Honeybees, Death, Grief, and Life: “The Honey Field” by Laura Boggess

Years ago, my company hired an expert on bees. Concern had been expressed about one of our product’s effect on bees and bee colony collapse was a general issue. I spent considerable time with this expert on work projects, and I learned, among many other things, that honeybees came from Europe, that Missouri is home to some 75 different kinds of bees, that most bees live in the ground, that commercial beekeepers transport hives for pollination of crops like almonds in California, and what I should plant in my home garden that bees would like.  

Our beekeeper expert became a good friend. And I was inspired to plant Monarda, commonly known as bee balm. It’s a member of the mint family, and it spreads like mint, so you have to manage it. And I found myself spending considerable time watching it attract bees – four different kinds, in fact, two of which were easy to identify – bumble bees and honeybees. The other two were small, almost tiny, and you had to get close to see that they were indeed bees, not gnats.

 

The Honey Field by Laura Boggess is about bees, too, but it’s also about much more. Of novella-like length, it’s a story of death and grief, illness and healing, and life and love. And food, including a few recipes. And bees, honeybees to be precise, occupying several hives in a semi-rural area.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“Hyla Brook” by Robert Frost – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Wordsworth’s “Excursion”: 1 and Wordsworth’s “Excursion” 2: The Ruined Cottage – Adam Roberts at Adam’s Notebook.

 

Reaching for Something Beyond: Father Ian Ker and The Catholic Revival in English Literature 1845-1961 – Dermot Quinn at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

A pair of sonnets for St. John the Baptist – Malcolm Guite.

 

The Poetry Club: Bookmark It – Tweetspeak Poetry. 

I Shall Return – poem by Claude McKay at Every Day Poems.

Sitting in "Mildred's Garden" with Laura Boggess

Mildred Ruffner lives in a small town in West Virginia, not far from Charleston. She and a food friend are preparing to open a bed-and-breakfast and retreat center, with a highlight being a beautiful garden. The garden provides a respite from a 15-year-old pain – being abandoned by the boy she thought she’d spend the rest of her life wife. 

Sam Gillenwater is a Nashville singer, doing so well that his newest album is considered a top contender for a Grammy. He’s preparing for a tour when his “sort-of” girlfriend Heather overdoses on heroin in Sam’s apartment and is hospitalized. They both had known their relationship, once close, was going nowhere. 

Mildred and Sam had met face-to-face once, at one of Sam’s concerts. But their relationship begins to grow on Instagram, after Sam almost impulsively follows Mildred on the platform, something he reserves for only the closest of friends and family. Something begins to emerge in their posts and messages to each other, and that something is romance. And soon they’ll discover they share something powerful – a national heritage.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poetry and Healing: “Waiting for Neruda’s Memoirs” by Laura Boggess

Amy Pinkleberry fears she’s losing her mind. She hears voices, disparaging voices, telling her she can’t make it on her own, that the money her ex-husband gave her will run out, that she can’t land a job. She flees what looks like a promising job interview with a bank manager because the voices are eroding any shred of self-confidence she might have. Her ex-husband may be right; she may very well be crazy.

She’s been waiting for two weeks for the Amazon delivery of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. In Amy’s mind, the book has become a lifeline to sanity, because poetry is the only thing that stops the voices. Yes, it may be obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yes, it may be auditory hallucinations, as the doctor suggests. But it was only Emily Dickinson who could stop the voices last year; this year, it’s Maureen Doallas. When she finally checks her order (what happened to two-day delivery?), Amazon shows it as delivered – to a house down the street. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Just as he was

Let us go to the other side

he said, 

                      just as he was

A fishing boat would take him

and them across 

                      just as he was

They took him along

to the other side 

                      just as he was

black clouds thickening

above their heads 

                      alone, he slept

terrified as the boat titled

they woke him 

                      just as he was

he spoke, the wind, the waves

died 

                      just as he was

                      completely calm

On Thursday, Nov. 20 at The High Calling Retreat at Laity Lodge in Texas, Laura Boggess used Mark 4:35-39 as the basis for a Lectio Divina (sacred reading).  I took two notes: “just as he was” and “completely calm.” Laura is the author of Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grownup World (2014).

