writing – The Cathedral Bookstore

The Spiritual Journée

Join Cameron Dezen Hammon, award-winning spiritual memoirist and writing instructor for a Spiritual Writing Workshop, Sunday, October 24, 6 -8 p.m.

When I say, “Spiritual writing,” what do you imagine? Does the image of a darkly clad Victorian lady transcribing messages from the great beyond pop into your head? Or do you think of St. Augustine, pouring out his Confessions? A medieval monk prayerfully copying the Gospel by candlelight in a high tower?

Or do you picture yourself in more modern settings with contemporary tools: a Moleskine prayer journal, where you transcribe prayers and respond to them, or where your original prayers flow freely onto the page? A blog where you click and share your devotional thoughts with others in real time?

Spiritual writing has taken many forms over the ages, but its purpose has always been to answer the same question: How do we connect with the divine? How do we capture the concept of infinite Love with a few nouns and verbs? How do we convey our feelings and questions about God to other mortals? Words fail.

But words are often all we have. And they are a powerful starting place. Henri Nouwen said, “Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories.” By writing, he said, we claim what we have lived, and we can integrate it more fully into our journeys. In this way, writing can become lifesaving, for us, and for others. It can connect us, to ourselves, to each other, and to God.

We’re all on a spiritual journey, and we can benefit from writing our stories. Whether you want to write your experiences to process them for yourself or to share them with other travelers, the first step is to take pen to paper to capture the details.

It’s interesting that the Old French root for both journey and journal is journée: a day’s length, a day’s work or travel. We experience our spiritual journey one day at a time. If we are going to write a spiritual memoir, we need to begin capturing our experiences one day at a time, journaling until we can begin to see pattern or direction emerge. At that point, we can begin telling the stories of our journey in ways that provide even deeper meaning for us and for our fellow travelers.

Join us this Sunday evening, October 24, 6 p.m. til 8 p.m. when Cameron Dezen Hammon, who teaches Creative Nonfiction and Spiritual Writing in the English Department at Rice University, leads us in a Spiritual Writing Workshop. She will delve into the ways we take part in a spiritual story that connects us to one another, to the Divine as we understand it, and to the natural world in which we live. We will investigate our own spiritual experiences through writing prompts, conversation, and a short reading from her award-winning spiritual memoir, This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession.

Take the first step on the writing journey, or find companionship along the path you are already following. Whatever your experience with writing, this evening promises to be centering, enlightening, and encouraging.

Join us before the workshop at The Well, a contemplative Celtic Eucharist, and for Tea & Toast by the bookstore in Latham Hall.

The cost of the workshop is $20, and it includes a copy of This Is My Body, as well as a journal. Register to attend by clicking here. For more information, click here. And, if cost is a hardship, please contact the Rev. Becky Zartman by clicking here.

I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
~Flannery O’Connor

Spiritual Writing with Cameron Dezen Hammon is presented in partnership with Brazos Bookstore.

A Wrinkle in Time: Was the Book Better?

Will the new light this movie sheds on L’Engle’s tale of good and evil amplify the message for you, or will your ink-on-paper experience–or your devotion to the specifics of the original story–prevail?

As director Ava DuVernay brings Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time to life, moviegoers have begun the eternal debate: Was the book better? L’Engle herself maintained great skepticism towards a film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, but the story’s richness lends itself to further exploration of religion, creativity, and inclusivity.

A quick recap (sans spoiler) for those of you who have not read the book since middle school: Meg Murry, an awkward teenager, must travel through time and space to rescue her little brother from the clutches of evil. The method she uses is called “tessering,” a phenomenon her scientist father studied until he disappeared several years earlier. Meg learns of her mission from other-worldly beings; and the journey demanded of her takes her to the most dangerous landscape imaginable, that of her own heart.

Despite the difficulties of categorizing the quirky story published in 1962, it quickly became an international bestseller. Because of L’Engle’s treatment of religious themes, it soon became as controversial as it was beloved. The American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom lists it in the top 100 frequently banned books.

L’Engle, who served as librarian and writer in residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City for over thirty years, included many biblical references in the novel, and the ecumenical world view she put for went so far as to suggest a “happy religious pluralism” described by The New Yorker as one in which “Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and even scientists can live together in peace.” Her intimation that love was more powerful than doctrine upset some conservative Christians, who claimed it offered an inaccurate portrayal of God and nurtured an unholy belief in myth and fantasy.

