Avoiding Old Flames on Facebook

Toward the end of spring semester, I set a box labeled “I Always Wanted to Ask” on the table at the front of my class. I invited students to write down lingering questions about sex and gender, the subject of our course at Messiah College. A panel comprising five students and me, the professor, responded to all the questions. A classic one emerged: “Can men and women be ‘just’ friends?” It elicited a classic response. “Yes,” I said, “but only by taking romantic potential into account in some way. And no, if the man and woman have been romantically involved with each other.” Most students advocated for platonic friendship and kindly pointed out that the world has changed since the dinosaur age in which I came of age.

I won’t rehearse the dialogue that ensued, but I’m slipping a related question into the box: Is it wise to “friend” old flames on Facebook?

Three old flames have flared up recently (and I only have so many, so it’s an unusually active season). I corresponded with one, a single back-and-forth. After all, I justified, he was just a flicker. Facebook offered another to me as a possible friend. I couldn’t resist peeking at his photos to see whether my kids are cuter than his (surprise — they are), and then I moved on. The third requested that we be friends, and I still need to decide how to respond.

Here’s the thing: I believe in marriage. I believe in total loyalty and lifelong commitment. At my husband’s and my wedding, we sang a hymn that begins, “Are ye able,” said the Master / “to be crucified with me?”/ “Yea,” the sturdy dreamers answered / “to the death we follow thee.” Bringing crucifixion imagery to a wedding was intentional. We expected marriage to be hard, and it has been at times, but we have stuck together. Like our trust in Jesus, we hope we are able to hold our marriage until death.

I believe that all relationships in my life either support or detract from my marriage, however tacitly, and they stay or go based on that criterion. I believe spouses should have access to each others’ phones and e-mails and should approve of each others’ Facebook friends. I believe privacy with exes, even and perhaps particularly virtual privacy, is dangerous. I’m on the road I chose, and no good will come from revisiting roads not taken.

But here’s another thing: I don’t really believe in the way I got to marriage: testing the waters, wading in, backing out, then trying again with someone else — in a word, dating. Most societies do not have dating (until fairly recently, ours didn’t either), and likely for good reasons. My love for my husband may be bright and burning like the sun, but having dated means that other small stars are visible in my sky, perhaps especially when the sun’s light occasionally wanes. Before the Internet, these stars were far away — I had no idea where these men lived, or how to find them if I wanted to. Now, they are as close as the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling above my sons’ beds.

I know what full-blown adultery is, but fidelity is breached long before physical acts occur. How about looking at an ex’s profile pictures and imagining the life you could have had together, the children you could have been raising, the house you could have bought? How about looking at old photos your ex has posted, remembering the encounters you had in that time and place? How about indulging the brief thrill that arises when his or her name appears in your e-mail inbox or your Facebook wall (the rush is fueled, after all, by past words and experiences shared only between the two of you)? How about nurturing the notion that you missed your chance with your real soul-mate by keeping in touch with the supposed soul-mate? These actions and attitudes may not be adultery, but they certainly do not represent loyalty.

Facebook presents me with nicely worded options: “Confirm this request for friendship, or quietly ignore it.” This man is likely just saying hello, having seen my name or photo on a mutual friend’s page. Chances are, it’s no big deal. But I’ve made my choice, regarding the man as well as his request. Old flame, consider yourself quietly ignored.

Jenell Williams Paris is professor of anthropology at Messiah College and has written for Christianity Today about the spiritual disciplines, sex, and Mother's Day. Her next book is about sexual identity.

Simplicity: It's Complicated

The New York Times recently profiled an Oregon couple who winnowed their possessions down to 100 things, giving away most of what they owned and cozying up in a 400-square-foot apartment. The article discussed new (read: more cautious) spending patterns, spurred by the recession but potentially having long-term staying power. Americans are investing in experiences and leisure activities such as vacations and concerts, which contribute to their happiness in a way that the latest electronic gadget does not. “ ‘It’s better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch’ is basically the idea,” says Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia.

The emphasis on owning less relates to the Christian virtue of simplicity. In Matthew 6:19–20, Jesus reminds us to store up treasures in heaven, not on earth, while the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16–21) warns against preoccupation with saving for future comfort. Biblical examples of giving away wealth and possessions abound, from Old Testament teachings on tithing to Jesus telling the rich young man to “sell all that you have and give to the poor” (Mark 10:21).

Should Christians hop on the 100-things bandwagon? Does material simplicity — spending and owning less — always lead to spiritual and emotional enrichment?

In my 20s, I attended a Washington, D.C., church that had rigorous membership requirements, including a minimum 10 percent tithe. I worked for low-paying nonprofits in an expensive city, so tithing made a big difference in what was left once rent and groceries were covered. Instead of embracing forced simplicity, I resented it for making even the most mundane purchases occasions for anxiety and guilt. I remember standing in a drug store aisle contemplating whether it was irresponsible to buy new pantyhose. Scrutinizing every purchase didn’t free me from material concerns to make room for spiritual ones. It just made me cranky. And it didn't feel like freedom to agonize over a $4 pair of pantyhose.

Our five-person family used to live in a tiny five-room house, which required unrelenting commitment to efficient storage, scrutinized shopping lists, and regular cleaning. It required far more work, and fostered more anxiety, than life in our larger home now. Living in a consumer society can make simplicity complicated, as we navigate culturally entrenched gift-giving rituals, or accommodate expectations that we dress a certain way for work. I struggle with how to foster simplicity without our kids resenting us for being tightwads.

Jesus said that he came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. Abundant life — that’s really what we’re after, isn’t it? Do our spending, saving, and giving contribute to an abundant life, or to resentment, anxiety, covetousness, and a consuming concern with how much we have or don’t have? Perhaps what Christians should strive for is abundant simplicity.

Abundant simplicity does not mean agonizing over every purchase or adhering to an arbitrary number of possessions. If someone gives the 100-things couple a gift, do they start mad mental calculations to identify what they will give away to accommodate the new item? Do they say, “Sorry, but your gift puts us over our limit”? If they ever have children, will they be able to graciously accommodate the stuff that inevitably accompanies kids — the goody bags and found objects and favorite stuffed animals? Gratitude, contentment, and acceptance of life as it is, even when it does not conform to our preferences, are also virtues.

Abundant simplicity is more about paying attention — to what we want and need; what we have and buy; what we spend, save, and give; and our relationship with our bank accounts and material objects. When do money and things enhance our life, and when do they tempt us to envy, anxiety, fear, pride, or selfishness?

Simplicity doesn’t always mean spending less. We might spend more on well-made clothes that fit and flatter, for example, rather than filling our closets with bargain-rack finds that we rarely wear. Simplicity doesn’t always mean having less. I have many possessions that provide daily satisfaction, such the nearly new leather loveseat I bought from some neighbors who moved, and that has quickly become my favorite writing spot. Other possessions — a well-equipped kitchen, a car with a power driver’s seat, multiple swimsuits for pool workouts — allow me to care for myself and my family well by accommodating my physical disability. Could I live without these possessions? Absolutely, but I’m glad I don’t.

The observation that money spent on experiences contributes to happiness also rings true. My daughter’s horseback riding lessons or our family vacations to Cape Cod are luxuries, but they offer my kids some of the moments they will remember forever — how it felt the first time the horse broke into a trot, the drowsy contentment of slipping between sandy sheets with the damp, salty air blowing in through the screens. That feels like abundance to me.

My Encounter with Mental Illness

My freshman year, I spiraled into a clinical depression triggered by an off-campus move. That semester, my lack of finances required moving from the dorms into an apartment across the street from the university. There, I lived rent-free with a generous elderly woman. Yet I felt like an outsider looking in as daily I’d peer out the window at students walking to and fro.

