Book Review — Page 5

TSP Book Club: Scared of the Dark

June 28, 2012 By Diana

She wanted to play hide and seek.

In the dark.

This child of the light,

who loves to stride and run her way through life,

she wanted to go into the closet,

turn out the light

and, ‘shhh…be quiet,’

and hide from her beloved Poppy.

So I picked her up, held her close and shut the closet door.

She turned out the light and urged me to go further in.

Very carefully –

because it was dark in there! –

I backed us up into the furthest corner,

and waited.

“I can’t see you, Nana,” she whispered.

“I know. I can’t see you, either.”

She wrapped her arms around me a little bit more

tightly, touching her cheek close to mine.

“Your glasses seem scary in the dark, Nana.”

“I’m sorry, honey. Can you feel them?

They’re just my regular old glasses.

Nothing to be scared of.”

“They look scary,” and her voice quavered just a little.

But here is what she did:

as she got more frightened,

she clung to me ever more tightly.

More kisses,

more strokes,

more nestling.

We had failed to let Poppy in on the game,

so he never did come find us.

We turned on the light,

opened the door,

and went back to our usual Wednesday happiness –

tea party, books, lunch, nap.

Later that day, as I thought about that

sweet moment in the darkness,

I think I finally began to understand something

of what Julia Cameron has been trying to teach us

over at the TweetSpeak Poetry Book Club.

For the last six weeks, we’ve been exploring,

“The Artist’s Way:

A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.”

And I’ve been fighting it hard,

regularly resisting the Morning Pages,

generally keeping myself on the edge of things,

watching curiously while others test these waters.

It feels like the dark to me, you see.

Reaching into the muck that is too often my mind

(especially in the morning),

feels strange; it feels scary.

Yet I find myself resonating with much of what Julia says,

nodding at the need for self-care,

agreeing with her call

to creating space for creativity in my life.

I particularly like this sentence

from our concluding week’s assignment:

“Creativity is a spiritual practice.” (pg. 182)

I believe this with my whole heart.

I have encouraged creativity,

in my kids,

in my home,

in my church,

in my ministry life.

Why, then, am I frightened by this ‘artist’s way?’

Maybe because even familiar things can take on

strange forms and shadows

when we’re operating in the dark.

Maybe because I’m not sure what I’ll find if

I hang out in that dark for very long.

Maybe because I’ll discover a big

audacious dream in the middle of the muck,

and I’m not sure I can handle that.

Maybe because I’ve forgotten to cling to what I do know,

to cling to Whom I know,

and to trust that who I am –

even in the dark –

is held,

safe,

loved.

A little more nestling may be required.

Joining with Lyla and the gang over at TweetSpeak, with Emily for her last-for-the-summer Imperfect Prose, with Jennifer at God-Bumps and Ann’s Wednesday group:

Filed Under: Book Club, Book Review, personal journey, Wonderings in the World

True Confessions: The TSP Book Club

May 30, 2012 By Diana

Okay, it’s time for the weekly check-in.

We’re reading Julia Cameron’s, “The Artist’s Way”

over at TweetSpeak Poetry,

under the fearless leadership of Lyla Lindquist.

If you read last week’s initial response to this book,

then you already know that I am

a Rebellious Resistor

to this methodology.

Which, I am told – as I read further this week –

is actually to be expected as one tries to

free one’s inner artist.

So much for originality.

I am still resisting the Morning Pages part of this experience,

or as I referred to them last week, ‘the dang pages.’

I believe I did them exactly once.

However,

I am totally embracing the Artist’s Date concept.

I think you might even say I’ve gone a bit overboard

in that department.

The floral pictures in this post were taken during the second

(or was it the third?) daytime treat experience of

the week just past. They were taken at a local garden,

a wondrous place called “Seaside Gardens,”

where our kids had given their dad a gift certificate for his birthday.

Oh my, did that light my inner creative fires!

(Or course, I had to break the rules a little –

I didn’t go alone.)

I did, however, take myself out to eat at a favorite restaurant,

with my book in hand.

AND I squeezed in a visit to a grandson’s kindergarten

play, where he played the role of:

The Big Bad Wolf

The Three Piggy Opera.

(here he is rubbing his hands together gleefully while

singing, “I wanna big, fat pig to eat…”)

The scary thing for me in all this is –

I am beginning to see a pattern.

A life-long pattern.

And it’s nowhere near as pretty as the one

that showed up in this Norfolk Pine at the Seaside Gardens.

No, it’s not pretty. At.All.

I’m beginning to see this thread,

a twisty, unattractive thread

that weaves through a lot of my life.

And it goes like this:

First,

I get scared of something or someone

who threatens me in some way.

Or…I get tired/frustrated/overwhelmed

by expectations – mine and/or others.

Step Two?

I get angry inside.

Pitiful, really.

Sort of carpy, cranky, testy,

defensive, self-righteous,

judgmental.

You get the picture.

Not a lovely one, is it?

