Crossing the waters with Leslie Leyland Fields

"I was not a fisherman when Jesus first found me, but this life on these shores has bent me low and strong."

–Leslie Leyland Fields, in Crossing the Waters

The latest book from Leslie Leyland Fields, Crossing the Waters, is her tenth. For those of you who don't know Leslie, she is a masterful writer, a woman of profound faith, a speaker and teacher, a mother of six, and an Alaskan fisherman. Yes, an Alaskan fisherman. She was also on the original faculty of Seattle Pacific University's MFA program and was my creative nonfiction mentor during my first year of the program. I've written other posts about her and her books here, here, and here.

Although Crossing the Waters is her latest book, it interestingly returns to the place of her first few books, including the memoir, Surviving the Island of Grace. The book is grounded in the family island that they return to every summer to fish Alaskan waters as a commercial fishing crew. This is not a situation where they direct the efforts of an "other" hired team. This is a situation instead where they operate the skiffs, lay out and pull in the nets, navigate the waves, feel the challenge and the exhaustion – and fear. In this book she writes about one recent summer on the fishing island. It's a life I can only imagine.

But Leslie goes a step further in this book. Nearly six thousand miles further. She travels to Israel, to the sea of Galilee, and walks around it over the course of a couple weeks, weaving into the book what she sees and learns there to grow her understanding of Jesus, living as he did around the sea, calling as he did so many disciples that were fishermen, traveling as he so often did in fishing boats across dangerous waters.

She offers all this up on the pages of this book to help us – to help herself as well – see the story lines of grace.

There's a lot to love about this book, but this is what I love most. After being a Christian and married and a parent and a writer and teacher and fisherman for decades, Leslie doesn't claim to have everything figured out or offer herself as an example of someone living a perfect life that you too can achieve if you follow her ten action steps. She doesn't write from the posture of arrival. She is with us on the path. I'll say that again, she is with us on the path, offering herself as a travel companion. She knows who she is following, and she's feisty and strong, possessing a wisdom honed by years of staying on the path (and on the waves). She is increasingly unafraid. It's a blessing to walk these pages, and this life, with such a companion and guide.