Although I lived in a cloud of mental confusion, somehow I managed to attend classes and chapel. For over a year, I daily fought back a stream of tears that threatened to publicly out me. I thought I was crazy; my only relief was sleep. So I slept a lot. And I loathed myself. Even though I prayed and read Scripture daily, I felt numb, isolated, and alienated — damned. It felt as if God had fled. Although surrounded by several thousand professing Christians, I was too ashamed and embarrassed to tell others except a counselor and superficially a few others. For the most part, no one seemed to notice. I contemplated suicide.

Because of the fervent prayers and encouraging phone calls of my younger siblings, Kenny and Michelle, I clung to life. Day by day they ministered God’s grace. And, thanks be to God, I started the climb out of the lowest rungs of hell late in my sophomore year.

Yet I know that not everybody makes it. And according to one report released last week, the number of college students struggling is growing. At an American Psychological Association meeting, John Guthman of Hofstra University reported that, based on a sample of over 3,000 U.S. students, the percentage of students with moderate to severe depression rose from 34% to 41% from 1998 to 2010. Relatedly, the number of students on psychiatric medications went from 11% to 24% in the same period. (Conversely, the number of students who said they had considered suicide within two weeks of counseling went from 26% to 11% in this period.) Guthman said the rise isn’t about increasing stress loads — though that’s a likely factor — but about more students with pre-existing conditions attending college, and their increased willingness to seek help.

Here at Cedarville University, in an anonymous survey conducted by Student Life, 33.2% percent of students reported dealing with depression at one time or another during their college experience.

As a resident director, I share dorm life with 154 women, and many confide in me. And because of my experience, I am sensitive to signs and symptoms of depression. When I notice signs or am told someone is depressed, I gently inquire about her well-being. If she opens up, I suggest she see a campus counselor and take full advantage of the resources available here. I encourage her to share with safe persons within the Christian community, here and elsewhere — to suffer within community and find hope and perhaps healing in the midst of it. I pray that she’ll know the love of God — that she isn’t alone in the deep sadness; that Christ’s body suffers with her.

In her book Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos, 2006), Kathryn Greene-McCreight, an Episcopal rector and professor who has battled bipolar disorder for years, notes, “The mentally ill are one of those groups of handicapped people against whom it still seems to be socially acceptable to hold prejudice.” Because of the stigma associated with depression and other mental illnesses in the Christian community, it can be difficult to persuade my girls to see a counselor. Many consider it embarrassing to walk into Counseling Services. If a counselor suggests that they talk to University Medical Services about a prescription for an anti-depressant, a good number hesitate or flat-out refuse.

Some indicate that neither they nor their parents believe in psychology or anti-depressants. Depression, they maintain, results from personal sin or demonic oppression; if they’d read the Bible and pray more, they’d be healed. One young woman with bipolar told me she didn’t want to worry her parents. She’d continue to go to counseling, she said, but she couldn’t risk her parents finding out, as they surely would if she sought a prescription for her condition.

In some cases, depression is caused by personal sin, life circumstances, poor nutrition, other illnesses, demonic oppression, or some combination thereof. In those cases, repentance, support from the Christian community, the spiritual disciplines, the care of a physician, pastoral counseling, and medication (when necessary) are invaluable. In other cases, depression and other mental illnesses arise from a biochemical imbalance, often one that runs in families, like my own. In such situations, medication can serve as a form of God’s grace.

Christian colleges should aim to create an environment where students who need help feel free to get it, thus releasing them from stigma. And we need to observe and take action. If a student drops out of class or an organization, if she is failing, or if her overall affect drastically changes, faculty and staff should consider inquiring about the student’s well-being. Upon discovering a struggling student, ideally they’d help that student seek counseling and/or academic support. In addition, they could encourage the student to share his/her struggles with a student life dean, resident director, pastor, and trusted others, forming a web of support.

A Christian campus community has the unique ability to offer holistic counsel and even pastoral care to suffering students. It’s inexcusable that we often lag behind secular institutions in addressing mental illness. In the spirit of Jesus, let’s step up and offer our students the care and support they need.

Midlife Matters: An Interview with Dale Hanson Bourke

I met Dale Hanson Bourke at a meeting of women involved in promoting women’s health and economic empowerment in Zambia. I admired her intelligence, curiosity, and breadth of experience as a journalist and women’s health advocate. Later, I traveled to Zambia to see the projects World Vision and its collaborative partners (such as World Bicycle Relief, International Justice Mission, and the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia) were undertaking to empower women and help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Dale was in Zambia at the same time, and I enjoyed getting to know her as we traveled in the beautiful countryside on very bumpy roads. I ate my first fried caterpillar with her at a World Vision ADP. When the trip was ending, we said we should have a reunion with our three traveling mates in the summer.

Remarkably, Dale was able to carve out time to host us. Her book Embracing Your Second Calling: Find Passion and Purpose for the Rest of Your Life was a frequent companion in the weeks before I saw her in Maryland. At 43, and definitely aware of being solidly in midlife, I found myself deeply moved by the book (recently re-released and updated), so it was a treat to talk with Dale about it when we were together a few weeks ago.

What follows is an excerpt from our conversation.

…

JG Dale, as you know, I love Embracing Your Second Calling. I was moved by the way you weave Ruth and Naomi’s story throughout.

DHB I was struck by Naomi. Here was a woman for whom the first half of life was full. She had two sons — what every Jewish mother wanted. She had a good husband who provided for the family and removed them from a land broken by drought. She even had two daughters-in-law whom she loved, and who loved her.

Then her life fell apart. We’re told in the Book of Ruth that she was too old to find another man and to have another child. In other words, she was in midlife. When her husband and sons died, she was angry with God. She said to him, “Change my name. Call me ‘Bitter.’ ”

But she still loved God even when she was angry with him. She never stopped talking to him. I love that. And the fact that Ruth would stay with her and follow her back to a land plagued by drought — that speaks to the kind of person Naomi was, that Ruth would follow her.

. . . [A]nd it was truly miraculous the way God created a second calling for Naomi. At the end of the Book of Ruth, she is holding a baby, her grandchild. God had put her into the line of David when her own family line was dead. She was made part of the line of Jesus!

JG In what ways did you connect with Naomi?

DHB I connect with her in many ways. Yes, in part because we are both the mothers of two sons. I also connected with the fact that there is a point in life when we say, “Wait, a minute ago I had my children here. I was making their lunches and being their mom and suddenly, they’ve left. They’re gone.” It hits you hard.

It’s amazing how you go through the first half of your life so busy with your kids and then — it’s all gone. All the things you felt you were good at don’t matter anymore.

JG My oldest is 14. I understand what you’re saying, but I know I won’t feel it until I’m there. Is there really no way to prepare for it?

DHB No. You have to go through it. And . . . it is a loss. I’ve been very fortunate. I’d had a full family life and full work life. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for a lot of my friends for whom being their children’s mother represented their whole identity.

JG You say in the book that many women feel “washed up” in midlife but that truly, we have so much to give in the second half of our lives.

DHB I am amazed by all the women I see who are so talented and have so much to give the world. And I know how much the world needs. But there are women who are stopped. Stopped by their own sense of inadequacy. It grieves me. It’s like the life has been sucked out of them. Just like Naomi — she thought, “I'm not going to have more babies. I’m not going to have another husband. What good am I?”

There’s a message — overt and under the surface — that if you’re a woman and you get to a certain point in your life, the best you can do is try to hide it.

JG Dye your hair. Get rid of wrinkles.

