Hope

Review: Habits of Hope

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Cover image for "Habits of Hope" edited by Todd C. Ream et al.

Habits of Hope, Todd C. Ream, Jerry Pattengale, and Christopher J. Devers, editors, foreword by Amos Yong. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514010709) 2024.

Summary: Essays by educators on six key practices and how they may cultivate hope among faculty and students.

The pressures on those who teach in higher educational contexts have continued to ratchet up. The Covid pandemic intensified the pressure on professors and stresses in the lives of students. More recently, educational institutions have come under scrutiny and fire from federal and state governments that have included the suspension of research grants. Many educators are tired and discouraged.

The contributors to this volume don’t address how to ameliorate the larger cultural and institutional challenges. Instead, they focus on the practices at the heart of their work with students. Beginning with Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, the editors root the theme of this volume in Christian hope. The opening essay by Kevin C. Grove, CSC draws on his experience as a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross and their motto: Hail the Cross, Our Only Hope and talks about how the cross frames hopeful teaching at the University of Notre Dame.

Then, subsequent essays focus on hope in the following teaching practices:

Integration. Philip Ryken outlines some of the policies and practices at Wheaton that foster faculty development and student efforts to integrate faith and discipline.

Conversation. Cherie Harder, president of the Trinity Forum, discusses the value of discussing important questions in a disciplined and charitable manner. She advocates keeping it real, giving it time, listening, asking questions, avoiding invective, ditching your phone, reading widely, and practicing epistemic humility.

Diversity. Recognizing the controversial character of diversity initiatives, Kimberly Battle-Waters Denu emphasizes the theological and ecclesiological roots of diversity as a Christian practice and how that enriches the educational experience.

Reading. Hans Boersma, in one of the more abstruse essays argues for reading well as part of the process of “deification,” becoming more like God. The hope in understanding in our reading is that all the logoi we read participates in the Logos, the word God has spoken through his Son.

Writing. Jessica Hooten Wilson describes her own love of writing as a child and how we write out of the belief that there is something worth expressing, be it stories, history, or poetry. She shares some of her own practices with students including feedback on drafts rather than grades, written reflections, and reading other writers on writing.

Teaching. David I. Smith explores the how of teaching as more important to the nature of teaching than what is taught. He discusses how community within the classroom may work out practically.

As you might intuit, the context in which these educators work is the Christian college context. Yet educators in the public context might incorporate many of the elements of these practices in their teaching. In particular, Cherie Harder’s conversational practices are vital to Christians seeking to foster public square conversations in public universities. Everything Jessica Hooten Wilson writes about writing is applicable to any Christian working with students on their writing.

Hope is in short supply on campus these days. Yet the investment in the rising generation has always been an exercise in hope. No matter what else is going on, as long as there are students and teachers, there is opportunity for Christians to practice hope. This slim volume helps point the way.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Anchor of My Soul

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Cover image of "Anchor of My Soul," compiled by the editors at Paraclete Press.

Anchor of My Soul, compiled by the editors at Paraclete Press. Paraclete Press (ISBN: 9781640609815) 2025.

Summary: A compilation of readings, quotes, poetry and works of art on the theme of trust and hope.

The year 2025 is a Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis has chosen as a motto for this Jubilee Year, “Pilgrims of Hope.” With so many countries, and even the creation itself, in tumult, this theme speaks to a deep need in human hearts. Always, to be sure, and especially in this moment. Appropriate to this year and moment, the editors at Paraclete Press have compiled a collection of readings including short fiction, poetry, letters, speeches, and quotes. Works of art, rendered in full color complement the readings

The work consists of three parts. The first is organized under the theme “Hope is the Thing with Feathers/A Patient Waiting.” It opens with the Emily Dickinson poem of the same name and includes O’Henry’s fine short story, “The Last Leaf.” Other works include a passage from Les Miserables, set off by Van Gogh’s Thatched Cottages at Cordeville, one of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters, an excerpt from Nelson Mandela, and another short story, this by Tolstoy.