And thirdly? I try to hide what I’m feeling

or what I’m frightened about.

And you want to know how I’ve done that for most of my life?

By eating too much.

By covering myself in layers of insulation.

By hiding all the fear and all the anger

beneath a protective covering.

(Did you notice that I went out to eat for my Artist’s Date?

And that my grandson was singing about eating??

I jest…but only a little.)

I’ve had some success in the last year or two with

shedding pieces of that covering.

But I gotta say,

this book is bringing out the worst in me.

How childish is that??

I mean, really.

What have I got to be angry or defensive about?

She asked us to make a list of favorite things we like to do

and then to write down when we did them last.

And almost all of them I’ve done in the last week,

3 or 4 of them as I was making the list!

And my ‘Life Pie,’ which one of our chapters this week

asked us to draw?

Aside from confirming the fact

that I cannot draw a pie to save my life,
my six areas are in pretty decent balance.

And the list of 10 small changes we’d like to make

in our lives?

Perhaps this says it all:

Item number 10 on my list?

“I would like to wring Julia’s neck.”

I wish I could report that I’m making great progress,

leaps and bounds kind of progress,

in letting go of this resistance.

But as you can see,

I’m not leaping and bounding anywhere,

except perhaps straight into the Slough of Despond.

One tiny ray of light, of hope this week?

I did enjoy writing down 5 childhood characteristics

that I like about myself.

I share this with you very hesitantly, however,

as it probably tells you more about me

than I really want you to know.

But here they are:

1. Inquisitive

2. Bossy

(bossy? who puts bossy on their list?)

3. Responsible

4. Lighthearted

5. A voracious reader

Truly, dear reader, do you think there is any hope for me?

Joining once again with the gang over at Tweetspeak, hoping they will not give up on me just yet.
You can check out the other posts in this collection by going here:

Filed Under: Book Club, Book Review, personal journey, Wonderings in the World

Resistance & Rebellion – Living with My Inner Artist

May 25, 2012 By Diana

She went with us to the Caribbean,

in all her multiple-quotation,

list-of-affirmations,

call-to-creativity glory.

And I dutifully read all of the introductory

material and chapter one,

learning about such things as

the brains we all juggle

(Logic/Artist);

the principles of creativity

and why we need to live by them;

the powerful voice of the Inner Censor.

And most appropriately,

I learned about the Creative Block.

Why appropriate, you ask?

Because at the end of it all,

I found myself in the middle of

a big, fat, nasty one,

that’s why.

I was on vacation.

And Julia asked me to commit to

WORK.

Morning pages,

an Artist’s Date,

Weekly Check-Ins,

a timeline look back at my life,

in search of Monsters who might

have stifled my budding artistic genius.

But here’s something you may not know about me:

I am, at heart, a Rebel.

I know, I know.

I don’t look like a rebel at all.

I am a ‘good girl’

(if people of my age are allowed

to refer to themselves as ‘girls’).

I’m a pastor, for pete’s sake.

I’m older.

I dress conservatively

(except for the occasional wild and crazy color

and a whole lotta jewelry).

I take care of others.

Yes, I do a whole of that last one.

I take care of others.

I read the Bible and I do so

because I believe that I meet God there.

I am a centrist theologically.

I am a centrist in most things.

But.

I resist following the rules.

I resent being told how to do things.

I don’t tolerate what I perceive to be ‘fluff’ too well.

My eyes tend to glaze over when

I read the words ‘affirmation’

or ‘ creative recovery.’

Imagine my response, then, to this volume.

Oh, I’ve underlined it aplenty,

I’ve even got stars and creased corners on

lots and lots of pages.

I actually liked a lot of what I read,

agreed with it, too.

Until I got to the part where I had to do something about it.

Yeah, that’s when the Rebel showed up.

Don’t know if she’s related to the Inner Censor,

but I have a hunch they’re kissin’ cousins.

Because once I started reading about what I

needed to do to release my Inner Artist –

I started to push back, HARD.

First of all, I don’t do longhand anymore.

Never was good at it

(yes, that’s the voice of the Inner Censor –

but it’s also the voice of reality),

I hate doing it and can’t really read what I write anymore.

(Of course, we’re not supposed to read this stuff.

We’re just supposed to write it.)

And I’m not a morning person.

AT ALL.

And in my dotage,

I indulge my non-morning-ness whenever I can.

So the two times I actually did write the dang pages,

it was well into mid-day.

The Artist’s Date?

Now, that’s something I can wrap my mind around.

In fact, it’s something I actually already do,

although I’ve never called it that.

I seek solitude, often at the beach or a favorite restaurant,

and I look for beauty wherever I go.

That one was a cinch.

The timeline I got to today.

And here’s what I discovered –

the biggest Monster in my story is…

ME.

Yup. I get in my own way more than anyone else ever has.

Sure, my mom (and my dad) had hopelessly high

expectations for me when I was a child.

