Hit Hard

By Patrick McLeod and Tammy McLeod

Tyndale House     2019

268 pages    Spiritual Memoir

We have all experienced great loss in our lives at one time or another, whether through death, divorce, Covid, and on and on. In their book, Hit Hard, Pat and Tammy McLeod explore the type of loss called “ambiguous loss”, a type of loss where there doesn’t seem to be a finality, and the grief is ongoing with no closure and no ultimate validation. Wikipedia defines ambiguous loss as “a loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding. This kind of loss leaves a person searching for answers, and thus complicates and delays the process of grieving, and often results in unresolved grief.” It is a concept developed by Dr. Pauline Boss and seems extremely appropriate as we are currently engulfed in the pandemic with loss ensnaring almost all of us in one form or another.

Several years ago, Zach McLeod, the McLeod’s second child, suffered a severe head injury on the football field, and since that moment his life and the life of his family has never been the same. They tell their family story in the book Hit Hard. The couple alternate in sharing their memories of that moment, the toll it took on their son and their family, and how through very hard emotional and spiritual work, they have been able to move beyond that tragic moment and deal in positive ways with the ambiguous loss it brought to them. They say that the purpose of the book is to relate to other families and individuals as they attempt to move beyond their own loss. The McLeods have just recently told their story in a video they made in February of this year, as a source of hope for families dealing with loss from Covid 19. It can be found here.

I was impressed by the huge supporting community the McLeods had around them as they dealt with this loss as well as the way in which they have channeled their loss over the years.  On the other hand, I think that they acknowledge that you can feel very alone, even when you are in a huge community. Both Pat and Tammy are pastors involved in student ministry in the Boston area; both have advanced degrees in ministry. They also are involved in mission in South Africa.

Hit Hard is extremely well written—thoughtful and insightful as well as devastating in the content. The intended audience, I believe, is anyone who is experiencing ambiguous loss, although it would be appropriate for everyone grieving loss. It is also very inspirational—showing that such great loss can lead to positive outcomes and great satisfaction.

Here are two more sites for those intrigued with their story: an interview with the family and the couple’s website.  However, when I Googled Pat and Tammy McLeod, I was able to find many articles, TV interviews, and pictures of the family over the years.

I appreciated very much the publicist sending me the book to read, and I would recommend it as a source of encouragement and hope.

 

Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

Viking     2010

304 pages     Spiritual Memoir

In the late 1990s, Sue Monk Kidd and her young adult daughter, Ann, traveled twice to several sites in Greece and France. Kidd, the author of Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, and The Invention of Wings  among other works, was in a creative funk. She was turning 50 and feeling her age. She had begun thinking about a fiction book that she wanted to write that involved bees, a young girl, and a Black Madonna. 

The second trip the mother-daughter duo took to Greece helped her ferment and develop the concept of the sacred feminine in her mind. She says that "When I visited Mary's House in Ephesus during Ann's and my first trip, the theological polarization I felt about how to relate to Mary began to be resolved." Each event in the story of Mary "feels like a universal story, offering points of entry into my own experience." 

Ann had just graduated from university and had broken up with her boyfriend when the pair took their first trip. She, too, was in a funk and quite depressed. A university trip to Greece had convinced her that she wanted to study ancient Greece for a graduate degree, but unfortunately, she was not admitted into her graduate school of choice. By the second trip, Ann is in a better place emotionally and is planning to be married soon after they return from their travels. During this trip, she debates whether to become a writer. On both trips, she ponders the poem by David Whyte that says, "Give up all other worlds except the one to which you belong." What world does she belong in? She finds that to be the mission of her travels.                                                              

In each section of Traveling with Pomegranates, Sue and Ann share their journals and their impressions of the area they are visiting. They also express their spiritual growth and their heart's longings. Sue purchases glass pomegranate charms to wear on necklaces as a way to counteract what she sees as a growing estrangement between mother and daughter. The necklaces serve as a reminder of the story of Demeter rescuing her daughter Persephone from the underworld. They find the answers to their inner searching through their growing understanding of the Madonna and other images of the sacred feminine. Both grow from these travel experiences—individually and together.

I found Traveling with Pomegranates to be both intriguing and tedious. The most intriguing part for me was how Sue formulated the concepts that became her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees. The tedious parts were their inner arguments, which became strained and repetitive as the pair journeyed. On the other hand, the book is an excellent example of how travel can formulate ideas and creative expression. 

I read the book for the monthly spiritual growth book group at my church. It engendered a great deal of discussion, but several times, members of the group were heard to say, "Well, it wasn't my favorite." Many felt that the publishing of the book was Sue Monk Kidd's attempt to help her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor begin her career as a writer. But, everyone agreed to reread Secret Life of Bees for next month's book group, citing the introduction we got from Ann in Traveling with Pomegranates.

The Invisible Girls: A Memoir

by Sarah Thebarge

Jerico Books    2013

266 pages     Spiritual Memoir

In her memoir The Invisible Girls, Sarah Thebarge relates two intertwined stories in her life—her struggles with breast cancer and the family of little Somali girls that she has helped for several years Thebarge is also a woman of steadfast faith, which is evident in every aspect of the memoir which covers a span of about five years.

