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Stones to Bread
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Tuesday, 01 May 2012 00:20 |
Leslie Leyland Fields, Interview #176
From The Spiritual Book Club:http://blog.spiritualbookclub.com/2012/04/leslie-leyland-fields-interview-176.html
Name: Leslie Leyland Fields
Where you live: Kodiak Island, Alaska
What you do as vocation or avocation:
I'm the author of seven books; a columnist and contributor to Christianity Today magazine; a speaker; a mother of six; and I work in commercial salmon fishing.
Two favorite books:
Frederick Buechner's novelGodric and Eugene Peterson's five-book series on spiritual theology: Tell it Slant, Eat This Book, Christ Plays in a Thousand Places, The Jesus Way, Practice Resurrection
Two favorite songs:
Joan Baez singing The Byrds "Turn, Turn, Turn" [To everything there is a season...]
Why are you interested in spirituality?
For the same reason I am intensely interested in science and beauty and the intricate workings of all this world. I see the presence of spirit in all things, and know that everything good has somehow come from God. If I am to begin to understand anything of human existence, I must pursue the visible and invisible. If I am to begin to understand anything of God, I must pursue the visible and invisible. When we divide and dissect the world, separating spirit from body and spirit from matter, we do violence to what is real. Wholeness is possible; healing and reconciliation between people, between people and God, between people and the earth---all this is possible, at least in part.
Favorite quote:
He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
---Aeschylus (from Agamemnon)
Favorite websites:
Your heroes?
My brother Todd, William Wilberforce, Flannery O'Connor.
A Spiritual lesson you hope to learn:
I hope to see God's radiance and goodness in all things and in all people, and to write about it in the most beautiful language I can find. This is not easy for me-either the seeing or the writing! I have a naturally critical spirit that needs to be humbled and poisoned-by love and by the truth. Here is the truth: so much mercy has been shown to me, I am a debtor to all.
A Place I feel spiritually connected:
Among the lovely sinners and saints in my new church and out at our fish camp, Harvester Island, a small one-mountain island off Kodiak Island, inhabited by just my family and I. There we are intensely alone, together, among ocean, whales, falcons, mountains, storms, sea lions; among grandeur and loneliness I sometimes glance the visage of God.
Editor's Note: Leslie is author of numerous books, she's also a speaker, a professional editor, and a columnist for Christianity Today. You can see her memoir Surviving the Island of Grace: Life on the Edge of Wild America here.
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Tuesday, 21 February 2012 04:10 |
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Intercultural Fiesta Fail
‘We are all alike!’ doesn’t fly in a fly-infested hut in El Salvador.
 The thinly thatched roof of the bamboo hut barely shades us from the tropical sun. The four women do not stop making tamales as my daughter introduces me to them. They smile shyly at me while tending the wood fire and tying the leaf- wrapped bundles with twine-like stems. The flies are thick. A baby sitting on the dirt floor surrounded by chickens cries. I try to look pleasant and non- judging.
“Will you come to the fiesta, then?” my daughter asks the mother and her grown daughters.
“Sí,” they nod, glancing at me nervously.
The “intercultural fiesta” had been planned for months around my arrival in El Salvador, where my daughter is working in rural villages. The party was the perfect incentive for the women she works with— practicing songs and skits to raise awareness on domestic violence, an enormous problem in their country. I was part of the program. We would share our lives and learn from each other.
“They’ll dress up as much as they can,” my daughter tells me. So I dress down: a dress from Walmart, a plastic necklace, old vinyl sandals that stink when my feet sweat. I want to blend in, to be one of them, to not be what I really am: a rich American.
After a skit where my improvisation and faulty Spanish elicit a little too much laughter, we move on to a round of charades. The women act out their lives in the villages, and I do the same for my life in Alaska. For “work,” they stand in a row and swing their arms gently back and forth. “Hoeing corn!” I shout out, while my daughter translates. They grin. For my turn, I mime standing in a skiff and pulling in a net heavy with fish. Because they have heard about this already, they immediately guess “Fishing!” When I pantomime church, I bend my head to pray, I lift my hands to worship, and I enact Communion. They shout “prayer!” “Praising God!” “Communion!” with the excitement of recognition. Later, I teach them a hallelujah song.