After I finished reading Crossing the Waters, I came across a verse in the Psalms that resonated with what I had just read. The verse asks: who is wise and will keep these things and will understand the mercies of the Lord?

~~~

p.s. I just learned that Crossing the Waters was awarded Christianity Today's Book Award in the category of Christian Living/Discipleship. Hooray!

A Path Revealed: A conversation with Carlen Maddux about finding the way through

This is a picture of a manuscript that I read nearly a year and a half ago, studded by sticky notes nearly too many to count. These sticky notes aren’t there to mark suggested edits but instead they mark places in the text that took my breath away, or places that taught me something I need and want to remember, or scenes that I simply loved, or confessions that triggered sober witness. Written by Carlen Maddux, a friend from my hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida, this manuscript is now a book that has been recently published by the fabulous Paraclete Press.

A Path Revealed: How Hope, Love and Joy Found Us Deep in a Maze Called Alzheimer's is the story of Carlen and Martha Maddux in the years that followed Martha’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 50. Martha was a public figure in St. Pete, serving for years on the city council, managing multiple local and state political campaigns, and running herself for Florida State legislature.

Carlen, a journalist, takes the reader along his and his wife's path, and while their path is one through Alzheimer’s, the practical wisdom that emerges in their story can be overlaid on any crisis. The practical wisdom is applicable to life in general. Who among hasn’t faced circumstances that we wish were different than they are?

In A Path Revealed, Carlen learns what it means to take God seriously and personally. He learns what it is to lead, particularly to lead a family. He models what it's like to truly love your spouse. Self-help books in which the author has figured out 10 steps to living with [fill in the blank] and proceeds to teach in didactic fashion pale in comparison to this wise and personal journey hard-lived on every page.

Recently, I asked Carlen a few questions about the book, the writing of it, and the path through crisis, and he graciously responded.

This is your first book – why did you decide to write your story for a broad audience?

CM: While trying to develop my story line, I found two strong themes running along parallel rails: 1) Alzheimer’s and its potential for destroying a family; 2) The spiritual odyssey that emerged. I struggled trying to decide which was the organizing theme. Early on, I tapped a couple dozen readers for feedback; half of them didn’t know us.  Each one of them told me that the focus of my story was this spiritual journey. Alzheimer’s was the context, they said. Developing this then as a spiritual odyssey moving through a life-threatening crisis immediately moved our story into an audience broader than one strictly interested in dementia. A clinical psychologist, who was one of my early readers, says this on the front cover: “This book belongs on the nightstand of every family coping with a crisis.”

In the book you wrote that your reporter instinct kicked in after Martha's diagnosis, driving you to try to figure out whether there was any way out of Alzheimer's. As you came to realize there was no way out of that particular diagnosis, what primary question, or questions, took that initial question's place?

CM: It was the most primeval of questions: HELP?!

How was journaling during this time instrumental in helping you find the way through this maze?

CM: I started a journal almost from the day Martha was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was 50 at the time; I was 52. I didn’t begin writing a journal for “spiritual discipline” reasons. I did it to survive. I had so much information coming at me, and so many questions stirring up inside, that I needed a central clearinghouse. The idea of a journal instinctively arose. I’m glad it did. Soon enough, my thoughts and writings evolved into issues deriving from this spiritual odyssey. I wrote in this journal for a decade, consuming 14 volumes. My last entry was the day my wife moved into her nursing home.  

How did the act of writing the book – even before you had a plan to publish it with Paraclete – help you achieve the wholeness that you referred to in the book's Prologue?

CM: Writing my book almost didn’t happen, I say in the Prologue. The raw material for the book had to be the journal I’d kept, and I initially found it too difficult to open after having closed it five years earlier. Somehow I got past that grinding feeling. As I read and scanned the 14 volumes in no particular order, story fragments began linking together. Not only that, memories of conversations and images were awakened that I’d not written down, helping me to add color and texture to our story. Fourteen years into our journey—about the time I started to write my book—I suddenly realized how far our family had traveled, and from where we’d come.

At the end of the book I open my Epilogue this way: “Only recently has the meaning of my walk with Martha at Gethsemani come clear to me, carved out like a statue in relief by the intervening years.” (A month after her diagnosis, Martha and I visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and climbed up a wooded hill.) I continue: “Our family has stepped over jutting rocks and tangled roots and moved through a wooded darkness speckled with light. We have stumbled onto sunlit clearings and paused at the wonder of it all, lingering with delight before turning back to the path set before us. Yes, ours has been a maddening and frustrating journey, disheartening even. Yet somehow this walk—our walk—has followed a sacred path, pointing our way toward a Presence far greater and more real than any entrapment by a disease.”  

How does the path through your crisis help people who find themselves in their own crisis, whether or not it is related to Alzheimer's?

CM: That’s a question best left to my readers. Based on the feedback I’ve received, though, our odyssey has so many twists and turns, dead ends and fitful starts, and yet a hope and joy emerging from this milieu, that the story seems to connect at levels that are unique to a reader’s particular crisis. How that happens, I’m not really sure. I do know that they feel a certain authenticity with the pain, suffering, and confusion I share, and thus an authenticity with the hope, love, and joy that arose.

~~~

[Photo: taken of the many sticky notes that marked my reading of Carlen's manuscript]

Teach me to number my days

Last week I went to a memorial service of a friend I had known since childhood. She died too young, only a year older than me, and suddenly. And a few days ago I learned that another person from my childhood past, the brother of a dear friend, also just died, also too young, a year younger than me, and suddenly. Writing and delivering a meditation for a funeral or memorial service must be hard enough for any minister but all the harder when the person who died had so much life still ahead. The meditation at the memorial service I attended was spot on, with the spot being that sweet spot where grief meets hope meets how-then-should-we-live encouragement. Teach me, the minister recited from the Psalms, the minister who was choked up herself, the minster who was also saying goodbye to a best friend. "Teach me to number my days, that I may gain a heart of wisdom." The need for mindfulness about our days that have a limit, she said – but more than that. The need for wisdom, she said – but more than that too. Teach me. The need – the plea – to be taught by the Lord God who loves us.

Amen.

~~~

[Photo: taken in a friend's garden.]

694. Confirming ownership of the journey

Last Sunday was confirmation Sunday at my church. Eight ninth-graders wore white gowns, representing baptism, and red stoles, representing the Holy Spirit, to mark the completion of two years of study and service. They each spoke a few minutes about their understanding of faith and what it means to be a Christian and then received some gifts: salt (be salt of the earth), a candle (shine your light), a cross, and a small slim leather Bible engraved with their name. Those of us in the pews gushed from pride and joy even if they weren’t our children because they are our children.

Our pastor said that confirmation and graduation seem like similar events but in fact they’re quite different: a graduation implies an end of something, whereas confirmation is about beginning. He said that the beginning marked by confirmation is that of taking on a new role. The young adults clothed in white and hugged in red now take on the primary responsibility for their own faith development. The church is here, parents are here, teachers are here, but the journey of faith is one's own.

A bonus in being present for a ceremony or sacrament, in addition to being part of the event involving people you care about – be it a wedding, funeral, baptism, graduation, or confirmation – is that we ourselves get to enter into that space where transactions are made, commitments are offered, hope is claimed. Quietly and passively but with as much inner and hidden, active agency as we wish, we get to engage with the life passage marked by the ceremony or sacrament. Yes, I do, till death do us part; let not my heart be troubled; please grace, flow; beginning again, I intend to grow.