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Playdates with God” by Laura Boggess

The crowds are large. Jesus is busy with Kingdom work. He’s talking to people. He’s having yet another “let’s out-teach-the-teacher” session with the Pharisees; this time they’re trying to trip him up on divorce. And then some people bring small children to him for him to lay his hands on them, to give them his blessing. His disciples admonish the adults bringing the children. And then he admonishes his disciples.

“Let the little children come to me,” he says, “and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:13-15 NIV).

It’s a punctuation scene. Right before this happened, and responding to his disciples’ question about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus had called a little child to his side and said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3-4 NIV).

Writer and editor Laura Boggess decided Jesus was serious.

She asked herself what might happen if she approached God with the heart and mind of a child.

And she wondered what that would look like.

One of her first experiences was on a trampoline. When the people who owned the home weren’t there.

Thus were born regular “playdates” with God.

And thus was eventually born Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grownup World.

It’s not just a trampoline. It’s a zipline (I want to see a video of the author ziplining). It’s bird watching. It’s Super-Soakers. It’s walking on the beach. It’s a hammock. It’s anything you plan or encounter that pushes you out of your adult comfort zone and embraces the idea of play and wonder, with the idea that it will lead to a more childlike heart, and a more childlike faith.

 

Boggess has the gift for telling stories. Each one of the chapters is built around a specific playdate and theme. But she doesn’t stop with only an account of the theme; she adds insights from toher events and situations, calling upon authors from St. Augustine to Madeleine L’Engle and Luci Shaw to enhance and expand.

If I have a personal favorite chapter (and I first have to say I have several favorites, including the naptime chapter), it’s the one entitled “Love Story: Yada, Yada, Yada.” It’s about how the busy world (not to mention arguments and misunderstandings) can crowd out and turn cold our closest human relationships.  

I read Playdates with God, and I experience both the joy of play and the deepening of faith. Boggess is that good a writer.

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

Where Does the Poetry Come From?

What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

Consider the word “image.” It suggests a picture, an illustration or drawing, a photograph, an idea. But it doesn’t suggest the reality of a thing – only the representation of the reality.

Today, in the hypermedia, 24-hours news cycle world we live in, we hear “image” and we think “reputation.” But is our reputation the same the reality of our self? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

“Image” has a physical connotation. But, in the sense described in Genesis 2, where “God made man in his image, male and female he made them,” the idea of image is more profound, and more complex, than mere physical appearance or similarity.

One aspect of the complexity of the image we bear is the creative impulse. Made in God’s image, we image-bearers are creators as well.

In A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Made to Live, author Emily Freeman explores this creative impulse. She notes the apostle Paul’s explanation in the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, that we are a masterpiece, or workmanship, made to do good things. And she notes that the Greek word translated as “masterpiece” is poeima, the same word that gives “poem.”

“What happens when God writes poetry?” she asks.

“We do,” she answers. “We happen.”

And she goes on. “We are walking poetry, the kind that moves, the kind who has hands and feet, the kind with mind and will and emotion. We are what happens when God expresses himself.”

This is the same idea behind my book, Poetry at Work. I wasn’t as direct as Freeman is; she’s speaking largely to Christians and I am speaking to a broader audience. The idea of my book is that poetry is inherent in the work we do. What I don’t say in the book is that the work we do is done in the creative image of God, whether we believe in God’s existence or not.

A colleague at work, going through kind of a bad patch, read Poetry at Work. “I had no idea,” he told me, “how much this would help me make sense of it all. Something much bigger than work is at play here.”

I make the implication at several points in the book, but it is my heart’s desire for readers of Poetry at Work to ask the question, if poetry is inherent in the work we do, then where does it come from?