My heart fills. Though we live 7,000 miles apart, we are women, we are mothers, we worship God—we share so much. I think of the apostle Paul’s metaphor for the church, that we are “many members, one body.” I think of the mystery of the communion of the saints. I try to overlook the flies and the dirt to see these families as my neighbors.To love them.
But the we-are-all-alike glow doesn’t last. Few of the women try to speak to me. The children are afraid of me. I am unable to eat the food served, because a previous meal has made me sick. They do not invite me to sit with them under the shade of the tarp. I ennoble them because of their brown skin and deep poverty. They ennoble me because of my white skin and wealth. Despite their dressing up and my dressing down, we are clearly still “other” to one another, and nothing I do that day changes it.
Now, back home, I realize it is a travesty to try to erase what lies between us, which is not simply distance but skin color, language, education, worldview, lifestyle, life span, and myriad other real distinctions. Surely these matter.
The basis for loving our neighbors, and for unity in Christ, is not proximity, understanding, or commonality. We are one in Christ not because we are one and the same, but because Christ is the same. It is an impoverished theology that mistakes unity in Christ for sameness in Christ.
The perfection toward which we are heading, the extinction of our sin nature, will not blur us all into homogeneity. At Pentecost, a foretaste of heaven, the Holy Spirit did not repair the splintering of language begun at Babel, the miracle we would expect. Christ did not unify the multi-tongued hearers through the same language, but through the hearing of the same gospel.
No one at the fiesta that day would have mistaken me for anything but what I am. I’m relieved. Whatever borders I cross next—be they in countries or church pews—I can give up the guilty fiction that I can become the other. I do know, however, that I can at least be among the other. There, among the women, I hope they marveled, as I did, that redemption is so wide it even includes a middle-aged gringa with bad Spanish and stinky feet.
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Tuesday, 27 September 2011 02:52 |
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A Wordless Presence
Stones to Bread | Leslie Leyland Fields
(oiriginally appeared September, 2011 in Christianity Today)
The wrestling season is finally over (cheer)! Its duration-and my 16 years spent in the bleachers for this particular sport-always test my heart and stamina. Wrestling tournaments bring a special kind of torment to both spectators and participants. Two people wearing nothing but a singlet and flat sneakers circle each other like panthers, trying to vanquish the other by pinning him or her, helpless, to the mat. Spit, blood, and sweat are often involved.
It's primal and intense, a display of strength and athleticism nothing short of astonishing. And if you are a parent of one or two of those ripped, twisted bodies being taken to the mat, it's sheer fear. Necks aren't supposed to bend that way. Backs should not fold, and bloody noses deserve more than a coach ramming a twisted piece of Kotex up the nostril. O child of mine! I can hardly watch.
At the last tournament, tired and desperate, I took up my camera. Thus armed, I stood at the edge of the mat now, 20 feet from the action, with the lens to my face, but all was changed. Now it was about snapping a decent photo, not worrying about the other guy snapping my son's back. It was about recording a drama, capturing a moment of art in the spar.
From that vantage, Russian author Anton Chekhov's famous prescription for writers came to mind:
"A writer is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound under compulsion, by the realization of his duty and by his conscience. To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist."
I thought, too, of the essential role of the artist-writer as a witness, a dispassionate recorder of the often unpleasant.
I needed no further justification. I was now the photographer-witness, safely and objectively documenting my sons' pins, wins, and losses. It saved me a section of stomach lining and led to some interesting observations.
But the longer I stood there at the end of the mat, the more my objectivity shrank. By the eighth hour, I had put my camera down to watch the blind wrestler tapping his cane to his next match. I cheered on the gutsy girl wrestlers. I brought my embattled sons bottles of water. In short, I drew close.
Chekhov's brilliant short stories often ring true, yet these particular words of his feel a poor prescription for writers and for believers living in a suffering world. This month brought another death in our church family, the daughter of a friend. This was her fourth child to die. I did not want to go to the funeral. I wanted to keep a safe distance. I had nothing to offer but what she possessed too much of already: tears, despair, unanswerable questions.