They were both artists in their own way

and my small muscle development was lousy

(remember what I said about handwriting earlier?).

So I just quit trying to do anything with my hands.

And I quite trying very, very early.

I couldn’t play piano like my dad or my brother.

I couldn’t draw or create beauty like my mother,

so I didn’t do it.

Ever.

Until I went to college and no longer felt the weight of my parents’ abilities pressing in on me every single day.

And when I began to venture out a little here,

a little there, it turned out I could do some things

acceptably well.

Not great, but okay.

But the real, true chicken-heart was inside me,

not my parents, not my teachers, not my friends,

not my employers.

Me.

So.

Now I’m facing this HUGE block.

No ideas.

No desire.

No sense of call.

No sense of giftedness.

Nada.

Zilch.

Think maybe I’m just the teensiest bit resistant?

The Rebellious Resistor.

Pretty much my middle name.

Sigh.

Joining with Lyla and the gang over at Tweetspeak Poetry for the interactive posting about Julia Cameron’s classic book, “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.” As you can tell, I have a lot of inner work to do. Oy vey. Lord, have mercy.

Filed Under: Book Review, community, personal journey, Wonderings in the World, Writing

Beauty in the Backyard

May 11, 2012 By Diana

All my life, I’ve been a reader – I.love.books – all kinds of books. And some of them have been formational for me, sometimes in ways I didn’t fully recognize at the time I initially read them.

Today, I’m talking about one of those books – over at Sheila Seiler Lagrand’s place.

This one I read almost 50 years ago – can you imagine?

And I just downloaded it to my Kindle and read it again.

Come on over and find out why it was such a key piece of my own story.

Sheila is a most gracious hostess and I’m sure you’ll find lots of other interesting stuff to read while you’re there. You can find her by clicking here.

Filed Under: Book Review, Guest Post, Spiritual Formation

When to Write…

May 2, 2012 By Diana

As a matter of principle, I seem to be late a lot. And I am very late in joining Lyla over at TweetSpeak Poetry for their book club reading of L.L. Barkat’s wonderful small volume on the craft of writing and the life of the writer. It’s called “Rumors of Water,”and I cannot encourage you strongly enough to read this one through. Mark it up, read it again, live with it a while – if you ever have occasion to write anything at all, ever, her words are wise and truly helpful. This is the last week and it’s on the last two sections of the book: “Glitches” and “Time.”

I am wrestling today with this whole idea of time.

When is it time to tell certain stories?

When is it too early?

Or too late?

How do we know when the time is now?

I’ve had this blog for a number of years.

It was initially an assignment,

a strong request from my boss,

who had a blog himself and

he wanted others on the church staff to have one, too.

I’ve loved to write ever since I can remember.

I’ve had teachers encourage me to do more of it.

I’ve even had a ‘call’ to do it,

an almost audible voice asking me to

‘write my life down,’ primarily for my then newly-born elder granddaughter.

She is six years old now.

And I still haven’t done it.

I’ve made a stab at it here and there.

I’ve written some of the stories.

But about five years ago, I came up against this extremely painful reality:

parts of my story may be mine,

but they impinge on the lives

and feelings

and experiences of others.

So maybe they’re not my stories to write after all?

Let me explain a bit more about what I mean.

In the right hand column is a list of the archives of this blog. You’ll note that I wrote about 20 times the first year – 2006. And about 10 times the next year.

And not at all in 2008.

Not one post.

From summer 2007 until sometime in 2009,

I stayed away from here,

badly burned by a most difficult experience:

I wrote a story before its time.

It was a difficult post to write because I had just spent a pretty rough week watching someone I loved suffer terribly.

I wrote, without names, about that experience.

About how watching others suffer,

wondering, “How long, O Lord, how long?” – about how

that is a particular kind of pain straight from the bowels of hell itself.

My boss was thrilled with the post.

He thought it was powerful,

evocative,

true and necessary.

However, someone else who was close to the situation

was deeply wounded by what I wrote.

And you know what?

That wounding far outweighed my boss’s appreciation.

FAR outweighed it, if there are some kind of

cosmic books being kept of such things.

That post was ‘live’ for a total of about 12 hours,

and then it was sent into cyber limbo,

never to be seen again.

But the repercussions from it reverberate

right into the present day.

So I am left wondering.

When can this part of my story be told?

Never?

Maybe so.

And that’s a hard reality to look at.

I am hoping Ms. Barkat is right.

“There is no hurry.

The things we cannot write about today,

we will surely find we can write about tomorrow.”

Perhaps time will tell.

A patient reader of this blog will also notice

that from 2008-2010,

almost all posts were strictly work-related –

prayers and sermons I had written for corporate worship.

It was not until I retired at the end of 2010

that I began doing

regular, reflective writing once again.

And I do it very, very gingerly still.

The last thing I want my writing to do

is to further complicate or make painful the lives of others – so I’m learning

(very slowly) to dive beneath the surface,

to put some of my observations about life

and death

and family

and faith

out here in print.

