Reading Scripture with Sex Abuse Survivors

Elaine Heath's We Were the Least of These offers a healing balm, but should be read alongside more traditional interpretations of Scripture.

Rachel Stone

Laura survived a rigid and abusive fundamentalist upbringing, then married a Baptist minister who sexually abused her. Now she’s an atheist. Vyckie was a wife and mom in the Quiverfull movement who now also leans toward atheism, believing that the Bible necessarily leads to oppressive patriarchy. For these women, and for other survivors of sexual abuse (SA), church just doesn't feel safe, because church — and not just the Catholic Church — is where SA happens. Because of these women's experiences, the image of a male God, presumed by some scriptural interpretations to be primarily interested in men and male interests, is decidedly unattractive.

In the spirit of Phyllis Trible, whose now-classic books God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality and Texts of Terror pioneered explorations of women in Scripture, Elaine A. Heath, professor of evangelism at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas, has written a book offering hope to SA survivors and those who 'journey with them.' The title, We Were the Least of These (Brazos Press), hints at Heath's guiding concept: that far from being misogynistic, the gospel is truly good news for victims of SA, that whatever has been done to them ('the least of these') has been done to Jesus, whose death and resurrection is "a living power that lifts us out of the black holes of our lives, that heals our wounds, that removes our shame."

As a pastor-theologian, as well as a survivor of SA herself, Heath exudes compassion for those who've suffered the myriad scars of sexual abuse, and an understanding of how certain readings of Scripture can be deeply therapeutic. The story of Esther is often read as a tale about heroism, with the original queen, Vashti, read as a foolish woman who refused to obey her husband. Heath’s reading senses the exploitative nature of King Xerxes’ attempt to ‘display’ his wife, and his generally irascible nature. In this way, Heath understands Esther as an abused woman who is nonetheless strong and able to speak out for others.

Heath’s close re-readings of Scripture (granted, from an unapologetically feminist perspective) are illustrated with stories from SA therapists and survivors. The result is a book that's at once strongly theological and thoroughly pastoral, an excellent resource for both survivors and those who seek to offer them solace. Each chapter concludes with points for reflection and recommended activities; there's even a 'retreat plan' for SA survivors, including many creative ideas for therapeutic reflection and re-creation.

Ministering to survivors of SA is clearly Heath's passion; her readings of Scripture, however, seem simplistic. I was particularly troubled by her reading of Genesis 3 as a story of “original wounds” rather than “original guilt, with the serpent as an abuser, and Eve as a vulnerable victim. I think that there’s enough within Scripture that clearly speaks to God’s concern for the abused and vulnerable without recasting stories as central to the biblical narrative as Genesis 1-3 into abuse and recovery narratives. And whereas Trible’s first book demonstrated the plausibility of understanding God in the Old Testament as both father and mother, complete with detailed explanations of the Hebrew translation, Heath seems to leap toward application, offering a hermeneutic that skates by the really difficult issues involved in understanding some of the Bible's seemingly misogynistic parts — just about all of Judges, say, or some of the laws in Deuteronomy. "Whenever we find an interpretation . . . that violates the liberating and healing spirit of Jesus in the Gospels," Heath writes, "we have to go to Jesus to unlock the real meaning of that text."

Go to Jesus? Yes, always and often, but I have a hard time believing that this alone will persuade all readers to accept Scripture as more supportive of women than it's frequently understood to be. Evangelical scholar William Webb's book of a decade ago offers a much more nuanced path toward understanding some of the Bible's scary parts; while he's not focused specifically on the needs of SA survivors, application of Scripture is his primary concern. We Were the Least of These is sure to be a balm to those healing from the wounds of sexual abuse and a valuable resource to those caring for them, but for even stronger and more soothing biblical medicine, I would read some Trible and Webb alongside.

The Lost Girls of China and India

Why so many baby girls are being killed in the world's two largest countries.

Amy Julia Becker

Across most cultures and throughout time, parents have wanted boys more than they have wanted girls. Recently developed technologies are allowing parents to reject their girl children before they are even born.

In India and China, the world’s two most populated nations, parents have chosen to abort hundreds of millions of baby girls.

According to Samanth Subramanian, writing for The National, “Indians are aborting more female foetuses (sic.) than at any time in their nation's history, with the practice growing fastest in the more affluent states. . . . There are now 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6.”

Furthermore, the BBC News reports that in India, “activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade.” In addition to a large number of abortions using so-called “sex-selection,” the infant mortality rate is higher for girls than boys in India, probably due to a combination of neglect and infanticide.

This gender disparity has posed social problems for decades. In 1994, India's legislators made it illegal for ultrasound technicians to reveal babies’ sex in India, yet the disparity between births of girls and boys has only increased in recent years. The laws on the books are rarely enforced and pose minimal consequences, but even for doctors who obey the law, the problem remains. World Magazine recently reported on a hospital in Morena, a rural area with 825 girls to every 1,000 boys. The editors wrote, “The hospital insists it strictly obeys the law against using sonograms to reveal the gender of a baby. . . . The sex ratio at birth at [Dr. R.C. Bandil’s] hospital is as high as 940-945.” In other words, even when baby girls aren’t aborted, they die young: “An exhausted mother who faces neglect, poor nutrition, and blame for producing a daughter is likely to pass on that neglect, social workers say. For an infant, that can mean the difference between life and death.”

An even greater gender disparity exists in China, where “the ratio is 837 girls per 1,000 boys.” According to an Economist report last year, “The destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus.” Furthermore, at least in India, parents still often pay a dowry when their daughters get married. Girls cost more and produce less. Ultrasound technology and abortion allow them to be treated as commodities, discarded like defective widgets on a production line.

In addition to the obvious and egregious ethical problems posed by widespread abortion and infanticide of baby girls, the Economist spells out pragmatic problems for such an imbalanced society: “the cumulative consequence for societies of such individual actions is catastrophic… In any country rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognised routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity.”

The Economist cites South Korea as the only nation where the rates of sex-selective abortions have decreased dramatically: “In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as China’s. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. The forces of modernity first exacerbated prejudice — then overwhelmed it.” In addition to suggesting that China change its one-child policy, The Economist suggests a series of other measures to effect change: “encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life — using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police.”

A fundamental Christian claim is the inherent worth of every human being. In Roman times, Christians contributed significantly to the end of infanticide. Contemporary notions of human rights alone are not the key to cultural change, nor is an appeal to the social necessity of men and women. Christians and non-Christians agree on the importance of changing attitudes toward women so that sex-selective abortions and infanticide cease, and a combination of governmental programs, law enforcement, and other social measures should help such change occur. Yet Christians have a key ethical foundation to offer to effect such cultural change. From Genesis 1:27 — “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them — ” to Psalm 139:13 — “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb" — Christians can attest that every human life is a valuable one with inherent dignity and worth regardless, of gender, race, age, or ability. The foundation on which gender equality lies is neither modernity nor pragmatism, but rather the truth about who we are as bearers of the imago Dei.

Beyonce Is Wrong: Girls Don't Run the World

Why her message of female power is hurting the African American community.

Natasha Robinson, guest blogger

According to the first single from Beyonce’s highly anticipated album 4, girls indeed run the world. Thanks to her musical contribution to First Lady Michelle Obama’s "Let’s Move" campaign, her recent Billboard Millennium Award, and surprise farewell performance to honor Oprah, all eyes from middle-age school rockers to professional intellectuals are on Beyonce. The 29-year-old is an influencer. From the words of her recent hit, “my persuasion can build a nation,” and she knows it.

Beyonce has built a musical career based on girl empowerment and the seduction of men. In her efforts to empower women, though, she has endorsed a self-absorbed world where a false view of love reigns supreme. Her songs reveal a worldview where men and women indulge in lust, lavish spending, and fantasies of catering, upgrades, and joy rides. I don’t see much responsibility or empowerment of either sex in that kind of behavior.

Yet the lyrics of her recent single acknowledge the men who respect what she does. In her skimpy attire, she seduces them while singing we have "endless power, our love we can devour when you’ll do anything for me."

The question that haunts me and should arise from moral women of influence is: What type of power is Beyonce encouraging women to embrace? Is an average girl’s persuasion enhanced by flaunting her body, vanity, and money more than modesty, character, team building, and leadership that place the needs of others above themselves?

True persuasion and leadership elevates all people without sacrificing others along the way. That’s what alarms me with the “positive” messages in songs like “Run the World (Girls).” By elevating girls in a music video where they stand strong against an all-male army, Beyonce has subtly (or perhaps not so subtly) sent a message that devalues boys and men.

As an African American woman who is heartbroken over the current condition of African American boys, I find Beyonce’s message destructive and damaging to the Black community. The reality is that so many African American boys are being ignored in the classroom and other social arenas. These young men are dropping out of high school at an alarming rate. Many who graduate from high school cannot read with a significant level of comprehension or write a grammatically correct paragraph. Some sources say we now have more Black men in prison than in college. If Jesus' teachings concerning the Good Samaritan resonate at all, we should all share in these concerns. We cannot continue to ignore the plight of these young men while Beyonce is encouraging all the independent women to "throw their hands up."

Does God value women? Certainly! Does he want them to be strong contributors to society? Absolutely!

Yet when considering how God supremely values women, we must remember other fundamental truths: that God is love and wants us to walk in love. We must also acknowledge that we were created for community. God said that it was not good for humankind to walk through life alone. He created women and men for a holy partnership that is not limited to marriage. Whenever one gender of God’s partnership is elevated above the other or is ignored, we all lose.

There is much work and community building for all of us to do. I want to see young girls grow up into God-honoring, intelligent, beautiful, and strong leaders. When they show up in the classroom, corporate boardroom, or sanctuary, I want individual lives touched and the environment changed by their very presence. I do not want these women believing, however, that they don’t need men. Not only do we need them, they need us, and both sexes should seek opportunities to value, honor, and lift up each other.

