Saturday Good Reads

Over the past decade, I spent more than a few days in “the canyon,” the Laity Lodge complex in the hill country of Texas. It is a starkly beautiful place, evoking a sense of how landscape and geography often have an inherent sacredness.

One of the more indulgent aspects of Laity Lodge is the food, and one of the best-tasting aspects of the food is the graham cracker cookies. They will probably never taste like they taste in the canyon, but Laity Lodge posted the recipe. 

Speaking of food, growing up in the South meant growing up with grits. My mother frequently made them; my grandmothers made them; and they were usually a staple on hotel and restaurant breakfast menus. Some of the best grits I’ve ever eaten were at Tujaque’s Restaurant on Decatur Strreet in the New Orleans French Quarter, right cross from Café du Monde (the coffee and doughnuts or beignets place). They were a side dish to barbequed shrimp, and I would have been content to have eaten the grits as the appetizer, main course, side dish, and dessert. 

Grits were born in poverty, says a report by Kristen Hartke at National Public Radio, and now they’re showing up on fine-dining menus everywhere.

More Good Reads

Faith

Why We Need the Apostles Creed in 2019 – Michele Morin at The Gospel Coalition.

When Is the First Time We See a New Testament Book Used as Scripture? – Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder.

Silencing the Scream – Chris Castaldo at Tabletalk.

Life and Culture

Making Middlebury safe for speakers – a modest proposal – Charles Murray at AEI.

Is This ‘Common’ Language? A College’s Misguided Guide – Rand Richards Cooper at Commonweal.

News Media

The Press Will Learn Nothing from the Russiagate Fiasco – Matt Taibbi at The Rolling Stone.

Writing and Literature

Salvaging: Boat Trailers, T.S. Eliot, and Resurrection – Jeff Bilbro at Front Porch Republic.

Is Anybody Out There? One Writer on the Purgatory of Submission – Glen Cadigan at The Millions.

The Magic of Ed McBain’s 87^thPrecinct – Paul Abbott at CrimeReads.

The Protestant World of Shakespeare – E.J. Hutchinson at Mere Orthodoxy.

Poetry

Light and Fear – Joe Spring.

Auction – William Baer at The Agonist.

American History

What was So Wrong with Slavery? – Stewart Henderson at Emerging Civil War.

Art

Notre Dame: experts explain why Macron's five-year restoration deadline is impossible – Hannah McGivern and Nancy Kenney at The Art Newspaper.

Greenland – Land of Unending Ice – Stefan Forster

Painting: Woman Reading a Book, oil on canvas by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875).

The High Calling: A Path Paved with Poetry

Today marks the end of The High Calling as an ongoing web site focused on work and faith.

My personal path to The High Calling was paved with poetry.

In the summer of 2009, I was having a conversation on Twitter with two people I had never met face-to-face. One was Jim Wood, who had a blog called Shrinking the Camel (now a Patheos/High Calling blog) and wrote on faith and work. The other was L.L. Barkat, who had a blog (or two, perhaps three) called Seedlings in Stone and was the managing editor of a web site I had just begun to visit, called High Calling Blogs (HCB).

We were talking about making sandwiches, wine, poetry, and a movie called Bottle Crazy. Within a few minutes, I composed a short poem encompassing all of those elements within the character count of one tweet. We laughed, but something had changed. An awareness, perhaps a bond, had formed with a poetic tweet that connected us.

Later that summer, I was in a bike crash and spent the night in a hospital so the doctors could watch my four broken ribs and partially collapsed lung. Unable to sleep with an oxygen mask on my face, I read Laura’s Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places straight through. It was rare for a book to speak directly, almost personally, to me, but that one did.

Eventually, I screwed up enough courage to start participating in the HCB poetry prompts. I started writing occasional articles. And then L.L. asked me (and Jim Wood, too), to be contributing writers. I made my first trip to Laity Lodge in the fall of 2010 – joining the rest of the “virtual” staff at the writer’s conference. I attended the poetry seminar, and so The High Calling, Laity Lodge and poetry came to be even more bound together in my mind.

In 2012, I became the Twitter editor and discovered The High Calling network, comprised of all of the people who had signed up with The High Calling and had an official network entry on the site.

I went exploring and realized The High Calling’s reach expanded beyond the site and beyond the virtual staff I had come to appreciate and love. It expanded beyond the office in Kerrville and that almost sacred place called Laity Lodge.