I’m not sure I know the answer to the questions

I’ve raised,

but I’m trying to do what L.L. suggests:

“Trust the process and move on.”

Filed Under: Book Review, Writing

Synchronicity: The THC Book Club

February 10, 2012 By Diana

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the Book Club selection this time around – David Brooks’, “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.”

Yeah, I like it a lot.

But writing about what I’m reading? Not so much. No, not so much. It’s a tad overwhelming, that’s what it is. It’s a whole lot of factual information coming from the worlds of neuro-science, anthropology, sociology, psychology and a whole bunch of other ‘ologies,’ and there are times when it feels like I’m trying to drink from a fire hose. So, I missed last week’s go-round. And I almost missed this week’s, too. It’s called procrastination and it’s my middle name. So far, there hasn’t been a study to explain why some of us do this so very well, but there really should be. Sometimes it feels like a real, textbook disease!

So to make up for this lapse in my notoriously short-circuiting attention span, I am going to attempt the impossible tonight: I’m going to write about SIX chapters instead of the usual weekly three. How’s that for crazy??

Using his central characters Harold and Erica to help illustrate the information he has gathered, Brooks looks at the following topics over the course of these 100 pages: Intelligence (which includes other factors besides IQ), Choice Architecture (basically, a chapter on marketing psychology), Freedom & Commitment (a brief glimpse into how we grow our most intimate relationships), Limerance (where the kind of happiness that results from ‘falling in love’ leads to a repeating rhythm of ‘difficulty to harmony’ rather than any kind of a ‘golden mean’), The Grand Narrative (how the basic human tendency toward overconfidence can lead to the spectacular failure of a system or a business), and Métis (a French word meaning a ‘mental map,’ which allows a person to ‘know,’ both rationally and intuitively, how to proceed in any given situation.)

As I read through these chapters, I found myself becoming increasingly excited to discover that so much of what Brooks’ research has led him to conclude is in remarkable synch with a whole lot of other reading I’ve been doing in the last few years. Specifically, I am finding a lot of synchronicity with the work I am doing both to learn about and to practice the discipline and art of Spiritual Direction. So much of what I’ve learned – and am also beginning to experience – of spirituality in the 2nd half of life is centered around the interaction between our conscious and unconscious selves. Growing deeper spiritually necessarily involves letting go of a lot of ideas and behaviors learned in the first half of life. Richard Rohr, Gerald May, Margaret Guenther, Basil Pennington, Thomas Keating, my own spiritual director and his teaching team at the Charismatic School for Spiritual Direction where I am enrolled – all of them talk, write and teach about the search for wholeness, the integration of the self, the fine-tuning of our spiritual eyes and ears to catch glimpses of the work that is going on underneath the surface.

And woven all the way through these chapters – peaking with the last one – I found many of the same ideas. The terminology used is much more academic (Level 1 and Level 2 thinking, British vs. French Enlightenment, Epistemological Modesty), but the resonance is there. These two quotes could have come directly from some of my other reading, without missing a beat:

“Our hypothesis leads us to the radical suggestion that the critical difference between the thinking of humans and of lower animals lies not in the existence of consciousness but in the capacity for complex processes outside of it.”

“Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Epistemological modesty is the knowledge of how little we know and can know. Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life…built on the awareness that we don’t know ourselves. Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review. We are our own deepest mystery…And yet this humble attitude doesn’t necessarily produce passivity. Epistemological modesty is a disposition for action. The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance…that there is no one method of solving problems…most of what [we] know accumulates through a long and arduous process of wandering…the wanderer endures uncertainty…possessing what John Keats called negative capability, the ability to be in ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'” quotes taken from pages 245-248

Learning to balance these different kinds of knowing – the knowing that comes from fine-tuning our conscious mind’s ability to use logic and rationality AND the knowing that lies submerged at the level of the unconscious, things we don’t even know that we know – this is where I believe the work of the Holy Spirit is most powerfully revealed. And this is what each of these chapters, in its own unique way, underscores by means of research data engagingly presented.

Please understand that this is most definitely NOT a book about human spirituality. Brooks is writing for the popular, mainstream culture; he is not writing about the work of the Holy Spirit. But what I see as I read is heavily influenced by what I am learning elsewhere, by what I have experienced through my own integrative process. (Which is, by the way, far from complete.) As a person who has wandered many years now, who has learned to be more and more at peace with the many uncertainties of this life and to relish a good mystery on occasion, I found these chapters affirming, encouraging and captivating. I don’t know where he’s going with these characters of his (they seem to have gotten shoved to the background behind all the data in these pages), but I am looking forward to seeing how it all ends up, that’s for sure. And for me, that is a sure sign of a ‘good read.’

Please hop on over to The High Calling and check out our leader, Laura Boggess’s take on the book thus far.

The High Calling is one of the finest websites out there for thinking Christians. Check out their other resources while you’re over there.