DHB Otherwise, you’re just too ugly for people to look at. A lot of women my age start to take that in. They think, I’m washed up. I have to hide. But God’s call isn’t only for young women — it’s for all faithful people. I can go about my day and look for someone who needs a kind word, for someone who needs help. We need to let the Lord use what he can use. We can look for the pain in our lives and ask ourselves how that pain connects us to others.

JG That makes me think of the T. D. Jakes quote in the book: “Your ministry will be where your misery has been.”

DHB It can be so counterintuitive. But if we really believe that everything we go through is for a reason, we’ll believe there’s there’s redemption. If we’ve been through something painful, we can put our arm around someone else and say, “I’ve been through that. I understand.” That’s ministry.

JG Yes. In the book, you say that prayer is “the bedrock of the second half of life.”

DHB If we don’t do anything in the second part of life, we must at least learn to pray. Like Naomi, we must stay in close communication with God. Even when we don’t know what’s next.

Jennifer Grant is a journalist and freelance writer who has written for Her.meneutics about multitasking and Lady Gaga. She is working on a book about the adoption of her youngest child.

Preserving Man and Beast

Jeffrey Kluger’s recent Time magazine cover story, “What Animals Think,” explores new research about the human-like intelligence of animals. A Bonobo (cousin of the chimpanzee) can learn hundreds of words. Dogs demonstrate social skills by following a pointed finger to its object. Crows bend wires to create fishing hooks. Elephants appear to mourn their dead.

Christians can and should marvel at the surprising points of connection between human and animal. But overemphasizing our commonalities can lead to dangerous territory. The Bible articulates a hierarchical model of creation, with humans “ruling” over the animals (Gen. 1:26). (Of course, much depends upon how we interpret the word rule. More on that later.) Genesis depicts humans as set apart from the rest of creation, for only humans have been created “in God’s image” (Gen. 1:27). In addition to prioritizing humans through the actions of his ministry, Jesus affirms the distinct nature of humans when he addresses human anxiety: “You are worth more than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:31). In other words, God cares for all of creation, but God endows humans with particular worth.

Unfortunately, as Kluger notes, “For many people, the Bible offers the most powerful argument [against animal rights] of all. Human beings were granted ‘dominion over the beasts of the field,’ and there the discussion can more or less stop.” He is right: The Bible has been used to wrongly justify disregarding, even abusing animals. In contrast, a proper understanding of humans “ruling” or “stewarding” role should lead to greater flourishing for human and animal alike.

For secular ethicists, our points of connection with animals are most significant when it comes to the question of suffering, and Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer is the leading voice for the ethical treatment of animals. (Singer’s views have been explored several times in Christianity Today.) In sum, Singer believes that pain and suffering is bad — in humans and animals — and that “to the extent that humans and animals can experience their worlds, they are equals.”

It’s no surprise that Singer, an atheist, denies the biblical hierarchy. But when the distinction between human and animal is disregarded, the value of life becomes the value of life in general rather than the value of human life in particular. A smart chimpanzee, for instance, might be deemed more valuable than a human in a coma, or a human infant, or a person with a cognitive disability. For Singer, suffering is the ultimate evil and temporal happiness, the ultimate good. If animals suffer, and suffering is bad, then humans should do all they can to prevent such suffering. As a corollary, Singer advocates the possibility of infanticide for very sick or disabled infants. Since suffering is bad, if an infant is suffering (or if that infant’s parent is suffering as a result of the infant), then the infant can be killed (from Singer’s “Taking Life”). An atheistic view of animal rights denies the ontological difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. The animal rights movement has drawn positive attention to the suffering of animals, yet some of its main proponents have also contributed to a devaluing of human life.

C. S. Lewis offers a different perspective. Precisely because animals are not created in the image of God and do not have a soul, Lewis writes, “the infliction of pain upon them [becomes] not easier but harder to justify. . . . For it means that animals cannot deserve pain, nor profit morally by the discipline of pain, nor be recompensed by happiness in another life for suffering in this” (quoted in “C. S. Lewis’s Theology of Animals,” an article by theologian Andrew Linzey). In other words, suffering in humans is more easily redeemed by God than in animals, which makes it all the more important for humans to see to it that animals do not suffer.

Kluger offers suggestions for an ethical response to the new data: “We could surely stop using [animals] to test cosmetics . . . We could surely eat less meat . . . And we could rethink zoos, marine parks and other forms of animal entertainment.” For Kluger, the only reason to do these things is because we can relate to animals and don’t want them to suffer. But Christians have a deeper rationale for caring for creation: In the Genesis account, Adam is given the task of naming the animals (Gen. 2:19-20). This responsibility implies a relationship of care and respect, as of a parent to a child. Fulfilling our caretaking role should foster humility and gratitude in us. And the new research demonstrating the intelligence and emotion of animals should only prompt greater reverence for God’s creation.

Christians will always be charged with “speciesism,” as we believe that humans are the most valued (and most valuable) species, and our species is fundamentally different from others. But evidence should never exist to warrant the charge of Christian indifference to the suffering of animals. While Singer’s ethic leads to the protection of animals at the expense of human flourishing, adhering to God’s instructions in Genesis should lead to mutual flourishing and blessing for animals and humans alike.

Top 10 Posts of the Past 30 Days

Thanks to all our regular readers and stumble-upon visitors for continuing to make Her.meneutics a lively, exciting blog to be a part of! The editors here especially want to acknowledge some new bloggers who have covered topics that matter and know how to start good discussions: Jennifer C. Grant is a mother of four and columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Anna Broadway is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity. And Hannah Faith Notess is the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, and managing editor of Response magazine. Look for more good work from them in the coming weeks.

(10) Multitasking: Bad for the Soul, by Jennifer Grant // Comments: 12
Sure, I was getting a lot done as a mother of four. But I was having a hard time obeying God.

(9) Seeking a Spouse? Lighten Up, by Anna Broadway // Comments: 25
Could ‘dating cards’ help Christians take their love lives a little less seriously?

(8) Eat Pray Love Book Club Discussion, by Katelyn Beaty // Comments: 23
For all the bad and the ugly in Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 spiritual memoir, I wanted to hold on to the good. Here's what I found.

(7) The Glamorous Life of the Pregnant Teenager, by Laura Leonard // Comments: 12
Do pop culture's portrayals of teen pregnancy harm young women?

(6) The Friendless, Voiceless Disney Princess, by Hannah Faith Notess // Comments: 12
Most 'family-friendly' movies lack substantive female characters and friendships, according to the Bechdel Test. Then again, so do most movies.

(5) Celebrate National B-----Feeding Month, by Annie Young Frisbie // Comments: 43
To counteract our culture's squeamishness about breast-feeding, first we need to be able to talk about it.

(4) How Many Kids Should We Have? by Amy Julia Becker // Comments: 29
To answer the question, Christian couples need more than a few select Bible verses.

(3) Following Christ at a Porn Convention, by Dawn Herzog Jewell
Editors' Note: This post has been removed at the request of the author.

(2) Why I Can't Boycott Mel Gibson, by Anna Broadway // Comments: 47
And it's not because he is 'too talented,' as Salon stated last week.

(1) An Open Letter to Anne Rice, by Karen Spears Zacharias // Comments: 52
What I see when I look at the church.

Have We Forgotten Haiti?

The hubbub has died down. Other tragedies have struck; our attentions have been averted. A little over eight months ago, Haiti experienced one of the worst natural disasters in history. Since then, Chile, Turkey, and now Pakistan have faced their fair share of environmental turmoil. We watch helplessly as nature devastates the homes and lives of thousands, and then we turn our attention to the latest earthquake, then back to the wars, celebrities, Apple products, and the ordinary everyday.

