Journal Time

with Ray Waddle

For 20 years or more, a new form of Christian writing has been asserting itself, changing the scene, refusing to go away.

It's tough-minded, humorous, personal, eccentric, sometimes profane, but biblically oriented. Some call it "spiritual writing," a backlash against sappy traditional devotional clichés, jargon and simplistic religious answers. In my experience three names stand out as trailblazers of this spiritual writing movement -- Frederick Buechner, Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott.

It dawned on me the other day that this trio shares something more in common. They're all Presbyterians.

I think there's a reason.

It has to do with their appreciation of God's transcendence, a Presbyterian sense of divine providence, which gives them freedom to trust their imaginations and find humor in the human predicament.

Lately I've been returning to them as the heartbreaking disaster along the Gulf Coast and its aftermath unfolds.

Of the threesome, Lamott is the frantic one, funny and profane. She's a left-winger who worries about her weight gain, her growing teenage son and the Iraq war. But she loves Jesus, the messiah who loves the world, who expects us to love it too, and who hears her prayers in heaven.

In her new book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, she looks to her California Presbyterian minister for wisdom. Lamott keeps her spirits up thinking how hilarious and inspiring it is that God would redeem material as unpromising as human beings.

"You've got to love this in a God -- consistently assembling the motleyest people to bring, to the lonely and frightening world, a commitment to caring and community," says Lamott, a columnist and novelist too.

"It's a centuries-long reality show -- Moses the stutterer, Rahab the hooker, David the adulterer, Mary the homeless teenager. Not to mention all the mealy-mouthed disciples. Not to mention a raging insecure narcissist like me."

Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota, Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, is more earnest, more selfconsciously a poet. She is alert to the moods of landscape, in her case the fierce beauty of the Great Plains. She's a babyboomer who returned to her Protestant roots after a wayward young adulthood -- a religious conversion aided by her discovery of monastic disciplines of silence, prayer rituals, and meditative reading of Scripture.

The result has been a string of books that wed biblical insights, social criticism and a personal voyage as a lay Presbyterian supplemented by ties with a Catholic monastery in South Dakota.

In Amazing Grace, she declares:

"I take refuge in God's transcendence, continually giving thanks that God's ways are not my own. God has a better imagination, for one thing: I doubt that I could have discovered on my own that my way toward reclaiming my Protestant inheritance would be by means of becoming an associate of a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastery."

Buechner, the elder in this trinity, the author of more than 30 books, is godfather of the latter-day trend of writing about biblical faith from the sharp angles of everyday human joy and pain. Last year he revised and reissued three classic books (Wishful Thinking, Peculiar Treasures and Whistling in the Dark) under one cover, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith.

The book is a series of short meditations on 366 religious terms (such as incarnation, faith, charismatic), biblical figures (Esau, Pilate, Jesus) and everyday words (lust, retirement, tree).

In every case, Buechner locks his attention on overlooked meanings, inviting readers to be wakeful to what's around us -- the drama of existence, the mystery of each life underway in a spiritually charged universe.

For the entry "tears," he urges paying the closest attention to them, no matter what may trigger them: "They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next."

Despite renegade moods, these writers maintain a bottom-line reverence for the power of everyone's secret story and the mystery of the divine author behind it. Their writing pledges allegiance to honesty -- the candor of anger or doubt, yes, but above all the honesty of declaring their Christian faith by using their own voice. With it, they probe and proclaim outrageous redemption in a grieving world held together by God's hands.

(Ray Waddle, a writer based in Nashville, is the author of a new book, Against the
Grain: Unconventional Wisdom from Ecclesiastes, published by Upper Room Books.)