I discovered poetry in the network—not actual poetry and poems, although there was some of that, but poetry in the much broader sense of God’s people. To discover this network was, at times, to be overwhelmed by faith. A significant portion of the Bible is written in poetic form, and perhaps for that reason I find a strong connection between poetry and faith.

So, on behalf of The High Calling, I tweeted this network of God’s people, using Twitter to promote the links for their articles and personal blog posts. To tweet all network members all the time would have taken a staff of several people. But I tried.

Who is, or was, the High Calling network? Diana Trautwein. Lisha Epperson. Brock Henning. The Center for Faith and Work. Mari-Anna Stalnacke. Ed Cyzewski. Billy Coffey. Jen Sandbulte. The Theology Work Project. 4 Word Women. Jolene Underwood. Lynn Mosher. Zechariah Newman. Megan Willome. Linda Chontos. Jen Avellaneda. Maureen Doallas. Chris Peek. John Blase. Tanya Marlow.

And hundreds and hundreds more. My RSS reader overflowed with the blog postings of the network. I had to develop a second list of blogs to visit.

I read people who struggled and celebrated. People who hurt. People doubting their faith. People overcoming their doubts. People with seminary degrees. People with a high school education. Single people. People struggling to have children. People struggling to manage families. People who had published books, and people trying to publish books. People with addictions.

I read people who mourned the deaths of loved ones, and one way they had to deal with it was to write. I read people who laughed. I read people who suffered debilitating illnesses, and some who were dying. People who supported the right to bear arms and people who ardently believed in gun control. Political liberals, conservatives, moderates, and independents.

I read the incredible diversity that is God’s church. And I found poetry everywhere I looked, the poetry of faith, the poetry that is faith.

And I learned that, for all of our differences, for all of our politics and denominations, for all of our hopes and dreams and occasional nightmares, we are one in Christ Jesus.

Like all other human endeavors, The High Calling may pass, but that unity will always be.

Related: Change at the High Calling.

Photos: Various pictures of The High Calling staff activities during the past five years, all taken at Laity Lodge in the Texas Hill Country.

This landscape bleak

This landscape bleak:

stunted trees scrubbing

low hillsides, or clustering

in small groves in gentle

service to shade

each other. Clutches

of prickly pear boldface

the grass golden in autumn

splendor, covering rocks

and stones dropped by giants,

or less. All fenced by wire

not to keep intruders out

but to keep the cattle in.

Except for the fences

it might be the road

to Bethlehem.

Photograph: the view from atop the Circle Bluff Trail, Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas.

This well of stone

I sit in this well of stone

of limestone silence, circling

and semicircling around me

I sit on a narrow ledge

convenient for sitting

preferably in silence

the empty sky is loud

above me

It is a sculpture I sit within,

a cocoon of stone of two rooms

one a single space

with a turret, entered

by bending low before

standing up again, a bow

of obeisance.

Two rooms, two thresholds

within a threshold, one

equipped with a back entrance

an escape, unexpected

Photographs: The permanent art installation “Threshold” by Roger Feldman, Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas.

Can Poetry Help Us Understand Scripture? Part 2

This article was first published at The Master’s Artist.

Last week, I noted that I had attended a poetry workshop taught by poet (and University of Missouri professor) Scott Cairns. Twelve of us spent two days talking about poetry, and talking about poetry in relation to Scripture, and writing poetry, our overnight assignment: pick a difficult passage of Scripture and explicate it – using poetry. In other words, we had to write a poem that might help our understanding of the passage.

Much of that idea of explicating Scripture underlies Cairns’ Philokalia: New and Selected Poems. Published in 2002, the volume includes both new poems and poems from his previously published collections (he’s also published more since then). The term “philokalia,” or “love of the beautiful,” is taken from the collection of texts written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by Easter Orthodox theologians.

Among the new poems in Cairns’ collection are five “Adventures in New Testament Greek,” in which uses the form of poetry the meanings of five words: metanoia (repentance), hairesis (heresy), nous (mind), mysterion (mystery), and apocatastasis (universal redemption – a heresy of Syriac origin). Here’s what he does with metanoia:

Repentance, to be sure,

but of a species far

less likely to oblige

sheepish repetition.

Repentance, you’ll observe,

glibly bears the bent

of thought revisited,

and mind’s familiar stamp

--a quaint, half-hearted

doubleness that couples

all compunction with a pledge

of recurrent screw-up.