Just as we must take responsibility for the images that we affirm or reject as women, men must do the same. My brothers must stand strong and hold each other accountable so that they do not fall prey to the fantasies and lies presented by the world. We should hold godly men accountable for breaking the cycle of “no fathers in the home” by consistently fulfilling the roles of teachers and mentors in the lives of children being raised by single mothers. In this way, children can observe a healthy partnership between men and women. They can then affirm who real men are and what real men do.

If we do not commit to these changes, we will continue to raise young men who have no consistent male leaders, teachers, or mentors in their lives. Furthermore, these young men will have very little expectations of themselves, since everyone knows that girls run the world. Therefore, they can transfer residence from their mother's homes to their girlfriend’s, and let her take care of him since she’s the college grad making the paper.

Both genders need to stand firm and confident knowing that the other is there to partner, encourage, and help them carry the load. We do not have to bear our burdens alone. We can be present for each other. Together, we can live the example of God’s truth and love in the lives of others.

We stand to partner because God loves us and wants an army of codependent men and women to glory him by lovingly running this world together.


Natasha Robinson is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy (2002). She served six years active duty as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. Currently, she is co-director of the women’s mentoring ministry at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, and founder, writer, and speaker for His Glory On Earth Ministries. She is a full-time student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and a wife and mother. Check out her blog, A Sista's Journey, where she featured a five-part “Way Up for African-American Boys Series.” Twitter @asistasjourney.

Should Christians Pursue External Beauty?

A controversial Psychology Today article arguing that black women are less attractive than others got me thinking about real beauty.

Enuma Okoro, guest blogger

Give beauty back,
beauty, beauty, beauty,
back to God,
beauty's self and beauty's giver.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.”)

“Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”

That's the title of a recent (and promptly removed) Psychology Today online article by London School of Economics psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. It should be a dead giveaway that the content to follow will be nonsense. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out. Kanazawa rated survey responses from the Add Health project, a somewhat select questionnaire completed by a small pool of participants. He concluded that black women are “objectively less physically attractive than white, Asian or Native American women.” Kanazawa added, “The only thing I can think of that might explain the lower average physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races . . . .”

The public and journalistic uproar has died down. I’m sure Psychology Today has since had some interesting staff meetings. Naturally, I am tempted to cite the litany of painstakingly beautiful black women. But responding this way would be moot, suggesting the premise of the “scientific study” is legitimate discourse. Still, I have found myself reflecting on some deeper concerns it gets to, besides issues of racism that most critics have noted.

For me, a Christian Nigerian-American woman, it's equally important to debunk Kanazawa's ridiculous query as it is to examine how tempting it still is to allow ourselves to fall captive to the popular imagination that insists that physical attractiveness encapsulates the highest definition of beauty, and is the chief means by which we measure our and others’ value. Women have never been strangers to this cultural temptation. Beauty, as our culture defines it, lures us to want to both “put it on” and possess it for our personal gratification and public flaunting.

For people of faith, a fuller understanding of beauty is that it always points us back towards God’s self and God’s goodness. If we Christians believe Scripture, then even though we recognize that all creation mirrors the beauty of God, we most fully recognize God through the person of Jesus Christ. To look for God is first to look to the Word that bears witness to the Triune God, and then to match up the witness of the illuminating Word with the Spirit’s movement in the world. Following this trajectory presumes that beauty is that which reflects the life of Christ.

Such reasoning offers a whole new landscape on which to spot and cultivate the multiple forms that beauty takes, including what we do with our bodies, and how we use our hands and minds to nurture the flourishing of those in and out of our communities. Consequently, a historical litany of the most beautiful women would include Harriet Tubman, Wangari Muta Maathai, and the numerous Argentinean women known as Grandmothers of La Plaza de Mayo. A God-centered hunger for beauty is most fully satisfied when we pattern our lives after what we know of God’s character through Christ. And this is by no means to suggest a Marcion reading, that we know God only through the New Testament. Rather, as Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer posited so beautifully, we know God and his covenant story with humanity only by starting in the middle of God’s story, with Christ.

However, lest we throw the supermodel out with the baptismal water, Kanazawa cannot be critiqued for researching physical beauty itself. Our culture’s sinful emphasis on it doesn’t make it bad. As one naturally motivated and affected by aesthetics, I won’t deny the power of the human form in the peoples and cultures that reveal God’s incomprehensible, holy imagination. As a woman convicted that cultivating internal beauty both honors God and provides a way of living into God’s best for us, I also hold that women, Christian or not, can and should delight in the beauty of their human form.

Physical attributes of beauty are also a segment of beauty from the God-centered perspective. Our bodies are works of divine art, in all their shapes and sizes and various abilities or disabilities. It is always an act of faithfulness to delight in that which God delights, and I believe that God delights in what God creates. How one accentuates the beauty of the human form is another topic altogether, full of subjective arguments. But there is nothing inherently wrong with minding how we look and expressing our attempts, albeit at times quite fallen, to layer our multifaceted ideas of beauty upon that which is already beautiful. I am both playfully and sincerely grateful that I have the luxury to dwell on what I believe is most flattering to my human form, what dresses, occasional shade of lip gloss, or flimsy scarf makes me feel beautiful.

But while I delight in seeking to be beautiful on the inside and on the outside, I don't hang my existential coat on this body. The grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit help me cultivate the former and hold the latter loosely. There is no doubt that Kanazawa was on to something in that beauty deserves attention. But that attention should ultimately point us back to God, “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.”

Enuma Okoro was born in the United States and raised in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and England. She holds a Master of Divinity from Duke Divinity School where she served as director for the Center for Theological Writing. The author of Reluctant Pilgrim and co-author of Common Prayer (with Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove), Enuma lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. She blogs at EnumaOkoro.com.

An Open Letter to Donald Miller on Your Engagement

First, congratulations. Second, let's talk about that list of qualities we should want in a spouse.

Karen Swallow Prior

Dear Donald,

First of all, I’m a fan. I’ll admit I’m not young enough or hip enough to have discovered you on my own, but the college students I teach help me to keep up with the times, and they introduced me to your work some years ago. I love it all, especially A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I wish I’d had your books when I was languishing in youth group hell many years ago.

I’m thrilled to learn of your recent engagement. As someone who’s been married for 26 years—to the same man, no less—I can fully rejoice with you and Paige in your anticipation of the blessings, challenges, joys, pains, and memories this covenant relationship will bring.

In addition to two and a half decades of marriage, I bring the second-hand experiences of a fair number of hook-ups, break-ups, engagements, broken engagements, marriages, searching, longing, and questioning on matters of love and marriage: when you work with college students, you get to live through a lot of this with them. I’ve had the chance to watch a lot of young people make good decisions and bad. (And I made a few of each in my day.)

So when I heard about your recent post, “What are You Looking for in a Spouse? Why not Create a List?”— I was intrigued. It’s a good thing to know one’s self well enough before entering a lifelong partnership to be able to identify in a potential mate a handful of deal-breakers. For the Christian, of course, the first of these non-negotiables is being equally yoked. There are likely a few qualities that are essential to one’s being and therefore non-negotiable. One such non-negotiable for me would be a love of animals. Not an abstract kind of love, but the kind that turns pets into family members who share the furniture with the humans. A spouse who didn’t share this value would doom one or the other, and therefore both, to perpetual misery. I encourage my students to identify such non-negotiables when they seek my advice, as they often do.  

But upon reading your post—which includes a list of qualities that your fiancée, Paige, sought in the man of her dreams long before she had met her future husband—my intrigue grew into concern.

You see, a list like the one in your post—a list of more than a dozen traits the dream husband should exhibit, most of them self-centered, focusing on how a future spouse will treat “me” and make “me” feel—doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for God to bring a partner who can meet needs we don’t even know we have, needs God knows more intimately than we or our spouses can ever know.

While Paige wrote that her dream spouse would be someone who “is always thinking about me,” I can pretty much guarantee that neither your first fight nor your 91st will be about how much thinking you did about her on any given day. It will be about who forgot to mail the credit card payment or who didn’t roll up the car windows before it rained, or whether or not you really need more towels, again.

Yet, this matter of the list isn’t really my greatest concern.

My greatest concern is that you both realize that whatever qualities each of you identifies as non-negotiable must be already present in the other person. Here’s my plea, to both of you: Don’t enter into marriage with the expectation that one or both of you will “change,” at least not in some pre-determined, pre-scripted way.

You don’t put it quite this way in your post (in fact, Paige says you have all 15 qualities of her dream man already), but the idea creeps in rather stealthily (as such ideas are wont to do) when you say that one “great thing about creating a list is that Paige helps me become this man,” and later, “Paige is helping me become her dream come true.” This sounds as though you’re both banking on her changing you.

This notion that a man will change for a woman goes all the way back to Adam’s bite of the apple, but has more salient and recent precedents in Victorian thinking and Romanticism. It’s Victorian to think it is the woman’s role to “civilize” a man and make him a more suitable husband. It’s romantic to think such a thing is possible.

Of course, both husbands and wives do change over the course of a long marriage. Indeed all people change over time. They just don’t necessarily change in the ways we want or expect. And that’s not a bad thing. The long-haired, skinny guitarist in a rock band that I married years ago is now a mild-mannered school teacher who’d rather swing a golf club than a guitar axe. Likewise, the waif my husband wed who hid her insecurities behind too much black eye make-up and aspired to change the world as a social worker has become a cynical academic with few wifely qualities, save an overindulgence in footwear that borders on neurotic.

Yet, each of us is for the other, I firmly believe, what God knew we needed. Through God’s grace, we have brought out the best in each other over the years, even though that best wouldn’t likely have been found on any list either us might have written so many years ago.