Over at The High Calling today, Laura Boggess is beginning the February book discussion on A Million Little Ways. Her post introducing the book will be live at 2 p.m. Central time.

Image by Tony Melena via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Laura Boggess on “Poetry at Work”

Laura Boggess at The Wellspring has some kind words to say about my book, Poetry at Work. And she was reading it, and a book of poems by May Oliver, while she was in the hospital. (Hospitals contain their own particular kind of poetry.)

Laura and her husband live in West Virginia, is the mother of two boys (teenagers – we all understand). She’s a writer, a preacher, and a regular walker, bringing her camera along whenever she’s walking (and jogging).

See what she has to say about Poetry at Work.

Worldviews, Villains, and Decisions

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about and considering the subject of worldviews – what they are, where they come from, and how they affect our day-to-day lives. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, a worldview is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make decisions to live and work in it.

One problem with a worldview is that we tend to seek out information that agrees with our worldview, and filter out the information that doesn’t. Consider how seriously informed you would be if you got all of your information on the Obama Administration from either Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews – a steady diet of ridicule or chills running up your leg.

If we all did that, we would end up with a national government that was so polarized that nothing would get done.

OK, I’m trying to make a point here, because that’s exactly what we do have.

But it’s not just government. Think about how a worldview can affect a workplace, a church, or a relationship, simply by filtering our information that doesn’t conform to what we already believe.

The Heaths would say, and I would agree, that desperately holding on to a worldview at the expense of reality will, at a minimum, lead to bad decisions.

In the book, the call this “conformation bias,” and individuals and organizations do it all the time. It’s one of the “four villains of decision making” they describe in Decisive. The other three are narrow framing, or unduly limiting your options; relying on short-term emotions (if you’re upset, always chill before making a decision); and overconfidence, or having too much faith in our own predictions (and we all do this).

They’re not saying you have to jettison your basic beliefs if you want to make good decisions. But they do say that you should question why you react or respond in certain ways, and examine exactly why you believe one decision or course of action is better than another.

It could be that you confirmation bias – your worldview – is showing.

Can you think of an example of when the worldview an individual, a company, an organization, or a nation led to disaster? (There are some obvious ones – Nazi Germany – and some not-so-obvious ones – like Enron.)

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading the book discussion this month on Decisive. A post will be published each Monday in June (and I’m guest-posting on the book next week). To view the discussion and the comments, please visit The High Calling.

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

Not So Fast!

I grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s in a suburb of New Orleans. I was one of tens of millions of Baby Boomers, that demographic cohort that overwhelmed hospitals, elementary and high schools, and eventually universities. There wasn’t much we didn’t overwhelm, simply by the sheer force of numbers. And we’ll soon be overwhelming retirement homes, funeral homes and cemeteries.

Life seemed simpler and it seemed safer. The vast majority of our mothers worked at home, while our fathers worked elsewhere. I was six when my mother let me ride my bike by myself a little over a mile to the dime store. We had no organized sport leagues staffed by fanatical parents; we organized our own open field baseball games and street football games. A nearby woods afforded ample opportunities for exploration, games, and adventure (real and created).

Life seemed slower then because life was slower then. We had television, but it was mostly on for an hour after school (local kids show followed by the Mickey Mouse Club)a few favorite programs on Friday night and Saturday cartoons. And we preferred the big screen to the small screen – 25 cents for a matinee. We’d even take the bus to a theater that was too far to walk – by ourselves; by eight years old I had already learned the bus system.

And there were books, board games, and playacting. We’d dream up stories to act, often using the woods for the setting. War games, usually, or cowboys and Indians.

By the time I was married with my own children, life had changed. My kids were part of the Baby Boomlet – the children of the Boomers. Between my childhood and theirs, sports leagues had developed – basketball, baseball, fall baseball, and soccer (football was left to the high schools). And church activities. Busy-ness was taking hold. The advent of the internet and electronic games adding to the speeding up.

