Feedback, please!

 

Hello, friends! 

It's almost been a week since I finished this blogging journey through Kate Bowler's book Good Enough, and I'm wondering if you could take a few minutes and give me some feedback. 

At first I was going to ask, "What did you like?" and "What didn't you like?" but that seems awfully general and not terribly helpful. 

So instead, I'm curious to know: 

• Did you actually read the book or did you simply read the blog or a mix of both depending on the day? 
  
  
• What did you look forward to the most about the blog?  
  
  
• Were you more interested in the summary of each entry I tried to provide or my interpretation of what Jessica and Kate wrote? Did you like my wild tangents based on things going on in my life, or would you have preferred I stayed closer to the book? Or, a mix of both? 
  
  
• Would you be interested in reading more of my reflections based on a book we'd be reading together? 
  
  
• Do you prefer the blog format where you can read by yourself and go at your own pace, or do you think you'd like to try participating in a group discussion? 
  
  
• If you'd like to try a group discussion, would you want to do it face-to-face or would you prefer an online format, like Zoom? 
  
  
• What other thoughts do you have? 

Feel free to answer as many of these questions as you want either in the comments or shoot me an email if that's easier: albauer at yahoo dot com. 

Thanks for joining me on this adventure! 

Pastor Allison 

40 A Good Gardener

I am not a gardener. Never have been. Don't plan to become one. 

I did receive a snake plant for my birthday in February this year, and I'm proud to say that it's still alive. So alive in fact, I think it's about time to transplant it to a bigger pot. 

(I've heard a plant will break a pot if it gets too big. That sounds like a big mess. Of course, so does transplanting. Soo .... )

I'm not a gardener, but I do appreciate gardeners. For years I have benefited from the bounty of various gardeners in whatever neighborhood I was living in at the time. 

And thinking of all those people from all those years, I have to agree with Kate and Jessica when they say, "Gardening requires a certain kind of hope, envisioning new life in the midst of despair and death. Gardeners toil and trowel, pluck and prune, all for a single bloom. The very act of gardening is one of hope" (p 226). 

This entry reminds me that the book Good Enough was originally intended as a Lenten devotional, hence the 40ish devotionals. And this entry was meant to be read on Easter Sunday - the same day we read about Mary Magdalene wandering around in the garden, on the verge of losing all hope because Jesus' body has disappeared. 

She sees Jesus but mistakes him for the gardener. 

Kate writes, "What a strange detail: the resurrected Christ is mistaken for a gardener. 

Maybe it's because he stole the gardener's clothes, since his were stripped and gambled over. 

Maybe because Jesus looks like his dad, the first gardener, who tended Eden barefoot. 

Maybe Jesus looks like the new Adam, the head gardener for the new Eden of the new heavens and new earth. 

Maybe it's because he carries the pruning shears of a vinedresser, the careful tender of our souls, ready to pluck and plant, uproot and cutback. 

Maybe he looks ready to cultivate new life, to pull us toward resurrection with his fingers digging in among the worms. 

Or maybe this gardener looks like he knows something about hope - hope that Mary desperately needs" (p 228). 

(I like that last option the best. I'm totally going to use this whole section in a sermon someday, with proper attribution of course.) 

Gardeners know, like The Good Gardner, that a seed must be buried in order for it to grow. 

"When things look most lost, most dark, most covered, most long-gone, most hopeless ... that's when the seed is undergoing the most important change. Through its death, it might produce much fruit" (p 229) 

Over the course of these last 4oish days, I have felt almost the whole range of emotions a human can feel, and I'm guessing you have too. And I hope reading this book has been an encouragement to you, especially an encouragement to look directly into all those emotions and to explore what is lying underneath them. 

God loves you -- ALL of you and your life, even the parts of you that you don't want to acknowledge. And the parts you think are imperfect but really are good enough which is in fact good enough. And your body when it lets you down. And the losses you grieve. And the absurdities that fill your heart with joy. The sacred times and places where you hear God speaking to you most clearly. 