Part Two is titled “And with No Language But a Cry/Taut Expectancy.” We read of growing hope amid a German prison camp in an excerpt from Corrie Ten Boom. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” reveals his hope for “a new birth of freedom.’ In a short selection from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard explores “the secret of seeing.” Opposite this reading, we are treated to Claude Monet’s Section of the Seine, near Giverny. Other selections include poetry from John Keats (“To Hope”), an excerpt from Anne Frank, Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife during the Civil War, and Chekov’s “The Student.”

The readings in Part Three appear under the theme “Lift Every Voice and Sing/Anticipate with Trust.” Of course this includes James Weldon Johnson’s poem by this name. It has become an unofficial anthem of the Black community. Read this and you may find verses you have not heard before. There’s another story by Leo Tolstoy and Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” engraved in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty. A selection from the ending of The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis and a quote from Tolkien appear opposite Odilon Redon’s Evocation of Butterflies.

I’ve not named all the writers or artists represented here. This book, printed on quality stock is a feast for both the eyes and the heart. It is easy to lose heart in our doomscrolls of despair. The work reminds us that there is another, deeper story that we need to hear. Instead of being mired in the “Slough of Despond,” the writers invite us to join the saints through history and the many who, this year, have embarked on a “Pilgrimage of Hope.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The After Party

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Cover image of "The After Party" by Curtis Chang and Nancy French

The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics, Curtis Chang and Nancy French. Zondervan Books (ISBN: 9780310368700), 2024.

Summary: How we might shift toward a better Christian politics through humility and hope.

There are many Christians longing for a better way to engage in politics. We’ve lost friends and family, who have “disappeared.” We recognize that we will always have political differences, even among Christians, but believe this shouldn’t result in demonizing those who differ with us. We are concerned that we cannot sustain the fabric of civic life with the level of hostile discourse we see around us. But we wonder if a better way is possible.

Earlier this year, Curtis Chang and David French of The Good Faith Podcast, teamed up with Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, to produce a six part free video curriculum to help churches move toward a better Christian politics, titled The After Party. This book is a companion piece, written by Chang and Nancy French, an award-winning journalist, and the wife of David French, a columnist with the New York Times. The book and the course complement each other but may be used independently.

The focus of the book is a call for us to allow Jesus to shift us from the what of politics (ideology, party, and policy) to the how of politics (spiritual values, relationship, and practices). They point to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus calls for mercy, peace-making, refraining from angry mocking of opponents, prioritizing reconciling over winning, avoiding sexual scandals, and truth-telling. This is not a critique of politicians but rather how we engage in politics. The authors focus on humility and hope as two key spiritual values that help us move toward a better engagement.

They use these two qualities as X and Y axes identifying four types:

  • The Disciple: high in both humility and hope
  • The Combatant: high in hope, low in humility
  • The Exhausted: high in humility, low in hope
  • The Cynic: low in humility and hope

They include an assessment tool accessible through a QR code. There is a written version in the appendix, allowing readers to identify the type that may most closely fit.

Most of the remainder of the book explores each of the types. As it turns out David French, Russell Moore, and Curtis Chang identified as the Combatant, The Exhausted, and the Cynic. The chapters include narratives of each on how they matured as disciples, growing in hope, humility, or both.

The final chapter invites us to move from us-versus-them politics to the after party of peace at the foot of the cross. While we cannot fully embody that this side of kingdom come, we can be living icons, signs of what is to come as we live in humility and hope across our differences.

This book offers a clear alternative to our politics of division. Is it too simple? I don’t think it is the be all, end all solution. But it offers a starting point, with tangible practices we can try with our “disappeared” friends. Rather than waiting for politicians that practice a better politics, it proposes that Christians, particularly evangelicals, in churches across this country take the first steps.

Will it be enough? I don’t know, but true disciples of Jesus don’t ask those questions. They listen for the call of Jesus and follow. At least they’ve taken the first steps toward a better politics, and nothing good can happen until someone does.