Today, I read what parents do, how organized and scheduled everything is for children (not to mention their parents), and I worry for my grandchildren and their generation.

Our children need to be allowed to be children. If Harvard requires your child find a cure for cancer as an admission requirement, then there are worse things than not getting into Harvard (and likely less of a student load debt). Not every child needs to be in three baseball leagues, dance ensembles, and 14 after-school activities. No one needs to create a child’s imagination for him or her; they’re usually inventive enough to figure out things for themselves.

Over at The High Calling today, Laura Boggess is starting a book discussion on Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families, by Ann Kroeker. It couldn’t be more timely. I’ve read the first four chapters, and I think Ann has something important to say to all of us – with practical ways to start removing some of the busy-ness from our lives.

All of us – parents, children, grandparents – need to make a conscious decision to live our lives differently, more slowly, with more forethought and less anxiety, even if it means we don’t fare so well in the competition we maintain with everyone else.

Our children – and grandchildren – will be the beneficiaries.

Please visit the discussion at The HighCalling. It’s important.

Photograph: Author Ann Kroeker overlooking the Frio River at Laity Lodge near Kerrville, Texas, by Jennifer Dukes-Lee. Laity Lodge is becoming known as Rivendell on the Frio.

I knew it had always been true

I know the date, time, and place almost exactly.

Jan. 26, 1973, about 9 p.m., outside a room in a basement lecture hall at LSU in Baton Rouge.

I didn’t do the proverbial “ask Jesus into my heart as my personal savior.” It didn’t go quite that way. It was a silent prayer, but it went more like this: “I’m running into something here that I don’t understand, a standard that I can’t measure up to or even hope to measure up to. In comparison, everything I’ve known and wanted and desired is trash. I don’t know why you want me, but since you do, you’ve got me.”

I can’t explain this, but very quickly everything became brand new. I was not “madly in love with Jesus.” I had no mountain-top emotional experiences. But it was all brand new, and I was now seeing things with new eyes.

No one talked about worship wars, culture wars, politics, or the new building program. The church I started attending wasn’t a conventional church at all – it was a group of people who met on Sundays in a lecture hall in LSU’s law school.

I was introduced to a small Bible study group that met in a house off-campus on Saturday mornings. At my first meeting with them, the discussion was about the design of the tabernacle for the Hebrews during the 40 years in the wilderness.

I even went on what today would be called a short-term mission trip – a beach outreach during spring break at Destin, Florida. I remember having an hour-long conversation with a tourist from Germany.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those very early days of my new-found belief would shape my faith for the next 40 years – the way I thought about faith, the way I tried to live it, the way I understood it. It was never about institutions, denominations, or buildings. I encountered all of those things and more along the way, but I never confused them with the church or my faith.

Perhaps most significantly, I have never had doubts about Jesus, God, or my faith. I’ve had plenty of times, serious times, of asking “Why,” and not understanding, and getting angry. But I’ve never had a “crisis of faith,” although I know people who have. I’ve never gotten caught up in the evolution-versus-creationism debate.

In a very real sense, I have had the gift of faith. (If there is any of me in the main character of Michael Kent in my two novels, it is precisely this gift of faith.)

Last week, we followed David Platt as he jackhammered some of the concrete of American cultural Christianity. We’ve had some time to clear away the rubble and let the dust settle.

To the extent that it’s possible, in Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live, Platt has blasted away the “American cultural” part and is reaching to define what’s left – the “Christianity” part. He’s stripping away what we Americans understand about Jesus, and taking us to what looks like a very different place – the place where Jesus is.

What this is about, Platt says, is taking Jesus at his word. It’s not picking or choosing what we’re most comfortable with, but taking him at his word – his whole word.