But I could not stay away. I wept through the entire service and hovered around my friend as the casket was loaded into the hearse. Just before it left, I looked into my friend's face, gave her a hug, and left.
I am haunted still. I am haunted because I believe in presence. I believe in a God who did not stay coolly distant and "objective," but who came close enough to us to spend his own blood and spit, a God who came so close, he took our place "so that we who were once far off could be brought near" (cf. Eph. 2:13). I see him with muscled arms and legs grappling with Jacob on the night plain. I think of Emmanuel, "God with us," who ate dinner next to the possessed and dispossessed, who expended his presence extravagantly to the near and far-off alike.
But I am not Christ! How puny my hugs and my tears before the magnitude of this friend's grief! Is this all my presence can offer? In my own helplessness now, I remember Jesus' words, "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them" (Matt. 18:20). We tend to invoke these words at prayer meetings and church services before we launch into lengthy supplications. But I am beginning to understand that maybe my wordless presence with her was a prayer. Maybe Jesus' words are really true. Maybe our physical presence beside those who grieve, who feel abandoned, who wrestle against the muck of life is itself an embodied prayer that invokes-or somehow actually becomes-"I am there among them." God with us.
This is more than a hope. As I step off the bleachers, sooner now, with water or a hug to someone alone, my hands, my legs, my feet will be praying: God with us, be with us. I know he will.
I believe in a God who did not stay coolly distant and ‘objective,' but who came close enough to us to spend his own blood and spit.
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Thursday, 11 August 2011 15:48 |
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Stones to Bread
"The Power and the Glamour"
Searching for Beauty amid Hollywood's beautiful people.
Leslie Leyland Fields | posted 7/25/2011 11:27AM
Related articles and links | [no previous page] 1 of 2 [next page]
I recently returned from Hollywood. I was flown there and back, housed more than comfortably at the Hyatt Regency on Avenue of the Stars. I was there (ahem!) on official Christianity Today business, accepting an award for an article about food and animal welfare. I can still see the plush of the red carpet, the glamour of the designer gowns, the gleam of the chandeliers in the grand ballroom.
Given the deeply theological person I am, and given the sophistication of CT's readers, let me get to essential matters: What did I wear? A black chiffon dress with just one problem: a visible hole near the hem, which I discovered five minutes before show time. I had to wear it-I had brought nothing else. So much for class and beauty.
I slunk into the ballroom late feeling disheveled and underdressed, with barely enough time to fix my face. I found myself surrounded by flocks of unearthly beautiful people. I sat across the dinner table from a bejeweled and tuxedo-clad couple who treated me to stunningly perfect profiles. During the televised ceremonies, a parade of famously gorgeous faces filled the stage and mega-screens mounted beside it. At the after party, in line for exquisite vegan fare, I stood in front of-or, rather, beneath-one of the presenters, a goddess in a swooping gold lamé gown, bronze makeup, and a flawless face. I could hardly stop staring. Among such company, I was, at best, faceless.
And how does such beauty enter a ballroom? Not the ordinary way, I discovered. The celebrities waited behind a 40-foot banner with the Genesis Award logo in front and a red carpet at the base. A gaggle of photographers, some of them perched on ladders, jockeyed for position. The entire area was heavily guarded and cordoned off from riffraff like me. When a celebrity emerged onto the carpet, the ballroom lit up and the shouting began: "Over here! Here! Look this way!" Like a fluid mannequin, she would move into poses, locking her eyes onto every camera she could see, her face following the voices. With lights exploding, faces radiant, hands and voices raised, the mood was exultant. I felt like I was in church.
In such a place, I thought of a C. S. Lewis quote: "The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing ... to find the place where all the beauty came from."
Was this the place? Had I found it?
Like so many others, I am in pursuit of the beautiful. "Beauty will save the world," said the Prince in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. I almost believe this. I live on an island in Alaska, on a cliff over the ocean, beneath spruce and snow-covered mountains. I follow beauty's trail into landscapes, music, theology, literature, art. Yet as stunning as it all is, somehow I know-as the glittering audience in the ballroom that night knew-it is not enough. We long for more, for beauty as not just idea or place or artifact, but the human-beautiful. Beauty in the flesh, personal, animate. Beauty like us, only better.
