Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

10 Novels for Recovering Fundamentalists

by Yvonne Shao in Christian Spirituality

[Editor’s note: see the end of this post for a chance to win a signed copy of Lila, by Marilynne Robinson.]

When I left fundamentalism and evangelicalism behind, I educated myself by reading books on theology, self-help, church history, and current church issues. Rachel Held Evans, Peter Enns, Anne Lamott, Keith Ward, NT Wright, CS Lewis, Barbara Taylor Brown, Sarah Bessey, Lauren Winner, and others came to my rescue.

However, reading non-fiction could only take me so far. Sometimes you need art, because art is a gentle teacher, reorienting your thinking by showing you images instead of facts. I needed that, because no matter how many facts I took in, my default setting seemed to be anxiety. I needed pictures of people leading lives free of dread and worry, pictures of people who relied on God because of love and not fear, pictures of people treating their neighbors with kindness and understanding. That’s where fiction came in.

Here are ten novels that meant alot to me, with a quote from each one.

1, 2, and 3. Three novels by Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Home, and Lila, are the stories of a gentle small-town minister and his family and friends. Don’t let that fool you, though—nobody gets off easy in these books. When characters’ lives get derailed, through their own actions or the actions of others, these novels emphasise caring for each other and listening.
“It seemed to me to be half sadness and… [Read more…] about 10 Novels for Recovering Fundamentalists

Shattering Snow Globes

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

Reflections for the First Sunday of Christmas

shattered globe

womb-water gushes out

mingles with sacrificed innocence

in war-wilderness streets

mama and daddy smuggle their

baby across jagged borders

feet pierced by fractured pieces

of heart-pondered dreams

escape into broken reality

birth half-remembered blessings

beneath the light of a new moon

Anna and Simeon. Their faces map all that they have seen of life. Luke tells us Anna is 84 years old. People have come and gone in her life. Life and death have danced together and then danced some more as the earth has spun and spun again on its axis. Yes, Anna and Simeon have seen and heard and felt in their bones the hopes and fears of many years. Then, when Mary and Joseph appear in the Jerusalem temple with Jesus, Anna and Simeon burst forth in a Spirit-seasoned duet of praise.

After everything they have encountered over many decades—after all that has gone awry in their lives and world—how do they know that this stable-born child is “destined for the rising and falling of many in Israel” (Luke 2:34)? What recognition stirs in Simeon to release from his spirit letting-go lyrics about his own mortality, his world-weary soul settling into a serene certainty about the future as he looks into the untested face of Jesus? What story still to be sung does Anna hear in the rhythms of Mary’s pondering heart? What truth does she imagine that baby holding in those tender, tiny… [Read more…] about Shattering Snow Globes

Lovingly Waiting

by Janene Cates Putman in Christian Spirituality

Truly he taught us to LOVE one another; his law is LOVE and his gospel is peace.
Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother and in his name all oppression shall cease.
Have you ever had your plans changed right in the middle of carrying out your original plan? Take, for instance, this week’s blog. I had it almost ready to go with all my research done on LOVE—I had my dictionary definitions (y’all know how I adore Mr. Webster), “Love is…” quotes (“Love is giving up the last bite”) and even a song from the 80s (Huey Lewis “Power of Love”).

And then I read this quote:
“Ask yourself what is really important. Have the wisdom and the courage to build your life around your answer.”
—Lee Jampolsky, psychologist and author
Mary, the mother of Jesus, had her life planned. She was to marry Joseph, a local carpenter who would care for her and their future children. Her life was scripted by society and religion. And this is the part that gives me chills: BUT THEN GOD!

God showed up to a peasant girl in a small town whose future was set. God showed up and asked her to be the means by which God was showing up in our world. God showed up and Mary said yes. To the most important question, she said yes. From a certain future to risk, uncertainty, and fear, this young woman said yes. Yes to God’s disrupting her plan. Yes to playing her part in changing the world. Yes to making the impossible possible, to making the invisible visible.

We often see her portrayed as… [Read more…] about Lovingly Waiting

Advent Four and Christmas Eve: Wrinkling Time

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

“Have you seen the baby Jesus?” the headline of a small-town news bulletin asked several days ago. Someone stole the baby Jesus from a local church’s outdoor nativity scene. Mary is still there pondering and keeping all of these things in her heart. The shepherds are still watching in wonder. Cows and donkeys are gathered around. But the manger is empty. Jesus is gone.

