The first anniversary of The Shack

(I rounded a little -- it has been on bestseller lists for 58 weeks) Although my contrarian streak often counsels me not to read Extremely Popular Books, it behooves a religion specialist, especially a religion books specialist, to know what this is about. My friends Jana Riess and Dave Nantais have led the way with their insights -- Jana's blog and Dave's article in America magazine. I was most struck by author William Paul Young's vision of the Trinity, which is not an easy doctrine for some monotheists (how can God be a three-in-one god?) His depiction of the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman who seemed to flit like a rainbow-colored bird is really no more odd or arbitrary than the time-honored bird imagery. What stays with me was his vision of the stars; it was positively Dante-esque, reminding me of the conclusion of the Paradiso, which invokes "the love that moves the sun and other stars." Not too shabby for someone who doesn't write that well.

Reports of the death of the book

appear to have been exaggerated, judging by the crowds at Printers Row Lit Fest yesterday. Even more gratifyingly, I sold nine books, gave away more (as an incentive), saw someone I haven't seen for years and had fascinating conversations about publishing, Oprah Winfrey (nope, didn't see her there) and life in general. People brought dogs of all sizes and tiny infants; rain only sprinkled while I was there. Books: low tech, portable, don't need batteries. Take one home today.

Happy birthday Will Shakespeare!

In Chicago it's officially Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Will is 445 today (more or less, the exact day not having been recorded). Last night at a laugh-out-loud performance of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre we had our cake and ate it too, as rappers gave us some tips for talking like Shakespeare, forsooth and fare thee well, cuz youth's a stuff will not endure, but Shakespeare has.

True love and home grown

tomatoes. Neither can be bought, but both carefully cultivated. Being blessed enough to have the former, I began this year's crop of the latter today, on my birthday. Another year of Mrs. Benson, Old Flame, Peacevine cherry, Wayahead, Brandywine, Lillian. Every tomato name tells a story. Among the new ones I am trying this year is Wins All (photo, and seeds, from Totally Tomatoes), which got its name in a 1925 contest. Ponderosa Pink is a parent. Meantime, it's gray and raining on the frozen ground. Dream on.

What's an anchoress anyway?

Julian of Norwich was an anchoress. That means she lived alone in a little bitty room inside a church, living a life of prayer and meditation. She spoke to people through a little window into her room. The church was bombed in WWII, but the doorway to her cell was saved. It's believed she had a cat as a companion. For rat control.

Discipline and Lent

Giving up stuff sounds like a Drag, but being disciplined sounds Good. I'll be praying with Julian of Norwich during the season of Lent. I may be a Quaker, but the liturgical calendar was etched into me early in life thanks to 1950s-style Catholic spiritual formation. Today's thought from Julian has to do with growth in the spiritual life -- her quaint Middle English term is "forth spredying." God's love increases, as does ours for God as we grow spiritually. It spreads forth.

What is this man smiling about?

Disgraced evangelical leader Ted Haggard was on Oprah Wednesday smiling a lot (this picture from Oprah's website doesn't do him justice) to promote the HBO documentary about him. Haggard spoke about being a "heterosexual with issues." His biggest issue is dishonesty.

Keeping spirituality simple

Oprah had some pretty confident shows on spirituality in connection with her "best life" theme to open 2009 last week and this. How then shall we live? Rabbi Irwin Kula said it well and simply: Learn something every day; do something kind every day; be grateful. That boils down an awful lot of theology and commandments and makes a do-able to-do list.

One vote makes a difference

I attended the Aurora Township Democratic Party caucus last night at the request of two friends who needed my vote. Things were pretty crowded at the grass roots as four candidates vied to be slated as Democratic candidate for township supervisor. Also pretty chaotic. If you didn't know when to say yea or nay, too bad. The chairman wielded the gavel rather heavily and quickly. You voted on slips of paper by coloring in the box -- no chance of a hanging chad or electronic voting machine error. Well, almost no chance -- one vote was in dispute because of a question over the voter's eligibility. That in turn required a call to the election commission. What then turned out to be the margin of victory? One vote separated the second and third place finishers. It pays to bring a friend. Also a book. Democracy is time-consuming as well as chaotic at its roots.

Back on the wagon

I have fallen off several wagons, including exercising, blogging, working, watching Oprah. Could be worse, though. I could have gained 40 pounds, like O. Let's get back on the wagon, girl.

