In
2011 and 2012, I was participating in a blogging linkup hosted by Bonnie Gray
at Faith Barista. It was mostly a
linkup with women and “mommy bloggers,” but I could write about my own children and
my new grandsons, and I didn’t need an excuse to do that.
And
then Bonnie went off-the-grid, for personal reasons. We knew she had been
writing a book, but when you go off-the-grid to write a book, that’s what you
say. Bonnie didn’t say that.
When
an online community leader says “personal reasons,” you respect that, and you
pray.
Bonnie’s
season of rest went on for a year. She was writing a book, but not the book she
expected to write. What she was writing about was surviving and dealing with
post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and some of its more visible symptoms.
Panic
attacks. Insomnia. Depression.
Bonnie
turned to counseling, and she wrote what seems to be an almost effortless book
that is part memoir, part meditation, and part resolution of what she was
dealing with. I say “almost effortless” because the book reads easily; it’s
both well-written and compelling. And you keep reading on even when it’s time
to turn the light out and sleep.
It’s
a book written with pain, and in pain, a book about how brokenness and broken
relationships can suddenly and unexpectedly erupt, decades after they happen. It’s
a book about finding rest and resolution, or at least the beginning of
resolution. And it’s a book about understanding, realizing how to deal with
what can never be made whole, what can’t be “fixed.”
The
heart of the story is what happened to Bonnie when she was a little girl.
Divorce is, unfortunately, not an uncommon event. Abandonment by a father is
not an uncommon thing. Dealing with a mother’s anger and rage may be less
common, but it is still common enough to be recognizable, to be familiar.
In
Bonnie’s case, the effects were both immediate and often ugly and long-term,
buried until they erupted into those panic attacks and insomnia. Our culture
may make divorce a relatively easy to accomplish, but there is nothing easy
about what leads up to it and what happens afterward.
And
what she writes about her own story is personally familiar. My own parents had both
been previously married. Each had a child from their first marriages. How and
why those marriages failed played itself in our family, too. Children often don’t,
or can’t, understand how this happens, but their do experience the effects.
Brokenness shapes who all of us are, even in families that don’t experience
divorce.
One
result from divorce can be overachieving, the state of constant activity and
work that is both a reach toward an unattainable perfection and a desire to
escape pain. Welcome to American culture.
Bonnie
tells her story with a structure that is both personal and communal –
developing her own story and helping readers find ways to tell theirs. The purpose
is in the subtitle – awakening the soul, and the mind and the heart, to the
idea of rest, rest from the frenzy of activity we call contemporary life, rest
from the pain many of us are trying to escape.
Finding Spiritual Whitespace is more than a
good story. It is a needed story. It’s a story that, as you read more and more,
becomes uncomfortably and personally familiar.
It’s
our story, too.
And
Bonnie’s community linkup is back.