And when we do that, we become part of a grand story. “So we go as disciples of Jesus who love his Word and trust his truth,” Platt says. “We got not simply as men and women who at some point decided to make Jesus our personal Lord and Savior, but ultimately as men and women who at every point are devoted to proclaiming Jesus as the universal Lord and Savior. We believe him as his disciples; therefore, we obey him and make disciples.”

That small group Bible study I joined right after finding faith? And that first study about the diagram of the tabernacle in the wilderness? What I remember most about it was the study leader showing how the lines intersected.

The lines took the form of a cross.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it was true. I knew it had always been true.

We’re discussing Follow Me over at The High Calling. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion, and various writers are posting each week. Today’s post is by Sheila LaGrand, and she’s covering chapters 4 and 5..

Related:

Here Come the Radicals. Christianity Today has something of a different take on David Platt, Francis Chan and other leading “radical” Christians.

David Platt Wants You to Get Serious about Following Christ. Christianity Today’s interview with Platt last month.

Last week’s discussion on the book at The High Calling.

Top photograph: the classroom in Lockett Hall, LSU, right outside of which I accepted my new faith in 1973.

Work: Fruitless, Pointless, Selfish, Idolatrous

Imagine you’re working for an organization that is trying to decide a course of action. It could be any action – a new product, an executive change, announcement of a partnership, filing of litigation, or anything else that organizations today find a normal part of doing business.

Head around the table are nodding as the champion presents the plan and what will be achieved. People are speaking in favor, supporting the idea (especially if it’s championed by someone higher up in the organization).

You sit there, uncertainty gnawing at you. As soon as you saw the PowerPoint slides begin, you see the flaw, or flaws. You see what’s being overlooked or glossed over. You see the errors in judgment. You’re getting this acidic stomach because you know where this plan is headed.

And you also know what will happen if your voice your opinion or raise the smallest question about it. Not a team player. Always negative. Afraid to take a risk. Doesn’t see the big picture.

This time you choose to speak out. The speaker gets red in the face and tries to stay calm. The more he tries to explain, the deeper he gets into the mire. Others around the table see the same problems, and say nothing; they will tell you later that they were glad you spoke up.

Despite your objections, the plan goes forward. And blows up in everyone’s faces. All the people who nodded and approved are suddenly nowhere to be found. And the champion gets angry with you because you were right. A considerable amount of work and resources turns out to be for naught. And you’re likely not to be invited back to the next meeting on the next plan.

I would like to say this is confined to the business workplace. But having worked for a public school district, churches as an elder or deacon, a newspaper, a university, several political campaigns, and Fortune 500 companies, I can say that it is unfortunately all too common across all kinds of workplaces.

I’m reading Tim Keller’s Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work with The High Calling book discussion group, and Keller speaks to the problems of work.

When it becomes fruitless, with more and more work producing a smaller and smaller result.

When it becomes pointless, and it doesn’t matter what you do or how well (or poorly) you do it.

When it becomes selfish, with people sacrificing the common good of the enterprise to achieve their own personal or team goals (a particular problem today because we’re all led to believe that we should be “self-actualized” and “fulfilled” by work).

When it becomes idolatrous, and we worship the work (meaning the fruit of our hands) instead of the Creator.

And problems happen because we are all sinful people. Work, designed by God as something good and for our benefit, is full of broken people and broken, imperfect systems. No management system, no new human resources initiative, no new vision and mission statement will ever change that.

What can change the problems in the workplace starts in the human heart. No workplace will ever be perfect, not in this lifetime, anyway, but change can happen and work be done in such a way that honors God and honors people.

Led by Laura Boggess, we’re reading Every Good Endeavor over at The High Calling. To see what others are saying and participate in the discussion, pleasevisit the site.

Related:

Books on Work: Every Good Endeavor

My Great Expectations

The first book by Charles Dickens that I read was A Tale of Two Cities. Actually, I didn’t read the book. I first read the Classics Illustrated comic book version of A Tale of Two Cities, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and that was after reading We Were There at the French Revolution, checked out from the local library. A couple of years later, I read the full novel by Dickens.