Thebarge has experienced a great deal of change in her life. Her family moved several times as she was growing up, and then she as a young adult moves many times as well--first as the daughter of a fundamentalist pastor, and then as she goes to university and graduate school, creates her career and deals with the extremely invasive cancer. This is probably one of the reasons why she identifies so strongly with five young Somali girls and their mother, who have been abandoned by their father and husband. They are lost in this new land, and in many ways, Thebarge is lost as well. The relationship between Thebarge and the Somali family is healing on both sides as they all struggle to adapt to tremendous change.

Each chapter is a short vignette—either of her cancer and her recovery or of the family that she is helping. She also tells of her failed relationship with her fiancé, who is unable to deal with his girlfriend's cancer. Thebarge's writing moves between the various aspects of her life and relationships and also as she struggles with the fundamentalist, restrictive faith of her upbringing. She has many arguments with God over what she feels is God's abandonment of her.  She writes that as she was recovering from the cancer, she plotted the future of her life. She decided that there must be some greater purpose to her life. Thebarge says: "Between the cancer and the pneumonia, I should have died by now. But God had mercifully healed me. So for now, until He cashed out my chips, what I owed Him was not a death, but a well-lived life." She seems to have reached a compromise with God.  It is at this point in her life that she meets the Somali family.

She takes the title, the Invisible Girls, from the idea that women often are invisible in society. At one point she equates the modest dress of the fundamentalist woman to the modest dress of the Somali woman she is helping. This overt modesty helps create invisibility in women, but she also tells of an incident of preaching the gospel to a young prostitute on the street—another form of an invisible woman. Her goal is to help the Somali girls to grow up to be women who are "too confident to wait for a man to rescue them, and to valuable to stay with a man who abused them." I think that adding this "invisible girl" theme to the book is a bit disingenuous because it feels contrived—perhaps the idea came from an editor who thought that the book needed something more than what Thebarge was delivering.

 The Invisible Girls was created from the blog Thebarge has written as a way of sorting out her life. She intends to use the proceeds from the book to pay for the educations of the five little Somali girls so that they can move out of invisibility into productive American lives.The fund can be found on her blog here: http://sarahthebarge.com/invisible-girls-trust-fund/

My hairdresser HIlary has been helping a young Nigerian woman/university student, Rejoice, and her little boy who came to Hilary's church seeking help. Rejoice is a student at Western Michigan University, and because of her unmarried motherhood status, she receives no support from her family. She is seeking asylum in the United States, and in the interim Hilary has taken it upon herself to offer the woman all the help she can. The stories are very similar, and I will take the book to Hilary when I go to see her. (More information about Rejoice and her needs can be found at the Go Fund Me site that Skyridge Church in Kalamazoo has set up.)

When I received The Invisible Girls from the publisher, I did not intend to read the entire book—just enough to get the gist of it so that I could write a short blurb on my blog. Despite its many flaws, it was a quick and inspiring read, and I finished the entire book in a couple of hours. It is one of those books that you read, sigh, and go "Ahh, nice!" and then move on with living. 

An interview with Sarah Thebarge.

Sarah Thebarge's website, blog, and donation site for the Invisible Girls.

Fierce With Age: Chasing God and Squirrels in Brooklyn

by Carol Orsborn

Turner Publishing, 2013

244 pages     Spiritual

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time. That's the case with Fierce with Age by Dr. Carol Osborn. I have been having a few hard months. First, I turned 70; then I was working way to hard; then a dear friend died quickly and abruptly. Then I read Orsborn's memoir of a hard year she had after she turned sixty, and I found sustenance and the will to move beyond the restlessness that has been plaguing my days and nights. Orsborn is an expert on the "baby boomer" generation and the author of several self-help books.

Orsborn describes a year in her life through entries much like a diary. She is on the "wild side" of sixty when a job change causes the couple to move from Los Angeles to New York. She left behind her work, which was waning anyway, and found herself at loose ends and feeling very old. At first she rages against the concept of "ageism" and loses her spiritual footing. Then slowly, she finds herself becoming spiritually whole again and ready to move on fiercely. She says that she is "surprisingly re-energized about who I am becoming, and fiercely curious about what lies ahead."

But becoming "fierce with age" doesn't come easily to Orsborn, and apparently it is not coming easily to me. We see Orsborn's progress through the year from a bout of self-pity to the moment when she rages against God and comes to the spiritual understanding that while she is not about to give up, she is at a new stage in her life's journey. And like most women, she feels like she is on this journey on her own with very little guidance.

The Publisher's Weekly reviewer suggests that this is not "naval gazing" but a rich description of what most thoughtful women of a certain age experience. Before her year is over, she has developed 11 spiritual truths of aging, some guiding principles that she wishes to convey to others moving past middle age. I particularly like number five which says, "We can dance with rather than struggle against the essence of who we are."

