Interview with Christian Poets and Writers

I was recently interviewed by Mary Harwell Sayler of Christian Poets and Writers. Mary is a poet and poetry editor, and also is the administrator for the Christian Poets & Writers page on Facebook. She’s the author of Living in the Nature Poem, Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry, Poetry Dictionary for Children and For Fun, and the Christian Writer’s Guide.

Our interview covered a broad range of topics: my new book, Poetry at Work; who or what encouraged me to write; whether writing is a gift or a calling; what I’m currently reading; and a lot more.

You can read the interview at Christian Poets and Writers (it was posted yesterday). And thanks to Mary for the opportunity to talk about writing and my book.

Denial and Tears

All four of the gospels contain accounts of Peter’s denial of Jesus. Peter, as was his tendency, rashly declares that he’ll be with Jesus through everything that’s coming. “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” Luke records Peter’s response as “I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus responds by predicting Peter’s denial. Within a few short hours, the prediction becomes true.

Four points about the accounts fascinate me. The first is how Peter responded to the prediction. The second is how he responded when the prediction proved true.

In Matthew and Mark, we see Peter telling Jesus he’s wrong, and he will never disown him. I can’t think of another time when any disciple flat-out told Jesus he was wrong. They questioned him several times, and doubted, but no one essentially accused Jesus of being wrong.

But if any disciple would have done that, it would have been Peter, no question about it. Nothing subtle about Peter, the proverbial bull in the china shop. Mark at least notes that the other disciples agreed with Peter – they, too, would never disown Jesus.

The second point in the accounts that’s fascinating is Peter’s response when the cock crows for the third time and he realizes Jesus was right. Matthew and Luke record it identically: “And he went outside and wept bitterly.” Mark says that Peter “broke down and wept.” John, in perhaps the most charitable account, says simply, “At that moment a rooster began to crow.”

Peter weeps, and weeps bitterly. He knows his bravado was only that – bravado. Empty words, coming perhaps from vanity and pride and being embarrassed in front of his fellow disciples. At least he followed Jesus from the garden to the high priest’s house; the rest of the disciples scattered to the four winds. But Jesus was been right – Peter denied his Lord three times.

Jesus knew his disciples better than they knew him. He also knew something they didn’t know, and that’s the third thing that’s fascinating about the story. Whatever else they might have thought, said or desired, the simple fact was that they couldn’t go with Jesus. What he was about to experience he had to experience alone and by himself. No one could share the burden and the agony of the cross. Only Jesus could do that. It was his alone to bear.

The fourth point about the accounts is what happens as a result. Jesus uses Peter’s denial as a massive lesson in brokenness. It is one the last things that happens with Peter before Jesus is crucified, before Peter, too goes into hiding. He’s the man who brazenly told Jesus he was wrong, and he was the man who proved Jesus right.

Peter is the man who has to be broken if he is to become what is planned for him, if he is indeed the rock upon which the church is to be built.

Only the Gospel of John includes the final story of Jesus and Peter, the scene by the Sea of Galilee where the resurrected Jesus tells Peter to feed his sheep – saying the same thing three times, an echo of Peter’s three denials – and actually tells Peter how he will die, that he will indeed one day follow his Lord, just like he claimed he would do.

But first Peter had to be broken. As Bob Sorge says in The Fire of Delayed Answers, ”God has a proven method for reducing our self-reliance – He chops us off at the knees.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen at Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Brokenness,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

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

Poetry at Work: The Dignity of All Work

It was one of those conversations that start on one subject and somehow extend into another subject and then become something entirely different. In this case, a conversation with a secretary on a simple work assignment grew into a discussion about the value of people regardless of their position and then into the inherent value of all work.

It was a poetic moment.

I can’t recall what the specific work assignment was, but it was likely something to do with the company employee magazine (that’s the group she was working in). What prompted it was that she said something self-denigrating about her work: “I’m just a secretary.”

“You’re not just a secretary,” I replied. “You’re important. And you have inherent value, regardless of what you do for the company or any other organization.”

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

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

Poetry at Work – First Review at Amazon

I review a lot of books each year. I know the effort that’s required to review a book. Reading the book is often the easiest part.

How do you describe it? How do you explain what you like (or don’t) about it? Where do you find references to the author about other works or background? And don’t forget to keep notes – quotes you might want to cite, examples, descriptions, the aspects of the work that particularly struck you.

Book reviews are work. If you do them regularly, you can create an organized process. But they’re still work. And for those of us who write them, we generally have the same reason for sticking at it: we love books.

So when I see a review of one of my own books, I know what went into it.

The first review of Poetry at Work was posted on Amazon yesterday. The review’s title: “Young's heart of a poet is poured out extravagantly on every page.” You can read the review here. 