Then, in ninth grade, I encountered Great Expectations. It was required reading for my English class, taught by Miss Roark. The all-boy class generally looked at the book with trepidation – it was long. And we couldn’t read the Classics Illustrated version, and you could get an F if you were caught with the Cliff Notes for the book.

So for most of my class, it was an ordeal, and far less fun than, say, writing our own James Bond spy stories, which we were allowed to do for one assignment. James Bond was big; if I recall correctly, Thunderball had hit the movie theaters that summer, recruiting an entire generation of American adolescent boys into the espionage services. Poor Dickens had to compete against Sean Connery. Not to mention the female roles in the movie. Estella, as pretty as she might be, was no match for James Bond’s girlfriends.

Nevertheless, we had to read it, and we did. Early on, I was hooked. Great Expectations had everything – an orphan, a convict, a deranged old lady roaming around in a wedding dress like a professional ghost, her young and beautiful adopted daughter, heroes, villains, and an exciting story. I loved it, the whole unabridged, full-volume, complete novel with small print and no illustrations (I had a cheap paperback version).

As she describes it in Booked: Literature for the Soul of Me, Karen Swallow Prior also met Great Expectations in middle school via an abridged version, and she was hooked as much as I was. And, if forced to admit it, Prior would say that it’s her favorite novel. She’s read it numerous times, she says, and each time learns something new.

For me, it was a life-changing book. It introduced me to a world that is still very much with me today, the world of literature. It showed me the magic of story. And, like Prior, I found it to be totally realistic.

“What I love most about Great Expectations,” writes Prior, is its sheer magic. Dickens has a way of presenting both plot and characters that are enchanting enough to set the imagination aflame but at the same time realistic enough to reflect life as it really is, or might really be, at least.”

When you grow up in New Orleans, as I did, and you have a very large extended New Orleans family, and almost all of your friends come from large, extended New Orleans families, some with exotic Spanish and French names, you will likely meet every character ever created by Charles Dickens in real life. Including the deranged Miss Havisham in her wedding dress. And the convict.

And Pip, the hero. When I read Great Expectations, I became Pip. I was 14 years old and imagining myself an orphan in 19^th century England, falling in love with a beautiful girl and knowing it would end badly, dodging villains, and trying to find my place in the world. I became Pip, I was Pip, and I was at the center of a wild rocket-ride of a story.

The next year, my English class would tackle David Copperfield, and while I like it enormously, it didn’t hold the same magic for me as Great Expectations. That novel oriented my head, and my heart, toward reading and writing in a way that nothing else has before or since.

I think it’s time to reread it.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Booked. Please visit the site to see what others are saying about the three chapters being covered today, on Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and Tess of the D’Urbevilles.

Making Sense of the World

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me, and reading some of the same things that many, if not most, of us were read – nursery rhymes: Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Little Boy Blue, Little Bo Peep, Mary Had a Little Lamb. My mother read (and recited) them to me, and when it wasn’t nursery rhymes it was Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Without my realizing it, those readings defined how I understood poetry – a short story or song told in rhyme.

As I got older, my understanding of poetry grew more complex. In grammar school, I can remember poems like “Hiawatha,” “Evangeline,” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” In high school, it included “Thanatopsis,” Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Yeats, Vachel Lindsay, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Less Masters.

I read many of these same poets in college, in greater depth and breadth of their works. The poems that stick out include “Beowulf,” Malory’s “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (the emphasis on the English poets reflects my English literature courses).

What reading and studying  poetry had the effect of accomplishing was helping me make sense of the world. For me, poetry and fiction did this in a way that non-fiction could not. This is likely why the reading of poetry and fiction (and now the writing of both) has remained an important part of my life.

In Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, Karen Swallow Prior notes this ability of poetry: “I had come to see that poetry was not a means of escape, but rather an art of reconciliation. For poetry is made in the discovery of resemblances. It seeks likeness, even amidst the strangeness of differences.”

This resonates strongly with me. What she calls “reconciliation” is what I call “making sense,” and they are the same thing. Literature affords the opportunity to understand how others understand the world and express truth, and to find the likeness for ourselves.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Prior cites the example of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), the English poet who wasn’t known as a poet until after his death. During his lifetime, he was known as a Jesuit priest. He was also a man who struggled with his own demons, and he had actually burned all of the early poetry he had written and turned away from it. It was the Church, in this case, the Catholic Church, that convinced him to return to it.

His poetry had been out of fashion for a time, but it’s been making something of a comeback. Prior discusses his poem “Pied Beauty” and it’s a fine poem. My own favorite is “Myself Unholy:”

Myself Unholy

Myself unholy, from myself unholy

To the sweet living of my friends I look –

Eye-greeting doves bright-counter to the rook,

Fresh brooks to salt sand-teasing waters shoaly: --

And they are purer, but alas! not solely

The unquestion’d readings of a blotless book.

And so my trust, confused, struck, and shook

Yields to the sultry siege of melancholy.

He has a sin of mine, he its near brother;

Knowing them well I can but see the fall.

This fault in one I found, that in another:

And so, though each have one while I have all,

No better serves me now, save best; no other

Save Christ: to Christ I look, on Christ I call.

He’s speaking about reconciliation, about making sense of the world, and what he sees as his compass. That compass is how he finds direction.

We all have a compass, some kind of direction-finder that we use to seek understanding and reconciliation. The compass Hopkins used is also mine, which is likely why I’m drawn to his poetry again and again.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Booked each Monday in January. To see what others are saying, please visit The HighCalling.

Related: Do You Know Where the First Amendment Comes From?

A Light Shining: 2 Reviews (and a Giveaway)

I’ve tweeted and posted the links on Facebook, but I wanted to make special note here of two of the reviews that have come in for A Light Shining.

Laura Boggess at The Wellspring said this:

“In turns suspenseful and heartwarming, A Light Shining has all the qualities of those classic tales that stay with you for the long journey. These characters become friends and fellow sojourners…making their way into a reader’s heart and encouraging a deeper faith—one that has hands and feet. We all need such role models as Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes.

“I don’t want to give away the plot, but I was hooked in the first few pages. Glynn Young’s masterfully developed characters and gift of story make this book hard to put down.

“If you are partial to a good yarn, A Light Shining does not disappoint. And if you haven’t read Dancing Priest? You might want to start there. Nothing like a good book to ward off the chill of the cold season coming on.

“Go ahead. Find a cozy. Read all day.

“You are going to want to.”

And Diana Trautwein at Just Wondering said this:

"’A Light Shining’ is a very different book from ‘The Dancing Priest.’ Yes, the same characters are here and some fascinating new ones, too. Yes, there is, once again, cross-continental travel in this saga, as well as glimpses into Michael's everyday life as an Anglican priest. But from the very first sentence, you know that we are most definitely not in Kansas anymore. There is something ominous afoot, a threat that hangs heavy over every page.

“Initially, I found this almost off-putting. I love these characters and did not want anything terrible to happen to them! So as the story began, I was cautious. However, I was very quickly drawn into the unfolding of this drama, once again a willing and happy prisoner of the strong plotting and wonderful characters. I will not go into that plot in this review because I actually think that sense of dread is important to the reading of this particular story. Rather than romance, this story is filled with mystery and intrigue, hooking you early and well.”

Thanks to both Laura and Diana for their wonderful (and encouraging) words.

Giveaway

Finally, we still have a giveaway going on at Emily Weirenga’s place. It will be by random drawing, and the winner gets his or her choice of either Dancing Priest or A Light Shining. Just leave a comment. The winner will be announced tomorrow.

Thanks to Emily for hosting the giveaway.