And I hope more than anything else this journey has led you to a place of hope - bright hope - because really, in the end, that's all that matters: that we do our best to create sacred rhythms in our lives that train us to always look for the glimpses of hope that God scatters in our lives every day of the week but can only be seen by eyes that are searching for them. 

"The seed in the ground, the body in the tomb - this is a picture of defiant hope. All of the labor and sweat and love and precious time for a single bloom. Delicate and bold. Brief but memorable.

Alleluia, indeed." 

Pastor Allison 

39 "Bright Hope"

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide,
strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

I don't know if the title of today's entry is taken from the beloved hymn, "Great is Thy Faithfulness," but that's the song that popped into my head as soon as I opened the Good Enough book today and saw the title, "Bright Hope." 

I also thought, "Shew. We could sure use some bright hope today," remembering that the first two of twenty-one funerals are beginning in Uvalde, TX.

Kate and Jessica write, "Too much hope, and you are, frankly, delusional. Too little hope, and you will drown in despair. So, how do we have hope when our reality looks so hopeless?" (p 220) 

They turn to the prophet Ezekiel - the man of strange dreams and visions, "a traumatized witness to a traumatized people" (p 220). A man of many sorrows, a man in need of hope. And what does God do for this prophet? 

God sets Ezekiel on top of a mass grave, thousands of dead, dry bones. And God asks Ezekiel "a really stupid question" (p 221): Can these bones live?   

Of course not. 

"What good is hope in this place, spoken over a pile of drying bones?" (p 221) 

(Feel familiar?) 

And yet ... 

And yet, God restores the Valley of Dry Bones, breathing life into what was once buried and forgotten. 

God restores the house of Israel ... BUT "it doesn't come without the participation of her people" (p 222). 

There's no standing by passively watching God work; the land and the people will be restored because the people will build a new temple and establish a new polity. The people will rebuild. 

And perhaps the greatest reminder of bright hope and God's faithfulness is tucked into the very last verse of the book of Ezekiel: 

Ezekiel 48:35 " ... And the name of the city from that time on shall be, The Lord Is There.

As Jessica and Kate say: Not was there, but you ruined it. Not will be there, once you do these things or get your act together. 

The Lord is there. 

That's the bright hope reminder I needed today. 

May I be a person marked by bright hope in the midst of the darkest of hours. May I be an Easter person. (p 225)  

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

If you're feeling like I'm feeling, I hope you will try the "A Good Enough Step" on page 225: 

Find something that is useless, unrelated, and could be made into a terrible art project. Make a pile of things and then make something. "As you go, just focus on this one thing and complete it with only one goal in mind: let it make you laugh" (p 225). 

"Look, we can't make something from nothing. We are not God. So make something with your own hands and take a minute to pronounce it truly terrible ... and good. We must make something from what we have every day. What if you already have in your experience, and in your life, what it takes to make something good happy? Just from what you have already been given?" 

38 Too Few Sparrows

Kate and Jessica start this entry with a story I had never heard before of Mao Zedong's "war on the nation's sparrows" because they believed they were eating up too much precious seed grain. So they employed all sorts of tactics that caused the little birds to begin to fall to the ground (page 215). 

"China was victorious in its war, and soon the numbers of live birds had reached extinction levels" (p 216). 

But within a few years, they noticed that the rice harvest had actually decreased without the birds ... because now, all manner of insects and locust plagues were feasting on the crops, making the current famine that much worse. The government actually ended up importing 250,000 birds to put things back in balance. 

Hominem unius libri timeo. "Beware the man of a single book." (p 215) 

Kate and Jessica write, "Perhaps there were too many sparrows. But a single solution was not a solution at all" (p 216). 

The Chinese government narrowed in on the one thing they thought would solve the famine crisis. And it only made things worse. If only they had thought a little longer about this and came up with a few other options. Or perhaps employed multiple tactics simultaneously (maybe ones that didn't include killing massive amounts of God's creatures). 

If only they had consulted more than one book. 

What is the downsized version of this that can be applied to our individual lives?  In what ways do we tend to be people "of a single book?" 

