Dancing Priest: What You Learn at a Group Book Discussion

In February, a woman at church asked me if I would be interested in talking with her book discussion club about Dancing Priest. She had read it, and the three published after it, and said she had recommended it to the club. The question became, how fast could I say yes?

Then came coronavirus, and everything went into hibernation. But Dancing Priest hadn’t been forgotten, and once our county emerged from lockdown (or sort of emerged), the discussion was back on. Last week, I sat for two hours with the club’s members, about eight or nine people in all, and talked about Dancing Priest, its successor novels in the series, and the new and final novel in the series, Dancing Prince. 

Virus note: Yes, we wore masks and sat in a socially-distanced-approved manner.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by You X Ventures via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 2: The Poetry of the interview

It was the strangest interview I’ve ever participated in – on either side of the table.

A friend had talked me, or conned me, into interviewing for a job with St. Louis Public Schools – the director of communications. 

The school district was in chaos – an outside management firm had been brought in to run the district, schools were being consolidated and closed, services were being outsourced, central office layoffs had emptied more than half of the headquarters building, and protests by parents, students, employees, former employees, teachers and the teachers’ union were daily. School board factions were fighting each other through the news media. The news media was already showing up early each morning at the district’s administration building – knowing there would always be a new crisis to report.

And I wanted to insert myself into that?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

The Poetry of Displacement and Exile

“The need to destroy yourself and the need to survive fight each other like two brothers who’ve gone out of their minds. We hang up the soul’s clothes in the closet but we haven’t unpacked all its bags. Time passes and the way to deny exile is to deny the country we’re in, its people, its language, to reject them as specific witnesses of a mutilation: our own country is far away, what do these gringos know about its voices, its birds, its mourning, its storms.”

Argentine poet Juan Gelman (1930-2014) wrote those words in 1980, and in wrote them where he was currently living – Rome. With the disappearances and presumed deaths of his son and daughter-in-law at the hands of the military regime, Gelman fled for a safer place. And while exile was a safer place, it was also its own kind of prison.

The military junta ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. It was a brutal and murderous experience, especially for those suspected of left-wing or progressive political beliefs. Thousands of people were arrested and “disappeared,” including Gelman’s son and daughter-in-law. She was pregnant at the time, and, as it turns out, was allowed to live until she gave birth and then killed, the baby given to friends of the military regime. Gelman found his granddaughter 30 years later.

It’s difficult for those of us born and raised in a 241-year-old still-functioning democracy to imagine what drives a person to exile, and then what exile means for day-to-day life. It’s difficult to imagine thousands of people being arrested, and then nothing ever heard of them again. Escaping from one’s one fear of arrest and death is a miraculous thing, but then one must deal with the conditions of escape, being a stranger in a strange land, separated from the streets you know, the home you know, the church you attend, the grocery store where you shop, the holidays you celebrate, and often the very language you speak and understand.

Juan Gelman

This is the plight of the refugee and the exile, difficult even in the best of circumstances. While the United States is a nation of immigrants, and that would include refugees and exiles, but they have likely been a small portion of the overall mix. We contemporary Americans do not know what it means to flee the physical destruction of our land or the destruction of a murderous military regime.

Part of Gelman’s coping mechanism was poetry, including the invention of different personas for himself and “discovering” these lost poems. Reading them in the collection Dark Times Filled with Light is to read the struggle with the pain of personal loss and the pain of loss of self. He felt displaced, knowing the people he walked among in exile could not possibly understand his grief and loss, no matter how much they might sympathize with him.

Early On the Soul Begins to Hurt

Early on the soul begins to hurt / pale /

in the wavering light to explores your not being here /

the heart rises with misgivings /

goes over the sky like the sun

in daylong search / day in or day out / it burns

freezing / as if its bones thrown out

of joint / or like an unsaid word

where i try to march against death /

sould you harmonize harmonies that barely

make it across the world’s width /

broken / it broods over

what you left me / night on its feet

In exile, Gelman had his own separation from the life he knew, as well as the permanent separation from his children. The military regime robbed him of his day-to-day life, but it also robbed him of a future. And what he had to hold on to, he writes, was the determination never to accept the deaths of his son and daughter-in-law until he saw their bodies or their killers.

At Tweetspeak Poetry today, the discussion is continuing about Dark Times Filled with Light, led by L.W. Lindquist. Please visit the post and consider adding your voice.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Christians don’t do that, do they?