Review: Hope Ain’t a Hustle

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Cover image of "Hope Ain't a Hustle" by Irwyn Ince

Hope Ain’t a Hustle, Irwyn Ince (Foreword by Christina Edmonson). InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514005743), 2024.

Summary: A series of messages from the book of Hebrews making the case for the confidence we may have in Christ, our great high priest who endured the storm, who sustains our hope, and calls us to enduring faithfulness.

There are a lot of hustles out there–on the streets, in business, and even in our email. Sometimes even Christianity has appeared to be a hustle, promising a good life, as long as one enriches the congregation’s coffer. Irwyn Ince contends that this is not true of God when he writes:

“But God is not a hustler. And the hope he calls us to cannot be built on naive expectations that people will start seeing the things the way we do. Our longing cannot be built on the arrogant assumption that we are completely right in the positions we take. It cannot even be built on an expectation of steady improvement. If the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, that arc will never be smooth and straight from a human perspective. It will have twists and turns, ups and downs, starts and stops. Our hope, if it is to be enduring, must be rooted in the glory of Jesus Christ.” (p. 9).

In this book, Pastor Ince works from the book of Hebrews to show that hope grounded in the person and work of Jesus will never disappointment and will sustain us through the greatest of life’s challenges.

The book is organized in three parts. The first, “The Storm Before the Calm” addresses the storm the readers of Hebrews may be facing and the supreme authority of Jesus as Son amid the storms. Not only that, Jesus was made like us and entered the danger zone where we live. He came to liberate, to intercede, and to help as high priest and son over God’s house, superior to Moses. Through our hope in Jesus. we may rest in the danger zone, like John Lewis and Diane Nash as leaders of the Nashville sit-ins. As we rest in Jesus who went before us, we may rest while we suffer, knowing we will share in the rest of his glory.

Part Two, “Keep Hope Alive” begins with those words from Jesse Jackson at the 1988 Democratic Convention. Ince explores the unreasonable hope of Abraham and the arc between Melchizedek and the greater high priest Jesus, reflecting on unreasonable hope in the face of prison and plundering that the Hebrews faced, and the assurance they have in a great high priest who offered himself. He was the high priest who became perfect for us through his obedience, who is able to perfect us. His ministry, covenant, and promise are better than all who came before him. There is no better place to go, no better person in whom to find hope, than Jesus. To him we need to return, and he will keep our hope alive.

Part Three, “In Need of Endurance” speaks of the dogged persistence our hope in Jesus sustains. Endurance is built on upward confidence, inward confession of hope, and outward commitment. Ince points to the teaching of Hebrews to endure by faith, in need, and in joy. He uses the example of Superman’s X-ray vision to describe the kind of faith that sees Jesus through the challenges we face. Those who endure by faith live for the heavenly city, the better country, like Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg who suffered a terrible beating while praying to remain nonviolent and to forgive his attackers. Those who endure run through exhaustion by staying with the crowd, by dropping the weight of sin, by keeping our heads up, and fixing our eyes on the future with gratitude, lighting up the darkness.

Pastor Ince writes a book on hope that doesn’t see the world with rose-colored glasses. He writes how the hope that doesn’t hustle that we have in Jesus helps us face dark times without retreating into either fantasy or despair. For those dismayed by the slow progress toward justice in so many aspects of life, he bids us to keep hope alive through Jesus who went there before us and is both the son who reigns and the great high priest who intercedes. He challenges us that hope endures. It never gives up, so certain is it in the promise of God. Through the text of Hebrews, tales of courage from the Civil Rights movement, and personal life, Pastor Ince offers the gritty instruction we need to live into our hope in a “wearying world.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Deepest Place

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The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope, Curt Thompson, MD. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023.

Summary: Drawing on the experience of Paul, described in Romans 5 and using the insights of neurobiology, a psychiatrist explores how hope may grow out of suffering as one learns one is secure in the presence of God and of a caring community.