I pray for the same grace for you and Paige as you grow, both as individuals and as spouses to each other.  And I pray that the changes each of you undergoes in your great marriage adventure are both delightful and surprising.

Your fan,

Karen

How to Talk about Having Children

Maybe God intended babies to mess with our well-planned lives.

Sharon Hodde Miller, guest blogger

For all the ways reality television star and Hollywood socialite Kim Kardashian and I differ from each other, we do share one striking commonality: We both turned 30 this year. And for both of us, our entry into this new decade sounded an alarm on our biological clocks. It is ticking ever so loudly, which means we are both thinking more and more about babies.

Kardashian recently shared her thoughts on the future with gossip magazine US Weekly, saying that she would like to try for kids in the next year. Kardashian explained, “Well, I won't have [a baby] by the end of the year, but maybe we'll start trying by the end of the year. After the wedding [to NBA player Kris Humphries]."

Although US Weekly’s interview with Kardashian was a relatively benign, feel-good piece, it incited frustration in blogger (and onetime Christianity Today columnist) Mollie Ziegler Hemingway. Responding to the interview at Mommyish, Hemingway wrote,

“I guess what annoys me is the general idea that we can effectively plan when to have our children. I mean, it is true that you can take actions to prevent conception…But just because you want to have children doesn’t mean they will come… “…Kardashian is saying nothing that different from what I hear many men and women say. But should we treat babies as a consumer good? I mean, the last time I said I was hoping for something and hoping I’d get it by the end of the year, it was an iPad. Babies are no iPads. They are not consumer goods to be acquired. They are blessings granted to couples. Our language should reflect that.”

As a woman who is currently in major talks with her husband about having children, I have felt the tension that Hemingway named. Amid our discussions about the “best” time to have children, I sometimes feel crass speaking of our future children as scheduling conflicts. Like Hemingway noted, these are children we’re talking about, not iPads.

Both inside and outside the church, the dominant language about having children is consumerist in tone. The conversation more often occurs in the context of “when is best for us” than it does God’s intended design for marriage. My husband and I chose Natural Family Planning as a way to avoid the secular approach to childbearing, but we still notice the cultural mindset creeping in at unexpected times. We are both pursuing our doctorates, so we easily slip into the language of “fitting babies” into our programs.

One might of course argue that these are mere semantics. Whether we use language of “fitting” babies into our schedules or eagerly welcoming them, the outcome is often the same. Does our word choice really matter?

From a Christian perspective, the answer is a resounding yes! We first learn about the power of words in Genesis 1, where God literally speaks the world into existence. Later in John 1, Jesus himself is referred to as the “Word” through whom all things were made. John Calvin summarized God’s power-infused words saying, “[God] fulfills whatever he declares; for he so speaks, that his command becomes a reality.”

As beings created in the image of God, our words have a similarly creative power. Our words may not speak material into existence, but our speech shapes the way we see and process the world. It creates new ways of understanding, which impacts the ways we live. It either builds up and tears down, which is why Proverbs 18:21 tells us “the tongue has the power of life and death.”

With all of that in mind, the language we use about children is important. Our words shape the way we understand life itself, an urgent truth in a culture that increasingly questions the personhood and dignity of the unborn.

How, then, can we honor the imago dei in our discussion about children? How can we talk about having children in a distinctly Christian way?

Christian teaching on wisdom and stewardship provide us with a great place to start, but we cannot stop there if we want to break with consumerist language. An additional Christian principle that wrenches the focus off of us and places it on our children is hospitality. Rather than “fitting” these divine image bearers into our lives, we actively work to welcome them, both in our own families and in the world at large.

And finally, the Bible almost exclusively refers to children as a blessing. For all the frustration and exhaustion that children can bring, they are a gift from God made in his image. Rather than speak of children as a burden or an obstacle, our language should reflect the image they bear and the immeasurable worth they possess.

For all the debates about when life begins, I believe it begins in the mind of God. God exists outside of time, so our future children are as real to him as if they were flesh and blood. Knowing this, my husband and I will continue to navigate this conversation clumsily and imperfectly, but I pray that our words will reflect our children’s eternal value to their loving Creator.

What We're Reading This Summer

We're taking pleasure in books in the middle of texts and tweets.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey

In honor of the official start to summer and my plan to read many books by the pool, I picked up Alan Jacobs' new The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction this past weekend. The book is full of reminders of the joys of reading in the midst of Twitter and texting temptations. Shut down the computer, put aside the cell phone, lock your gadgets in the car before going into a coffee shop, the Wheaton College English professor recommends. He warns, however, against turning reading into a chore.

So this is what I say to my petitioners: for heaven's sake, don't turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the "calories burned" readout--some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C.S. Lewis once called "social and ethical hygiene." In Lewis's view, which I largely share, the tendency to think of reading in these terms arises when critics, especially memberrs of what Lewis called "the Vigilant school," convince others that they are the proper guardians of reading and the proper judges of what reading counts.

Read at whim, Jacobs says, with serendipity. He cautions against creating lists for fear of turning reading into broccoli. "This choosing reader is never merely passive, never simply a consumer, but constantly engages in critical judgment, sometimes withholding sympathy with a thoughtful wariness, and then, in the most blessed moments, when trust has been earned, giving that sympathy wholly and without stint," he writes.

Without wanting to turn reading into a mere list, we still want to offer some ideas to spur your reading, so our gift to you this summer solstice includes which specific books we plan to read this summer. We have offered lists in years past, but as our group of contributors grows each year, we limited our writers this year to pick just one book they plan to read. You'll also see an entry from Morgan Feddes, CT's new editorial resident, who helped me compile the links for this post. Jump in and let us know what books you plan to read.

Katelyn Beaty
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (1943)
Smith's protagonist, Irish-Catholic girl Francie Nolan, is like an Anne of Green Gables after a street fight: bookish, perceptive, longing to understand her world (1920s Brooklyn) yet alienated by its harshness, and hopeful about life's possibilities, despite the alcoholism and economic injustice that plague her family of four.

Amy Julia Becker
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, Judith Shulevitz (2010)
Shulevitz, a sometimes-practicing Jewish woman and journalist, reflects on the history of the Sabbath and its role within our culture as a way to ask questions about the ethical dimensions of time.

Anna Broadway
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott (1995)
This is a book on writing that I've heard about for a while but not had a chance to read until I recently snagged it from a friend's book-giveaway pile. I'm only a few chapters in, and it's already very funny, encouraging ... wonderful.

Alicia Cohn
The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman (2010)
Rachman's novel is about a failing English-language newspaper in Rome that (I hope) promises a poignant reflection on disillusionment with life and work.

Gina Dalfonzo
Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens (1843-44)
This is the only Dickens novel that I haven't yet read, and I've decided that it's time to remedy that.

Ellen Painter Dollar
The Boy in the Moon, Ian Brown (2009)
This is written by a father about his severely disabled son, focusing on questions around his son's interior life (does he even have one?) and the value of his life, both for his son and for others. I started it this week and it is both beautiful and very hard to read, partly because of the subject and also because it forces me to think deeply about difficult questions.

Morgan Feddes
Last Days of Summer, Steve Kluger (1999)
This is a WWII-era story, told through letters, reports, articles, and various other forms of media about a young Jewish boy who idolizes an up-and-coming baseball star. Fantastically written (though be warned, there’s occasional crassness). I laughed and cried, and even though I just finished reading it, I’m planning to read it again.

Jennifer Grant
Secret Daughter: A Novel, Shilpi Somaya Gowda (2010)
I'm attracted to novels that take me on journeys deep into other cultures, and this book -- whose opening pages describe monsoon season in India and the birth of a baby girl -- promises to explore complex emotions as it tells a story centering on adoption, gendercide in India, and the nature of family.

Marlena Graves
Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)
The story is about the complexities surrounding Ishmael's adventures aboard Captain Ahab's whale ship. I started reading it for enjoyment earlier this year but was side-tracked by other reading assignments. I hope to make it through most of the American classics that we own. Instead of signing a book out of the library, I figure I should probably read all of the books we have. I am on my way!

Laura Leonard
Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales (2011)
The business of entertainment is endlessly fascinating to me, and Miller/Shales' previous oral history, of SNL, was a great read. I am particularly interested to read about the experiences of women at what is essentially a corporatized "boy's club."

Michelle Van Loon
Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr (2011)
I'm pondering what "growing up" might look like at midlife, and Rohr's reputation as a wise, provocative thinker will likely provide me some meaty food for thought and prayer.

Sharon Hodde Miller
The Help, Kathryn Stockett (2009)
As a student, I don't have as much time for fiction as I would like, but every summer I always make room for a few special treats! This book, which launched to the New York Times Bestseller list in 2009 was both popular and controversial. Exploring the complex relationships between white women and black women in the 1960's, it promises to be an interesting read.
(Earlier Her.meneutics review of The Help)

Karen Swallow Prior
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen (2010)
This hefty tome explores through the rise and fall of one "successful" family much of what has gone awry in late-modern America, where freedom is too often confused with radical individualism.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010)
I admit, this book looks a little depressing, but if one in three women and one in two men develop cancer, it impacts just about everyone and should be better understood. I was inspired by my latest book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a beautiful story of the woman whose cells, taken without her consent during cancer treatment, have helped find cures for diseases like polio. The author skillfully raises questions about life ethics, race relations, and Henrietta Lacks' story, so cancer is still on the mind.

Caryn Rivadeneira
A Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
This winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction is, according to Didion, an "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

Why Men Should Read Jane Austen

And, how we all should read works like ‘Pride and Prejudice.’

Gina Dalfonzo

Nobel-winning novelist V. S. Naipaul recently started a firestorm with his remarks about female writers in general and Jane Austen in particular. According to the Guardian:

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".