Jesus disappears from manger scenes more often than I knew. “Baby Jesus theft” even has a Wikipedia entry. Sometimes sheep or other figures are stolen from outdoor nativity scenes, but most of the time, the thieves take the infant.

In an interesting turn of nativity theft events this season, a figure of Mary holding the baby Jesus was taken from an outdoor display at a church in Bancroft, Ontario. A donor replaced the stolen figure with a new one that “worked,” but was not an exact match. Soon after, the original was returned. Now, the scene in Bancroft has “doubled down” (as the news headline announces), featuring two figures of Mary holding Jesus.

While I lament the vandalism of Christian icons and worry about the violence that accompanies some of the acts, reports of nativity scene thievery have caused me to reflect on possible meanings of empty mangers. This Advent season, I have found myself skeptical of too-nostalgic waiting and restless for the arrival of God’s promised reign of justice and peace. Realities of pain and suffering in our communities have stirred for me the question: How do we… [Read more…] about Advent Four and Christmas Eve: Wrinkling Time

Incarnate Empathy

by Morgan Bolt in Christian Spirituality

When I was told I had Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumors three years ago, I took the diagnosis better than pretty much anyone else I knew. I didn’t wonder why or despair or curse my fate. I just accepted it and carried on as best I could. Some of that is no doubt due to my generally carefree nature and the fact that my own diagnosis didn’t contradict my understanding of the world and how God relates to it (which is why I wrote a book on the subject). But I also attribute a good part of this to the fact that I’m the one—rather than someone I love—who’s going through all this hellish treatment.

It would be far worse to sit and watch someone else I care about enduring round after round of chemo until I lost count, surgery followed by surgery followed by still more surgeries, debilitating radiation treatment that made eating all but impossible, and a pair of clinical trials. And then repeat it all for a second year. And a third. And counting. I’d rather go through these years of intense, difficult treatment myself than see someone I love endure it for a single day. I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

Several people have expressed to me that they wish it could be them, not me, going through it all. It is, I think, a natural reaction when we see people we care about suffering and struggling. We want to take their troubles from them, to carry their burdens and give them some respite from their trials. We’re made to experience empathy, after all, to feel others’… [Read more…] about Incarnate Empathy

Learning From the Wise Men

by Darrell Lackey in Christian Issues

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the Wise Men (Matt 2). Even in my fundamentalist/evangelical days, I found their story intriguing. Their time in the Gospel accounts is limited, but profound. As we come to this season of Advent, of that first coming, what might we learn from the story of the Wise Men? Here are three reflections we might consider:
God Acts Outside Traditional Frameworks/Understandings:
The Wise Men were from the east—they were gentiles. They were not heirs to the promise or the covenant. They were not given the law or rescued from Egypt. They were not told they were “clean” or chosen. They were outside the framework, the boundaries, the walls, that the Hebrews (Many of them) felt God had placed around Israel—the nation he had chosen out of all the peoples and nations of the world. The Wise Men were outsiders, foreigners, “others.”

And yet, God chose them to see and understand what those inside the presumed framework would not, or could not, see or understand.
God Speaks to Those Outside Traditional Frameworks/Understandings:
It is commonly understood the Wise Men were, what we would consider today, astrologers. The Magi were probably Persian-Medes, from a priestly class, and associated, again, with what we today would consider the occult.

And yet, God chose to speak, to communicate, to be present to those associated with a world and practices—that were actually condemned in Scripture (For example see Leviticus… [Read more…] about Learning From the Wise Men

Sounds of Silence 

by Marguerite Sheehan in Christian Spirituality

As a teenager, one of my favorite songs was “The Sound of Silence” with that heart wrenching lyric, “Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again. Because a vision softly creeping, left its seeds while I was sleeping. And the vision that was planted in my brain, still remains, within the sound of silence.”

We are in the time of silence and darkness again. Short days. Long nights. Times of division and deceit. For many, a time of loneliness, and for others hopelessness. Yet into the silent darkness creeps a vision that leaves its seeds while we are sleeping. That vision is one of light coming into the darkness and showing us another way forward within the sounds of silence.