"But I now understood, not just intellectually nor even just emotionally, but in the very depths of my mortal soul, that it was not only my destiny but also everybody else's to die someday. I would not, could not, make peace with aging until I had come to terms with the finitude of existence, including the possibility of suffering and the guarantee of death, none of which were likely to be on my own terms."

Nearly everything Orsborn struggled with resonated with me. Last night my husband and I were discussing her book and we mentioned how people--like servers or store clerks--now view us as old, when, in fact, we forget that we look that way. It is always a shock to be treated with deference to our age.

A year ago, I had the opportunity to work with a major children's publisher on a large project, which lasted for four months. It was a very exciting gig for me and extremely satisfying. At one point I mentioned to the 30-something woman who was running the project that I hoped I was being useful. "Oh." she said. "It is wonderful to have you in the group! You know the backlist so well." meaning that I knew all the old books. A back-handed compliment if I ever heard one.

I was inspired when Orsborn detailed the moments when her focus changed from fighting against the aging process to being inspired by the process. She vividly describes the moment when she realized that "...life is mysterious, awe-some and awe-ful all at once. Can we be wise enough to embrace it all?" That is what I want to do. Embrace the mystery. Live to the fullest with grace and wisdom.

Carol Orsborn's website, aptly called "Fierce with Age." http://fiercewithage.com/

The Publishers Weekly review: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-62045-375-9

Does This Church Make Me Look Fat

By Rhoda Janzen

New York, Grand Central, 2012

253 pages     Spiritual Memoir

Memoirist Rhoda Janzen says, “What a relief it is that we don’t have to be good at religion in order to seek God! We don’t even have to have a strong sense of belief. All we need is the desire to believe.”

In her second memoir, Does This Church Make Me Look Fat, Janzen displays her desire to believe with marvelously funny stories about a topic that shouldn’t be funny, i.e. seriously dangerous breast cancer. Janzen is an English professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, about an hour from where I live. PhD educated at UCLA, she is an academic who abandoned her Mennonite faith as a teenager. Her first spiritual memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress tells the story of the horrendous time in her life when she returned to her Mennonite roots to heal following a divorce and a lot of broken bones from a car accident. The desire to believe came back to her then and continued after she returned to her academic life.

By this time, she is open to returning to religion, or in her words, with the desire for faith. She meets a “manly man,” who is a born-again Pentecostal, and starts attending church with him. Although they are as opposite as can be (his son says that they might be from different planets), they find they are perfect for each other. 

As fate would have it, shortly after she meets “Mitch,” she receives a diagnosis of breast cancer—a massive tumor in her breast. Fearing the worst, she offers to let Mitch off the hook, but he tells her that he is the right man for this challenge, and so they face the surgery, the radiation, and the chemo together. The chapter that details how she finds out about the cancer raises goose bumps, both spiritually and factually. Yet, the way in which she handles the diagnosis is nothing short of amazing. In her inner being, she seems to know that everything will be all right, and so, as the book evolves, Rhoda marries Mitch, the cancer goes into a complete remission, and Rhoda becomes a part of Mitch's faith community.

I could relate to Janzen’s cancer journey on many levels. I will never forget when my husband, who had been fighting lymphatic cancer for 6 years, came home from a doctor’s visit. He had not told me he was going, so when he came home I was fixing dinner in the kitchen. I was mixing meat loaf as I recall, and he walked in, gave me a peck on the cheek, and told me he had been to the doctor. “The doctor says it’s really bad this time,” he said, and I kept making the meatloaf. Rhoda received her diagnosis over the telephone while she was counseling a student. She finished the session with the student and then went off to teach a two hour class. Sometimes doing common things helps soften the blow.

Janzen really doesn’t linger on the cancer. Most of Does This Church… is a love story and a narrative concerning the nature of faith and its reappearance in her life. It is the story of affirming the present, seizing upon the opportunities that life offers, and restoring the rightful place of faith in God in life. Although her spiritual journey is different from mine, I grew as I read about her journey and about the gracious God that guides her. 

Besides all that, like Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, this book is laugh-out-loud funny. When life becomes absurd, you can either bemoan the hand you have been dealt, or you can laugh at the irony of it all. Personally, I love Janzen’s humor, her outlook on life, and the affirming way her husband, friends and family love and support her quirky take on it all. 

As the review on the BookReporter says: “This is the story of what it means to find joy in love, comfort in prayer, and--incredibly, surprisingly--faith in a big-hearted God.”

Here is the review in the BookReporter: http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/does-this-church-make-me-look-fat

A review that appeared Sunday in the Tampa Bay newspaper:  http://www.tampabay.com/features/books/review-does-this-church-make-me-look-fat-by-rhoda-janzen-a-cheerful/1255048

An interesting interview in the Austinist: http://austinist.com/2012/10/03/rhoda_janzen_interview.php

Rhoda Janzen’s book appeared on bookshelves on October 2. She is making several appearances  in Western Michigan in the next couple of weeks. I hope to see her when she is in Holland at the end of the month.