Suffering can touch the deepest places in our lives. Often the result of some trauma, suffering rewires our brains to respond in ways to protect ourselves or suppress the ongoing pain. We may not even be aware of why until it threatens our jobs, our relationships, our finances, and our health. Curt Thompson has met many sufferers in his psychiatric practice. Through an understanding of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) and drawing on insights from the Apostle Paul of how we may be transformed through suffering, Thompson offers us a process, illustrated by a number of patient stories, of how people experienced such transformation at the level of rewiring their responses to anxiety-triggering events.

Thompson frames his account around Romans 5:1-5:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,  through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (NIV)

Crucial, in all human experience, according to Thompson is the forming of a secure human attachment, the lack of which is a source of suffering. When we have such an attachment, we can receive and know that we are loved and flourish, even through suffering. For the Apostle Paul, this secure attachment came through being justified by faith, knowing that he was at peace with and secure in God. This in turn allowed him to face rather than run from suffering, persevering, forming character and deepening hope.

But knowing these things in our heads is not enough. It is practicing different ways of thinking, responding, and bodily reacting. It involves bringing our awareness of what we suffer into a place where we are seen, soothed, safe, and secure (the 4 S’s). Thompson works toward this both in his personal work with patients and in confessional communities where people are able to “confess” the situations in which they suffer and experience the 4 S’s with others. The more they experience this, the more they can relinquish the behaviors that covered up their suffering. Like Paul, who speaks of standing in grace, there is a bodily integration, a standing in the 4 S’s that occurs. As people experience caring acceptance when they reveal what brings them pain and shame, they glimpse the glory of God, even as they most openly face the causes of their suffering.

But this process of facing suffering is hard and painful work. For some it is so hard, they turn back. But knowledge of the glory of being accepted and loved by Jesus can sustain us, especially when memories are reinforced by counselors and a caring community such as the confessional communities Thompson works with, and those memories become more embedded. Over time, as we persevere, character is formed, as we keep practicing Christ-formed and sustained responses to suffering supported in community. In Thompson’s practice, he and counselees “do the work” and “then pause and notice the work” which embeds it more deeply. They assess progress using the acronym FACES which stands for flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable, qualities that express increasing integration of our character.

Progress in being seen, soothed, safe and secure over time in one’s suffering, persevered in over time, not only forms character but contributes to an embodied hope as our responses are rewired and we increasingly taste Christ’s glorious acceptance, building our anticipation of what’s to come, coming full circle around to increasing glory.

Thompson is honest that not all complete the circle or cycle. For some, facing suffering is too hard, and they retreat. some find it too hard to be loved, when all they’ve known are people coming to hurt them. Thompson discusses the rich young ruler who not only shrinks back from giving away his wealth but in finding eternal life through Jesus’s invitation to be in relationship with him, the one who “looked on him and loved him.” We keep loving those not ready to accept the invitation to be loved, even as we enfold those who do in communities where they are seen, soothed, safe, and secure, allowing them to do the hard work with Jesus of seeing their suffering transformed into hope.

I appreciate how Thompson frames this work with the wisdom of Romans 5. His narratives of patient stories elaborates what this looks like. He also helps me understand why it is hard for many to understand the place of grace in which they stand, that they are secure in the love of Christ. They know it in their heads, but haven’t yet had it transform the wiring of their lives, the patterns of their memories. It helps me understand why believing people often inflict pain on others. In the words of Richard Rohr: “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”

What Thompson describes is a process of transforming discipleship at the deepest levels of our lives, making it possible not only to transform suffering but transmit healing to others. I cannot help wonder if this is the healing needed for a church that seems so angry and fearful, one so enamored with control and power, that clings to national glory and demonizes the other because it has never experienced the greater glory of the love of God toward all people in Christ. I wonder….

Review: Losing Our Religion

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Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore. New York: Sentinal, 2023.

