an abandoned shack on the edge of Gilead, she comes into contact with Rev. Ames, his church and the members of his church. What commences is an extraordinarily odd courtship and marriage. Only gradually does Lila come to know love; only gradually does she come to trust her husband and the church people around him. Constantly fearful of abandonment, she doesn’t even trust herself to stay, wondering when she will walk out the door with her baby and return to the hard life of a drifter.

Robinson captures so poignantly the cautious entry into the church by one who has learned to be suspicious of the church and church people. For those outside the church, and maybe especially for those on the edge of survival, the church can be a place to be afraid of, where those who desire to do good end up doing harm. There’s a scene when Doll temporarily leaves the loose group of itinerants, saddling them with one more mouth to feed. When they decide they can’t keep Lila, they abandon her on the steps of a church; there she is most afraid that church people will “steal” her away from Doll and that she will never again see the only one who has really cared for her, difficult though that life may be.

We get ringside seats into Lila’s struggle with the theology of exclusion so associated with the church. In particular, Lila simply can’t accept a God who would leave Doll out of heaven. Though she never got connected to the church and never was “saved,” it was Doll who saved her. We also get to see how Lila grows into the love of her husband and to some strange peace about her own part in the church. There is nothing fancy about their lives. Their love is deep, yet imperfect, hers seemingly tentative, as if that’s the only way she knows how to love. By the end, Lila seems to relax into the love of both her husband and her husband’s God.

Which brings me back to Kristy, to wondering what ever became of her. I know that wherever she is, she is still in God’s embrace. I just hope she has found a community that keeps on reminding her of that.

“Home”

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home.jpgWeary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.

Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Home, returns to Gilead, the fictional Iowa town that served as the setting for the novel of the same title. The return brings mostly the same characters, though the setting for most of the story shifts from the home and life of John Ames to his best friend and fellow minister, Robert Boughton. The story revisits and expands on the final episode of Gilead when Boughton’s troubled son, Jack returns home seeking forgiveness and the peace that has eluded him for his entire life. One of Boughton’s other children, Glory, has also returned home, ostensibly to care for her deteriorating father, but also because her own relational life has crashed and she needs a place to recover and restore.

Jack isn’t forthcoming with details of what has happened since he left, nor what has brought him back home. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the reader learns of Jack’s troubled life and of finally finding love and family, though home still eludes him. Glory, still sorting through her own shattered dreams of home, does her best to smooth the way for the repair of the breach between Jack and Papa Boughton.

At the heart of the wanderings and homecomings in Home is the difficult and gnarly question of forgiveness. Early on, when Glory is still trying to navigate her brother’s sudden return home and not fall through the thin ice of civility that covers the hard issues that still lie unresolved between Jack and his father, she says this, “There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.”

Papa Boughton genuinely tries to understand, a task made much more difficult by his son’s unwillingness to tell all. Still festering is a wrong from Jack’s earlier life that is still unresolved and for which Jack, ultimately is unwilling to acknowledge or for which is willing to take responsibility.

Forgiveness is not easy. It’s is not a one-dimensional. Forgiveness given can be retracted in a quick word of judgment. Intentions to forgive can be blocked by the difficulty of letting go of the transgression that cause the rift in the first place. And one can be offered forgiveness without the ability to receive it. Is reconciliation possible if the burden of transgression is so great that one cannot ever let go of it?

If home is the place where full acceptance and pure love is to be found, then I suppose none of us really ever find home. Probably, that’s simply too much to ask. Maybe home is, instead, the place where we work at it, a place where our best selves try to lay aside judgments and resentments, a paradoxical place of both warmth and struggle. Home is a place populated with skeletons of hopes and dreams unfulfilled and it is also a place were we occasionally find deep love and acceptance. It’s also the place where fathers and mothers recognize their own brokenness and failings, looking with hope not just to their sons and daughters, but to their sons’ and daughters’ sons and daughters.

What Jack came home looking for ultimately eluded him. As his sister caught a glimpse of what had almost been in his grasp, she comes to a moment of clarity and peace, realizing that at least for now, for all her wanderings, weary, bitter, and bewildered, she is home.

Gilead

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gliead.jpgA few days ago, I promised a review of Gilead. I realize now that this is not a review. Let me get this out of the way — Gilead is a fabulous book. In so many ways, it’s a fabulous book. Marilynne Robinson is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living American novelists.

The main character and narrator of the story is John Ames, a semi-retired, aging pastor in Gilead, a small town in Iowa. The story takes the form of a series of letters or journal entries that an aging father writes to his young son as a kind of recorded guidance for the son when the father is gone. The father has married a much younger woman late in life. John Ames believes that he will not live much longer and desperately hopes to provide materially for his wife and young son, and also to provide guidance for his son’s journey from childhood into adulthood.