The reports on Haiti are slower now that the country has entered reconstruction. No longer are we bombarded with television ads to “donate now,” nor are we hit with the gruesome photographs that once streamed onto televisions, websites, and magazines as the events unfolded (though we have heard plenty about singer Wyclef Jean’s bid for the Haitian presidency). To stay up-to-date with the aftermath now requires more intentionality on our parts.

Yet Haiti still needs help — direly. This week, a special recovery commission announced that more than $1.6 billion is needed to rebuild the country’s economy and agriculture sector, a primary source of jobs. A Monday New York Times editorial predicted that overhauling the country’s educational system, making it universal and nearly free, will take about 20 years. Meanwhile, about 1.5 million Haitians are still living in makeshift tent camps; only 4 percent of the rubble has been cleared; bodies are still being dug up; hunger continues; and grief will be present for a long time.

In mid-May, the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University estimated that American donors had contributed $1.3 billion to relief efforts, but that it expected donations to drop off soon. “We’re a nation with a short attention span; three to six months after a disaster, donations approach zero,” said center executive director Patrick Rooney.

Will we dare to stretch our attention spans? By “we,” I am not referring to the wealthy West coming in to save the day. I am referring to we the church, those who read about “pure, undefiled religion” (James 1) and are so deeply moved by it. This is a question I am challenging myself with: Will I continue to purposefully, intentionally stay aware of Haiti’s plight? Will I choose to be intentional with prayer and to whom I give money?

I worry about ad campaigns that build awareness by spawning T-shirt campaigns and bracelet trends, memorial concerts and speaker circuits. There is nothing inherently wrong with raising awareness and funding using mass marketing and clothing. I only fear that awareness becomes but a trend — that to help and care for others becomes another fashion accessory we wear on our wrists. And once the cause goes out of fashion, we are tempted to drop it.

C. S. Lewis writes about distracted Christians in the first chapter of The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape explains to his dear nephew, Wormwood, how to keep a Christian from being productive and focusing on real concerns. “Keep pressing him on the ordinariness of things,” he writes. “Don’t let him get away from the invaluable ‘real life.’” By this, Screwtape is urging Wormwood to keep his human charge focused on where he is right here, right now: stoplights, grocery lists, household chores, what’s on TV tonight, and so on. Heaven forbid that the human have a deep, challenging thought and become productive for eternity.

Haiti’s tragedy will, someday, pass, but another will come. How do we, the church, stay aware of the life-or-death needs of others when the headlines no longer blare in our faces? First, we must do a bit of homework. Occasionally news sources will have a website devoted to the relief efforts of a recent tragedy. Those are good places to start. Humanitarian groups such as World Vision and Oxfam International and many others clearly lay out on their web pages the work they are doing and the work to be done. If we want to know how to help, we can begin by asking those who are helping. E-mail them, ask them how you can support them — whether by praying, sending supplies, raising funds, or going yourself. Be intentional about the need that is there, seeking out those who are deeply connected to the need

And we must pray. Prayer is where we should always start, for even if we could rebuild all of Port-au-Prince in one day, much hurt and grief and need for Christ would remain. The Book of Common Prayer poignantly sums up the church’s mission: “For the poor and the oppressed, for the unemployed and the destitute, for prisoners and captives, and for all who remember and care for them, let us pray to the Lord.” May our attention spans stretch beyond mere moments of compassion, and may our thoughts linger so we can better pray and offer help where it is needed.

Kate Roberts is a recent college graduate who blogs at Between the Lines.

A Theology of Jiggly Thighs

Splattered across the media this week is Kristen McMenamy, a supermodel and mother of three who was featured on the August cover of Italian Vogue. She appears inside in a striking (some say offensive) photo spread, lying on her back against jagged rocks, wearing a black feathered dress, in a way designed to mimic the aesthetic of the Gulf oil spill images. But I was more intrigued by the model’s hair: The 45-year-old boldly flaunts her naturally long gray locks, telling Vogue Daily, “You can get older and still be rock-’n’-roll. I thought all that gray hair would make a beautiful picture.

I’m a fan of embracing the way God made us, but I have to confess feeling a little conflicted about the hoopla. I suspect my reticence is not unrelated to the fact that McMenamy still has the body of a Barbie.

At age 41, I have most of my cranial pigment, but I see where things are headed. If I live enough years, if you live enough years, the physical downhill slide is inevitable. The pigment fails. Once-toned arms get flabby. Other things start to jiggle, sag, wrinkle. If all this weren’t insulting enough, physical losses give way to social losses as we lose the ability to turn heads with our beauty.

As is my way, I like to make issues like sagging breasts and jiggly thighs theological. Specifically, I’m dying to get a handle on the divine logic behind the aging situation. What holy madness drives wrinkles and age spots?

I humbly invite you to join me in considering one weird possibility: I wonder if this process that is clearly happening against our wills — as the volume of beauty products that promise to reverse aging’s attests — isn’t what Jesus has been inviting us to embrace, all along, with our wills.

“Hold on, Margot. Jesus never said anything about crows’ feet or yellowing teeth or declining breast altitude.” Not in so many words. But to those who want to gain their lives — and maybe the attention of others — Jesus instructs us to lose our lives. Those who want to be first — say, in the high-school homecoming court — should aim for last place. Those who want to increase — possibly in attractiveness — should decrease. Jesus even taught his friends that those who want to attract God’s good favor should give themselves in ways that don’t attract the good favor of others. Downward social mobility is exactly what Jesus has been inviting us to embrace, all along. Though the apostle Paul wasn’t thinking about eye circles or thinning scalps, he confirms, “We who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor. 4:11).

In the end, the reality of the aging situation effectively dissolves any illusion that this life — or the next one, for that matter — is all about us. As we die to ourselves, whether purposefully or kicking and screaming, we relinquish whatever power we might have had to attract attention with our appearances. When we do it willingly, we live into Jesus’ good will for us. We make more room for others to be seen and heard and known and loved.

If you are young and gorgeous, and maybe have aspirations to be America’s Next Top Model, I completely understand that this whole set up seems unsavory. For those of us who want to age with grace, though, there’s real promise as we choose this Jesus-way. As we begin to embrace the inevitable losses inherent in aging we’re freed up, in a particular way, for the kind of self-giving love for which we were made.

As for Kristen McMenamy, even with the Barbie body she might have something important to teach Christian women.

The No-Fault-Divorce Nation

No-fault divorce is now legal in every state, making filing for divorce in America — whether both parties agree or not — simply a matter of getting the proper paperwork.

New York just became the last state to adopt the legislation, passing a bill in early July that was signed into law this week by Governor David Paterson.

According to New York Law Journal, the law lets mutually consenting couples divorce “within six months of stating under oath their unions are ‘irretrievably’ broken.” Proponents say such laws free couples from needing to prove that one spouse caused the divorce by adultery or abuse. But to suggest ugly divorce battles are a thing of the past would deny the devastation of divorce itself. There are plenty of reasons why making it easier to get a divorce is a bad idea. Opposition to the legislation has created unlikely allies out of the Roman Catholic Church, the New York chapter of the feminist group National Organization for Women (NOW), and the nonprofit Marriage Savers, founded by evangelical Mike McManus.

Marcia Pappas, president of New York’s NOW, echoed the Catholic concern for the potential economic inequality for women caused by sanctioning “divorce on demand”:

No-fault takes away any bargaining leverage the non-moneyed spouse has. Currently she can say, “If you want a divorce I’ll agree, but you have to work out a fair agreement.”