Filed Under: Book Review, Wonderings in the World

When Life is a Struggle: The THC Book Club

January 29, 2012 By Diana

(The book we are studying, in case you are joining in after the first two installments – which can be found on my blog here for the first segment, covering the introduction and the first 3 chapters, and here, for chapters 4-6, is David Brooks’ book, The Social Animal: the Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. The prime point of discussion begins with the wonderful writing and observations of Laura Boggess over at The High Calling. This was a birthday week for me, so I am very late in contributing to the discussion and, as a disclaimer, I must admit that I have not yet read any of the other blogs, including lovely Laura’s. That shall be remedied anon, I promise!)

My parents, on their wedding day and many years later.

Their story shares some slight – accent on the word slight! – similarities to that of Erica and Harold’s.*

At last, we meet Erica. The other half of this fascinating and complicated story about the forces that form us into who we are. And I, for one, am delighted to make her acquaintance. Erica comes from a very differently storied environment than does Harold, and reading about how her life unfolds is both startling and intriguing.

These three chapters about her are titled, “Norms,” “Self-Control,” and “Culture,” and they are rich with interesting, and sometimes controversial, information. Erica, you see, comes from what most people would call a highly dysfunctional family system, fathered by a mostly-absent Hispanic father, mothered (occasionally, between bouts with mental illness) by a Chinese-American mother. She and her mother cycle in and out of both poverty-stricken and working class neighborhoods, setting Erica up for what might seem to be a pre-determined future of struggle and failure.

But Brooks chooses to take a different route: he describes how Erica, through the intervention of a counter-cultural high school environment and the loving, though flawed, attention of both of her large, extended families, is able to succeed in ways far beyond most indicators and projected outcomes.

Most intriguing to me in the first of these three chapters were the discussions about “emergent systems” and “Gloomy Prospect” thinking and behavior, the latter often a byproduct of the former. Like our brains, our marriages, our cultures, poverty is an emergent system because the causes and contributors it are many and varied. Trying to pull one causal element out of the mix for some kind of ‘fixing’ is nearly impossible and just about always doomed to failure.

Instead, new thinking is required; the transformation of personalities and experiences by immersion in a completely different system. That system for Erica is the Academy high school she brazenly pushes her way into. Reading about how this system worked its ‘magic’ through their diverse and wholistic approach – offering counseling, medical care, new thinking, long hours, high demand and one-on-one interaction with teachers and coaches – was truly eye-opening. As I read about how and why the founders of this particular school succeeded in changing the ethos of their students, thus dramatically improving their chances for breaking free of the inter-generational cycle of poverty in which they were trapped – I found myself reflecting on my own recent professional past. This story underscored for me the importance of presenting the whole gospel to the cultures within which we live and work. The work of the church should never be restricted to gathering conversion-notches on our belts. Instead, we need to be practicing love and living gospel truth by reaching out to people in all areas of their lives, by seeing people as whole persons.

The themes that emerged from the next two chapters also resonated with a lot of what I have been learning and practicing in my own spiritual journey over the last fifteen to twenty years. These are the ideas (and the reflections they invited) that spoke most clearly to me:

1.) the power of anxiety to change the very structure of our brains (perhaps this is why, “Fear not!” is one of the most frequent imperatives in scripture?)

2.) the remarkable interplay between our conscious and unconscious selves

(we are integrated creatures and God meets us in every part of who we are)

3.) the use of the imagination in helping us to learn healthy habits (the value of dreams, imagined outcomes, hopes)

4. Self-control can be nurtured and strengthened by a whole series of small choices that center on the task at hand

(removing the egotistic self from the center of life)

5.) the primary power of how we see things in the decision making process

(“those with eyes to see…”)

6.) the tremendous impact of the community in which we live on the formation of our individual character

(how much of the story of scripture is centered around this whole idea? the chosen people in the OT, the church in the NT?)

7.) the import of paying attention in developing strong character (almost all contemplative spirituality begins with this truth)

8.) the influence of practice and repetition on the development of talents/skills

(the role of things like scripture memory and regular habits of prayer and study in the spiritual formation process)

9.) the force of positive self-interpretation in determining outcomes

(learning to see ourselves as loved and valued – by God and others – is crucial to growing in faith)

10.) the uniquely human ability and predisposition to teach, to hand on culture, to build “scaffolds that guide future thought.”

(the call in Deuteronomy 6 to teach our children, the entire rabbinic structure into which Jesus moved so readily and his call to us to teach what we have learned)

The least successful part of Brooks’ presentation came near the end of Chapter 9, Culture. He cites the work of Thomas Sowell who argues that cultures are not only intrinsically different, but also differently successful. For me, this argument only holds if we insist on a western view of ‘success.’ Having lived for 2 years in an African nation where none of our markers for success (upward mobility, salary, status) are valued, I had to fight the urge to feel superior to a people whose values were very different from those with which I was most familiar. The people of the southern province of Zambia value community, connection, paying attention to the intricacies of conversation, and are deeply committed to tradition. I would not choose to live there forever nor to absorb their cultural values. But I do hesitate to say that mine are better just because they’re mine. Some of this rang true to me, but a lot of it was troubling. It cuts to the heart of some of the difficulties of the modern missionary movement – where western culture was imported along with the gospel. Thankfully, that has changed a lot over the last 40 years!