He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.

Naipaul’s words caused controversy for obvious reasons: They were self-serving, condescending, and, as any of Austen’s millions of devoted readers could attest, wholly untrue. Not only was Austen’s talent equal to that of virtually any other great writer, but she was about as “sentimental” as a surgeon’s scalpel.

As my friend Lori Smith writes in her book A Walk with Jane Austen, “Biographers sometimes wrestle with Austen’s complex character—the good Christian girl with the biting wit, with the ability to see and desire to expose the laughable and ludicrous. . . . She had a capacity for devotion as well as an ability to wryly, if at times harshly, engage the world around her.”

But Naipaul’s words will blow over before long, as publicity stunts tend to do. What should be troubling us is that his attitude seems to be deeply embedded in our culture. I’ve known quite a few men—educated, well-read men—who either dismiss Austen as “chick lit” or simply never bother to give her a thought. (I’ve even heard one man say that she didn’t know what she was talking about because she never married.) There are men who still read and enjoy her, but their number seems to be diminishing.

One reason for this, I’m afraid, is the way that many of us women read (and watch) Austen these days—drooling over the romances while passing over the satire and ignoring the fact that, as Lori puts it, “the triumph of the books . . . is not only that the relationships come together but the kind of people who are allowed to come together—two people with characters that have been hammered out a bit, with faults that have been recognized and corrected.” In other words, the books are not just about love triumphant, but about the formation of good character and good values.

We Austen readers miss so much when we ignore the religious and moral bedrock of these novels. Sometimes we “use” the books rather than truly reading them (as C. S. Lewis expressed it in his insightful work An Experiment in Criticism), getting only romantic gratification out of them instead of thoughtfully taking in all that they have to offer. I’m not saying we shouldn’t enjoy the romance, but when we enjoy only that, we create an impression that that’s all these books are good for—and that’s an impression that’s hardly appealing to the average male reader.

Another reason is that we as a society seem so determined to segregate children by gender as soon as they begin to read. It’s not that we do it out of bad motives; it’s more a matter of wanting to make sure that both girls and boys will love to read. The way to do that, most of us believe, is to offer books that appeal to them on the basis of gender—just as pop culture offers them movies and shows and games on that same basis. Have boys read only boyish books, the theory goes, and they’ll want to read more and more. Except that it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.

When we at BreakPoint started covering books for teens and tweens, we heard from several parents begging for some good reading options for their sons. Yet the libraries and bookstores are full of books about boys and their pursuits. Why, then, do parents have such a hard time finding material?

Maybe the answer lies in what we’ve taught them to enjoy. Everyone has different tastes, of course, but I wonder if we adults have had more input into children’s tastes than we realize. In fact, I wonder if our gender-based ideas have created something of a vicious circle: The more we promote books that we think boys will like—always exciting, not too difficult, with as many boys and as few girls as possible—the more we help to narrow their minds and ensure that they’ll never try anything else. And in the process, we’re exhausting the amount of literary resources available to them.

This problem doesn’t just involve gender, of course; it’s also about what Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” which is far more rampant in our time than in his. It leads too many parents to dismiss shelves full of classics that appealed to children in earlier generations, in endless pursuit of the modern and relevant. We send them the message that classic literature is too hard, too boring, too far removed from their lives—is it any wonder they believe it? And this doesn’t apply just to Jane Austen, or even just to female authors. Try running a blog about Charles Dickens, and finding yourself constantly explaining to people that (1) yes, Dickens is worth reading, (2) no, he was not “paid by the word,” and (3) no, they do not deserve to be pitied for the rest of their lives because a teacher “forced” them to read him.

I realize I’m asking for a lot here. These days, teaching children, regardless of gender, to enjoy all sorts of literature from all sorts of authors is generally held to be far too difficult and not worth the effort. I’m not saying it would be easy, but I am saying it would be very much worth the effort. Aside from the obvious benefits to their intellect, vocabulary, and faith—for many of those great writers incorporated a Christian worldview into their work—it would broaden their horizons and teach them that it might just be possible to learn something from people who are different from them.

V. S. Naipaul might not approve, but I’ll bet Jane Austen would.

 

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog. She wrote "The Good Christian Girl: A Fable" and "God Loves a Good Romance" for CT online, and “Guarding Your Marriage without Dissing Women,” “Bill Maher Slurs Sarah Palin, NOW Responds,” “The Social Network’s Women Problem,” "Facebook Envy on Valentine's Day," "What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway?" "Why Sex Ruins TV Romances," and "Don't Think Pink" for Her.meneutics. Her book, “‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin,” is now available on Amazon.

Searching for Abba on Father's Day

What Daddy said to me, a 'love child,' that changed my life.

Margot Starbuck

The year Diana Ross’s hit song "Love Child" hit the top of the pop charts, I was born to a single mother who was unable to care for me. At three weeks, I was adopted into a family who raised me in an affluent suburb outside of Chicago. The view from the curb was that we were the perfect family, in the perfect home, in the perfect town.

On the inside of those stately brick walls, though, my home life was shaped by alcoholism and domestic violence. My parents divorced when I was 6. My mother remarried another alcoholic, and my father, who’d moved away, also remarried. By the time I was 15, both of those marriages had ended. What I learned about trust people was that they went away. What I learned about myself was that I wasn’t worth loving.

None of the adults in my life had a clue I was suffering. My broad smile fooled them and even me. It disguised the protective shell around my vulnerable heart meant to keep me from being be hurt again. As I moved into adulthood, though, that girl-size armor, pinching, chafing, began to fail.

In college, my roommate — single — became pregnant. That she decided to raise her child instead of placing him up for adoption created the first crack in my cardiac shell. Nine months later, holding her precious son in my arms, five hundred more fissures rippled around my guarded heart. Baby Isaiah’s blessed arrival, as well as his familiar origins, unleashed a deep wondering about my own.

Soon after Isaiah's birth, curious, I submitted an application to an international reunion registry that linked separated kin. Within a few weeks I was reunited with my birthmother. She was delighted to find me, and our relationship has continued to this day.

When I tracked down my birthfather, he was not interested in knowing me. With my unwillingness to face the sting of his second rejection and the chronic layers of grief it triggered, my pain eventually became unmanageable. Suffering from depression, I flitted between whatever psychological and spiritual resources promised healing. For over a decade, every book, praying church, healing conference, therapist’s office, and prayer circle left me more disappointed and devastated than the last. The spiritual reality that I was a beloved daughter of God — the one to which I agreed in my head, and sincerely preached with my lips — had yet to sift its way into my deepest places.

At my lowest point, I told a friend that my quest for relief was just about done. Though far from healed, I could simply no longer justify the time, energy, and financial resources being poured into fixing my broken heart.

“Doesn’t God have better things to do?!” I demanded of her.

Certain there was more important work — famine, poverty, and orphan care — to which the Almighty was committed, I was less convinced that God loved me. My wise friend gently assured me that an infinitely resourced God was not, in fact, too busy to care about the needs of my hurting heart.

In that lowest point, I finally released my fury at God, demanding, with raised fist: What reliable adult was for me when I most needed one?

In reply, two words drifted down from heaven, like fall leaves, landing into my desperate heart: I AM.

Resistant, I reasoned, “That can’t be a message from God. Those Bible words probably just bubbled up from my subconscious as an expression of my deepest longing.”

Then, two more words dropped: I am for you.

When an image of Jesus' body hanging on the cross filled my mind, I finally understood, in my deepest places, who God was and who I was. This deity wasn’t, as I had suspected, the kind of Father who cavalierly sacrifices his own kid. Rather, this was the kind of Father who, rather than preserving his life at my expense, poured out his life, out of love, for me. It’s what none of my well-meaning caregivers, who had longed to love me well, had been able to do.

Suddenly, what I’d known about the Father of Jesus in my head, and even in my heart, had penetrated my deepest places. The Enemy's sinister voice, which whispers lies into the ears of children who've lost parents to death and divorce, illness and addictions, work and war, had insisted that I wasn't worth loving. In the face of both the evidence of my experience and the hiss of the deceiver’s lies, God had assured me that, in Jesus, God was with me and for me.

My redemption could not be recognized by strangers like it can be on ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover: by a broad, goofy smile. Instead, my insides were finally freed from the cover of that artificial mask. Relationships reordered, the experience of inevitable absences — a friend showing up late to the movies — were no longer narrated by the quiet voice of the Deceiver hissing: “You’re not worth showing up for. You’re not worth loving.” I knew, at a cellular level, that I was and I am.

Like me and like the woman in the Supremes’ hit song, the beginnings of many have been cloaked in shame. These beloved ones have been identified by words like “illegitimate,” “accidental,” “foster child,” "impoverished," and “trafficked.” Today I am convinced that Jesus’ self-giving love on the cross sets God's children free not just from the guilt of sin, but from shame as well. Whether scarred by a father’s absence, wounded by his presence, or raised by a pretty good one who did his best but nonetheless fell short, the Father of Jesus longs for all those adopted as his children to know, in the marrow of our bones, his constant whisper: I am for you.

Margot Starbuck is the author of The Girl in the Orange Dress and Unsqueezed, both published by InterVarsity Press. She has written for Her.meneutics on strip clubs and jiggly thighs, and spoke with our blogger Alicia Cohn about searching for a father's love. Margot writes at MargotStarbuck.com.

The Cult of the Orgasm

Thinking Christianly about the vibrator boom and unsatisfied sexual desire.

Anna Broadway

Baptist theologian Russell Moore recently warned, “On the nightstand of a woman in your church, there’s a Christian romance novel and a Bible.” Yet if The New York Times is to be believed, he should have been more concerned with a vibrator on the nightstand.