The heart’s metanoia,

on the other hand, turns

without regret, turns not

so much away, as toward,

as if the slow pilgrim

has been surprised to find

that sin is not so bad

as it is a waste of time.

Philokalia contains far more than explorations of words; Cairns considers and examines all kinds of themes, divine and human. What the poems have in common is the use of a spiritual lens; these are themes and subjects best understood as subjects of faith, including issues we wrestle with and including the idea of poetry itself. (One poem, “Interval with Erato,” is a sexually charged poem about poetry and its inspiration.)

I have many favorites in this collection, but the one I found particularly appealing is “The Translation of Raimondo Luz.” It’s a long poem, and Cairns tells us it’s about “the greatest postmodern poet writing in Portuguese.” We learn he’s never left his hometown in Brazil; he’s self-taught, speaking seven modern languages and three ancient ones; he’s known as a radical theologian; he loves American rhythm and blues; and he’s an accomplished chef. And then Cairns tells us he is also a complete fiction.

That’s Scott Cairns – giving all of this extensive background and then offhandedly mentioned the person isn’t real, and then goes on to write a 10-page poem about him.

That same sleight of hand (or is it?) can apply to using poetry to explain difficult passages of Scripture. I know. I did it for the workshop.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Scott Cairns: Using Poetry to Explicate Scripture

This article was first published at The Master’s Artist.

In 2010, I attended a writer’s conference at Laity Lodge, in the Texas Hill Country about 90 minutes or so west of San Antonio. I had signed up for the poetry seminar taught by Scott Cairns, a professor at the University of Missouri, which is about 90 or so minutes west of where I live in St. Louis. I had previously read his A Short Trip to the Edge, an account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos (Cairns in Greek orthodox), and Compassion of Affection: Poems New and Selected.

I was looking forward to the seminar; I was not disappointed (and I loved Laity Lodge). Twelve of spent two days doing something I’d never heard of – using poetry to explicate Scripture.

That’s the idea, or one of the ideas, behind Recovered Body: Poems, published by Cairns in 2003. Cairns uses poetry to explicate Scripture, and more than that, to explore poetry as a kind of Biblical enterprise. And it’s utterly fascinating.

The poems are divided into three sections.

The first, “Deep Below Our Violences,” covers a range topics – a line from a Wallace Stevens poem, the Old Masters’ paintings, archaeology, a rather erotic discussion between the poet and his muse Erato, the death of a father. The poems are characteristically Cairns, and I can hear his deep, slow voice now that I heard in Texas on a windblown patio near the Frio River. And I can hear that characteristic wonder of life. Here’s “Regarding the Body:”

I too was a decade coming to terms

with how abruptly my father had died.

And I’m still lying about it. His death

was surely as incremental, slow-paced

as any, and certainly as any

I’d witnessed. Still, as we met around him

that last morning—none of us unaware

of what the morning would bring—I was struck

by how quickly he left us. And the room

emptied—comes to me now—far too quickly.

If impiety toward the dead were still

deemed sin, it was that morning our common

trespass, to have imagined too readily

his absence, to have all but denied him

as he lay, simply, present before us.

In the second section, “The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab,” the reader is given an introductory warning about the rabbi, who has often been accused of “apostasy, blasphemy, manic-depression, drunkenness, bad manners. He has been praised for his compassion, revered—if not much liked—for his eager upbraiding of the pious.”

Then you read the rabbi’s “commentaries” on the image of God, sin, Lot’s wife, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel, Joseph thrown into the well and then sold, the death of Moses, Solomon and his Song, Jephthah’s terrible vow, Jonah’s imprisonment, and the exile. Yes, those accusations against the rabbi have validity, but his commentaries force the reader to confront and wrestle with the meanings of the Biblical texts being commented upon.

And I wonder if I didn’t hear a little of that rabbi down in Texas, too.

The third section of poems, “Supplications,” is devoted to New Testament themes – Christ in Gethsemane, the thief himself crucified who ridiculed Jesus on the cross, a beautiful poem about Mary Magdalene, and Jesus descending into hell, among others. The poem about Mary Magdalene, entitled “Loves” is simple and strong, and a memory, declaration and hymn all at once. Cairns subtitles it “Magdalene’s Epistle,” and it is written as a kind of deep, thoughtful and profound letter.