We long for beauty as not just idea or place or artifact, but the humanbeautiful. Beauty in the flesh, personal, animate. Beauty like us, only better.
But their beauty, and our need for it, appeared a calamitous burden. So many faces I saw that night had been visibly altered-plumped, sliced, stitched, patched, pulled. "Nothing is in its final form," Lewis wrote in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. I marveled at what we have done to the face and body searching for that form. Some stars were so changed by surgeries, I almost couldn't recognize them. Some, like the couple facing me at the table, wore rigid, inexpressive features. The towering goddess in the thick eye shadow could not seem to turn her eyes to look down at me. Their beauty kept them distant, unrecognizable, less human.
For all this disappointment, I know there will always be a shouting crowd at the edge of the red carpet. We won't stop elbowing to see the made-up lovelies on the rug, even knowing they are marred and fake. It gives us hope that we ourselves can be fixed. We all want this: better bodies, better faces, better selves.
I have reason to hope, because there is another red carpet day coming. The screen will roll back, and out from a blinding flash of light, he will emerge. We will see his face and form and gasp: Here is what we have been longing for all our short lives. Here is where all the beauty comes from. And as he comes near, when we look close in his face, we will finally be given our own true faces, like his: holy, human, beautiful.
Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere:
Previous Christianity Today articles on Hollywood and Beauty include:
A Holy Longing | Beauty is the hard-to-define essence that draws people to the gospel. (October 2, 2008)
Pop Culture: Why Hollywood Doesn't Like You | (August 10, 1998)
Is Beauty the Beast? | After I stopped hating good looks, I was able to put beauty in its rightful place. (July 14, 1997)
Previous articles and columns from Leslie Leyland Fields include:
People of the Nook | What Bible smartphone apps tell us about the Book. (May 16, 2011)
A Feast Fit for the King | Returning the growing fields and kitchen table to God. (November 5, 2010)
The Myth of the Perfect Parent | Why the best parenting techniques don't produce Christian children. (January 8, 2010)
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Thursday, 11 August 2011 15:40 |
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People of the Nook? What Bible smartphone apps tell us about us-and the Book
Stones to Bread: Leslie Leyland Fields
(originally appeared May, 2011 in Christianity Today)
Related articles and links | 1 of 2
A couple of Sundays ago, my husband, son, and I enacted a mini-drama from a script that has likely played out in every churchgoing family in America. Never mind that we live in Kodiak, Alaska, thousands of miles from the rest of the country. Electronics, we know, are borderless.
During the sermon, with our heads intently bent over our study Bibles, my husband and I glanced down the pew to see our teenage son leaning over his cell phone. Texting during the sermon? My husband, later claiming self-defense, drew his own cell from his holster and began furiously sending texts to the other end of the pew. Teenage son didn't respond, which drew more urgent messages. No response again. By now we were steaming toward a march around the center pews to snatch the offensive item from the perpetrator's hands. Thankfully, "we'll get him later" prevailed.
By now you've already guessed the ending of this vignette. The response to our accusations: wide eyes and sly protestations of innocence before whipping out the cell phone-with the Bible fully downloaded on it. Ah, the snarky pleasure on his face.
It's true: I'm a dying breed. I've been lugging around this doorstop version of the Scriptures partly for its inconvenience. It reminds me of its import and my commitment to the words I so laboriously carry. But since this event, I've downloaded the Bible on my iPhone, and, like millions of others, have begun to use it, which has caused me to wonder: Are we Christians still people of the book? And if we're becoming instead people of the Nook, does it matter?
The moment the new icon appeared on my screen, I scrolled to Habakkuk and read it from start to finish. I chose that particular book for a reason. Just three weeks before, I watched breathlessly as my brother-in-law unrolled the Habakkuk scroll, one of the first pulled from the Dead Sea caves in 1948, on my living room rug. It was at least six feet long, on delicate parchment. I even touched it. Before you report me, or worse yet, doubt me, let me assure you: the scroll is a facsimile. It is a fake so real, with such exacting detail-burn marks, frays in all the right places-it bears a stamp to foil attempts to heist and pass it off as real. (Disclosure: My brother-in-law directs the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation.)