~~~

[Photo: taken of a full nest safe inside a hanging basket outside my front door several years ago.]

Pearls from the Festival of Faith and Writing

Home now from the Festival of Faith and Writing (FFW), I'm going to try and pick some pearls from the week to share here. This is a hard task considering that the three days were the equivalent of a long triple strand of the finest quality natural pearls of highest luster. How to choose only a few pearls to highlight? I'll start with one from most of the talks or panels I attended.

Tobias Wolff: "Is it possible to have certainty without arrogance or blindness? Without harm to others?"

Dani Shapiro: "Insist that suffering not be meaningless." Writing is a way to do that.

David Kim: We must do whatever we can to "counter atrophy of the imagination." The role of the arts is to "cultivate the imagination." He suggests reading through the Biblical narrative twice a year in order to shape the imagination. "Scripture is so wildly imaginative!"

Zadie Smith: Refuse to be a brand, to be a product, to slip seamlessly into capital.

Erik Lokkesmoe: Signs of life – truth, beauty, goodness – are everywhere!

George Saunders: "I imagine my reader so close and lovingly that she is practically bonded at my shoulder."

Hannah Notess: "Put energy into things that are worth it."

Caroline Langston: "Literary achievement is about spiritual practice."

Paul Harding: After being a drummer in a rock band failed when he was in his 30s, he took a 2-week writing course at a local university. Marilynne Robinson walked in and started teaching and it hit him: "This is the life I want for my mind." His life was never the same. (I love that story.)

There's more that could be said. Much more. This doesn't capture much and certainly not what I learned from conversations or the simple but profound excitement of ideas buzzing all around.