Recovered Body is a strong collection. Many of the poems were previously published by Chariton Review, Image, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications and two anthologies. The poems, individually and collectively, provide a different way to look at both Scripture and poetry, as text and a way to understand text, and how to apply that text and understanding to life.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

River sunset

The green and gray

give way to gold,

a golden canvas

of stone, reaching

high to its crown

of blue, enlightened

by sun. The stone layers,

cracks and fractures

into prominence, no flaw

hidden or disguised,

open to glory,

conceived in glory,

by the hand of glory.

The photograph was taken on Feb. 28, 2013, about 6 p.m., from the balcony at Laity Lodge, near Kerrville, Texas. 

The Risk of Following

I’m in the bookstore at Laity Lodge, near Kerrville, Texas. I’m here for a retreat, with a cross-discipline group of people who have come together to talk about work, faith, leadership, mental health, art, music, and digital media. An eclectic mix, to be sure, but there is a common thread: we share the thread of faith and a desire to live it in the world.

The bookstore is small, a quiet place. There are some fiction and poetry on the shelves – which my eye seeks first – but most of the books are about faith, devotions, prayer, theology and philosophy – matched to the themes that the lodge and the rugged Texas Hill Country inspire. You see names like C.S. Lewis, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner, Madeleine L’Engle.

And the poet Luci Shaw. I pull a slim volume with her name on it from the shelf; I’ve read her poetry, and enjoyed it, but this isn’t about poetry. The title is The Crime of Living Cautiously: Hearing God’s Call to Adventure. At first I think it’s about leadership, but it turns out to be about how to live a life of faith.

Indirectly, though, it is about leading and following – following Christ and following the leading of Christ. Shaw uses the prism of her own outdoor adventures to examine why she considers living cautiously a crime. And her experiences include bungee jumping, a rowing expedition, a week’s sailing with a woman friend. She enjoys adventures with excitement and a thrill of fear and risk.

Without explicitly saying so, Shaw seems to say we tend to follow Jesus in a rather safe, orderly and secure way, but that we should be following him in order to dare, to risk, in order to truly live. Her physical risks stand as a kind of statement of faith and exhilarating test of self.

Physical outdoor risk (like bungee jumping) are less important to me; here at Laity Lodge, the closest I will get to risk are a hike (mostly upward) and the two scorpion traps in my guest room (for the record, I never see a scorpion on this visit; I’ve seen them before, however).

But I understand what Shaw says; my own sense of exhilaration comes (tinged with risk and fear) have come from taking career risks – risking everything to do something new, something important, something that changes the status quo, something that leaves people (especially me) never the same again.

I’ve taken career risks in two large areas. One is writing a series of corporate speeches that branded me inside the company as a “radical” but which permanently changed the company and the industry. The second is the area that I represent at this retreat – digital media. Interestingly enough, I’m not here to represent what I do at The High Calling (part of the same organization as Laity Lodge); I’m here because of what I do at work, and what I’ve done.

I look back and some of these career risks and smile, but I remind myself that, in their time and context, they threatened and upended the status quo, and there was always opposition, sometimes rather ferocious. An email newsletter for employees (it sound quaint in 2013 but in 1993 it was a revolution that I fought people for months to do and then realized I could do it without permission). Another battle: a corporate web site (“Waste your money if you want to, the web is like 8-track tapes. The future is Lotus Notes”). Then blogs. And then social media.

Did I succeed every time? Yes. And no. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, a cost was paid. When people have a vested interest in the status quo, they don’t take change lightly.

But this is what happens trying to live a life of faith. Jesus is not status quo; what was status quo was sin, and he came to upend it as only he could do. To follow him, as Shaw explains in her book, is to live a life of risk, daring and adventure.

I buy The Crime of Living Cautiously. It turns out to be well-paired with another book I’m reading, David Platt’s Follow Me. It also turns out that Shaw wrote a considerable portion of the book right here at Laity Lodge.

Follow him and change the human heart, starting with your own. And then change the world.

Over at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is writing about “follow.” To see her post and those of others, please visit her site.

The road from Damascus

The road lies behind the grayness

called trees, graveled white

as it accompanies the river,

the river clear in crystalled

greenness. I see Paul walking

among the trees, holding a thorn,

the man’s arm around

his shoulders. Paul is weeping.