By the end of her college career, after eight years of observation and learning in both high school and college, Erica distilled everything into these three life maxims: 1.) Think in networks; (we are all embedded in multiple ones) 2.) Be the glue; (always work in an environment of high trust and do all you can to be a conduit of it.) (3.) Be an Idea-Space Integrator. (standing at the junction of two ideas can be a place for success and connection – fill any existing gaps in information and/or in trust.)

I look forward to learning how Erica implements these maxims in her future life, both professionally and personally. Seeing how this young woman with seemingly few prospects grew into a determined, self-controlled, committed young adult was fascinating. Surely, sparks of all kinds will fly when she and Harold connect!

*The differences between the home ‘cultures’ of my parents were not nearly as dramatic as those of Harold and Erica. But…my father was raised by southerners committed to education, had two parents with middle-class jobs (accountant and school teacher, when she worked before she had children), was catered to, showcased and favored by his mother (to the extent that it made him physically sick for one entire school year), was successful academically and musically. My mother was raised by Canadians from the working class (father a binge alcoholic jack-of-all-trades {butcher/gardener} and a mother in retail sales who didn’t spend much time at home). Education was not a value in her home, although she did attend college for two years – until the money ran out. The counter-culture for my mom was the church her parents dropped her off at each week – it’s where her gifts were affirmed, her primary friendships were formed (many of them lasting 50 years or more) and where she met my dad. The two of them filled the gaps for one another and together, they worked hard to create a happy and healthy home life for me and my brothers. I’m curious to see what Erica and Harold do with their own family, if they have one.

Filed Under: Book Review, Wonderings in the Word, Wonderings in the World

What Makes a Student? The THC Book Club

January 21, 2012 By Diana

Two views of the one room schoolhouse on the LBJ Ranch near Fredricksburg, Texas

At the tender age of 15, I entered the classroom of Arthur Bottaro with fear and trembling. He was short, imposing, intense, demanding and highly intelligent. Mr. Bottaro taught 11th grade Honors English at Glendale High School, and he was perhaps the single most important teacher in my life.

In his class, we were expected to write weekly book reviews and essays and we were to type them on ditto paper. Please remember that I went to high school in the dark ages, before either Xerox or mimeograph machines. I went to school in the era of carbon paper – and dittos. A ditto master consisted of two parts – a front sheet of specially coated typing paper and a back sheet, laden with purple ink. The letters typed on the top sheet would pick up the ink from the back sheet and then the type-covered master would be attached to a drum that was hand-cranked to produce copies from its inked back side.

And why did we have to reproduce our work? Because copies of each and every written assignment were made and distributed to every member of the class. Then we proceeded to rip each others’ work to pieces, under the studious, challenging glare of our highly dramatic and talented teacher. I was scared to death about 90% of the time – but that year-long experience is the crucible in which I learned to write clearly, succinctly, honestly and reasonably well.

I thought a lot about Mr. B as I read chapters 3-6 of David Brooks’ fascinating book, “The Social Animal,” the most recent selection of the Book Club at The High Calling website. This week’s assignment takes us through the development of our lead character, Harold, by looking at how the human brain grows, changes and expands from infancy through high school.

From the amazingly high rate of synapses formed during the first three years of life (called synaptogenesis):

“If you want to get a sense of the number of potential connections between the cells in Harold’s brain, contemplate this: a mere 60 neurons are capable of making 10(to the 81st power) possible connections with each other. (That’s 1 with 81 zeroes after it.) The number of particles in the known universe is about one-tenth of this number.”

to the entirely unique pattern those synapses take in each one of our brains, and how repetition forms our “neural networks,” which:

“…embody our experiences and in turn guide future action. They contain the unique way each of us carries himself in the world, the way we walk, talk, and react. They are the grooves down which our behavior flows. A brain is a record of a life. The networks of neural connections are the physical manifestation of your habits, personality, and predilections. You are the spiritual entity that emerges out of the material networks in your head.”

Just as the ancient Hebrews believed, we are creatures who are all of a piece – head/heart/body/mind/spirit. And though Brooks, in his introduction, indicated that he would not be delving into the spiritual arena in this volume, he does not seem to be able to help himself. We are connected – to the various parts of ourselves – and to each other.

As I hoped he might, Brooks does look at how story-telling is an important part of intellectual and emotional development, noting that many of the stories we imagine in childhood carry over into adulthood, at least in terms of their tone, and in the way we think about life. An interesting contrast was made between ‘paradigmatic thinking,’ (which is “structured by logic and analysis”) and ‘mythic mode,’ (which contains “another dimension…the dimension of good and evil, sacred and profane. This mythic mode helps people not only tell a story, but make sense of the emotions and moral sensations aroused by the story.”) This distinction just may help me understand why my brother and I see the world so differently!