If you also were at FFW, please join me and add a pearl of your own in the comments or feel free to post a link to something you wrote about it elsewhere.

~~~

[Photo: taken of FFW program, which you can take a look at here.]

Reading for Holy Week and a conversation with Sarah Arthur

This week holds Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, and Holy Wednesday. Maundy Thursday. Good Friday. Holy Saturday, then, finally, Easter. Holy Week. I’m reading Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide, gathered and edited by Sarah Arthur. It’s Sarah’s third devotional guide. I wrote about another, At the Still Point, on this blog last summer.

On these pages Sarah brings together Scripture, poetry, and literature for the purpose of prayer, for the purpose of Word informing word and visa versa, for the purpose of sparking imagination in service to truth.

I’ve jumped ahead to the readings for Maundy Thursday with its title “Accused,” the day of the last supper and Jesus’s arrest and midnight trial. From Psalm 35: “Ruthless witnesses come forward…” From the prophet Isaiah: “He was opposed and afflicted yet he did not open his mouth.” From Mark 14: the narrative of the first hours after Jesus’s arrest. From Revelation: an angel delivers judgment. From a poem by Hannah Faith Notess: the images of the blood sacrifice of Passover startle the soothing comforts of bread and wine and a well laid table. From a poem by Jill Peláez Paumgartner: Jesus’s silence before Pilate is “the silence of termites. / It is the silence of the vein of silver / underneath the mountain’s / grimace….” From a poem by Luci Show: “fallen knees / under a whole world’s weight….” From the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky: an excerpt from the epic and genius scene of the Grand Inquisitor, a fictitious story of Jesus being brought to trial again during the Spanish Inquisition and challenged for his responses to the three temptations of Satan.

Recently I asked Sarah some questions about the book and her process.

What do you say to readers who have never before considered listening to God through literature, such as fiction or poetry, or who have never thought of integrating literature into their devotional practice?

SA: Well, if they’ve read scripture as a devotional practice, then they’ve already been in the habit of listening to God through literature. The psalms are ancient Hebrew poetry, after all; and meanwhile Jesus’ parables are stories he invented, brilliant little fictions that point to truths about the nature of human beings in relation to God. I sometimes picture Jesus lying on his mat at night gazing at constellations, the campfire burning low, the sounds of the disciples slumbering nearby; and his imagination is playing around with metaphors—seeds and birds, a luminous pearl, a banquet. Or he’s inventing characters: a father with some sons; make it two sons; and make the father loving and gracious, because that’s what our Father is; and the youngest son says…. So that by the time Jesus’ friends are stirring the next morning and have eaten breakfast around the dying fire and set out groggily for the next town, the entire story has unfolded in Jesus’ mind, complete with details like the pigs and the angry older brother and the father running, running hard. All of this to say, that if Jesus could engage in the practice of imaginative storytelling as holy work, then so can we; and so have many, many Christians over the centuries. To ignore that vast spiritual library is to impoverish ourselves as a people.

Within the broader themes of Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide, what specific themes will readers encounter? And how did you select the readings, poems and prayers that are compiled in this book?

SA: Lent is rather famously a penitential season, so as I researched poetry and fiction I looked for works that seemed to speak to the human experience of spiritual poverty: simply stated, we need God. Maybe the main character is terrified of death. Or maybe the poet has sinned, and knows it. Or maybe the author has looked inside himself and found nothing: no reserves of strength or virtue, no therapeutically helpful insight, just the bald awareness that apart from Jesus, he can do nothing. After Easter, however, the themes make the turn toward redemption and healing, restoration, recovery—but not cheap grace: I made sure of that. There’s a long road ahead, and our healing has cost God everything.

When writing this book, what pairing of literature and scriptural theme brought you the biggest sense of surprise or excitement, and why?

SA: When I was in 9th grade my English teacher read aloud to us, over the course of several weeks, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens—but right in the middle of the story my family moved to a different state. And for some reason, though I remembered key details and guessed what was probably going to happen (I figured Dickens didn’t create two nearly identical characters for nothing), I never finished it on my own. So when I began my research for this book I thought, “I wonder what ever happened to Darnay? Did that other guy take his place at the guillotine?” It sounded like an appropriately Good Friday-esque sort of theme. But what I didn’t realize was how powerfully Dickens deals with themes of rebellion and sacrifice and resurrection hope throughout the entire book. When the blood-thirsty crowds of the French revolution treat Darnay like a celebrity one day and call for his execution mere days later, I knew I had my fiction excerpt for Palm Sunday. It’s a harrowing insight into the kind of collective madness that could make both Palm Sunday and Good Friday possible. And we’re all in the crowd. All of us.

In what practical ways do you suggest readers use this book during Holy Week?

SA: It’s tricky because for the rest of the season (Lent, Eastertide) there’s a batch of readings for each week, whereas during Holy Week each day of the week has it’s own selections: four or five poems plus a fiction excerpt. Which means each day you’re going to be doing a lot of reading—good reading, I hope, enriching reading, but a lot. It will require some extra discipline, some intentional chunks of time. Maybe read a little in the morning, a bit more on your lunch break, and the rest before bed. In any case, perhaps you can think of yourself like the disciples in the garden on the night of Jesus’ arrest: you’re being prompted to keep awake, to pay attention, to concentrate. Which is good practice for the devotional life all year round, actually.

An adventure now going forward

I've been reading the book pictured in the photo above: Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope by Gabriel Marcel. Isn't that a great book cover? Classic 60s. The book was written in 1951, but this edition came out in 1962. Homo viator, according to Wikipedia, means "pilgrim man," meaning "man [let's add: or woman] on his [her] way to finding God." It's a book like the one I mentioned here, over-my-head much of the time and requiring rereading of many sentences and paragraphs multiple times but offering a tremendous reward of insights for the effort. In fact, I made a post a couple weeks ago of a quote I found in this book and received notes of appreciation for it from readers. 

On this threshold of the new year – 2016 – I want to offer you a couple more excerpts from the book as nuggets of hope and peace.

“Absolute hope…appears as a response of the creature to the infinite Being to whom it is conscious of owing everything that it has and upon whom it cannot impose any condition whatsoever….”

“Hope is engaged in the weaving of experience now in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward.”

“Might we not say that hope always implies the superlogical connection between a return and something completely new? Following from this it is to be wondered whether preservation or restoration, on the one hand, and revolution or renewal on the other, are not the two movements, the two abstractly dissociated aspects of one and the same unity, which dwells in hope and is beyond the reach of all our faculties of reasoning or of conceptual formulation. This aspiration can be approximately expressed in the simple but contradictory words: as before, but differently and better than before. Here we undoubtedly come once again upon the theme of liberation, for it is never a simple return to the status quo, a simple return to our being, it is that and much more, and even the contrary of that: an undreamed-of promotion, a transfiguration.”

May 2016 be for you, dear reader, an adventure moving forward, a weaving together of restoration and renewal, a transfiguration.

~~~

[Photo: taken of the featured book. How convenient that the cover so nicely matches the rug in my office.]