Thank you, Elizabeth Marshall.

Food and Idolatry

In 2008, I had the opportunity to hear food author Michael Pollan speak at Washington University in St. Louis. He was receiving a literary award from the English Department. The venue was packed – the room haled 600 comfortably and it was standing room only. I was clearly out of my demographic – the vast majority of people in the audience was students and under 23 years old.

In the middle of telling an entertaining story about fighting a mole in his vegetable garden, Pollan was describing how he flooded the mole’s tunnel with gasoline and set it alight, hopefully to force the animal out or kill it. “I was,” he said, “the Westmoreland of the vegetable patch.”

The room roared with laughter.

I was surprised that so many people seemed to understand the joke. I got it, and the older faculty members got it, but almost 600 people under the age of 23? (If you don’t get the joke, William Westmoreland was the army general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the one associated with the use of napalm against the enemy.

I leaned to the laughing19-year-old next to me and whispered, “Who’s Westmoreland?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “But isn’t Michael wonderful?”

That’s when I understood that Pollan wasn’t a journalism professor or author or food activist. He was a rock star, and what I was witnessing was popular culture at its most uncritically laudatory and undiscerning. It was cool to like Pollan. He was performing for his audience and they loved it, even if they didn’t get the jokes, allusions or examples.

In many ways, this is no different than Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus.

Last week, in the introduction to the book discussion on Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty by Brett McCracken, I mentioned how Christians have adopted many if not all of the various communication forms of popular culture – movies, television, and rock music, among others. This adoption isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we often don’t consider how the form of communication shapes the message we’re trying to communicate.

And over the past decade, one of the communication forms of popular culture has become food. Fifty years ago, sociologists talked about the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption (keeping up with the Joneses). Today, it’s conspicuous virtue, and food has become caught up within it.

So, for example, consider one of the main tenets of the food movement that Pollan is so much a part of is to eat local. When it first became popular, local was defined as no more than five miles from where you lived – you should eat only what was grown five miles or less from your home. It took no time for most people to realize that such a definition would not likely appeal to, say, a resident of New York City or Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco (Pollan’s hometown) or Los Angeles. The definition has changed over time, and is now 400 miles, which to my mind really stretches the idea of “local.” Even then, it means that if you live in New York City or San Francisco, you shouldn’t eat bananas. And no seafood for Denver or Des Moines. And none of us in the United States can have coffee or tea.

It’s an appealing notion – you should know who grows your food. And it’s possible for some of us. But what study after study has also shown is that “eat local” is not as environmentally sustainable as “eat globally.”

But “eat local” is a conspicuous virtue. It’s not enough to pursue it. We want people to know we are doing it. And that’s where the line can be crossed, especially for Christians.

This section of McCracken’s book was disappointing. He uncritically accepts much of what passes as popular wisdom today on food. He tries to make the case for how important food was to Jesus, but it falls flat – food in the Gospels was never about the food itself but about the relationships and the people Jesus was eating it with or miraculously providing it to. And it’s difficult for me to read a rather rapturous description of a ten-course meal (even in small portions) and consider how many people, and children, in the wealthiest nation on the planet go to bed hungry every night.

McCracken does warn of the danger of food snobbery, but it’s one small part of two lengthy chapters. And while he cites the need to know about where our food comes from, he doesn’t cite the need to be discerning about all of the people, including Christians, who tell us about the spirituality of food and how we should eat.

The problem isn’t food snobbery. It’s food idolatry.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Gray Matters. I didn’t mean to go on a rip, but I think I was expecting something more insightful from these two chapters than what can be found in any secular popular magazine. To see what others are saying, please visit The High Calling.

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

Breaking news

This just in:

a Galilean teenager

has been told she’s

expecting, that the baby

she’s carrying will be

the long-awaited messiah,

the Jewish messiah, can

any good thing come

out of Galilee? Family

spokesman Joe, her fiancé

apparently, would say only

that it was the plan of the Lord

and declined further comment.

The girl herself quoted

a popular song and said

let it be.

Painting: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidus, by Carlo Crivelli (1486), National Gallery of Art, London.

Thank you, Shaun Masterton

Shaun Masterton is a poet who lives in the U.K. We met online two or three years back, in the heyday of One Stop Poetry.

Yesterday he posted a feature on my new book, Poetry at Work. You can find it on his blog.

Thank you, Shaun, for the feature and encouragement.

And yesterday, a friend in St. Louis called – she had not only already received Poetry at Work from Amazon but had also read it. “Good thing you had some humor in it,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have had tears in my eyes the whole time. This is about my work, too! I recognized it!”