The sections in chapter 5 on parenting were deeply encouraging, underlining that good parenting does not require a graduate degree in psychology but rather depends on connections established early in life and continued at each stage of development. And it depends upon our modeling both resilience and problem-solving. The hackneyed phrase about giving our children both ‘roots and wings’ seems to have been proven in the social laboratories of our finest universities.

And the last few pages of that chapter reminded us with a powerful, storied example of how ‘fearfully and wonderfully’ we are made, with layer after layer of complexity that we cannot often see, much less navigate with success. “This is why,” Brooks writes, “all biographies are inadequate; they can never capture the inner currents.”

But it was in Chapter 6, where we are invited into Harold’s high school experience, that we delve most deeply into the powerful impact a courageous and dedicated teacher can have on adolescents. From his analysis of cliques and the intricacy of the socialization process, Brooks underscores the primacy of reading social cues correctly. Our hero possesses supreme skills in the social arena. But in the classroom? He is lost at sea.

Until he encounters Ms. Taylor, a teacher with powerful insights into how the adolescent brain is structured. She also possesses a grand idea for matching students with their particular passion for learning. And here is where Mr. Brooks’ writing and research began to resonate with me at a very deep level.

“Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered. She didn’t so much teach them as apprentice them…She forced them to make mistakes. The pain of getting things wrong and the effort required to overcome error creates an emotional experience that helps burn things into the mind. She tried to get students to interrogate their own unconscious opinions…She also forced them to work…She pushed. She was willing to be hated. Ms. Taylor’s goal was to turn her students into autodidacts. She hoped to give her students a taste of the emotional and sensual pleasure discovery brings – the jolt of pleasure you get when you work hard, suffer a bit, and then something clicks. She hoped her students would become addicted to this process. They would become, thanks to her, self-teachers for the rest of their days.”

And this, of course, is the place where I wrote Mr. B’s name in the margin of my book. For in addition to a long list of books, we also talked about ideas; we particularly talked about how ideas IN books can change the world. We acted out scenes from Shakespeare and Wilder; we enjoyed earnest discussions about controversial reading material; we learned to take a book apart, by theme/characters/plot and then to put it back together again. We were encouraged, even demanded “to think on paper,” as he used to say. Mr. B. was largely responsible for any academic success I enjoyed at UCLA and many years later, at Fuller Theological Seminary. Because Mr. B. gave me permission – and provided the expertise – to read anything and everything on multiple levels at once: analytically, emotionally, intellectually and experientially. And then he taught me how to write about it with clarity and occasionally, on a really good day, to write about it with grace.

He died of a heart attack, very suddenly, about a dozen years after I graduated, when he was about 17 years younger than I am now. And I never went back to say ‘thank-you.’ So tonight I will say it:

“Thank you, Mr. B., for your careful attention to each one of us and your unique teaching style with all of us together. Teachers like you are a gift to the world and I am forever grateful that you were a teacher of mine.”

Filed Under: Book Review, Wonderings in the World

David Brooks on What Makes Us Human: The THC Book Club

January 14, 2012 By Diana

She’s sleepy, and fighting it – hard.

I take her back to the bedroom and open the computer,

dialing up iPhoto so that she can look at ‘pichures, pichures.’

As she looks, and identifies each person she knows,
her hands begin to snake their way up my sleeve.

This is a favorite sleep aid – the touch of human skin,
the skin of those who love and care for her.

It’s a repetitive behavior pattern that we’ve wondered about a little,
as parents and grandparents sometimes do.

Now, thanks to some fascinating input
from the latest book selection at the Book Club over at The High Calling,
I have a little more insight into why this works so well.

She has discovered a primary source of self-soothing, has our active, charming, I-won’t-sleep-unless-you-absolutely-force-me-to granddaughter.

And then there was touch…As Harry Harlow’s famous monkey experiments suggest, babies will forgo food in exchange for skin…They’ll do it because physical contact is just as important as nourishment for their neural growth and survival…Human skin has two types of receptors. One type transmits information…[about]…objects. But the other type activates the social parts of the brain. It’s a form of body-to-body communication that sets off hormonal and chemical cascades, lowering blood pressure and delivering a sense of transcendent well-being. pg. 33

Smart girl, our soon-to-be-two Lilly.

Rife with tidbits like this, David Brooks’ new book, “The Social Animal,” is a fascinating, often hilarious, always insightful collection of a lot of different scientific information gathered together in an engaging story-telling format.

Brooks takes the results of research – from biology, neuro-science, psychology, anthropology – and skillfully weaves it together in and around the history of a fictional family. What I am discovering is that the data is ‘sticking’ with me far better in this format than it would in a scholarly article.
My particular brain seems wired for story.
And I’m guessing we just might find some evidence for that in the data that is still to come in Brooks’ collection.