Cultural mores are changing, The Times reports; once available mainly in dimly-lit sex shops, vibrators for women are now being sold in national chain drugstores, a supposed sign of women’s empowerment: comfort with discussing and pursuing not just sex but that sometimes-elusive hallmark of “success,” an orgasm. The Times credits this shift to many factors, but inevitably certain TV shows are said have played a role in the vibrator boom.

With the ranks of single Christian women unlikely to shrink anytime soon, it’s doubtful we have entirely opted out of buying into this trend, since we navigate the same cultural milieu as women outside the church. Aren’t we, too, struggling with some measure of sexual disappointment and frustration? Though many of us are likely too shy or conscience-stricken to purchase a vibrator, masturbation has been a topic of debate among evangelicals, with some concluding that it’s an acceptable way to wait until marriage for sex (assuming sex requires a partner). How should Christian women respond to the vibrator trend and its broader message of sexual empowerment?

First, a few observations. A vibrator is a replacement — a simulator, if you will. It’s not a man, but it’s meant to resemble one. It’s straightforward, makes no demands, produces fairly consistent results. And it doesn’t smell, make rude noises, or wince when you cry. But neither can it hold you, stroke your hair, or make you coffee.

Given the choice between a “perfect” lover and a vibrator, most women would choose the real thing. But in many cases, the substitute must seem better than no lover or an imperfect one. And for those with an uneasy conscience, the ethics of sexual substitutes aren’t entirely clear.
If we look at the few applicable biblical passages, it turns out that masturbation isn’t exactly the point. The best-known example is Genesis 38, when Judah’s son Onan is slain for “spilling his seed” instead of sleeping with his deceased brother’s wife. But as Thomas Laqueur explains in his cultural history of masturbation (yes, one exists), the real moral issue was not the means of avoidance, but rather Onan’s refusal to honor the cultural tradition of Levirate marriage, whereby he was supposed to provide Er’s widow, Tamar, with children in his brother’s stead.

The next passage people often turn to is Matthew 5, in which Jesus equates lust of the heart with adultery. Since masturbation without fantasy is rare if not impossible, the reasoning goes, it will always involve something clearly condemned by Jesus. Ergo, masturbation is sin.

I did not find this reasoning compelling when I first began to wrestle with masturbation’s morality. Any time you start to justify a position based on a carefully argued interpretation of one passage or verse, I get suspicious. Surely the Bible is not meant to be treated like the Constitution or a lease; isn’t that the heart of legalism? If something’s wrong, wouldn’t it be more clearly and frequently addressed?

For a while, such thinking seemed to provide a rationale for reading the Bible’s silence as tacit permission to masturbate. But that doesn’t take away the likely guilt or the shame a man once confessed to me in a quasi-counseling phone conversation. And it doesn’t make masturbation any more worshipful — of something other than yourself, your desire, and your pleasure.

This is why I have ultimately reached the conclusion that masturbation is an unwise and probably sinful practice. What, after all, is one of the most fundamental themes and values of the Bible? Self-giving love. Over and over, the biblical authors stress that God’s love is unconditional, sacrificial, and self-donating (John 3:16, 1 John 4:7-10, etc.). And this is not just the love He has for mankind, but the love within the Trinity that we, too, as God’s image bearers, are called to imitate. There is no higher standard for human relationships.

If self-giving love is the best way we could relate to others generally, can this be any less true in a sexual relationship? Since I am presently unmarried, I can only speculate about how this plays out between a husband and wife. But to my mind, the biblical ideal of self-giving love leaves no room for masturbation or other means of sexual self-fulfillment for the unmarried. How can such a practice possibly form me into an increasingly more sacrificial person?

But not only is masturbation inherently focused on the needs of the self, it also involves trying to provide for those needs by oneself, instead of trusting God to know best whether the sexual intimacies of marriage are truly needed or best at the present stage.

There, as they say, is the rub. For therein lies the great if, the fundamental lack of control over what form that “best” might take. And the older you get, the harder the desperation and anger are to fight, never mind the curiosity and sheer physical hunger that sometimes sweep through like the desert’s flash floods.

But masturbation fixes none of that. Instead of hope, it brings emptiness. Instead of moving you from loneliness and self-absorption to things that are excellent, praiseworthy, and encouraging (Phil. 4:8), it takes the mind to increasingly dark places. And instead of fostering greater self-sacrifice toward others, in breeds an increasing self-concern and inward focus.

The good news is, we don’t need masturbation to prepare for marriage and sex — if God has those ahead for us. There are many ways to grow in loving others well without being in a romantic relationship, and the more we learn to love like Jesus, the better for all of our relationships.

The hard part is that a life without self-supplied sexual release is one in which loneliness, uncertainty, and libido can take on a starker, sharper reality. There is no escape, no cushion, no numbing device.

But a funny thing happens when you cry out to God in such places, where before you would have turned to a screen or your hand. In all those efforts to provide for yourself, there’s a fundamental aloneness and isolation. But the minute you turn to God in your hunger, there’s communion. That doesn’t make the circumstances easy or the night shorter, but in fighting through unsatisfied sexual longing with God, it’s possible to gain a measure of what so draws us to real sex in the first place: intimacy.

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 Eat, Pray, Love, Christian dating, Mel Gibson and prayer in writing and on foot.

Raising Yeshua-Followers in the West Bank

Ariella, a Messianic Jew, raises four children amid violence in the Holy Land.

Michelle Van Loon

“It’s ironic, but I feel that my kids are safer here than living in the U.S.,” said Ariella B. I met Ariella nearly two decades ago when we were attending the same Chicago-area congregation. Recently I had a chance to visit her on a recent trip to Israel. She is now a vivacious 40-something wife and mother of four elementary-aged children living in the West Bank.

“Safe” is probably not the word that comes to mind when most of us think about raising a family in a Jewish settlement on the far side of the Green Line. But Ariella insists that her family’s rhythms would be familiar to most American parents: school activities, piano lessons, chores and outings shape their day-to-day life.

“We don’t have too many fears of child abduction or mugging. There are the usual safety measures - areas you know to stay away from, and where pickpockets are in the Old City. But normally, kids stay out late here with no problem. Everyone here is required to serve in the army, so everyone knows how to take care.”

Ariella, who emigrated to Israel from the U.S. nearly 15 years ago, is a Messianic Jew. “Our town of about 40,000 is a short distance from Jerusalem. Most living here hold to some form of religious Zionism, otherwise they would not feel comfortable living here.

“When I was 13 and had my Bat Mitzvah - my coming of age ceremony - the Torah portion for that week was Ezekiel 36:24-39. This set of verses turned out to have incredible impact for me in my 20s as I came to faith in Yeshua (Jesus), and again a few years later when I became part of the community of returning exiles.” She married another Jewish believer she met after moving to Israel.

Though the number of believing Israelis is growing (current estimates place the Israeli Messianic population at around 10,000 out of a population of more than 7 million), Ariella and her family have long been accustomed to living as a sometimes-persecuted minority in the country. They attend a small Hebrew-language Messianic congregation, but have friends in many other congregations as well. This network of relationships provides support as they live their lives among those who don’t share their faith in the Messiah.

“We have a lot in common in terms of morals and lifestyle with our neighbors,” Ariella noted. “My husband and I believe God brought our family to this community. The move here was attractive as well because rents are sky-high in Jerusalem. We can afford to live here.”

There is a cost to that affordability: bars on every window of their one-story home, an armed security guard at the entrance to her community, and the gauntlet of checkpoints, concrete barriers, armed soldiers, and United Nations monitors, all ever-present reminders of the tensions that exist in her region of the world.

Two incidents of terrorism this spring struck especially close to home for Ariella’s family: the massacre of a five members of the Fogel family in Itamar, another West Bank community, and a bombing that killed a Christian Bible translator at a Jerusalem bus stop. The Fogel murders shook the entire country to the core. The funeral was broadcast live on Israeli television. Days later, the bus bombing triggered fears that a third intifada had begun.

Talking with her children about the danger in their world is a necessity, but Ariella’s approach is shaped by her faith as much as it is by the hard facts of life on the other side of the Green Line. “All Israeli kids are briefed not to touch or be around objects left alone without an owner, for instance. They know that terrorists don’t want us here. My family prays regularly for those who want to harm us. We pray for their salvation, that God will have mercy on them and stop them from doing evil.”

Ariella noted that prayer doesn’t automatically banish fear in her household, but she and her husband process scary issues as they arise in order to prepare their children to embrace their role in their culture. “They understand that here and being a believer means they won’t have an easy life. But I also want them to know that only God’s promises are our foundation for safety.”

Ariella believes she's responsible for modeling openness and fear-free engagement with both their Jewish neighbors and the Arab community. “God has given my husband and me opportunities in our daily lives to share God’s love with Arabs. I like it when the children are with me for these ‘divine encounters’ so they can witness them. Last week, I met a lady from Gaza who was in a hospital waiting room with me. In the course of our conversation, I shared my faith with her. She knew I was Jewish, but I explained my faith in Yeshua (Jesus) to her, and she let my 7-year-old daughter and me pray for her healing. My little girl has been praying for her since that encounter.”

Ariella and her husband are quick to counter any hatred the children may pick up from the polarized culture in which they live. “We don’t want the prejudices of others to be the foundation for our family’s responses,” she said. “The children know God’s heart to redeem, and that brings perspective.”

And according to Ariella, that healthy, hopeful perspective is a gift parents can give to their children, no matter what their zip code is.

Taste and Smell That the Lord Is Good

Molly Birnbaum's book Season to Taste reveals how our sense of smell connects us to places and people.

Rachel Stone
Chances are you know of someone who has lost their sight or hearing wholly or in part. Helen Keller could neither hear nor see but found brilliant ways to articulate her experience. Countless other writers and artists have made their experiences accessible to those of us who've never been limited in those ways. Because of their efforts at translation, those of us who see and hear can imagine what it would be like to lose either. Yet what of smell and taste? These less commonly impaired senses are no less significant avenues by which we experience all that is. What would it be like to lose them, perhaps forever?