Summary: A call to repentance, to come to Jesus, for an evangelical church that has lost its credibility, authority, identity, integrity, and stability.

“The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigourous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings.”

Russell Moore, p. 44.

Russell Moore has experienced first hand shattering disillusionment with a church that no longer seems to believe its own message. He was at one time the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a popular author and has spoken trenchantly on the moral issues of the day, grounded in his belief in the authority of the Bible. That all changed when, seeing the immoral behavior of our former president in his candidacy, he refused to endorse him. Added to that, when an investigative report uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual abuse in his denomination, he advocated for the survivors of abuse when denominational leaders were stonewalling the issue. For the first offense, there was a popular backlash that included withholding of contributions. For the second, he was called on the carpet for being divisive and jeopardizing the support of church mission programs. He was attacked and demonized. At the end of his term as president of the ERLC, he resigned and joined a nondenominational congregation, leaving the body he had been a part of since he first walked down the aisle in response to an altar call.

Moore has wrestled with the parlous state of an American evangelicalism being abandoned by those who no longer think the church believes its own message, that has embraced political rather than spiritual power, that has justified the immoral for the end of “winning” a culture war, that has jettisoned a belief in truth, and turned to a nostalgic wish to return to some unspecified past greatness rather than to trust and walk with Christ into his future for his people. He sees the crumbling of such a “religion” to be a good thing. We ought to lose such a religion. Moore recurs to the practice of the altar call, a time of decision and turning from all these illusions and returning to our first love for Christ who alone can save us.

In five chapters, Moore outlines what he sees evangelicalism has lost. There is lost credibility, the growing gap between professed belief and actual behavior. There is lost authority as churches have embraced the tribal narratives of different political groups rather the truths they profess together in the creeds. There is a loss of identity in the embrace of a Christian nationalism of blood and soil rather than the multiethnic pilgrim exile community who follow Jesus. There is a loss of integrity in the acceptance of moral compromise to “win” battles–a far cry from Christian faithfulness that prioritizes trusting obedience over “results.” And we have lost the stability of nostalgia that fails to face the traumas we have endured in the recent past, where we end up repeating what has not been repaired.

Each chapter not only addresses the losses both of our failings and our crumbling illusions. Moore addresses how the faithful live when the ruins are falling. He urges us to embrace rather than resist disillusionment, to face rather than deny judgment. He calls us to tell the truth and avoid foolish controversies. A telling challenge for me was that he urges us to not “self-censor.” Most of extremist lies come from a very small but vigorous group who persuade truthtellers to go to ground. He urges us to refuse secularization and false framings of warfare that target people rather than spiritual powers. He urges the cultivation of intergenerational community. He challenges “whataboutism” that justifies immoral acts by the immorality of the “other” side, calling us to long-term integrity rather than short-term success. He movingly describes his growing friendship with Beth Moore, of whom he once spoke critically as he urges us to new communities and friendships with those whose gospel faithfulness transcends other differences.

As he concludes, he speaks of revival in very different terms. A reviving of American moral and religious greatness might actually be a bad thing without repentance and the hard work of the deep healing of our spiritual woundedness. Nostalgia seems so much safer and yet this is like going back to slavery in Egypt rather than following God in the uncertainties of the wilderness. His final words recur to his title: “Maybe only when we lose our religion will we be, once again, amazed by grace.”

This is both a hard and hopeful book. Moore unflinchingly names the failures of evangelicalism. He doesn’t offer any glowing promises but simply, for those who will hear, a call to press through our disillusionment to repentance, through our cynicism to belief in Christ, through our culture warring divisions to engaging local communities, and through the fog of a post-truth and post-morality world to integrity of belief and behavior. There are no promises here that these things will save evangelicalism or America. Rather, the only hope offered is that come what may, we will be saved, along with those drawn by gospel faithfulness. That is the hope we all find at the altar.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Good Catastrophe

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Good Catastrophe, Benjamin Windle. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2023.