The introduction and first three chapters are filled with the basics of human partnering, relationship-building, baby-making, and knowledge gathering. (There are only a couple of pages dedicated to the actual physical act responsible for babies; there is much more emphasis on developmental issues, all of which are intriguing and often bring an ‘aha!’ moment of recognition).

What has been most interesting to me thus far is the number of parallels between what hard science is discovering in laboratories and guided studies and what early psychologists – most especially Carl Jung – discovered early in the 20th century by doing lots and lots of talk therapy. These words from page 32 sound an awful lot like what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious:’

The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice. But it is all information, and it all flows from the dead through us and to the unborn. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and its many currents and tributaries, and it exists as a creature of that river the way a trout exists in a stream. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

At the end of this week’s assignment, a lovely, and by far, the most poignant small piece of story-telling in this volume, came from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
So sweetly, these words served to underscore that ‘aha!’ moment I’d had earlier about our Lilly and her need to be skin-to-skin.

Coleridge’s three-year-old son once woke in the night,
begging his mama to come in and touch him.
Perplexed, his mother wondered why.
“I’m not here,” the boy cried.
“Touch me, Mother, so that I may be here.“

You are here, sweet Lilly.
You are most definitely here.
Thanks be to our good God for that wondrous truth.

Filed Under: Book Review, family, Wonderings in the World

The Power of a Good Romance

January 2, 2012 By Diana

A good story well-told is a powerful thing. Story can bypass the regular channels of intellect and observation, cutting to the chase of emotional and spiritual connection; it can provide beauty, relief, even epiphany. Because story, like all good art, can touch the soul as well as engage the mind. Story can speak of things eternal – like hope and joy and love. And the best story-telling can do all of that in and through the nitty-gritty of real life, never ignoring or denying the pain, suffering, failure and struggle that mark our days on planet earth.

I began to understand these truths most deeply while our son-in-law was in the midst of an extremely difficult journey that led to his death three years ago. Watching him suffer, and watching our daughter and their three sons share in that pain, there were days when I simply could not imagine how life could ever again be good and rich. And on those days, I turned to story to help me – to remember that suffering is not all there is, that death does not have the final answer, that the power of Love is stronger than anything else in this life.

And the story-telling that spoke most clearly into that time of darkness was romance. Good romance, not dimestore fantasy. I read and/or watched everything that Jane Austen ever wrote and the BBC ever produced from that writing. I lost myself for a few minutes or a few hours; I let the harsher realities of life sit in the background for a little while. And I allowed myself to enter into those stories of trial and error, of personalities rubbing against each other in misunderstanding and false expectation. And most especially, I celebrated the resolution that always came at the end, when clarity and sanity were recovered and Mr. Darcy or Edward Ferrar or Mr. Knightley spoke their hearts and found reward as Elizabeth Bennett and Elinor Dashwood and Emma Woodhouse happily said, ‘Yes.’

Now I add Michael Kent to the list. And Sarah Hughes. “The Dancing Priest,” by Glynn Young, is a romance for today, a tale very well-told indeed, and a beautifully wrought reminder that, “God is not dead nor doth he sleep.” I suppose this story is to be categorized as ‘Christian fiction.’ But for me, this book far out-classes most of what I’ve read in that genre. (Admittedly, my sample is small.) It does have specific references to conversion (for this is a love story on multiple levels) and uses some of the lingo of the evangelical world here and there. But basically, this is a rousing good romance, period. A great read for just about anyone, Christian or not. A great story that is told through characters who are complex and interesting, and settings that vary widely. The lead players are each loaded with back-story and fascinating friends and family, all of whom add depth without distraction.

I had the wonderful experience of reading this story aloud as my husband and I took long car trips over the last few weeks. We were both hooked immediately and looked forward to turning on the Kindle whenever we set the cruise control. If I had to guess, I’d say that at least a dozen times, I had to stop reading for a moment to control tears. The story is that gripping, that real.

And here’s my armchair analysis of why that happened: this story, this romance, is a brilliant reflection of the Great Love Story that centers our universe, our life. For that’s what the Christian faith surely is – the greatest love story ever told. And those of us who follow after Jesus find ourselves – even in the middle of our messiness or our pain – we find ourselves caught in the grip of a rousing good romance: the God of the Universe, the One who took the downward journey to Bethlehem, who walks with us through the good and the bad, the beautiful and the messed-up – that God of very God waits for each of us to say, ‘Yes.’

“The Dancing Priest,” captures the imagination and the heart; it tells a beautiful, complex story that is just plain fun to read. At the same time, this very particular story mirrors for us The Story that claims and centers us as human persons. We who are created in the image of God, who are called into relationship, who are wooed and won, restored and rescued by the lover of our souls. Read it – I promise you, this romance will grab you and not let go.

Picture legend:
Top: The California coastline, just north of Julia Pfeiffer State Park on Highway One, surely one of the most romantic views in the entire world.