Norris' The Cloister Walk

There can be nothing better than a good poet writing prose whether Thomas Lynch, the Michigan funeral director writing about death or Kathleen Norris, writing about her time in a Benedictine monastery. Both show a care for words and phrases that is formed in their lives as poets. Her subject matter is also compelling as she describes and reflects upon her experience living among the Benedictines and the community and rhythms of life that she found there. Some of the many good things that she had to say:
p27 [St Therese] "perfection consists in being what God wants us to be."
p38 "...the pain that comes from one's identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can't be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through."
p41 "The work of my life is given to others; in fact, the reader completes it."
p54 "[poem of boy] "I remember him/like God in my heart, I remember him in my heart/like the clouds overhead,/and strawberry ice cream and bananas/when I was a little kid. But the most I remember/is his love,/as big as Texas/when I was born."
p64 "...poetry, like prayer, is a dialogue with the sacred."
p68 "As so often happens, on this day worship reinforced my convictions that only Christ could have brought all of us together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things."
p127 "The tragedy of sin is that it diverts divine gifts."
p142 "...when you realize that anything good you write comes despite your weaknesses, writing becomes a profoundly humbling activity."
p147 "...those who know the exact price of things, as Judas did, often don't know the true cost or value of anything."
p154 "...if you're looking for a belief in the power of words to change things, to come alive and make a path for you to walk on, you're better off with poets these days than with Christians."
p165 "[Oscar Wilde] ... the problem is not in what we do but in what we become."
p206 "...it is through our failings and weaknesses, our "ways of imperfection," that we find God, and God finds us, the God who can turn any mess we've made to the good."
p251 "The problem did not start with theology--with my inability to grasp Christ as a living person--but might have more to do with my resistance to accepting the full mystery of the Christ present in any person..."
p261 "...too many young people grow up understanding that "true love" means possessing and being possessed."
p267 "Ceremony forces a person to slow down, and as many of live at a frenzied pace..."
p283 "Laundry is one of the very few tasks in life that offers instant results...For some people, laundry seems to satisfy a need for ritual."
p294 "It is not a choice but a call, and often the people who last in a monastery are those who struggle through their early years reminding themselves of that fact."
p311 "'What is it you seek?'...The ritual answer is anything but easy: 'the mercy of God and fellowship in this community.'"
p313 "Real beauty is always both tough and fragile..."
p315 "I wonder if the pace of modern life, along with our bizarre propensity for turning everything into a commodity, erodes our ability to think symbolically, to value symbols for their transformative power."
p352 "It is the aim of contemplative living, at least in the Christian mode, that you learn to recognize a blessing when you see one, and are able to respond to it with words that God has given you."
p367 "What could it be but sweetness, and God's blessing? His welcome refreshed me and made me see something that's easy to lose sight of in our infernally busy lives. That we exist for each other, and when we're at a low ebb, sometimes just to see the goodness radiating from another can be all we need in order to rediscover it in ourselves."

McLaren's A New Kind of Christian

Following in the tradition of the early Greek philosophers, McLaren sets up this book as an ongoing dialogue between a close-to-burnt-out pastor and his daughter's soccer coach/science teacher. The pastor is tired of the usual theological and personality battles in the local church and seems disillusioned with the message that he has been presenting. The science teacher also turns out to be a former pastor and left the ministry for some of the same reasons that the current pastor now articulates. The science teacher channels McLaren in this piece as he shares his spiritual journey and the "generously orthodox" claims he had come to hold dear.
p52 "When we let it [the Bible] go as a modern answer book, we get to rediscover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value for us, a kind of universal and cosmic history, a book that tells us who we are and what story we find ourselves in so that we know what to do and how to live."
p54 "What if faith isn't best compared to a building but rather to a spiderweb? Instead of one foundation, it has several anchor points."
p83 "...we are chosen by God not for privilege but for service..."
p87 "What's the consequence of that..." creation by God
p91 "We are becoming on this side of the door of death the kind of people we will be on the other side"
p97 "...maybe a hundred years from now, the descendants of my fellow evangelicals today will be like the Amish of tomorrow, but instead of maintaining 1850's German culture, they'll perpetuate 1950s American culture."
p98 "One of the most dangerous things in the world...is to redefine sin to suit our own tastes."
p130 "I see a huge contrast between crossing a line in this way, and following Jesus on a journey. It's as if we have taken what is for Jesus a starting line and turned it into a finish line."
p155 "[The church] is about three things: community, spirituality, and mission..."
p162 A misguided view of seminaries and their libraries

McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy

The rather long subtitle for this book "Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant..." Indicates the main point of his book - conceiving a Christian orthodoxy that includes and goes beyond current or historical boundaries with Christianity. There is much to admire here - who's against going beyond meaningless boundaries? The trouble for McLaren is various readers will have different ideas about what is or is not a meaningful boundary. I'm reminded of Lindbeck's Nature of Doctrine which argues that each group develops it's own dialect of the Christian language. McLaren is right, I think, in suggesting that there is a common language that can found and that there is value in sharing in it. The difficulty is that it is the very nature of communities to be formed with a certain theological dialect and there can be some challenges in maintaining a community when dialect is left behind or changed.
p64-65 Helpful chart of views of Jesus by group
p80 "Has he become ( I shudder to ask this) less our Lord and more our Mascot?"
p85 "Jesus defined his own identity not as being served, but as giving his life in service, and in this way, acknowledging Jesus as master means one voluntarily "takes his yoke" and learns from Jesus how to serve God, plus one's neighbor, plus one's enemy, and so the whole world."
p179 "...the tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them."
p225 "...the sacrament nature of Catholicism is this: through learning that a few things can carry the sacred, we become open to the fact that all things (all good things, all created things) can ultimately carry the sacred..."
p290 "...the practices of humility, compassion, spirituality, and love--which develop only in community--are more essential to a good and healthy theology..."
p293 "It [generous orthodoxy] is rather to be in a loving (ethical) community of people who are seeking the truth (doctrine) on the road of mission (witness) and who have been launched on the quest by Jesus, who, with us, guides us still."

Lamott's Traveling Mercies

Anne Lamott takes you through her life twice. The 55 page "overture" is a brief autobiography that sets the context for the stories and reflections that follow. The stories and reflections range from an encounter with a man and his dog on the beach to spending time with her friend dying of cancer. Perhaps because her life experiences and context is very different from what I have known, the shared and common faith is quite powerful. My favorite chapters are on Forgiveness and Grace (128-144) but here's some the good quotes:

p8. "He was a God whom his children could talk to, confide in, and trust, unless his mood shifted suddenly and he decided instead to blow up Sodom and Gomorrah"
p55 "She pointed it [the church] out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, 'You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.'"
p65 "Maybe it's because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way."
p95 "It's frustrating if you are hoping to have a happy ending, or at least a little closure, a movie moment when you toss them [ashes] into the air and they flutter and disperse. They don't. They cling, they haunt. They get in your hair, in your eyes, in your clothes."
p106 "She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of hte emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers.
p231 "It's about baptism, for God's sake. It's about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rain and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving in to all those things we can't control; it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get drenched."

Rathbun's Post-rapture Radio

Rathbun's book is a satire on the state of current American evangelicalism told through the voice of a narrator who stumbles upon the writers and journals of the Reverend Richard Lamblove. Lamblove finds himself in a highly-exaggerated evangelical church, trying to make sense of everything and ultimately, tries and fails to change it. Rathbun's overall critique is upon evangelical and megachurches focus on numbers, individualism, and status.