In a new book, Season to Taste, Molly Birnbaum looks for answers to this question after severe head trauma following a car accident erases her sense of smell. Her quest aimed not only at seeing if she could at least partially regain her sense of smell — an aspiring chef, Birnbaum had to indefinitely postpone attending the prestigious Culinary Institute of America — but also at unearthing the significance of smell to the human experience.

In finding answers, Birnbaum is filled with anxiety beyond the practical question of whether a chef who can't smell, and therefore can barely taste, can cook. Is it even possible to regain a sense of smell? (Anosmia has a dismal recovery rate.) What if there's a gas leak while she's alone? Does the science of pheromones (the scents apparently responsible for much of what attracts humans to each other) suggest that she will never feel love or desire again?

Birnbaum engagingly and deftly leads the reader through the varied and fascinating aspects of scent and its role in human experience and culture. Women give off sexually attractive pheromones when they're fertile, while women on oral contraceptives don't, a phenomenon Barbara Kingsolver played with in her novel Prodigal Summer. In this way and in many others, smell is a way of relating to other people.

I've had chronic sinusitis most of my life, the occasionally severe flare-ups of which cause me to lose, temporarily, a large portion of my ability to smell and taste. But I had never before had occasion to consider how significant these senses are. There's still a lot that's not fully understood about how we experience and interpret smells, but Birnbaum's story makes clear that without this mysterious sense, we feel lost, even disconnected from our surroundings and other people. As I read on, I realized that I sleep on my husband's pillow when he's away because it retains his scent, that I obsessively sniff my 5-year-old's hair (it really smells of sweet florals, and it's not his shampoo), and that I know when onions are sauteed to the degree I prefer not by looking but by sniffing. I also noticed the way everyone comes drifting into the kitchen, noses in the air, when something aromatic is happening there. Smells really are relationally significant. They are not everything, of course; Birnbaum finds love while her sense of smell is still iffy and when the perfect 'welcome home from Afghanistan' meal for her boyfriend is a disaster. She realizes that love, not the perfection of her senses or abilities, makes life sweet.

Even so, some church traditions use incense and candles, and celebrate the Lord's Supper as an integral part of every worship service, the scent rising symbolically with prayer while reminding worshipers of God’s sweet presence. It's not unusual for people to say that they experience God while listening to, say, Bach's Mass in B Minor, or taking in a view of the Alps. It's less common to hear stories of wonder and transport inspired by the aroma of freshly baked bread or budding wildflowers. Perhaps incense and a regular practice of Communion highlight, in part, that smell and taste are an essential part of our humanness. While I doubt that anything like the avant garde 'scent-opera' that Birnbaum describes is likely to be the next fad in creative worship, Season to Taste has given me renewed gratitude and wonder toward God, who walked our often-smelly earth, broke his own body for us, and invited us to partake of it in fragrant and earthy bread and wine, while sweetly, imperfectly fragrancing him in the world until he comes again.

Anthony Weiner, Gnostic

The embroiled congressman's defense that sexting is not adultery reveals a mind-body dualism long resisted by Christian tradition.

Karen Swallow Prior

The technology is new, but the sin is so, so old.

The latest “victim” betrayed by the very technology he thought to have harnessed for his own nefarious ends — in case you’ve been fast asleep under a rock somewhere — is Rep. Anthony Wiener (D-NY), busted this week for emailing and tweeting half-a-dozen women, none of whom happened to be his wife, sexually explicit messages and photos. The story ballooned into a media frenzy largely because Weiner’s initial denials dragged a story that should have been over in 24 hours into days of increasingly bizarre interviews and defenses. Finally, it all culminated in the sort of tearful, emotional confession that has been played out on the public stage far too often before, and, arguably, to greater effect.

The overwhelming sense of the whole lurid affair is sadness: what a waste of a man, a marriage, a political career, power, time, and human relationships. Along with the sadness, of course, is much room for outrage, particularly from Weiner’s constituents and his wife, who reports now say is pregnant with the couple’s first child, and her family and friends.

Yet some encouraging news has emerged from the mire.

Media coverage of the story and the public’s reaction seems to indicate that we’ve come a long way in our professed sexual ethics since the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, circa 1998. At that time, then-President Bill Clinton insisted that oral sex did not constitute actual sex, and that he had therefore not committed adultery. Although 87 percent of Americans disagreed with Mr. Clinton then, much public discussion at that time centered on the exact definition of adultery, and which particular sex acts crossed the line (fellatio?) and which ones didn’t (cigars?).

However, with Weinergate (as the case, naturally, has been dubbed), the discussion is a bit more morally sophisticated. For the moral debate swirling around this scandal, besides whether or not Weiner should resign, centers not on the merely technical definition of adultery but on the more holistic, and even more biblical, idea of fidelity. If the Clinton sex scandal focused on the letter of the law, the Weiner situation seems to be more centered on the spirit of the law.

Neither the public nor the proliferating experts and bloggers seem to be buying into a bright line between actual physical contact (which Weiner denies) and online liaisons, despite Weiner’s attempt to cop that plea in his confession. In fact, a quick poll done by the Associated Press in the wake of his Monday confession found that many Americans say that it doesn’t have to be physical to be cheating. In another poll, “60 percent considered sending lewd photos over the Internet ‘to people other than your partner’ to be cheating.”

Like the public, experts, rather than being concerned with one specific sexual act, have been discussing the larger context of marital fidelity, one describing Weiner’s online behavior as “foreplay for an affair,” stating simply that “cheating is lying [to] and betraying your spouse.” Over and over, the experts are wisely identifying the litmus test for infidelity as the question, “Would you do this in front of your partner?” Many say the congressman's conduct does constitute adultery or, at the very least, an “emotional affair.”

Both national sex scandals — first Clinton’s and now Anthony Weiner’s, with oodles more in between — reveal at work the old mind-body dualism that Christian tradition has worked hard to overcome. This dualism sees the human being not as an integrated whole self, but as a composite of warring elements, material vs. immaterial, physical vs. spiritual, and, in this brave new world of technology, “real” vs. “virtual.” The Clinton scandal emphasized the physical aspect, such as which kinds of bodily contact are considered adultery. Weiner, on the other hand, parses his transgressions according to this body-mind split: he acknowledges virtual liaisons, but suggests that his alleged lack of physical contact constitutes a difference in kind not degree.

In the space of a decade and a half, these two cases reflect a subtle transition of our cultural mindset away from a modernist way of thinking, one based in black and white classifications and definitions rooted in a scientific worldview, to a more nuanced (some would say postmodern) way of thinking that focuses more on the relationships and contexts that transcend the old categories.

As usual, the Bible's view is not either-or but rather both-and. In the Christian view, definitions (“adultery”) and categories (“married”) matter deeply. So do relationships (even online ones) and context. In other words, the letter of the law — “Thou shalt not commit adultery” — matters. At the same time, as Jesus indicated when he called lust of the heart a form of adultery, the spirit of the law matters deeply, too.

Clearly, adultery was prevalent enough in ancient cultures that it needed to be addressed in the Old Testament and the New. What’s new in the 21st century is not the sin but the increased opportunities offered by the structure of modern life and its technology. Technology contributes to the illusion of a dualistic view of human nature by offering a false sense of privacy and control as well as the chimera of disembodied human experience.

If nothing else then, this latest scandal provides some powerful reminders: namely, that our secrets are not hidden from God and can't be hidden from others forever; that our sense of control is but child’s play to a God who is sovereign over the universe; and that fidelity — whether to God or one another — requires our whole being, body and soul.

A Backyard Garden of Grace

When our family decided to buy only items that were local, used, homegrown, or homemade, little did we know how our garden would change us.

Nancy Goodwin, guest blogger

A move to Spokane, Washington, in the summer of 2004 brought many expected changes to our young family of four. There was a new call to pastor a congregation, new schools, a new house. But our home’s ready-to-harvest vegetable garden came as one of our biggest surprises. Little did we know, as we tentatively plucked tomatoes and snapped green beans off the vine for the first time in our lives, that this little inherited garden would bring the most change.

Before then, I had never seen homeowners mow their lawn or trim their trees, let alone harvest a backyard bounty of zucchini. For my husband, Craig, a lowly rhubarb plant provided his lone agrarian experience growing up in the Seattle suburbs. Like many in our Gen X generation, we grew up far removed from farming and agriculture, but since our first accidental harvest, we have joined a growing movement of backyard farmers.

A combination of recession economics and interest in "green" living has led to unprecedented growth in vegetable garden seed sales in recent years. Home Depot has named “Growing Your Own Food” one of its three gardening trends for 2011. "Edible landscaping" is a new catchphrase as we enter the heat of a new growing season. As a pastor and a Christian, I’ve come to see this move toward gardening as not only a step toward health and sustainability, but also as fertile ground for spiritual formation.

Craig has been the driving force behind our growing garden through the years. He added a greenhouse and turned every bare patch of earth in our yard into productive land. I have focused on weeding and cooking the harvest. I didn't think we could expand the garden further until 2008, when our family committed to limit purchasing items that were local, used, homegrown, or homemade. Craig took the homegrown part to heart and proposed a plan: “Let’s take out the lawn and turn it into a vegetable garden labyrinth!”

Skeptical, I replied, “That's nice.” It wasn’t until Craig showed up with a sod cutter in the back of his car that I realized he fully intended to tear out 2,000 square feet of grass and replace it with a maze modeled after the floor of the Chartes Cathedral.