By bypassing mutual agreement, S3890 would treat nearly all divorces alike. Under current New York law, fault matters in property distribution and alimony only in rare instances, when “so egregious” as to be “a blatant disregard” of the marriage. Beating one’s wife with a barbell until she is unrecognizable would count, but verbally abusing and striking one’s wife and child while intoxicated would not, even if the abuse required a physician’s care. Not all reasons for divorcing are equal. Often someone is at fault and that should matter if the law is to do justice.

In defense of no-fault divorce, Bonnie Erbe argued in U.S. News & World Report:

The longer we mollycoddle women, the less well women are going to fare economically. Women must realize that marriage is an economic partnership as well as a romantic one, and if women want to give up working to stay home to raise children, they are also giving up their financial futures as well.

But it’s because marriage is an “economic partnership” that women shouldn’t be “giving up their financial futures” when they stay home with young children. That legal partnership is supposed to make women (or men) feel safe in the decision to sacrifice their personal earnings for the good of the family unit. Enforcing a contract isn’t “mollycoddling” women; it’s the way the legal system is supposed to work.

McManus of Marriage Savers warned about the fiscal price tag of the bill by documenting the rise from 639,000 divorces in 1969 — the year of the first no-fault law, instated in California — to more than a million by 1975. “It is a grave mistake certain to increase the divorce rate by up to 50 percent, and boost the state budget deficit by hundreds of millions annually,” he said.

McManus advocates reforming divorce laws on a state-by-state basis, recommending that states lengthen mandatory separation periods prior to granting divorce and replace no-fault divorce (which he calls “unilateral divorce”) with mutual consent divorce in cases involving children. His goal is reconciliation between spouses whenever possible.

Marriage Savers is one of several groups expressing a surge of concern for the state of marriage in the U.S. Marriage Savers works through “Community Marriage Policies” that establish standards requiring premarital counseling and ongoing marriage-enrichment courses, including conflict resolution and step-family support. According to the Maryland-based nonprofit, once a community gets a significant number of people to sign this type of agreement, the divorce rate drops.

The Manhattan Declaration, signed by prominent members of the Christian community last year, emphasized the importance of churches getting proactive about protecting marriage. A 2005 Ellison Research study of 872 Protestant churches showed that only 28 percent of the churches offered a marriage enrichment course. Perhaps indicating modest improvement, a 2008 study of 2,500 U.S. church congregations (including Protestant, evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, and “world religions”) released by Faith Communities Today indicated that 60 percent of churches offer either parenting or marriage enrichment programs (the Ellison survey showed 20 percent offered a parenting or child development course).

Groups like Marriage Savers, Let’s Strengthen Marriage, and Smart Marriages believe that marriage is in crisis, due in part to devaluing the institution through measures such as no-fault divorce. Many of these organizations take a preventative approach by encouraging community — especially church-based community — support and education. In these ways, they hope the church can lead the way to making divorce and other marriage-related problems less common.

The objective of churches becoming the benchmark for stable, healthy marriages seems to me something worth striving for.

How the Movie Partly Redeems 'Eat Pray Love'

Eat Pray Love Book Club Discussion: Part 5

Katelyn, I took away much the same idea you did from Eat, Pray, Love: that perhaps our highest selfishness is the belief that without us, everything would fall apart. We are suspicious of her “selfish” decision to essentially run away from her everyday life in New York City and focus on herself and her relationships with herself, God, and others in Italy, India, and Indonesia. My initial reactions to the book were more negative than positive — for many of the reasons you mentioned, Katelyn — but when I mentioned my objections to a friend who had really enjoyed the book, she asked why I would consider seeking God to be a self-centered pursuit. Great question.

The things that bothered me most about Gilbert’s book, I realized, are the very same things that tend to bother me most about myself. I too have a tendency to indulge in a good bit of a “navel-gazing,” and have spent many, many hours dissecting my life, my problems, and my feelings about them, in journals, in solitary thought, and in conversations with friends. In fact, I spent a few months in London and Italy in the immediate aftermath of a pretty difficult emotional situation doing little but this very thing. Was I selfish then, to spend so much time “working on myself” and restoring emotional and, more importantly, spiritual, order and health to my life?

I went to see the movie, Eat Pray Love, this weekend interested in how it would handle this general theme. While the book could spend pages and pages in Gilbert’s mind, a direct movie translation of her prose would bore viewers to tears. So I went with pretty low expectations--even beyond my thematic concerns, the movie has been receiving reviews that range from mediocre to downright bad (it currently has a 39 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes). Mostly, I was looking forward to the opportunity to escape into beautiful, exotic locations, if only for a few hours--the travel narrative providing the most enjoyable aspect of the book for me. I was also curious, of course, to see just how deep the movie would be willing to delve into the spiritual aspect of Gilbert’s memoir. Turns out the answer is, not very deep. The movie trades in the spiritual revelations of the book for a psychology lite version of soul searching — Julia Robert’s Liz seeks primarily to deal with her guilt over leaving her marriage, and to open herself up to love again. Gone are her struggles to learn focus and commitment, to find meaning in ritual, replaced with a few images of Roberts in tortured om poses, struggling to focus on spiritual matters. What those spiritual matters are, the viewer never learns. It’s all boiled down to her attempt to get over her guilt and past the pain and into a restored, whole version of herself.

The movie Gilbert seems far less focused on herself and far more focused on the people around her. In each place she quickly develops a community, always made up of a combination of locals, expatriates, and fellow travelers, and it is these relationships that bring her through the pain of her string of failed relationships and the guilt of her painful, messy divorce. In the book, many of these characters acted as accessories to her travels, adding local color to each place and providing a sounding board for Gilbert’s internal meanderings, but in the movie it truly is her love for these people that transforms her life.

While at the ashram in India, Liz struggles to get through the Gurugita, a morning chant made up of 182 Sanskrit verses. In the book, she decides to dedicate each verse to her 8-year-old nephew, using her love for him as a starting point or model for the type of spiritual devotion and love she wants to embody. In the movie, she dedicates her Gurugita to Tulsi, a 17-year-old Indian girl being forced into an arranged marriage. It really is a touching scene when she tells the girl, who is struggling to get through her wedding day, that she has been dedicating her prayers to the couple’s happiness. This scene is mirrored by moments in both Italy (a Thanksgiving table offering) and Indonesia (a rallying of friends across the globe that provides a home for a dispossessed woman and her child). It is these moments that offer the possibility of real change as we see how both people have changed each other’s lives. It’s a give-and-take, not merely the “take” if often reads as in the book.

The lack of spiritual content in the movie actually ended up being a good thing, in my opinion. It traded the convoluted pseudo-Hindu mish-mash of the book for a very grounded look at community and the role it plays in restoration. It did well in pushing to the background her personal spiritual quest, because, while I do not believe that such an undertaking is a selfish thing, it can easily come across that way, and did to many readers.

Did anyone else have similar (or dissimilar) feelings about the movie? How about the implications of her year-long travels — selfish? Or not? What makes a spiritual quest selfish or unselfish?

Editors note: This is the final installment of the Eat Pray Love Book Club Discussion, which began last week. Thanks for engaging with the ideas behind the book, and feel free to weigh in on whether you'd like to see another book club in the future and if so, what books you would like to read.

Why We Envy Elizabeth Gilbert

Like most readers, I devoured Eat, Pray, Love pretty quickly, finding it to be eloquently written, eagerly honest, and fairly perceptive of culture, relationships, and of the self.

Through her engaging memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert invites us all to peek into her self-reflective quest after a painful divorce. Don’t we all wish we could replace painful relationships with glamorous travel involving relaxation and reflection? Unfortunately, most of us are not able to pursue such endeavors, so we are relegated to living vicariously through reading Eat, Pray, Love. Better yet, now we can skip the book and head to the theater.