Summary: Drawing upon the Book of Job and Tolkien’s idea of “eucastrophe,” proposes that when we face pain and adversity, we are at the place where great good can occur.

The American dream of the good life is an illusion. Despite our curated Instagrams, life often goes sideways in painful ways. A parent loses a child. A disaster destroys a home. You experience a series of financial reverses. A friend is diagnosed with a serious or terminal illness. We struggle with a chronic affliction for which there seems to be no remedy. If you live long enough, you discover that a good life of peace, health, family accord, great friends, and prosperity comes undone. What hope have we in the face of the inevitable catastrophes of life?

Benjamin Windle has faced painful adversity from a dangerous dog attack on a child to the loss of a brother to cancer and fire at one business property and flooding at another in the same year. As he wrestled with these matters, he turned to the book of Job and studied J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of the “eucatastrophe”–the good catastrophe–when seemingly terrible things bring out qualities of courage, resilience, and hope in the lives of those who suffer and face adversity.

He begins with Job’s self-description of the stump that at “the scent of water” buds to life (Job 14:7-9). When we face devastation, do we seek “the scent of water”? That doesn’t mean we are not honest about our brokenness, our pain, our failures. Alluding to Leonard Cohen, he observes that “It’s the cracks that let the light in.” With Tolkien, he argues that pain and hope are not opposites but close relatives. Sometimes, it simply comes down to practicing hope in the ordinary, not unlike Stephan Curry’s practice in a rough backyard court where he determined to make shots rather than chase the missed ones.

Windle tells great stories to illustrate the great good that often accompanies adversity. He recounts the Keith Jarrett performance in Paris, a best-selling recording, where he learns that the piano he requested was not available and the old one available was out of tune with sticking keys. He ended up improvising one of the most amazing performances of his life. To illustrate how friendships can sustain us in adversity, he describes the two hundred hands that passed children hand to hand out of flooded caves in Thailand.

Ultimately hope is rooted in the character of God and our everlasting destiny. Adversity draws us to lean deeply into these realities. Windle offers us a framework for leaning into that hope beginning with sitting in the pain, mining the good, and seeing eternity. He doesn’t inundate us with cliches and sentimentality but he does call our attention to how pain and hope meet in many lives, from Job’s to his own. The chapters are short, easily read with artwork and quotes that tastefully introduce each chapter. This is a good book to read if the dream of a good life has become a nightmare, and you are wondering how to live with hope when everything is going wrong.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Nourishing Narratives

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Nourishing Narratives, Jennifer L. Holberg. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: Making sense of our lives and our faith through the stories that shape us.

Stories have a powerful way of shaping our lives. Some are the stories we tell of ourselves. Some are the stories that have captured our imagination. And there is the story of our faith, the larger story of God in which we find ourselves. Jennifer L. Holberg, a professor of English and co-director of Calvin College’s Center of Faith and Writing found her own life shaped by stories from childhood and loves exploring their shaping power with her students. In this work, she reflects on the ways stories have shaped her and how they are central to a vibrant Christian faith.

She opens the book by sharing some of the story of discovering the power of story in her life and the work she does with students to read stories in nuanced ways that nourish their lives. She draws on sources as diverse as old cookbooks, the Exodus narratives, and the poetry of Mary Oliver and Gerard Manley Hopkins to explore the idea of enough. Carrie Newcomer’s lyrics open a chapter on the grace of the ordinary, going on to explore Mary Oliver’s “Summer Morning” and “In the Storm,” in which the tails of ducks form a roof to protect sanderlings, “a hedge of feathers” that is a miracle amid the ordinary. And then she speaks of the faithfulness of her own father, a military officer who modeled Christ, put family first, and remembers the anniversary of her doctorate each year.

She uses Tennyson’s In Memoriam to explore the nature of friendship and loss, remarking the power of churches bringing casseroles and cakes when you are in trouble, the need to be vulnerable, and the generous gift that enabled Harper Lee to write To Kill a Mockingbird–the generosity of a friend. In another chapter, she spotlights the biblical Martha and Matthias, the thirteenth apostle, those ready to serve as faithful witnesses.