We were attending a large church, large enough for two services in a big auditorium but still small enough to know people. We had been there a while, and knew a lot of people through Sunday School, mission trips, and adult classes.

A friend from work attended with his family. We never saw each other at work; different facilities and totally different parts of the company. But we connected at church, shared work war stories, sat in classes together, and helped each other through our children’s teen years.

And then – train wreck. For a time, his wife stopped coming to church; he would bring the kids. Then he told me his marriage might be over. And then his wife started attending church with her boyfriend.

I didn’t know the whole story, only having heard one side of it. But it was devastating to my friend, to the children, and to the church.

And then another friend, one I knew professionally, decided she wasn’t happy in her marriage. And she knew God wanted her to be happy. So she walked out on her husband and child. Later we learned she walked out of one relationship to be in the relationship she had already developed with a co-worker.

Then a couple we were in a small Bible study group with broke up. He decided he didn’t want to be married any more. As it turned out, he had a relationship at work.

And then a friend, with whom I worked in ministry for years, told me he and his wife were divorcing. She had told him to leave. This wasn’t a case of infidelity on either side; it was more that their marriage was wrecked and neither saw any hope for trying to retrieve it.

All of these people were Christians. Bible-believing, church-attending Christians. In every case, no one had a clue, even their closest friends. They came to church every Sunday wearing their Sunday smiley faces. With ample opportunities to share their hurting in prayer, classes, small groups, and individual friendships, they had said nothing.

And it made me wonder if the problem might be the church. You’re not supposed to have problems like this if you’re a Christian. It’s non-believers who have these problems. It’s the culture.

And maybe it is the church.

In Heart Made Whole: Turning Your Unhealed Pain into Your Greatest Strength, Christa Black Gifford says that “Jesus’ intention for us as believers is never to suppress the truth of our emotions and put on fake religious smiles, attempting to deal with very natural things on our own. When life hurts, we hurt just as He did—and that’s simply okay.”

Gifford and her husband went through the agony of losing a newborn child. It could have destroyed them both; it could have destroyed their marriage. They had dark, black days, and they probably still do, but they knew that the depth of their pain was known and understood.

We the church need to do better.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Heart Made Whole. Today concludes the discussion. To see what others are saying about this chapter, “A Heart Made Whole,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Lila Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Thinking with the Heart and the Brain

It’s about 60 A.D. The Apostle Paul is in Rome, a prisoner, awaiting his audience with the emperor as is his right as a Roman citizen. The waits could be long, and Paul likely waited about two years.

In the meantime, he writes letters to the churches he helped to found, in what is now present-day Turkey and Greece. He was particularly close to one church, that of Ephesus, located on the coast of what was then the province of Asia (present-day western Turkey). Ephesus faced the Aegean Sea.

Ephesus was the provincial capital, famous for its temple of Diana or Artemis. The city’s amphitheater could hold between 25,000 and 30,000 people. It had a stadium like all important cities of the empire. Paul had founded the church there, and had stayed in Ephesus for three years. He knew the city, he knew the people, and he knew the church.

His letter to the Ephesians is primarily a letter of encouragement (other churches, like the one at Corinth, received reprimands). And early in the letter, he uses a curious expression: the eyes of the heart. “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened,” he writes, “in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you” (Eph. 1:18).

We associate the heart with feelings, and particularly love. We associate the brain with thinking and with the processing of what the senses absorb. But as Christa Black Gifford points out in

Heart Made Whole: Turning Your Unhealed Pain into Your Greatest Strength, the heart and the brain are intimately connected.

“But when you ask people to turn on all of their heart to experience God,” she says, “some get very nervous that you’re asking them to turn off their brains. …In fact, the condition of your heart is most affected by the three-pound organ sitting inside your skull.”

And that is the connection Paul is making with “the eyes of the heart.” He’s telling the Ephesians to fully experience God by opening the eyes of their heart.

To feel, the heart must understand; to understand, it must see; and for the heart to see, the brain must be operating. Experiencing God is an all-sensory experience. The heart is involved, but so is the brain.

And no, you don’t check your brain at the church door. If fact, the brain is vitally necessary for faith. It’s vital for both the expression of faith and the deepening and maturing of faith. Faith is not an all-emotional experience.

We hear what Paul says. We bring our brains to bear on what we believe. And we open the eyes of our heart.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading Heart Made Whole. Consider reading along and join in the discussion. To see what others are saying about this chapter, “Your Heart-Brain Connection,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

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