pxix "A seeker would never consider entering an antique building, dark and dour, to listen to old-fashioned music and hear an oddly costumed professor give a speech. But it was not a stretch for that same seeker to pull into the new church's large parking lot, enter the wide glass doors, sit in the theater-style seats, watch a band play familiar-sounding music, and hear a person dressed in regular clothes share a little bit about life."
p19 "...any church not meeting the Retail Needs of its congregation had an average of only six to thirteen months of "Potential Relevance" left.
p40 "This peace that Jesus is talking about is what we would probably call convenience."
p53 Evangelical Hermeneutic: It is about me. It tells me what to do or what not to do. It condemns those who are different from me. It implies the opposite.
p81 "Salvation has nothing to do with eternal self-interest. Salvation has nothing to do with building your own security pod that will jettison you to heaven when the world gets too hateful or your body gives out."
p86 "what takes more faith--to believe that God can save you and offer personal fulfillment and comfort, or to believe that God can reorient the whole world from one of hate, greed, fear and personal gain, to one ruled be peace and justice?"
p107 "I just want everyone to feel comfortable"
p145 "Where is the fire in baptism? Everybody does the water but where is the fire?"
p151 "Christ sacrificed himself once and for all, and when we remember that definitive act of love through the ritual of the Lord's Supper, there can be no qualifications in our invitation to the table."
p155 "We know the trajectory of power and glory...Sacrifice and humility is another story."
p160-2 "The people in these churches had adopted the culture of Rome, and so the message of Revelation is that they are living by the values of the Empire and not the values of the Kingdom of God."

Dodd's My Faith So Far

Patton Dodd, currently a PhD student at BU, marked a turning point of his faith journey when responding to an altar call at a charismatic megachurch and that's how his faith memoir begins. His tale is largely a look at his struggles in combining his Christian faith with both the secular and Christian cultures. Towards the beginning of the book, he struggles to free himself of his old patterns and addictions by clinging to the Christian culture. Rather than being a place of refuge and comfort, Dodd experiences incongruities and excesses in both his charismatic megachurch and in his time at Oral Roberts University. His faith being neither simple or easy strives to find a middle ground. Here's some of the good stuff:
p1 "Becoming [a Christian] has to do with daily practice--what to think, what to say, what to read, where to put one's foot down and why."
p14 On speaking in tongues "Ooh, it sounds horrible. The deacon does it so naturally, and I sound like one of the Sand People on Tatooine. But as I speak, the deacon starts praising God, so I figure I am doing something right."
p19 "Growing up evangelical means that turning on the radio involves a moral decision."
p33 "If I can see it, it must be temporary. If I can't it must eternal, and therefore true"
p39 "I leave the service knowing that God Himself has taken a spoon and scooped all the nastiness out of my chest and flung it into the stratosphere... I want to be Shop-Vac'd by God."
p49 "The Southern Baptists, the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians--I see that they are Christians, too. They are on the right path, but they are walking awfully slowly."
p57 "Religions people don't worship God; they worship the form of God."
p88 "Faith is a tool, like a crowbar the believer constantly uses to pry obstacles aside, or a paintbrush to alter the appearance of the world."
p101 "Our testimonies sometimes take the form of spitting contests"
p106 "Without really knowing that I'm doing it, I have started to compile a list of Screwy Christian Stuff: certain parts of the Bible, certain interactions with other believers, certain moments in certain church services that upset my idea of a Christianity that works they way I expect it to."
p122 "Also on the Screwy list: Is Jesus mean?"
p160 "Others have found it: a place where you can believe and not feel as though you have to jump off a cliff to do it, a place where you can achieve a kind of modified contentment in a flawed faith culture."
p163 "You'll get stronger, and you'll screw up, and then you'll get stronger some more. Eventually, you'll get over it. It's called sanctification, and it takes a while."
p171 "ORU skateboarder Jason, who is now Eastern Orthodox ('It's all about the Eucharist, man')"
p174 "People who believe in Jesus, yes, but who have to remind themselves why. People who love God, of course, but who have trouble expressing how. People who have faith, though not as much as they'd like. But they're working on it."