It is easy to polarize the dark and the light as though we could live with one and not the other. As if one were good and one was bad. As if one is preferential and the other better left behind. From such thinking, it is easy to slide into racist imaginings where dark is something to be feared and light is normalized and not to be called “my old friend.” This easy and destructive slide was showing its head in my teenage years, and so, when “The Sound of Silence” came across the airwaves, it was a wakeup call that resounded. The vision within the lyric remains in the airwaves of our country and continues to seed itself in new forms, such as Black Lives Matter.

Today in my little village of Shelburne Falls, the snow is falling silently and the ground and all of us walking around… [Read more…] about Sounds of Silence 

Advent: Waiting for What We Already Have

by Morgan Bolt in Christian Spirituality

It often feels like I’ve done more waiting than anything else the past three years. I’ve waited for my initial biopsy results. I’ve waited for bloodwork. I’ve waited for my urine to get to the right specific gravity to start chemotherapy, waited for chemo to be made, and waited for the infusions to finish.

I’ve waited for radiation, waited for one clinical trial and then waited for another, waited for surgery again and again and again, waited for relief from shingles, waited for painkillers to take effect, waited for constipation and diarrhea to end—sometimes at the same time, and waited for some new treatment to be invented that gives me a better chance.

And, most of all, I’ve waited for healing. I’m waiting right now for my next set of PET scans so that I can start waiting for those results. Really, I’ve been waiting over three years now for the results I want, for the seemingly unachievable No Evidence of Disease pronouncement.

All that waiting reminds me of the waiting we do during the Advent season. Advent is, after all, a time of waiting for the arrival of the Messiah, the deliverer who will establish God’s kingdom here on Earth. Advent might mean “coming,” but for me it has always felt more like “waiting.” Waiting and watching for an arrival, certainly, but waiting nonetheless.

For me, the best part of the Advent season has always been the knowledge that, though we wait for Christmas Day to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, Immanuel has already arrived.… [Read more…] about Advent: Waiting for What We Already Have

Advent: Joyfully Waiting

by Janene Cates Putman in Christian Spirituality

Joy to the world—the Lord is come!

Joy to the world—all the boys and girls now! Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me!

OK, I admit it—this week’s blog has been the most difficult of this series for me to write. The good news is I’ve been singing

Jeremiah was a bullfrog
Was a good friend of mine
I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him a-drink his wine
And he always had some mighty fine wine

for days (I know you’re humming along now—you’re welcome)! Look, I’m a joyful person—my Hot Husband, our children and grands, our extended family and friends, a lovely glass of wine with Jeremiah the Bullfrog all bring me great joy! So it’s not that I don’t like JOY or I don’t have JOY or that I need to find JOY in the journey. It’s just that JOY is so dadgum hard to explain, right? It’s one of those nebulous things that we know it when we feel it and we profoundly feel its absence when we lack it—but what is the actual definition of JOY?

The dictionary gives these meanings: a profound feeling of happiness; a feeling of great pleasure and happiness; the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune; delight, exuberance, elation, bliss; to rejoice; to delight. These definitions seem to me to be vague, hazy and even transitive. Can’t JOY be abiding; can’t it come to stay?

Celebrating Advent trains us in waiting. JOY comes, many times, as a… [Read more…] about Advent: Joyfully Waiting

Rock Us Into Joy

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This third Sunday in Advent (December 17) is Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday. But not much joy can be seen or heard in Jesus’s childhood home of Nazareth this week. Leaders there have quieted some of the usual Christmas celebrations in protest of President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Protests and violence have broken out in Bethlehem as a result of the decision. Photographs of both ancient cities show smoke-filled streets and angry protesters.

Nazareth and Bethlehem are not the only places in our world where conflict, violence, and uncertainty are daily realities. These realities—the depth of so many people’s suffering—have made this season of Advent, the season of waiting, a melancholy one for me. I am weary of waiting for justice to prevail in places where people are hungry or homeless or in fear for their lives.

So, how do we celebrate Rejoice Sunday in a world so burdened with sorrow? One of the promises of  Advent and of the Gospel story is that joy and sorrow sometimes hold hands. As headlines shout disturbing, heartbreaking news, people in Christian communities continue to hold on to the countercultural, radical, and subversive promise that somehow, even in smoke-filled streets of protest, the hopes and fears of the years meet and are transformed by God’s unending love.

So, joy? Joy for me on this Rejoice Sunday is present, but it is a quiet joy, a leaning forward and looking back—a persistent moving toward hope while… [Read more…] about Rock Us Into Joy