In the course of these letters, he reflects far and wide — on the life of a pastor, on life in a small town, on the fragility of life, often coming back to his desperate wish that he could provide better for his wife and child and his concern about how they will get along after he dies. Much of the early part of the story recounts his own roots; both his father and his grandfather were a preacher. His grandfather had been a violent activist in cahoots with John Brown, and who embraced the use of guns and violence in the Lord’s name. By contrast, his father was an ardent pacifist who condemned his own father’s involvement in the Civil War violence in Missouri and Kansas. Late in the novel, the son of Ames’s best friend — a fellow minister in town — for whom he has become namesake returns home. He is a troubled young man who has nearly always been in trouble. The depth of his brokenness is revealed gradually and comes to a climax at a point where there will be judgment or grace.

The story resonates so deeply with me in part because of my own family history. My grandfather was a pastor, first in the wilds of northern Saskatchewan and then in the plains of Kansas. He had four sons, all of whom, as I understand felt some pressure to go into church work. The youngest son did for a time, and then left the pastoral ministry for a long and productive life work as a therapist. My own father went to junior college, then the army, then a brief stint delivering mail, and eventually returning to college to complete a degree to become a teacher in Lutheran schools. I have no strong evidence, but Dad always talked about the glory days when he was delivering mail. I don’t think he was ever very happy as a teacher, and he certainly had a roller coaster experience as a church worker.

I went away to college. To become a musician. An environmental engineer. Anything but churchwork. And in an explicable sense of calling (or was it guilt?), I completely changed direction and decided to pursue training to become a pastor.

I’m at that age when the years are catching up. I’ve now been a pastor longer than I was not a pastor. In a sense, I went into the family business. And now I also have a son who went into the family business. I felt some mild pressure toward a church vocation, but I don’t think that was what led me. I don’t think our son felt that pressure; if anything, we tried to talk him out of it, knowing that it’s a vocation with a high reward, but also can exact a high human cost. Reading this story always pushes me not only to reflect on my own family history and how it has shaped me, but more to the point, how I can continue to be a good father to my own sons. My relationship with them is not over now that they have left home, and I still have both the opportunity and calling to continue to shape them for good or not.
Gilead is a lot of things. It is simply a good story, beautifully written and artfully told.  It is a story about friendship; it is a story about the simple joy of love and family and about how that love is complicated and incomplete; it is a story about judgment and grace and how difficult the grace part can be.  And it is a story about generations and the way we want to or don’t want to be like our parents and how we inevitably are shaped by them regardless of our intentions.

The Testimony of Marilynne Robinson

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MRobinson.jpgWhen I first read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead shortly after it came out in 2004, I remember being deeply moved. I read it once and then I turned right around and read it again, something I rarely do. So touched was I at the exquisite portrayal of the aging father writing to his young son, not to mention how the narrator talks about his relationship with his own father and grandfather, that I bought a copy of the novel for each of my sons for Christmas and included in the gift a letter trying to express my hopes, dreams, and love for them.

Good literature and good writers do that for us. They are not just stories that we live into for a short time, but they touch us in the places we live, how we relate to the people around us, how we face the complexities, the joys, and the struggles of our own lives.

Over the past few months, I’ve reread Gilead (for the fourth time, I think) and then went on to read her next two novels, Home, and Lila. They’re not sequels exactly, but the same characters populate all three stories in roughly the same time in the same place.

Robinson’s creates characters of such depth and nuance that we can identify with them as if they were real, regardless of the fact that the reader has almost nothing in common with the characters’ context. For  instance, in Lila, the title character is a woman whose grew up in the most difficult of circumstances; her life was bare existence. Yet in the midst of the abuse and violence and scarcity, she knew the deep love of the woman who cared for her. At the depth of her humanness, we relate; we know her loneliness; we know her drive for acceptance; we know her doubts about easy answers.  With what seems like perfect timing, the author gradually reveals the characters as the story progresses; the more we read, the more we learn about them and the more we want to care about them.

Robinson has such command of the language, masterfully putting words together to form descriptive and evocative sentences. Her writing is beautiful and elegant, yet with a simple economy of language. For instance here’s a passage where the narrator of Gilead reflects on an afternoon when his wife and son brought him a bouquet of honeysuckles.

I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light — pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. 

In her stories, Robinson deals with the bones of life, the things that lie deeply embedded, what makes life the wonderful and sometimes terrible thing that it is: judgment and grace and forgiveness or the struggle to forgive; the constant recognition of the shortness of life, the passing of the generations and the complications of progeny. Neither does she shy away from the harshness and meanness with which the human sometimes treat the other.

I recently learned that as an adult Robinson has passionately pursued a study of theology. No surprise to me. While it’s clear from her popular success that one doesn’t have to be a person of faith to appreciate her writing and her stories, I consistently find that her writing informs, deepens, and challenges my own life of faith. She puts the flesh of character and story on some of the most gnarly theological problems. Lila, who by virtue of her marriage to John Ames has become connected to the church — “saved” in the language of the church members —  struggles to understand the eternal destiny of the woman who brought her up, cared for her, and loved her deeply. Theological questions are always human questions.

Back in October, an excellent biographical article appeared in the New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/magazine/the-revelations-of-marilynne-robinson.html?_r=0

Come back on Thursday to read my review of Gilead, and next week, reviews of Home and Lila. I look forward to hearing what you think and joining the conversation.