Well, do you tend to listen to news from the same media source all the time? (Do they always tell you what you want to hear or what you think is happening?) Do you only consult the same one friend when you're trying to make a difficult decision? (Do they always confirm what you were already thinking?) 

If you surround yourself with people who look like you and work like you and think like you and believe like you, then you become a person of "a single book." 

"If we are going to be the kind of people who build a more equitable world, work toward peace, and fight for justice, there must be room for anger and lament. But how will we know when we're on the right track? We can search for the signs - there will be love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control" (a.k.a. the fruit of the Spirit!).

If we are going to be the kind of people God designed us to be, then change needs to happen, particularly an openness to that which is different from us. From people who are different from us. For solutions that maybe aren't the first ones that come to mind. To be people of "multiple books." 

There is always risk with change and with loving others, but there is a way to know if we're on the right track or not: does it produce the fruit of the Spirit - is it loving and joyful and kind and good and gentle and faithful and self-controlled? 

I suspect you will know sooner rather than later whether a particular change passes that litmus test or not. 

Our hearts are soft, our ears open. Speak, Lord, of the change You desire to write into our life stories as they unfold. For we are gently becoming aware that knowledge will not be the basis for our understanding of how life goes. Love will. (p 218) 

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

How do you feel about the suggestion in "A Good Enough Step" on page 219? They talk about "weaponized piety." 

I'm not sure I understand exactly what they mean by that, by "weaponized piety." And I'm also not sure what the point is of asking the two suggested questions either." 

Perhaps I'm just tired, and my brain is out of gas for the day, but I honestly could use some help with this! 

P.S. Look at me asking for help! I've come a long way in the last 15 months! :-) 

37 The In-Between

Liminality is a delicious word. 

Liminality. It's delicious to say. I knew what liminality felt like, but I never knew the textbook definition until the last couple of years. 

According to all-knowing (wink) Wikipedia, liminality ... "In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold")^[1] is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition the status they will hold when the rite is complete.^[2]

Liminality is a person standing at their college graduation ceremony. Or a couple getting married on their wedding day. 

Or humanity living during a global pandemic. 

Kate and/or Jessica quote anthropologist Victor Turner who says that liminality is like being at a threshold - lifting your foot up to enter a room but before you put it down on the other side. "We are at a threshold - something still becoming - but we don't know yet what all the factors are, and how to frame them. We yearn for normalcy only to find that liminality has become our 'new normal'" (p 210). 

We can be in-between all kinds of things: 

• Relationships
• Seasons of independence and dependence 
• Jobs 
• Friends
• The diagnosis and the cure 
• Feeling courageous and feeling afraid 
• The life we have ... and the life we want 

When you're in a liminal space or time, you're unsettled. And a little lost. Feeling a little exposed and vulnerable as you wait for what's next. 

And maybe instead of rushing ahead to "what's next," maybe it's better to linger in the liminality for just a little bit longer. 

"Instead of trying to escape it, let us settle there for the moment. Knowing and trusting we aren't alone. We're in this strange middle place ... together" (p 211). 

Kate and Jessica point out that liminality is all a part of losing our life for Jesus's sake:  “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 10:37-39) 

Blessed are we, somewhere unnameable, fully present to our reality. Tracking it, with all its subtle gradations and colors and contrasts, the sweetness and the struggle, the stuck and not-quite fitting. (p 212) 

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

Liminality is uncomfortable, to be sure. But Kate and Jessica advocate recognizing it when it happens and lingering there for just a bit. 

In their "A Good Enough Step" on page 213, they write, "For one hour, consent to the in-between. Nestle right in there, not knowing anything for sure. Crazy, isn't it? That's not where we are comfortable. But try it for one solid hour. No strainging for answers. Not pushing to land on an idea. Or solve a problem. See if a poem or song fits. ... (They suggest trying Psalm 131.) 

"And if you do happen to get a nudge where something becomes clear, a just-noticeable difference - sometimes the shift comes sideways, the truth that something has changed - receive it. And if not, just read awhile in the unknowing. Because someday we will see things as they really are. You can count on it" (pp 213-214).