L’Engle suggests that the powerful messages of Christianity are not just for Christians. As Meg’s father tells her, “We were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” The author appreciated the tension created by opposites and understood that tolerance and love could bridge seemingly irreconcilable differences. In community, she explains, we draw closer to God not through sameness but through our shared life. Love, L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time says, conquers all, and we do not have to be privileged, pretty or perfect to experience the power of this world-bending connection.

Several dozen Cathedral members recently ventured to the theater together to watch DuVernay’s new movie, discuss a little Popcorn Theology, and decide book or movie? A little background, ICYMI: Nominated for the Academy Award and winner of four EMMYs, DuVernay has received critical acclaim for her work across film genres. In 2017, she was named one of Fortune magazine’s 50 Greatest World Leaders and TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. She is the founder of ARRAY, a grassroots distribution and advocacy collective dedicated to the amplification of films by people of color and women which was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies. She gathered an all-star cast including Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Mindy Kaling, and Zach Galifianakis, and A Wrinkle in Time is the first film directed by a woman of color to have a budget of over $100 million.

And our reaction? With its presentation of the full breadth and accessibility of God’s kingdom, Ava DuVernay’s film version matches L’Engle’s creative fire, although some viewers in our group criticized it for combining and deleting characters and for deleting Christian references. The question was also raised: Would children understand the meaning of the story, or would they just be mesmerized by the special effects? But whether or not an individual approved or disapproved of DuVernay’s interpretation of the story, watching the movie together led to thoughtful discussion.

And that division might please L’Engle, who believed that our seemingly insurmountable differences can, in fact, be bridged—through that amazing tesseract we know as love. It’s not surprising that our group would have differing opinions about a movie based on this story. Three generations of readers have loved, questioned, or banned A Wrinkle in Time, and its longevity proves its power to withstand disapproval. More than half a century after the book’s original publication, DuVernay’s newest film opens the story’s arms even more widely and brings its mid-century perspective into the future.

Book or movie? Strict adherence to the original or a more liberal interpretation? You’ll have to decide for yourself. But whichever medium you prefer, you’ll be reminded that one of the great strengths of the underlying message of A Wrinkle in Time is its ability to carry us beyond the perceived boundaries of our understanding.

Read or reread the book. Watch the movie. Or come by the Bookstore and pick up one of the many books we have by and about Madeleine L’Engle. Whether your path to understanding takes you through fiction, non-fiction, books, movies, or all of the above, we’d love to examine her fascinating world with you.

A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
― Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

The Peace Builders’ Poems

Taking more time for stories won’t solve our problems, but it provides an understanding that is the first step.

The Jerusalem Peace Builders, Israeli young adults from the each of the Abrahamic faiths–Christianity, Islam, and Judaism–spent the week at the Cathedral. On Sunday, before reading the lessons in the service in Hebrew and Arabic, they explained themselves to us by reading poems they had written.

Each poem began, “I am from…” And each list-format poem included sweet, mundane ingredients that made up these young men and women: my mother’s hummus, my sister’s tabbouleh, roses and olive trees. But going beyond the sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice aspects of their character, they also shared darker ingredients: trouble, chaos and death, and the ways love had softened hearts of stone.

As they had opened up to each other through the course of the week, they opened themselves for the coffee-hour crowd. They shared their inside jokes and their respect and love for one another. They will never be able to look at a person from another religion as other, because by sharing their stories, their “I am,” they created connection and empathy.

At the Cathedral, the Dean has a book club. The titles are varied, selected by the group, and we carry them here in the bookstore. The title for September’s meeting is My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit. Called a “must-read book” by Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times, Shavit doesn’t try to tell us what to think about Israel, instead, he shares its story, intimately intertwined with his own.

“The Israel question cannot be answered with polemics,” he writes. “As complex as it is, it will not submit itself to arguments and counter arguments. The only way to wrestle with it is to tell the Israel story. That is what I have tried to do in this book.”

Taking more time for stories–for sharing our own openly and listening to and reading those of others intently–won’t solve our problems, but it provides an understanding that is the first step.

The heartfelt group hug after the Jerusalem Peace Builders’ reading testified to what an important start knowing and understanding one another is on the path to peace.

The shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.
–Anthony de Mello