This poem was written March 3, 2013, at Laity Lodge in the Hill Country of Texas. The photograph was taken from the balcony of the lodge overlooking the Frio River. 

A Retreat of Blessing

I spent three days last week at Laity Lodge, some two hours southwest of San Antonio in the Texas Hill Country. The landscape is rugged and rather desolate, but for all that it had a beauty that is striking.

I had been to the lodge twice before, with staff retreats for The High Calling. This time, however, I was there not for The High Calling but because of my work in digital media. Some 60 of us from the United States, Canada and the U.K. had been assembled to discuss digital media, mental health, faith, and leadership, all part of a new leadership initiatives effort by the Foundations for Laity Renewal (the foundation that owns the Laity Lodge property and its camps, and The High Calling as well).  

Music was represented, too, as it always is at a Laity Lodge retreat. This time the music was by the members of Jars of Clay, who played each night, at the Sunday worship service, and at a concert on Saturday night. A Jars of Clay concert for 60 people. And getting to talk with the band members, eat with them, and even spend three hours with two of them in the art studio making block prints.

This may come as a surprise, but they turned out to be real people.

I met and talked with some wonderful people – professors from Duke, Rice, Seattle Pacific University and Kings College. An ebook publisher. The editor of Christianity Today. An architect. A pastor from the inner city in Houston. Marketing people from both academia and the private sector. Non-profit organization leaders. The foundation staff, including chairman David Rogers. Kathryn Aylsford, co-author (with Tim Keller) of Every Good Endeavor. And my friend Marcus Goodyear, editor of The High Calling.

We had a block of free time each afternoon. On Friday, I joined a group of five others to hike the Circle Bluff Trail. I was the only one who had hiked the trail before, so I got to be trail leader. It’s not a long hike, only 2.5 miles roundtrip, but most of it is upward. You have to pay close attention to the trail itself; it’s not difficult to slip down the side, or to trip over a stone. At the top is the view – what crowns the hike itself. You can see for miles. And right at the bottom of the bluff is the Frio River and the new family camp under construction – and getting ready to open in April. I had toured the construction site in November, and it is one impressive facility.

After the hike, the digital media crowd, about 10 of, met in the lodge library, and we talked. We talked about our problems, our issues, about what’s happening with digital media, some of the new things some of us were trying or planning. It was a solid and even inspiring conversation.

We had four or five main presentations in group meetings – on digital media, mental health, leadership, the leadership initiatives, and on faith, including a rather rousing sermon by Marlon Hall, the pastor from Houston.

My three hours in the art studio on Saturday afternoon were spent working on a block print. My goal was to create a concept for a book cover, a non-fiction work that I’ve been contracted with for and is due to be delivered in manuscript form on July 1. We googled images, we drew, we traced, we carefully cut and we painted – many times over. What I walked away with was the sense I had had a delightful time learning to do some I had never done before – and an idea for a book cover. I looked at the prints last night, and they’re rough, but at least the germ of an idea is there.

I’ll likely have more things to write about from the retreat; I’m still absorbing what I heard and learned. But it was a time full of ideas, inspiration, thoughtfulness, and a sense of the sacred. I was blessed.

Top photography: the main building at Laity Lodge. Bottom photograph taken March 1, 2013, from the top of the Circle Bluff Trail at Laity Lodge. The buildings at the bottom left are part of the under-construction family-camp.

Hearing the voice ahead

Hearing the voice ahead,

we dance among the trees,

we dance among the trees,

moving forward, hearing

the voice ahead, dancing

on the leaves, touching

hands, hearing

the voice ahead,

always ahead, carried

on the wind, carrying

the wind, being

the wind.

This poem was composed in the Great Hall at Laity Lodge in the Hill Country of Texas, after hearing Marlon Hall speak. I was there for a Leadership Initiatives retreat hosted by the Foundations for Laity Renewal.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVersePoets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph taken from the balcony of Laity Lodge, looking across the Frio River to the hill beyond. This is the view when you’re seated in the Great Hall for a worship service.

The silence is deeper here

The silence is deeper

here, encased in canyon

walls, air filtered

dry of remaining

vestiges of noise, enclosing

the life moving within.

The silence is deeper

here, embroidered by sacred

songs rising, words distilled

pure of extraneous and

unnecessary matter, encircling

the silence pulsating within.

The silence is deeper

here.

Photograph: View from the balcony, Laity Lodge, looking down the Frio River.