Morning in Chicago

I am attending the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, held at the Chicago Hilton Towers, a sprawling old hotel. I haven’t had much chance to stay in my room because I have been walking and walking the halls and exhibit areas making connections with people and trolling for ideas for journalists and publishers. When I am finally in my room at long day’s end, I don’t sleep well. Yet this is not that bad a situation.

I can look east out the windows of my ninth-floor room and reflect on and admire Lake Michigan and Chicago’s well-planned lakeshore, or I can look south and watch traffic industriously flow and lights turn green and red in coordinated sequence. Right now, the day before the 2008 presidential election, I also have a bird’s eye view, quite literally, of the big tent in Grant Park where presidential candidate Barack Obama, my senator, and 65,000 supporters are planning to party like it’s 2008 tomorrow night. It will be a celebration, or not, although the odds and polls favor the former. The big white tent complex looks like a scene from Camelot. Is it OK to say that, I asked a colleague in describing the tent, wondering if I could invoke the Kennedy-era mystique.

Is it OK to say that Wednesday will be a new morning in America? That’s a Reagan phrase, and would definitely not be associated with the Obama camp. But regardless of who wins, Wednesday will be a new morning. I think of it as literally, and metaphorically, true, prompted to this observation because I watched the sun rise this morning over the Obama party tent. It was a deep pink rectangle peeking out of a grey-blue bank of dawn clouds that sat at the horizon. The sun rose; well, of course, it does that every day. Every day is a new morning, a fact of life and nature always taken for granted and never taken for beautiful unless one takes the time to stop and look, Or one happens to be on the ninth-floor of a lakefront hotel. Or one happens to be finishing up the graveyard shift. Or one happens to be a student finishing an all-nighter. Most people don’t pay attention to a new morning, but it happens every day like clockwork.

I am looking forward to a new morning on Wednesday. These are not the greatest times for America. People are losing jobs, losing savings. The call for change resonates very powerfully in these circumstances. It could be also that people have been losing hope. I haven’t. I know I can’t afford to lose hope; I’m not sure anybody can. When something is really lost, you don’t even know it’s missing.

Since I was awake early, I got up and watched the sunrise. That seemed like an excellent time, and place, to pray: I hope it is a very new morning on Wednesday. God, please let my candidate win, I prayed. God doesn’t vote, but I will, doing my itsy-bitsy part to bring about the outcome I pray for. I was going to say do my part in bringing about God’s will, but I’m not sure I can say that either without being misunderstood. All I really mean is my vote counts in the larger scheme of many millions of votes, and it’s supposed to be a heck of a vote turnout. There are large forces at work.

I look forward to voting and I look forward to a new day on Wednesday. I will take neither of those for granted and continue hoping.

Beautiful and poisonous

The garden died in the season's first hard freeze last night. One thing that stands out in my late garden when all else grows weary is monkshood, a late bloomer, and I love late bloomers. This year I had several strong stems of this regal blue flower. Someone asked me about it and I had forgotten that it's poisonous. I won't harvest it, but I will enjoy as this tall delphinium-leafed specimen makes a last stand in the late autumn, after everything else has packed up its summer glory. I wonder if there is a connection between being a monk and being sinister. Could make a good sequel to The Da Vinci Code --- Monkshood, or, Intrigue in the Garden.

How life works in the garden

Picking green beans a little past their slender prime this morning, I had to give a wide berth to a humungous spider. Humunguous enough to see greenish-yellow stripes on its underside, and fine hairs on its long legs. A small yellow jacket got too close and landed in the web. The spider was on it in a flash, throwing out silk and rapidly rolling its helpless prey. Done. The yellow jacket wiggled a little in its spidery straitjacket. Then the webmaster approached and bit, letting out venom to paralyze the prey. Spiders, it seems, grow more common at the end of season. I should be grateful for their help in keeping down the insect population. In looking to understand what I saw, I read that spiders are nature's physicists in how accurately they construct their webs. This science major was an argiope (rhymes with calliope) spider.

Oprah picks Shakespeare

The new book club pick The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is inspired by Hamlet. And it's 576 pages. I can't wait.