We knew little about labyrinths at the beginning of this adventure, but as our plan emerged from the freshly revealed dirt we learned how they served as alternatives to long and risky pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the medieval church. Labyrinths were prayerful pathways meant to foster attentiveness and patience in their travelers, with each twist and turn leading closer to God at the center. Each turn the traveler takes is an occasion for reflection: am I turning away, or am I getting closer? And how could these questions help me pay attention to God's voice in my life?

Our family established a rule early on: you have to walk on the path. No shortcuts. This helped nurture the growth of the plants, and also caused me to slow down and be careful. This was often an inconvenience, especially when running into the garden to grab some basil or chives for dinner. But every time I was tempted to skip, hop, and jump over the rows, I was forced to slow down and ask, Why am I in such a hurry? It forced me to pause and to remember to give thanks for all the beauty and new growth along the path.

Along with slowing me down, my work tending to the garden has helped me pay attention to the soil of my life. It is a way of daily living out the parable of the soils that Jesus teaches about. I especially relate to the soil Jesus describes as choked by thorns (Luke 8:7). That’s the weedy soil, and believe it or not I’ve come to be grateful for the weeds in our labyrinth.

How I used to hate to weed! I used to be so overwhelmed by the weeds that I'd turn in my gardening gloves for coffee and a magazine on the front porch. But I’ve learned to take one patch of earth at a time and I’ve learned the value of preparing the soil. When you’re pulling weeds, you’re not making something grandiose happen. All you are doing is preparing the soil for something to happen. The result is largely out of our control — it is God who makes the garden grow. But what we can do is prepare the soil as best as we can.

And often I came to realize it’s not just the soil that needed tending.

One day while weeding the designated patch for the day, I became aware of an awfully loud noise. It wasn't the neighbor's obnoxious leaf blower. It was the noise of all the things I was anxious about, people I was angry with, an argument left unresolved. There were a lot of fat, weedy thorns taking up space in my mind and soul. My time in the garden helped prepare the soil of my life, inviting God into the noise and unrest inside. It was God's turn to do the weeding and gently lead me toward the center again.

The garden lessons in paying attention led Nancy Goodwin, mom of Noel (11) and Lily (8), and Presbyterian pastor with husband Craig, into a year-long experiment in consumption, choosing to consume only things that were locally produced, used, homegrown or homemade. The Goodwins' family adventure is chronicled in Craig Goodwin's book, Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living (Sparkhouse Press).

Why Romance Novels Aren't Emotional Porn

Just because such novels are about escape doesn't mean they are destructive.

Caryn Rivadeneira

I slink into bed, click on my light, and grab the book. Guilt shakes me a bit. After all I’ve read about these sorts of stories, I figure by the end I’ll hate my husband or hunger for more of the escape they offer.

So why do I risk this? Because the night before, I had sat next to its author at a book-signing. Because she and I chatted and laughed for hours. Because I really liked her. And because I want to find out if it's true: Whether she, as a romance novelist, is really just an emotional pornographer.

The belief that popular romance novels are "pornography for women" has been around a long time. In my tenure as editor of Marriage Partnership magazine a decade ago, we ran stories of women addicted to romance novels, whose obsession with romantic ideals had destroyed their marriages. Other articles have claimed romance novels are sort of a gateway drug to actual porn for women. Others still say that even romantic comedies are a sort of emotional porn. And just a few weeks ago, popular Southern Baptist theologian Russell Moore wrote about a new book that equates romance novels with porn.

While Moore doesn’t morally equate the two, he sees strong similarities. “Both are based on an illusion,” Moore writes. Even with Christian romance novels, Moore says, “A lot of this genre . . . is simply a Christianization of a form not intended to enhance intimacy but to escape to an artificial illusion of it.”

Hence, my guilt.

As it turned out, however, after finishing and enjoying my first, then second Christian romance novel — Yukon Wedding by my book-signing friend Allie Pleiter, and Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers — I still preferred my own husband to the books’ hard-chested, rugged, rich, and righteous heroes. (I find it terribly sexy that my husband doesn’t see me in need of constant rescue.) And even after two back-to-back romances, I wasn’t compelled to rush out and buy more. I may be hooked on reading, but not on romance, per se.

Still, Moore’s premise nagged at me. I did enjoy the “escape” and illusion the books offered. It’s nice to enter a world where broken people get their pieces put back together.

So I asked Pleiter, a Chicago-based writer who boasts 12 published romance novels (plus 2 non-fiction works), a speech degree from Northwestern University, six translations of Beowolf, and a happy 21-year marriage, what she thought of the charges. I wanted to know what she had to say about those who claim her genre sets up women for unrealistic expectations and has the power to derail marriages.

“Most women are smart enough to know that real life has no violins swelling behind the drop-dead-gorgeous hero professing love in a dramatic sunset,” Pleiter says. “They can be entertained by the ideal of the story without turning it into some kind of impossible relational checklist.”

I think she’s dead-on. Any of us who enjoy reading fiction — of any stripe — do so in part for the entertaining escape. Whether it's romance or mystery, literary novels or action-packed adventures, we love reading because we love getting lost into other people’s lives, worlds, interests, and desires. We can enjoy all the good of their world or cringe at the hardship, all the while understanding that it is made up.

Of course, some might try this logic with porn: that pornography viewers (or readers) understand it’s not real. But there’s a difference still, and it lies in Scripture. Philippians 4:8 says, “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable.”

Simply put: romance is lovely, among other things — or at least can be. Romance can and does get corrupted in our fallen world, but even God uses romance in his Word as an image to help us understand his love for us and what our love for him might be. God never uses images of lust and degrading sex to do the same.

While the people involved in porn, at any level, are redeemable and loved by God, the medium is not. It’s neither true, nor honorable, nor right, pure, lovely, nor admirable. Porn hurts everyone involved, and even those not involved. Romance novels, for example, don’t readily contribute to the trafficking of women and children in the sex trade. Porn does.

Christian romance novels may indeed hold some danger for some. If your relationships suffer because of them, of course don’t read them. And if — as is often the case with those who view porn — you read romance novels to fulfill your own unmet longings and needs, be warned: you won’t.

But unlike porn, which offers empty depravity, Christian romance stories offer something beautiful and hopeful and God-honoring: stories of people overcoming hurts and heartache and finding love.

In fact, this is why Pleiter says she writes Christian romance. “I welcome the chance,” she says, “to pull readers out of their daily lives for a few hours and show them a lovely world where people forgive one another and where love conquers all.”

Pushing back on Moore’s comment, Pleiter says this isn’t about creating an illusion but holding up an ideal.

While we may not agree on all the “ideals” romance novels convey, Pleiter raises a good point. It is the ideal of being forgiven and love conquering all that appealed to me. And while my brain knows this isn’t always true, my heart wishes it were. The good news is that my soul knows it will. Not in a book. Not in this life. But one day.

So, far from wrecking marriages, the occasional Christian romance should strengthen our hope. Nothing to feel guilty about there.

Lessons from an Expletive-Laced Picture Book

Self-sacrifice can make parents unhappy and unhealthy — or it can help cultivate the abundant life God desires for us.

Ellen Painter Dollar

Four months before its October 2011 publication date, Adam Mansbach’s for-adults-only picture book, Go the [Expletive] to Sleep, is already a bestseller and viral hit on Amazon. Looking through the preview pages online, I immediately understood the book’s appeal. With soothing rhymes and colorful illustrations at odds with its explicit language, the book captures the short-tempered weariness of parents desperate for their little ones to depart for dreamland, but thwarted by night-magnified fears and repeated requests for water, hugs, or a favorite toy.

I have friends who cherish bedtime as a chance to reconnect with their kids over a good book. Me? I just want to get it over with. I’m tired. I’m cranky. I want to climb into my own bed with my own good book. As Adam S. McHugh explored on his Introverted Church blog last week, the constant interaction of parenting can be particularly exhausting for introverts like me. God, in his infinite humor, blessed me with three extroverted children who process everything through talk (and talk and talk and talk, often while draping their bodies all over mine). By bedtime, I crave space and quiet as fiercely as a thirsty person craves water.

To state the obvious, being a parent is both a great gift and really, really hard. The sacrifices of parenthood take a measurable toll on parents' happiness and health. A study in the journal Pediatrics found that young mothers, so focused on their children’s incessant needs, get less exercise, eat less-healthy diets, and have higher body mass indexes than childless peers. And last year a popular New York magazine article summarized research revealing that parents tend to be less happy than adults without children.

We worship a God who sacrificed himself to the point of death. Should I embrace the sublimation of my own needs as a life-giving form of sacrificial love? Is it Christlike to grit my teeth and read that second chapter of Little House on the Prairie when every bone in my body yearns for rest and solitude? Or might acknowledging my fatigue be better for both me and my kids, who need a rested mom and to learn that sometimes others’ needs come before theirs?

Jesus said, “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39). Offering ourselves to God (which so often involves offering ourselves to others) leads us to a more abundant life. For Christians, the goal of self-denial and sacrifice is the cultivation of a more whole, healthy, and authentic self, not an empty shell giving off toxic fumes of exhaustion and resentment. When I contemplate my 11 years of motherhood, I see that the sacrificial love my children require has nudged me closer to being the person God made me to be.

While I’ll always be an introvert, motherhood has made me more hospitable. Not only must I welcome my children just as they are (endless yammering and all), I also have to be in relationship with their friends, enemies, friends’ parents, and teachers, even those I struggle with.

I am a better writer since becoming a mother. I’ve always been able to string words together nicely, but motherhood has given me a tighter focus and a more compelling voice.

While prayer is my perennial struggle, spontaneous prayers of thanksgiving have become second nature. Gratitude is the only possible response to the heart-squeezing sight of my children erupting into a joyful skip just to get from one ordinary place to another, the sound of their laughter floating in through the kitchen window, or the salty-earthy taste of their skin as I kiss them goodnight (finally!) after a long day.