For most of us, self-reinvention involves switching from coffee to green tea, though we are constantly encouraged to change things up and become a better person. On the newsstands, O, the Oprah Magazine offers “The Makeover Issue! 178 inspiring ways to change things up (Oprah did!).” Real Simple wants us to perpetually make our life easier (usually through buying more stuff to organize the other stuff we already own). Perhaps those of us who are drawn to spiritual memoirs secretly hope we’ll find the subtle answer to a fulfilling and satisfying life.

Would Gilbert’s book sell like hotcakes if it were written as a biography? Probably not. Most consumers would be less enthusiastic to pick up a book about a woman who goes through a vague divorce, gorges on pizza in Italy, does some “oms” in India, and meets a male replacement in Indonesia. When choosing a biography to read, most of us look for a hero to emulate, someone whose entire life story is worth telling. Instead, Eat, Pray, Love offers us a way to act fly on the wall for an up-close glimpse at another person's spiritual journey.

Traveling offers the alluring opportunity to self-reinvent, allowing us to leave painful memories behind so we can understand other cultures and simultaneously engage in personal discovery. After reading Eat, Pray, Love, I coincidentally began Bill Bryson’s journey on the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods, and although they are both traveling memoirs, Bryson purposefully draws conclusions from beyond his own experiences with observations about his surroundings. He brilliantly mixes history and cultural scrutiny with hilariously deadpan anecdotes from his travels. “If a product or enterprise doesn't constantly re-invent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and alas, nearly always uglier,” he writes.

In contrast, Gilbert’s engagement with the surrounding culture always seems to lead back to herself, from indulging in Italian pizza, to her wandering thoughts during meditation in India, to her altruistic attempt at financing a healer’s shop in Indonesia. Predictably, she is swept off her feet by a Brazilian man for the happy ending. She writes, “I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.” Despite her reassurance, it is hardly convincing.

Gilbert is not the only author who has experienced personal success through personal narrative. Spiritual memoirs seem like quick sellers for Christian publishers, with popular hits from authors like Donald Miller and Anne Lamott, to recent books from Susan Isaacs, Jason Boyett, and Rachel Held Evans. In our interest in others’ spiritual quests, however, perhaps we are losing sight of another valuable genre: the biography. Last year, Chris Armstrong eloquently argued for CT that Christians should regain the lost spiritual discipline of reading biographies.

Of this I am convinced: Biographical narratives have power. They carry the potential to bring deep transformation. But today, we have lost some of our forebears' sense of the power of life stories. I think this began happening at the beginning of the 20th century.

Conveniently, Eric Metaxas’ 500-page biography Bonhoeffer (Thomas Nelson) currently stands in the way of finishing my summer reading list. It sits on my shelf, as if to mock: “You will never finish me.” While Eat, Pray, Love offers a convenient escape from daily realities, Bonhoeffer offers the tale of a radical theologian’s daring (and fatal) quest to resist Nazism. Somehow, the two don’t seem to compare.

Snakes on a (Spiritual) Plane

Eat Pray Love Book Club Discussion: Part 3

Perhaps because I was once a religious studies student, Eat, Pray, Love reminded me of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience — and, though, the two books have quite different forms, Gilbert’s memoir raised problems similar, for me, to those encountered in James nearly ten years before.

Religious studies is the secular study of religion, so in my first graduate seminar, we examined various theories of religion, comparing insights and shortcomings. James took a more psychological approach, which I liked, but as I read page after page of the various anecdotes he recounts, there emerged a troubling elision between the positive and the negative, the joy-giving and the fear-inducing “religious experience.” The failure to account for any possible difference in the cause behind such discordant experiences as some of those he recounted struck me as a major weakness in his catalog.

I, of course, was reading him through a Christian worldview, in which spiritual beings can be both good and bad. Thus, when I read those accounts, there was always a phenomenological question in the back of my mind: What caused this? Was this a “God sighting”? Or something else?

Gilbert’s detailed recounting of her various spiritual experiences, from a lonely East Coast bathroom to the rooftop visions of India, prompted a similar reading dialogue. And she doesn’t exactly discourage such assessments, more or less attributing the book’s earliest spiritual encounters to a fairly Christian-sounding God. From there it gets muddy and murkier. But when she got to her time at the Indian ashram, and made a completely casual reference to the appearance of a snake image during meditation — this seen as a good thing — I was shocked.

It wasn’t this surprising interpretation that took me aback as it was the total lack of qualification or contextualization of a view that certainly isn’t the only take on such images. Elsewhere in the book, she spends more time responding to anticipated reader objections to some point of view she’s taken on spiritual matters, but here there was nothing — not even a suggestion that some might, at minimum, be surprised by her spin on snakes.

For a woman who began by talking about Christian notions of the divine to describe snake imagery as positive, without once acknowledging how the same are perceived in other traditions — like, say, the Christianity referenced before — astonished me. Admittedly, Gilbert aims at something quite different from scholarship on religion, but I still find it strange she wouldn’t even mention the starkly different interpretations of the same imagery and why she chose the one view over others, or why her view may even have changed.

But, as we also learned in grad school, it’s not fair to criticize a book for something its author didn’t set out to do. And while Eat Pray Love is very much a memoir of searching, its aim seems less to find the force behind certain experiences than it is restoration of the self and the capacity to experience life. If that were Gilbert’s aim, though, there are enough hints of C. S. Lewis’s Hound of Heaven in the book to leave me hopeful she may yet find herself in a much bigger, grander story than she yet realizes.

Anna Broadway is a writer and web editor living in the San Francisco Bay area. She is the author of Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity. She has written for Her.meneutics about Mel Gibson and dating.

India: It's Complicated

Eat Pray Love Book Club Discussion: Part 2

If a young, wealthy woman from India had traveled to the United States because she believed she’d find spiritual enlightenment, stayed for the entire four months of her trip at a retreat center run by a somewhat-controlling new religious movement that had branched off from Christianity, and then returned home to write a book about it, would you believe that she had a good understanding of either Christianity or the United States?

If all you knew about India was what you learned about the country from the book Eat Pray Love, you’d be forgiven for thinking that thinking that the country of India is a sort of spiritual spa where, if you’re rich enough, you get enlightenment the way you might get a facial or a massage.

You might be shocked to learn that it’s the world’s largest democracy, roughly equivalent to the continent of Europe in land mass and the number of languages and cultures. It’s religiously diverse, and the predominant Hinduism, in which Gilbert dabbles, recognizes 330 million deities, none of whom can be located by gazing into Elizabeth Gilbert’s navel.

I found myself wishing she’d gotten out a little more. In her quest to find spiritual enlightenment in India, Elizabeth Gilbert is following a path that is both well-trodden (by the Beatles, no less) and well-satirized (Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola is worth a read). However, it should be mentioned that a lot of times the spiritual path often involves…I don’t know, actually looking at stuff in India.

It’s easy to mock Gilbert’s self-absorbed spiritual quest, but I should probably know better. I’ve been a spiritual tourist in India, too.

For a few months, I schlepped my heavy backpack and battered copy of Lonely Planet India on and off trains, staying at $5-a-night hostels, among other white twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings from wealthy countries. Most of them were from Europe. Some of them had been to ashrams. And for a few I talked with, their spiritual quests seemed genuine, in spite of their preference for tacky, flowy pants printed with the Om symbol. They talked earnestly about the peace they’d experienced in meditation and changes they’d make in their live when they got back to Liverpool or Stockholm.

In the back of my mind, I secretly thought I was better than they were, because I had come to be content in Christianity, the religious tradition I’d been raised in. But when my carefully-planned cross-cultural volunteer experience didn’t go as planned, I found myself aimlessly traveling longer than expected—and doing a bit of soul searching myself.