I viewed the scroll with head-spinning confusion: One of the most ancient documents reproduced through the most advanced technologies to look and feel as aged as the original. Its appearance instantly reminded me of the Bible's historicity, the marvel of its faithful passage through the centuries, the significant cost in human lives for its preservation.
Our eagerness to put the Scriptures onto scrolls fi rst, and onto electronic screens later, is more than a love of invention and gadgetry.
I did not consider these things while scanning Scripture on my three-inch screen this week. It's hard for me to remember that these words that now accompany my daily tasks, accessed at my slightest whim, cost anything more than money. It's hard for me to remember that the words in this book, now sharing the same battery and housing as my photos and games, in the same purse compartment as my lipstick and breath mints, have any history behind them at all.
But as I paged through Habakkuk's horrific prophecies of Israel's coming destruction, I came to these final verses: "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, ... and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation" (3:17-18, ESV, emphasis mine).
My breath stopped. My eyes stung. These 2,500-year-old words delivered through a state-of-the-moment widget spoke to the oldest human problems-the problem of suffering, the problem of trust. I needed these words; a friend had just died. I needed them then, and I will need them again.
This unprecedented ability to carry the words of God almost weightlessly everywhere I go, and to read them on the same device that helps me manage my life, strikes me as utterly theologically fitting. I am reminded of the priesthood of all believers, and the Scriptures' self-definition as the "words of life"-meaning, surely, at least this: words that are to inform and infuse every part of our lives, commingling with breath mints, photos, and phone calls.
We may forget at times the lineage of these words, but our eagerness to put the Scriptures onto scrolls first, and onto electronic screens much later, is more than a love of invention and gadgetry, I believe. It's a timeless need for life-giving truths. It's love for the Book.
Mark Miwerds
May 20, 2011 7:11pm
I need to add to my initial comment that all the digital Bible versions and helps IN NO WAY replace the printed Word that I still refer to just as much. They merely supplement. There is something about having an actual Bible in my hands and from which to read and study that I would never be content to do without. I expect I'll always bring a printed Bible with me to church services, and the many margin notes I have in them would take a lifetime to transcribe into my digital versions (which may be my next and biggest project).
Mark Miwerds
May 20, 2011 6:33pm
I am overjoyed that I can now study a dozen different Bible translations and compare them with a couple of the Greek MSS on my trusty laptop and without having my entire table or living room floor covered by large, open books. Roughly the same applies to handheld devices. For all the bad and evil the Internet offers, I still believe computers and the Net have been a wonderful gift from God to Christians. I have various browsers set up so that one click brings me a selected Bible reader, set to the very place I left off the day before. I find that my knowledge and understanding has increased greatly, and this experience is incredibly edifying, allowing me to better serve others. I really can't say enough about it. My thanks go out to all those Christians who offer the many free and downloadable software programs and the many Bible versions that are also free to all of us. God will reward you in your efforts and service.
John Hale
May 16, 2011 6:25pm
Maybe it's because I use an iPod touch, not a tablet, but I still need a printed Bible to best get to passages during a service. Our pastor goes from passage to passage during his sermon, and it still remains faster to find them with a regular Bible. Where my iPod touch is useful is when I want to find a particular word or phrase, or want to compare different translations at an online parallel Bible. So I don't think Gutenberg has been quite ran off yet by the Nook and its kin, but instead has found a new friend that supplements rather than replaces.
Ben S.
May 16, 2011 5:47pm
So readily available in pocket and purse, searchable down to word and verse - I find it very useful too, but can't help think it will be yet another reason for us not to commit the Word to memory in the only place that it changes our hearts and lives, not to master the entire context of verses, passages, books rather than catchy verses and phrases, not to value and esteem it as the living and ultimately objective Truth that never changes when there are 100's of versions available in every phone. At least that seems to be the trend line ever since Gutenberg began to make it more and more available up to America today.
Dwayne Nelson
May 16, 2011 5:41pm
I am a person of the Book on the Nook. I downloaded a copy of the Zondervan NIV Study Bible to my Nook Color. I am finding that I read the Word more frequently now because I carry my Nook with me everywhere.
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