I found the chapter on “Small Steps at Very Great Cost” particularly striking. Holberg writes of our experiences of the pandemic. As a single person who was used to being alone, a bit of a hermit, she enjoyed it in a way, yet like many of us was deeply concerned with the rents in our social fabric. She quotes a poem of Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” with the phrase “When at last we knew how little/Would survive us–how little we had mended.” but concludes with the reappearance of creatures and color thought gone forever, expressing the renewal out of the ashes that we hope for. She speaks tellingly of the power of our words, the stories we tell, not to save, but to shape; likewise the small acts of great service, the considering of the other’s interest. And to those who would hurl the epithet “sheep” at those who embrace the servant way, she considers this an honor. She is following the Lamb of God.

The whole thrust of this book is to draw together the constituent elements of hope, because such hope, nourished on story is what sees us through. She concludes the book sharing of her love of working with students. She is not one to bemoan “this generation” but rather shares her hope for them as they explore stories together to know they are loved, to know they are enough, and to know their voice matters.

I think I would have loved to have Holberg as a teacher. She loves literature, not as material just to analyze and critique, but when read closely, to read our lives and offer hope. She writes both with informal elegance and spunk, sharing vulnerably her own stories, even challenging the silence around women’s health issues and menstruation. Through the many poems and stories, we see the biblical story, the pilgrim journey in the way of the cross, the hope of those who forsake all to follow Christ. She sums up what she has drawn from these stories (and particularly from The Divine Comedy) in three phrases. Don’t be afraid. Love in abundance. God’s got this.

These are good watchwords and evidence someone who has mastered, or been mastered by, her subject matter. How we need these words for our time. What strikes me as I consider this is that they reflect the kinds of stories to which Holberg has given herself–true, noble, good, and beautiful stories. Not all stories are such, nor would all lead to these watchwords. On what narratives will we nourish ourselves?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Unforgettable

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Unforgettable, Gregory Floyd. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2022.

Summary: Through remembering his life of faith, the author remembers the working of God in all of life’s seasons, giving hope for the future.

This book surprised me in its capacity to evoke memories of my own life. Perhaps it is because the author and I are the same age, lived through the same times, although with different experiences, but on the same journey of faith.

The book began in the author’s experience of caring for his mother during her decline with Alzheimer’s disease and the question of “who are we without our memories?” He started recording his own memories, not ones he searched for but those who came to him. This book is the product of that remembering time.

Perhaps the most defining came in his eighteenth year:

“…in my senior year of high school, I heard his voice. Not audibly, but an impression on my heart, a word pressed into it: Jump. I woke in the middle of the night to a voice that said: ‘Jump, and trust that I will catch you.’ Somehow, I knew this was God speaking, and I decided to jump. If I was correct, I would find myself in the arms of God”

Gregory Floyd, p. 30.

And this is where he found himself. Floyd describes the experience of brokenness and forgiveness, the beauty that finds its focus in Christ. He describes the beginnings of his marriage and the decisions to put God first, even above their love, realizing this is what would bind them most deeply together, as they received God’s gift. He describes creating a family–a large one of nine children, one who died.

One of the quite wonderful passages is the one on the Word, and how scripture speaks to him of the abiding love of God and how one might live in that. He opens his own life of prayer, learning to pray as he can and not as he can’t, taught by the Spirit and shaped by the prayers of scripture. He remembers both the prayers and the silences. He vulnerably shares his journey of wrestling with the loss of a son in an auto accident in front of their home–a parent’s worst nightmare. He is honest about the grief, even after 25 years, as well as the hope of seeing him again and sharing a ‘10,000 year glance.”