My body, affected by a lifelong physical disability, has taken some knocks from the rigor of bearing and caring for children. But motherhood has also allowed me to see my body as a worthy thing capable of nurturing three children, rather than a broken thing. I’m also inspired to treat my body well so I can be available to my kids for many years.

Overall, the self-loss required by motherhood has led me to a healthier, more authentic self. Yet in the thick of day-to-day demands, I sometimes put the brakes on self-sacrifice so that there will be a self there left to give. When the slightest bedtime delay (e.g., one of my kids tells me a knock-knock joke instead of putting toothpaste on the brush) has me shaking with barely suppressed fury, I know I’m done. More self-giving won’t make anyone’s life more abundant. It will just leave me fuming and a kid in tears when I inevitably raise my voice. At those times, I will say “no” to even the most reasonable requests.

It has taken me years to concede that, for young children, what parents give is rarely enough. No matter how much time and attention children receive throughout the day, they yearn for more. It’s okay to admit that I’m spent, my own bed and book await, and yes, I want them to just go the . . . um . . . just go to sleep.

Readers, what about you? If you don’t find bedtime particularly taxing, what parenting task leaves you with gritted teeth or expletives on the tip of your tongue? How do you embrace the self-sacrifice that is necessary for being a loving parent in a way that leads to abundant life rather than debilitating emptiness?

Working for the (Son of) Man

What a theology of work might look like for female professionals, who tend to downplay their success.

Alicia Cohn

“You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone." So goes Tina Fey's advice in her new book, Bossypants, to young women in the workplace.

Fey’s advice couldn’t be more true. Every day seems to bring more news of unemployment and low job creation in the United States. Although the so-called “man-cession” (more men being laid off than women) began to reverse in 2010, women are not catching up to men in the slow return to the workforce. Further, reports the National Association of Colleges and Employers, women who do manage to find work are paid 17 percent less than new male workers, despite the fact that they are just as likely to be hired.

Meanwhile, we are in the middle of college graduation season, when some 3 million young people are trying to enter a workforce with already four workers for every job opening. College-educated workers who remain unemployed face what is the longest unemployment duration in history, and may have to settle for work that did not require a college degree (known as “mal-employment”), thus having a trickle-down impact on those with less education.

Further, according to Harris Interactive, 59 percent of parents provide financial support to their adult children who are no longer in school. And an estimated 85 percent of new graduates are moving back in with their parents, at least partly to save money. As it happens, I fit all of these statistics.

Conditions are difficult all around, and the numbers seem designed to make us all feel less valuable in our respective workplaces. But according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, women tend to feel less valuable in their workplaces, anyway.

“We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap,” Sandberg told the graduating class at Barnard College this year. She said,

Studies also show that compared to men, women underestimate their performance. . . . [I]f you ask men why they succeeded, men attribute that success to themselves; and women, they attribute it to other factors like working harder, help from others. Ask a woman why she did well on something, and she’ll say, “I got lucky. All of these great people helped me. I worked really hard.” Ask a man and he’ll say or think, “What a dumb question. I’m awesome.”

Sandberg concludes that in a world full of “awesome” men, “believing in yourself is the first necessary step to coming even close to achieving your potential.”

While Sandberg makes some valid points in her speech, her solution seems to add a lot of pressure. After all, where does believing in ourselves come from in the first place? And where do we turn when our confidence takes a hit?

Judging from statistics, most American workers are either hunting for a first job, trying to find a new one, or nervous about losing the one they have. And all of these conditions are stressful. My response to that kind of stress is to try improve at whatever I’m doing. If I’m working, I want to be the perfect employee. The mantra most college students learn is: Be eager to work and eager to please. But those goals can come with specific perils, such as compromising priorities (why be available for volunteer work when it might mean losing this job?), censoring statements of faith or anything "churchy," and compartmentalizing in order to convey a strict professionalism (no Tina Fey-style goofiness or black fingernail polish).

So as a solution, the survival method of striving for perfect sounds about as stressful as worrying about having a job, right? All of this stress leaks out into the rest of our lives. And it can become overwhelming - some surveys suggest women stress more than men when work and home life overlap.

There are plenty of Scriptures (2 Thessalonians 3:10, Ephesians 4:28, Proverbs 14:23) that indicate that Christians should be working hard at something. The shift in perspective - and the real stress relief - requires focusing on why we work: Not simply to make money and have a “function,” but to glorify God and fulfill his call on our lives. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters" (Col. 3:23). As Christians we are allowed to dedicate our work - at home or office, behind a coffee bar or a desk, during the week or overtime - to God.

Sandberg asked, “What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just buying into someone else’s definition of success? Only you can decide that, and you’ll have to decide it over and over and over.”

I’d need to talk myself into feeling awesome every day if that’s how I viewed my job. But Ecclesiastes calls that kind of work meaningless, “like chasing the wind.” There must be another way.

Working for God means stability: never sending out a resume with crossed fingers or bluffing through an interview because I never really change employers. It means speaking up in meetings and working harder every day, not because I am constantly reminding myself I’m awesome, but because I know how awesome God is. That’s a confidence that comes from knowing hard work is accepted as my reasonable service.

God asks us to run with perseverance the race marked out for us (Heb. 12:1). The running is its own reward. And if at times my race seems to run parallel to the endless rat race, I remind myself that even if I can’t see it, God has assured us a glorious finish line.

Why 'Happy' Isn't a Christian Word

How to practice hope during the happiest season of the Christian year.

Enuma Okoro, guest blogger

Last spring The Intelligent Life, a journal published by The Economist, ran an article claiming that Americans are overall an “unhappy lot.” Two years ago, The New York Times published “Liberated and Unhappy,” about the diminishing degree of happiness among American women (Her.meneutics weighed in too). And recently I stumbled across the website for The Happiness Project, a book by Gretchen Rubin that shot to number two on the NYT bestseller list within its first week of publication last year. I am still dizzy from the swirl of quotes and tips on the website about how to pursue happiness and join in on booming nationwide happiness-projects. The amount of literature being penned on happiness suggests that as a culture we want to believe that happiness is something we can will and achieve, and that it is our inalienable right and our due. At times, I too am guilty as charged.

I cannot help reflecting on our cultural obsession with happiness against the backdrop of Easter, these 50 days of invitation to dwell in the reality of resurrection. If the church could claim to have an official “happy season,” this would be it. Christ is risen. New life is possible in all circumstances. But, instead of the temptation to appropriate a Christian interpretation of a cultural phenomenon, perhaps the real place to begin is to consider that happiness may not be a word in our Christian vocabulary.

That’s not to say Christians cannot experience happiness. Rather, we recognize happiness as transitory as opposed to a telos after which we earnestly seek. Reflecting on Scripture and the call to discipleship, the closest Christians might get to notions of happiness is by practicing the spiritual discipline of hope, something that looks remarkably different from Western definitions or constructs of happiness.
It's a discipline to which Christ calls us as surely as we are called to service, prayer, fasting, and other disciplines. What we ultimately hope for is the full healing of creation, because we recognize that life is not fully as it should be. Ironically, it is this universal recognition that propels the secular hamster wheel spinning toward illusions of finding happiness.

Choosing the discipline of hope over the pursuit of happiness starts with acknowledging that just like the Christian liturgy, our habits shape us. Each time we practice being hopeful, we open ourselves to being formed into creatures who might recognize glimpses of resurrection life this side of the kingdom. Despite the broken circumstances of our individual and collective lives, we remain foolishly open to expecting bread instead of stones, and to the certainty that there always exists another reality to the one in which we find ourselves.

As Christians we face the decision each day of which narrative we will live into for one more day: the one where Christ is Lord, or one of the gazillion others up for grabs. It is an ongoing discipline to choose the former, to choose hope especially when the odds seem to be against a hopeful future.

Like happiness, hope can be hard to maintain. But unlike happiness, it is not a chase down a rabbit trail of new purchases, rehashed advice, and mantras. Rather, hope cultivates a distinct posture toward the world that is grown and sustained through conscious daily practices enacted within our varied circumstances, the good and the bad. It is a discipline we engage in daily whether we feel like it or not, whether we see any immediate results or not. It witnesses to another sovereignty besides ourselves, and another claim that what we see or experience in this fractured world, delightful or deeply painful, is not the lasting reality.

Hope has holy and human relationship at its center. When Christ appeared after his resurrection, the first thing he did was create the church. God knows that choosing and claiming divine reality and holy imagination is not something we do easily or quickly. Rather, we assist one another to practice the spiritual disciplines that foster abundant, hopeful life. Practicing hope is a way of learning to be fellow burden bearers and memory-keepers for one another when the realities of our lives threaten injustice, fear, pain and darkness, or simply threaten to suggest God is not able.

Hope acknowledges that the sundry list of life’s difficulties are never what God intends for a healed kingdom, and that God never leaves us bereft. At one stage of my own life, while in a committed relationship to a recovering alcoholic, practicing hope meant waking up each day and choosing to resist the constant temptation to query my boyfriend about how he was “doing” and whether or not he would attend an AA meeting that day, but still recognizing the importance of rejoicing in marked points of sobriety. Hope believes that all circumstances are redeemable at the foot of the cross and yet celebrates our difficult human efforts to live into that redemption. For my girlfriend exhausted with the disappointment of infertility, hope resembles accepting the invitation of friends who desire to take on the burden of prayer for this particular struggle. Hope recognizes that we do not walk alone and sometimes we carry others for part of the journey.

Hope does not anticipate or rely on a happy ending. Hope believes that the God who came to give us abundant life is always at work.

Enuma Okoro was born in the United States and raised in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and England. She holds a Master of Divinity from Duke Divinity School where she served as director for the Center for Theological Writing. The author of Reluctant Pilgrim and co-author of Common Prayer (with Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove), Enuma lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. She blogs at EnumaOkoro.com.

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