I spent time in a lot of holy places. Among them were: the tree under which the Buddha experienced enlightenment, a Jain temple with a hospital for wounded birds, an astonishingly beautiful mosque built emperor Shah Jahan (of Taj Mahal fame), a synagogue with handpainted Chinese floor tiles, the Missionaries of Charity Mother House, which holds the tomb of Mother Teresa.

At the Mother House, I felt like an actual pilgrim. I prayed and worshiped with other Christians. At the other places – I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be present in a holy place that belongs to another religious tradition. It’s complicated. But I hope that my struggle to understand those visits will, if nothing else, surprise me.

I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s famous advice—which has become a bit of a cliché itself: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Gilbert isn’t looking for a surprise. In fact, she admits she planned to find only one thing in India.

"I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two," she writes.
But perhaps if Gilbert hadn’t so carefully planned to spend her four months in India on the express train to enlightenment, no stops, her trip would have contained a few surprises for the reader.

Hannah Faith Notess is the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays, and managing editor of Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine.

'Eat Pray Love' Book Club Discussion

After finally reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s enormously popular 2006 memoir, Eat Pray Love, I could write an entire review about any one of these observations:

(1) The story embodies everything wrong with bourgeois Western spirituality: it’s self-centered, consumerist, and privileged without even knowing it.

(2) Gilbert offers a self-made spirituality, one that encourages readers to “cherry-pick” whatever rituals from various traditions make them feel better, without examining those traditions’ history or ways they flat-out contradict each other. For Gilbert, faith is primarily therapeutic, not theistic. And of course, her faith and mine clash on many points.

(3) If Gilbert talks the way she writes — (lots of parenthetical jokes) and ALL CAPS and italics! — she would exhaust me in about five minutes.

The book (whose film adaptation starring Julia Roberts comes out tomorrow) follows the newly divorced and seriously distraught writer on her trek to Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of psychic healing and spiritual insight. “Eat” takes place in Rome, where the 34-year-old savors the Italian language and an abundance of gelato, margherita pizza, and enough pasta to widen her waistline a couple blessed notches. “Pray” chronicles Gilbert’s four-month stay in a secluded ashram in Muktananda, where she gets up at 3 every morning, learns how to chant Sanskrit and meditate for hours, and meets Richard, her “big Texas Yogi” friend, who always has a well-timed word of advice. “Love” follows Gilbert’s stay in Bali, Indonesia, where — surprise — she falls for a significantly older, wealthy Brazilian named Felipe who calls her “darling” and makes tender love to her for days upon days.

Gilbert has a hard life.

And it would be easy for me to wax self-righteous and analytical about Eat Pray Love, which has spawned a slew of film-related products: a fragrance line, special tourist packages, a three-day blitz on the Home Shopping Network, even a phone app. Yet I wanted to approach this memoir with as open a mind and heart as possible. I wanted to assume the best about Gilbert, to see the goodness that one friend saw: “[U]nderneath many of Gilbert’s Eastern-leaning articulations of theology and worldview is a deeply Christian narrative that involves a fall, a search for God, and an experience of divine grace that is taken not only for the self, but extended to others as well.”

Whether Gilbert’s memoir echoes the biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption is something to be discerned by Christian readers in community. But I think believers, perhaps women in particular, might glean at least one nugget of wisdom from Eat Pray Love:

Simple pleasures point us to God. “[America] is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one,” writes Gilbert while in Rome. “Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure).” Gilbert observes that even when we aren’t working, we are still doing something — and often that something is soul-deadening instead of life-giving, and not even restful.

Gilbert escaped this cycle by moving to a country that more readily embraces cycles of rest — and that clearly celebrates the joy of food and drink. (There’s even an Italian phrase for “the beauty of doing nothing”: Il bel far niente.) After she and a friend travel to Naples to taste “the best pizza in the world,” Gilbert starts thinking about her weight, which has grown steadily on her “No Carb Left Behind” tour. Yet, she writes, “When I look at myself in the mirror . . . I see a bright-eyed, clear-skinned, happy and healthy face. I haven’t seen a face like that on me for a long time.” Later she suggests that “the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity.”

We aren’t meant to live for pleasure alone; God has given us work to do, and that work will tire us. But, for those trying to swim against the tide of our hurried, desperately restless culture, Gilbert’s own Italian Sabbath might help us relax more easily into the Sabbath God has made for us (Mark 2:27). And her no-holds-barred enjoyment of food (one description of “algae-green leaves of spinach, tomatoes so red and bloody they looked like a cow’s organs” nearly brought me tears) might help us just enjoy the simple but essential gift of it. Food didn’t have to be pleasurable, but in God’s grace and design, it is. Instead of scarfing the box of cereal in a moment of stress and hunger — which leaves me feeling gross anyway — I want to eat in a way that recalls the best food God has provided us: “Thou invitest me to Thy feast,” Augustine wrote in his Confessions. “Thou willest to give me the heavenly food and bread of angels to eat; none other, in truth, than Thyself, the living bread, which didst descend from heaven; and givest life to the world.”

This is what I took away from Eat Pray Love. What about you, Sarah and Laura?

An Open Letter to Anne Rice

Dear Ms. Rice:

You don't know me, so please excuse the intrusion. I hope you won't think this too forward, but I read about your recent remarks about quitting Christianity:

For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten . . . years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

I respect your decision. I can't even count the number of times I've felt the exact same way, but I lacked the gumption to declare it as boldly as you have done. I simply went about muttering, wishing for everything that I belonged to a different clan. A more perfect community.

I don't attend a large church, but it's large enough that I don't know everyone by name or by story. Take that lady passing out the programs at the door. I don't know her at all. I don't know if she's married or lost the love of her life to a fiery plane crash during World War II. I don't know what sufferings life has brought her way. For all I know hers could be one of the dozens of names listed weekly in the “Praying for those diagnosed with cancer.”

Sometimes it's a relief to not know people. It keeps a person from the obligation of sharing their sorrows or from the disappointment of discovering their failings.

That's the thing about being in relationship with others. I don't know about you, Ms. Rice, but I've found that to be true whether you are in relationship with people who belong to the clan of Christianity, or friends you made at the local Farmers' Market. Hang with people long enough and you're going to be disgusted by them. They'll do something that hurts so badly you'll wonder why in the world you ever considered them a friend to begin with.

You'll feel as betrayed as Jesus. On some level you'll know that's ludicrous — there's no way you can know the betrayal of the Cross. But you'll still feel that you understand his pain the way he understands yours.

That's how God designed us.

Desmond Tutu says we are created for goodness. He says that's why we feel so good when we do good things — because we are designed for it.

I believe that.

I also believe that God created us so that we are able to identify with each other. He created us to feel what others feel. That's why when a person lacks the ability to be empathetic we consider them a sociopath or narcissistic.

We are designed for relationship, created for community. The good and bad of it all.

I was thinking about all that at church today as the man three rows in front of me raised his hands in worship. For the past four weeks, he's been confined to a hospital bed at Oregon's Health Science Center University Hospital. His poor body has withstood about all the suffering a person can withstand. I don't know if it it's the cancer that will take him finally or the treatment he receives for it.

But I didn't care about that. What I cared about was that he was on his feet, arms extended, praising the Christ whose blood has cleansed us all from the inside out. The Christ whose mercies are new every morning.

I stood next to a woman whose husband has been deployed so many times to Afghanistan and Iraq that he has missed his daughter's entire high school career. Now that he's home, he no longer has any fight left in him. He's walked out on them. I hurt for that girl. I know what it's like to lose a daddy to war — whether you do it through death or through trauma matters not. She's going to have wrangle some demons for her faith one day. I pray that when that day comes, she'll come to understand as I have, that God is faithful in ways people never can be.