O's kickoff

I use a sports metaphor because she opened her 23rd season with the American athletes from the recently concluded Beijing Olympics in one of Chicago's very nicest settings, Millennium Park in the city's downtown. Mayor Daley (shown in the audience, at his first Oprah taping) must have loved (enough) the idea of showcasing Chicago as the welcoming and world-class host for the 2016 Summer Olympics. You can't pay Oprah to endorse what she doesn't want to endorse, but her home city is one of her favorite things, presumably. All those cheering people and a big balloon drop made me think of two other crowds of people and balloon drops I've seen in the past two weeks, namely, the party conventions. O's audience was the one that truly put country first. Unlike the partisan shows, Team USA brought us together.

Catching up with Oprah

OK, she gets to take the summer off, so I only checked in on the OShow occasionally. But meantime the Soul Series on XM Radio has had a steady stream of guests, and it's clear to me that she's switched media for dispensing spiritual advice. I had a conversation with someone who listen to O's show on XM, and that started me thinking. The TV show has a certain demographic/audience that has to be different -- more mainstream -- than the radio demographic/audience. Talk radio has very distinctive, niche-y audiences. Oprah seems to have figured this out somewhat late, but that's probably because she was busy making billions on TV. The Soul Series is, in its own words, "talk radio that stimulates your brain and feeds your soul." Eclectic, holistic health-oriented, prosperity-oriented, with a dose of brain science and Buddhism. Oprah is far from her Christian home, but so are many Americans, and some come from different homes. More later.

More green adventures

The Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford were an hour's drive (and gas is now under $4/gallon). They are walkable and shaded, with lots of lovely hardscape, from boulders to bridges to tea houses. The 12-acre site has pools and an impressive waterfall (a 20 foot steel wall supports it), so the sound of water is often in the background as you walk. The koi seem pretty Americanized -- some looked obese. Garden founder John Anderson often did business in Japan, and was inspired to develop this after seeing the wonderful Portland Japanese garden . Anderson is now the #1 ranked Japanese garden in the U.S. and Europe, according to the Roth Journal of Japanese Gardening . I could have stayed there all day, but instead we finished the day by using the Rockford Park District bike trail that runs along the Rock River, since the weather was good for biking. That trail was a lot less crowded than what we might have encountered had we instead chosen to go into Chicago for a lakefront ride.

Another green vacation day

I haven't been to the Morton Arboretum in the Chicago area for many years. A museum for trees is a wonderful concept, and offers markedly different walks and views than your average museum, which frequently houses the dead and/or inanimate. Only God can make a tree, poetically opined Joyce Kilmer, and the arboretum collects them in bunches, organized by taxonomy (maples, oaks), geography (plants of Europe, Japan, etc), landscape (acid, dwarf woody, etc). The place seems bigger than 15 years ago, and environmentally friendly parking lots are among newer features that promote friendship with Mother Earth. We caught the tail end of a theater-hike playing Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at various locations on the grounds. The mosquitoes did not cooperate, but the weather smiled. And summer prairie flowers were in high season.

I met a woman from Burundi

Florence Ntakarutimana is doing astounding and courageous work in Rwanda with the program Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities, sponsored by Quaker groups including the African Great Lakes Initiative. I missed her talk to our whole Illinois Yearly Meeting but learned from her in worship sharing. HROC brings together Hutus and Tutsis to acknowledge the trauma that the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s brought to so many, mourn it, find appropriate ways to express anger and rebuild trust. Forgiveness is not necessary, though it could happen. Florence speaks four languages: Kinyarwandan (the language of Rwanda), French, English and Swahili. The theme of our annual yearly meeting, and hence of the worship sharing, was reconciliation. Florence prays and she listens. That's how she does her work. Her faith impressed me.

Green vacation, day one

This year no 3,000 mile drives to northern Maine. My family and I are doing day trips and using public transportation. We drew up a list of places around Chicago that will delight and edify. Yesterday's destination: Starved Rock State Park near Utica. Starved Rock is formed of St. Peter sandstone, which is pretty soft as rocks go. In the canyons you can see the layers that have been worn through as you inspect the rock walls. (The picture looks like LaSalle Canyon.) It had rained the day before, so the waterfalls and streams were running verdantly well. Andrew's good eye spotted a cedar waxwing. Also a tiny snake that stuck its tiny tongue out at us, two deer in a roadside meadow, many millipedes on the march, a blue butterfly. The flowers were stunning: yellow iris, native columbine, jack-in-the-pulpit, spiderwort, pinks, wild geranium. Small sunny patches in the forest held bouquets of late spring flowers. The kids explored and got wet, the adults named things. It took an hour to get there, a green place to visit in a green way.