His memories move from his own life to the wonders of God in salvation and the splendor of His glory, of which he writes as clearly and reverently as anyone I’ve encountered. He concludes with his growing hope as he grows older and the showing of Julian of Norwich that “all shall be well.” What Floyd discovers in this reflection upon memories is that “God inhabits our memories,” sustaining us with his mercy and grace and taking our past experiences to foster hope for the future.

Why did this book speak so powerfully to me? I found myself walking through the different seasons of life with the author, and remembering the goodness of God, the riches of the scriptures, of prayer, of family, of Christian community down the years. As I approach the end of my seventh decade with the author, I do wonder what lies ahead. One thing is certain. We will die. While we never know when this is, the deaths of classmates, of those five, ten, fifteen or twenty years older reminds me that this is inevitably more imminent than I once thought it was. And what of those intervening years? The reminders of my own memories of the presence of God into whose arms I’ve jumped gives me hope that he will carry my wife and me safe through. The saints who influenced my life who I believe are cheering me on in glory are closer than ever. And every beauty, every gift of each day reminds me of what shall be, the emerald greens of this spring, the pleasures of weeding and planting, of savoring a good book, a symphony, a sunset. Floyd’s book reminds me of the God of grace and providence who has inhabited all my memories, all my days, and promises that “all shall be well.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Almost Everything

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, Anne Lamott. New York: Riverhead, 2018.

Summary: A series of “notes” or essays on hope, especially amid disturbing times.

“I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen.”

Anne Lamott

That’s how this collection of essays in which Lamott sums up why she lives with hope in apocalyptic times. She wrote this before COVID, George Floyd, the 2020 elections and their aftermath, and the invasion of Ukraine and a world staring at the possibility of World War Three, which is almost unthinkable. How did she know.

In “Prelude” Lamott describes this book as being written for her grandson and niece as almost everything she knows that might help. Then in typical Lamott style, she diverts and says that there are really only two things she knows–that she is mightily tempted to jump off of rooftops and out of speeding cars and that she has seen miracles.

She writes of the paradox of truth and how it affords hope when you hit bottom because there is something else, that bottom is only one side of the paradox. We really can’t change others or save them–it is an inside job. She writes, “Nor did I know about grace, that it meets you exactly where you are, at your most pathetic and hopeless, and it loads you into its wheelbarrow and then tips you out somewhere else in ever so slightly better shape.” There really is no fix in life, only forgiveness. We especially can’t change families–only live with them and forgive. Most things will work if we unplug them–even us. We need to surrender the impulse to return hate with hate. Empathy awakens us to how like we are to what we are tempted to hate. She derides diets that end with us gaining weight, suggesting kindness toward ourselves might be better.

There is probably little better writing advice than she gives a bunch of first graders, which was really writing one bad page after another until they became a book. She thinks that bitter chocolate is only good to balance wobbly chair legs and that we do better to carry Kisses in our backpacks to give away and make friends. She writes about death and accompanying the dying, comparing our lives to hen and chicks, with the belly button center that grows outward in glossy green leaves that eventually thin, fade, fall off and feed the soil. Contemplating death makes life richer.

One of the most moving chapter narrates the life of Kelly, an atheist friend who was in AA with her, and then out because she didn’t like the God part, her downward decline after a divorce and the death of her dog, their shared love of Survivor and the last, alcohol-ridden years where Anne hoped God would break through because nothing else could, and the final rest she found when she and a friend who was her last joy killed themselves together. She narrates the tragic fortress of alcoholism that led to her friend’s death when God came in the form of welcome and a cup of tea at an AA meeting.

She concludes with coming back to hope. No sweetness and sentimentality. We confront the terribleness of things, and yet glimpse the wonders of the world, the hush of a forest, and still have the sense that in the end, it will be well.

Lamott has this uncanny ability to puncture our pretensions and our certainties without leaving us bereft. In this context, of finding hope in the face of apocalypse, it comes down to the idea that there is always something beyond bad, that the story doesn’t end that way. Whatever we ground that in–God or intuition–it’s probably the best we have to hang onto in these days.