I hope she'll find that he will never leave nor forsake her — no matter what. He's not like us that way.

Two rows in front of that young girl sat a woman who has endured a lung transplant. To be honest, when we were praying for her as a community, I figured they'd be wheeling her out of the hospital in a body bag. That's how small my faith is sometimes. I'm a skeptic. A cynic. I'm ashamed of it, but that's the truth of it.

God proves me wrong all the time. I'm glad for that. I know people, believers and unbelievers, who care more about being right than they do about being redeemed.

Down the pew directly in front of me sat a young woman. Another single mom with another infant to raise alone. I watched as a white-haired lady walked across the aisle during the singing and took that young mother's face into her withered hands and spoke words of encouragement and love to her.

I stood there, weeping, because I belong to a flawed but courageous community. They have discovered ways to share in the sufferings and joys of one another, despite the disappointments.

The Polish have a blessing: May your soul be as strong as your people.

The thing about opting out of the clan of Christians, Ms. Rice, is that when we do that, we run the risk of missing the blessing God created us for.

I wanted to share that with you.

Humbly,
Karen Spears Zacharias

Karen Spears Zacharias is author most recently of Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide? She can be reached at karenzach.com or via Twitter @karenzach.
This post was reprinted from Karen's personal blog.

Celebrate National B-----Feeding Month

World Breastfeeding Week has just ended, we are in the middle of National Breastfeeding Month, and I feel like I've been boob-deep in lactivist reading. Oops — did my use of the word boob bother you? If so, then you might not want to watch this video, which features women (including mini-celebrities Ali Landry, Kelly Rutherford, and Lisa Loeb) tossing off euphemisms for breasts at the camera in celebration of their own breast-feeding experiences. The Bump, a community website geared toward new moms, created the video as a pro-breastfeeding public service announcement, part of their "Join the Boob-olution!" campaign.

I love the video.

Before becoming a mother, I was squeamish when it came to words for body parts. I didn't like the word breast even when it was applied to chicken, while some of the other ones were downright un-utterable by me. It just seemed so immodest to say them out loud. Good girls don't talk about their dirty pillows, right?

Giving birth and then breast-feeding lowered some of my inhibitions, and now that I'm a certified breastfeeding counselor training to be an IBCLC (International Board Certified Lactation Consultant), I can say pretty much any anatomical word without blushing. But I recognize that Christians and non-Christians alike maintain a great deal of squeamishness about women's bodies, and that posting the video on Facebook (as I did last week) might be seen as vulgar.

The women in the video are using words that are appear in our culture solely to sexualize women's bodies. That sin has become an obstacle that prevents many women from breastfeeding. Why should babies pay for the wrongs of their fathers and mothers? I applaud The Bump and its campaign for reclaiming breasts for babies by reminding us that the shock value of anatomical language can have the power to convict.

I'm all for the push-back against our unchaste, sexually perverse culture. I hope to raise my daughters to want something more out of life than Mardi Gras beads and thong underwear. And part of this means teaching them about the beauty of God's design of the female body, breasts and all.

At the risk of sounding crass, in order to breastfeed, a woman is going to have to be comfortable with words like nipple, suck, and erect. There is nothing wrong with these words, but a pious Christian woman might feel shame in saying them, because in our culture, their connotation is predominantly sexual. That shame gets misapplied to breastfeeding, making it something that's considered private, something that should happen only behind closed doors — in other words, like sex.

But while breastfeeding is an integral part of a woman's sexuality, there is nothing perverse about it. Far from it. In fact, of all the aspects of motherhood, from ovulation to intercourse to pregnancy to birth to lactation, breastfeeding is the only one with a true communal aspect. A mother learns to breastfeed by watching other mothers and by getting hands-on help. Because breastfeeding can't be scheduled without impacting the mother's milk supply or having potentially detrimental effects on a baby's growth, unless a nursing mother never leaves the house she will inevitably find herself in public with a hungry baby. God's design for lactation makes nursing at the breast the easiest, fastest way to soothe a crying baby. God has even made the physics of nursing modest, because the baby covers the nursing mother more than adequately.

Some in Christian circles argue that nursing represents a challenge to the "weaker brother" (Rom. 14), meaning a man who would be tempted to lust if a woman's breasts became uncovered at some point while nursing. To this, I would argue that it's much easier to teach men to look away than it is to teach a baby to wait until later to eat. If Christians think nursing is sexual and therefore private, then they should consider that they are sexualizing a nursing baby. Allowing our sick culture to prevent babies from eating the food created for them isn't something we should tolerate. And that fight starts by helping women — especially modest, godly women — to be comfortable with their breasts, both in word and function.

Annie Young Frisbie writes regularly for Christianity Today Movies and the CT Entertainment Blog. Her personal blog is SuperfastReader.com.

The Friendless, Voiceless Disney Princess

Take a moment to think of the last movie you saw. Did it have:

(1)   Two women with names

(2)   who had a conversation

(3)   about something other than a man?

If so, it passes the three-point Bechdel Test, named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who featured the concept in her cartoon strip in the 1980s (she says a friend came up with the idea).

I shared this video with my coworker and film critic for Christianity Today, Jeff Overstreet, and he noticed that many of the movies that don’t pass muster are kids’ movies. Of the top-grossing family movies in 2010, Alice in Wonderland and Despicable Me pass; Toy Story 3, Twilight: Eclipse, and Karate Kid squeak by; and How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After, Iron Man 2, and The Last Airbender flat-out flunk, according to this user-generated list.

Of the feature films put out by Pixar (arguably the high cultural watermark of family films) only three out of ten — The Incredibles, A Bug’s Life, and (barely) Toy Story 3 — pass.

The Bechdel Test can’t tell you if a movie is well-made, funny, or even portrays women in a positive light. But it can tell you that substantive female characters are often absent from the movies most of us are watching. What’s more, so are depictions of substantive female friendship.

When I think back to the Disney princesses who entranced me as a kid in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Bechdel Test makes me realize how isolated the protagonists were from other women. Ariel of The Little Mermaid literally lost her ability for conversation in her encounter with the other main female character, Ursula, in a conversation about how to get a man. Would her story have been different if she’d talked over her decision with her sisters or her (nonexistent) mother? Princess Jasmine of Aladdin had only a tiger for a confidant, while Belle of Beauty and the Beast confides her troubles to a matronly talking teapot. (It’s hard to say if a teapot counts as a woman.)

The relentlessly merchandised Disney Princess franchise allows little girls to dress themselves and imagine themselves as pretty princesses. And that may be all to the good. But what kind of story are young girls being invited to imagine? Even though the Disney princesses in the 1990s had been somewhat updated as confident, independent heroines, willing to defy parental wishes, their storylines still kept them so walled-off from other women, they might as well have been trapped in a tower by an evil witch.

Sure, it’s farfetched to think of Disney princesses meeting for coffee to discuss art, theology, and politics. But the strong, valuable friendships we rely on deserve to be portrayed in movies. Good friends enrich our lives intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. They support us through all kinds of challenges — not just boy troubles. When female characters’ conversation is only about men, girls get the implicit message that their life stories, and their friendships, will revolve around boys. It’s a question worth asking: What would a strong friendship between girls or women look like in a kids’ movie? And what would a princess’s story look like if it didn’t revolve around a man?

Have you seen a kid-friendly movie that passed the Bechdel Test? Have you seen one that flunked? Or have you seen a movie in which princesses discuss art, theology, or politics? If so, I promise to go rent it right away.

Hannah Faith Notess is the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays, and managing editor of Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine.