Cold Comfort Farm

I loved this book. It is really funny! I tried reading this before and watching the movie, and I couldn't get into it. For some reason, I loved it this year. Clever and crazy. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Imagine a Jane Austen heroine stumbling into an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, with the hillbillies portrayed by method actors. That will give you something of the flavor of this giddy tale, which presents a picture of country life that is roaringly bizarre—and hilarious. Flora Poste is a sophisticated Londoner whose education has been “expensive, athletic and prolonged.” When she is orphaned at nineteen, she heads off to stay with the Starkadders, her distant cousins on her late mother’s side. They have a dilapidated farm in the village of Howling—a place that turns out to be perfectly named, for what Flora discovers at Cold Comfort Farm is enough to make anyone scream. 

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Not all science fiction books are created equal. This is my third book by Philip K. Dick, and they are all engaging. It is still not my favorite genre, but I think it addresses some current issues, especially addiction to escape!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

If one were assigned the unenviable task of selecting a single book as a showcase for all of Philip K. Dick’s tropes, tactics, tricks, themes, and tics, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch might well be the best choice. In its pages, we see in incredibly effective form the majority of the imagery, incidents, characters, and themes the author became known for: consumerist brainwashing; peculiar drugs; simulacra; Manic Pixie Girlfriends Who Are Truly Other Than What They Seem; psychic powers, especially precognition; the universe as a hostile minefield; egomaniacal sociopaths who become both more and less than human; sassy cybernetic constructs; shifting internal monologues; the inanity of mass media and pop culture; shifting levels of reality. They’re all here, wrapped around, underlying, and enclosing a captivating story line.

Friday Freewrite Fifteen

This is going to be a fast fifteen freewrite. I used to do these so much more than I do now, but that is OK. I do love to get all the thoughts swirling around in my head.

Yesterday, I sat down with C for a stimulating conversation. Her husband is new on staff with our church, and I just love her. We have a lot in common, and it was just a fun and easy talk. Turns out she went to high school with one of my sorority sisters. Such a small world. 

C said, "I know you are just so busy."

I said, "Actually, no. I just have lots of different pieces but they all interact together."

For instance, this morning, I had someone post that they are looking for someone who does cross-cultural spiritual direction. I do it, but someone else suggested a certain person in the region where the person asking the question is. Well, that person suggested is in another one of my pots. So I am making the connection for the person asking. Those two pots are too separate "jobs" I have, but they interconnect. 

So my pots are right now:

1) 2nd Half Collaborative - that is most on my mind right now because I am going to the Midwest in a week to help facilitate a retreat. All the people I facilitate with are with one of the agencies in #4. 

2) Deepen III (and maybe Deepen II) - I supervise a group of new directors who are doing Cross-Cultural Direction. I am also going to give a talk on that to the Deepen III supervisors and new directors when I get back from #1.

3) Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius (scroll down) - I am going to lead two women through these starting in mid-September. I spent the last two days working out the liturgical year schedule. One woman is related to #4 and the other is related to #1. 

This video explains the Exercises:

4) International Agencies - I do spiritual direction with people from five different agencies that work internationally. I do extra work for one that I have been involved in for the last 29 years by creating help (videos and handouts mostly) in their intimacy with God and care of their soul. I do a lot of "spontaneous soul care" with the workers from this particular agency. 

I am big on the Cycle of Grace as a spine. 

And the Cycle of Grace relates to #1 above. I help the other ones in the same way as my materials are passed on to people in their agencies. :) 

5) Sustainable Faith School of Spiritual Direction - I am one of the Affiliates; and in October, I will start helping my spiritual direction trainers in their training of new directors. This relates to all but #2 because many of the people I am involved with in these different groups have also been trained by Sustainable Faith. But could there be a "wing" of Sustainable Faith that specializes in #2? Could they join forces? Could I be a bridge to seeing that happen? Stay tuned!!

6) Body and Soul Companion - I have a private ministry with individual directees. Some are related to the other four, and some are local leaders. I lead some of them through the Exercises. Most are associated with #4. Many are from other cultures and religious backgrounds. (Thus why I am being asked to speak on "Cross-Cultural Spiritual Direction" (and I am NO EXPERT). 

7) Local "Seed Community" - This started from something we did related to one of the agencies in  #4. We are considered the "pastors." (I don't think of myself this way though, but we have become that for signing off to send them out into the world.)

8) Order of the Mustard Seed - I co-lead a Centering Prayer time two times a week. I also occasionally lead Prayer Watches for the OMS. Many people in the OMS are being trained through Sustainable Faith, and I am thrilled. 

Later on Friday:

9) Renovare Book Club - I realized this in a discussion with my friend (2 1/2 hours and so fun). I forgot this pot. Such a good entry into all things Spiritual Formation. I am so grateful for Renovare, Richard Foster, and Dallas Willard!

Ulysses by James Joyce

I had attempted to read this on two separate occasions, but I decided to take the deep plunge this summer. It helped that I had been to Dublin since those first attempts, and it gave me some context to the "Odyssey" through the streets of this fabulous city. Now, I wish I had read the book before I went because I would have taken the map provided by the James Joyce Center (which was only a four-minute walk from my hotel)! Solution: Go back to Dublin. (Yes please!) 

This is one of the hardest books I had ever read, but I decided to just suspend figuring it out and just go with the flow. It is brilliant. Joyce loved to play with words and phrases. I loved the melody, and the narrator was THE BEST for making that come alive off the page. 

It also helped me to look up how it connects to the Odyssey of Homer (which I have read and taught). I feel like I accomplished a great feat. Just sayin'! 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Ulysses is perhaps the most famously difficult of all modern novels. Its difficulty, however, doesn’t lie in the story it tells, which, in its essentials, is quite simple: The book recounts certain events, most of them not in the least extraordinary, that occur in Dublin on June 16, 1904. What does make Ulysses more difficult than most novels is the manner of its telling. The stylistic richness and bravura of Ulysses are both daunting and exhilarating, often in the same line. The concentration of Joyce’s powers makes each passage a treasure to be excavated, each page its own Troy. Beneath all the complexity, Dublin remains the Muse, if not the real hero, of Joyce’s epic. No other work of literature had ever set out to replicate—and celebrate—the noise of urban life with such alertness, art, spite, and glee. Capturing the city he loved and despaired of in all its hunks and colors, grime and glory, grievances and yearnings, Joyce created a literary metropolis that hums, moans, shouts, and sings with the collective music of the human comedy. There is no other book like it. 

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

This is my summer to read Virginia. This book just proves what a genius she was. There is something about her writing that is so thoughtful and clear. I am not sure that this would be very interesting for most people, but I have read most of the authors she talks about in this collection of essays. So, I loved hearing her "TAKE" on them. 

It also makes me sad. How often brilliance and mental illness are closely linked. Sadness. Yet, C.S. Lewis was brilliant, but he found God. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

One of the most articulate and enjoyable essayists of the modern era, Virginia Woolf makes literary criticism personal, private musing universal, and social commentary both particular and purposeful. Woolf’s essays are legion, and they have been collected and regrouped in any number of individual volumes. Start with the pieces the author gathered in two volumes and called The Common Reader, in which Woolf assembles a refined personal library. Scholarship takes a back seat to serendipity, education seems—as it should—a circuit of enthusiasms, and a serious mind finds its shape among the sentences and sentiments that speak most directly to it. In these engaging volumes, Woolf develops her understanding while the reader learns valuable lessons about Chaucer and the Elizabethans, Montaigne and Defoe, Joseph Addison and Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot. Of special note are the essays “On Not Knowing Greek” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (in the first volume), and “How Should One Read a Book?” (in the second). Making their acquaintance, one gains insight not only into reading, but into thinking and being as well. 

Started Wednesday but Finish Saturday Fifteen Freewrite

by my friend, Claire, at https://www.instagram.com/verse_images_by_hand/ 

Wednesday:

Oh, how beloved I am. How beloved anyone who reads this is. Claire just made this for me, or maybe she was on this verse already when I asked her for any pictures she had about our belovedness.

I will be introducing this to a group in Chicago at the end of the month. It will be nice to have an image to go along with it.

This is a freewrite. Something that I have not done in a very long time! 

Saturday:

I am trying to remember what it was that interrupted my freewrite on Wednesday, but here I am many days later typing away. I was in the middle of making a decision. I had spent much of Tuesday afternoon through Friday morning a bit stressed about a decision I needed to make about whether to 1) Do another leg of the Camino and 2) Tack on being at the Deepen II residency for people entering their training for spiritual direction. 

Out of the blue, the director called me to ask if I would help with the training. What? I have been supervising four women who have graduated from their program and are going through another year of supervision. I think that is good because they only get one year of experience during their regular training because the first year is devoted to spiritual formation. The program I was eventually trained in (having already been mentored one on one) starts you off doing spiritual direction right away, which I really liked! (Throw you in the water and sink or swim - all swim though.) 

So, I was willing to entertain it, but then I asked for prayer, and I think that is when John called to tell us that they were 80% sure that they were not going to be able to do the Camino after all because they might be moving in November so that John can learn Russian! That is so exciting and something we have been waiting for so long for him. I am excited that they will be out of limbo.  

So then we thought if John and Katherine don't go with us, we can do the Burgos to Leon portion by bike because that is the Meseta of Spain and flat and closer to Malaga where the residency would be. So, I looked into bike shops, trains/buses from Madrid or Malaga to the Meseta, and it looked pretty positive. Maybe? 

Well, Thursday night, I had a dream, and I was on the Camino and my bike fell off the trail and into the water along with my helmet, and I was trying to go out to the water to get them, but someone said I would get carried away with the current. 

I just woke up Friday morning saying, "No to both the Camino and the residency." (Sometimes people asking me to help them carries me away in the current of their agendas for me.) 

I asked for confirmation, and Nancy said unbeknownst to her, she was in her garden on Tuesday and right after I got the invitation to the residency and at the exact time she said:

You could not have known this but I literally sat down yesterday and was praying for you.  I asked if I should call you and God said, "Just pray!” 

After my Thursday night dream, I thought, "No, I don't want to do this." 

Then an hour after that, Dr. Myers's office called about my adjustments before my injections, and these injections require me to stop and rest for a few days, not go and bike the Meseta. 

Then I found out a few hours later that they wanted me on the 12th of October and not the 15th (like it was originally communicated). Well, my last injection is on the 13th. So that settled and confirmed it. (If that had been communicated originally, then I would have said no right away. But no matter, I loved the talk with the director. She is a lovely lady.) 

When I wrote Nancy to tell her my decision, she said:

Honestly, I quickly saw you under His care and saw a question:

'What would you like to do?'

It came very quickly. It was as if the yes would add stress for a season. An added adventure for sure but with added stress.

As an observer that knows you, I was hoping you would say no.

:) I RARELY have stress dreams anymore. Ever since I learned about dreams in my spiritual direction training, and I could name the theme that would often come up in most of my dreams (feeling overly responsible and people-pleasing), God healed me of a lot of anxiety. Paying attention to this dream made me hop out of bed and say, "NO!"

I also think God was giving me an inkling during one of the spiritual direction times when I led my directee through a memory of an experience of joy. I usually do it with them (and keep it to myself), and God gave me the memory of Delta giving us business class when they made a mistake with our seat assignment from London to Portland. It was such a joyful surprise, and it was also a trip where it was just the two of us, and God was saying that we needed that since our last couple trip was in 2019. We always love those times together, and since 2014, we said, "Let's do this kind of thing every other year from now on." 

So, we did England in 2016, France in 2018, and the Rhine in 2019. (This was all after no vacation for "fun" since 1991 - no joke - mostly going to California to help my mom and ministry trips.) But then COVID came, and we have also had more ministry adventures and the Camino with friends. I would not trade those, but it is time to plan something as a couple. 

So peaceful and able to devote myself fully to going to Chicago and praying through my new small group for the 2HC. That is really good. God is so good to direct and guide. Bye.

The Pandora Problem

The Pandora Problem: Facing Narcissism in Leaders & Ourselves by E. James Wilder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book took me almost two months to read!

It is such an enlightening book but was hard to get through because it is discouraging to read about the prevalence of narcissism in Christian culture, and it is a big commitment to establish a group identity and love the narcissist. It is also about narcissism in ourselves, and I found the whole concept of "enemy mode" so helpful! I think I will read that book next.

In facing narcissism in our leaders and ourselves we have come to learn six things. Perhaps we knew them all before. There is very little new about these six truths that reflect our identity as the family of God.

1. We are a people.
2. We share the pain of others.
3. We exchange healthy shame messages
4. We combat self-justification.
5. We love our enemies spontaneously.
6. We build loyalty around weakness.

What we have concluded from these six truths can be summarized in two processes:

1. We raise hesed levels (a Hebrew word meaning "love and faithfulness,” “unfailing love,” “faithful love,” “steadfast love,” and “loyal love.”)
2. We lower qasheh levels (a Hebrew word "stiff-necked, hard, cruel, severe, obstinate, difficult, fierce, intense, vehement, stubborn, and rigorous of battle." This is a word for taking glory and avoiding shame.)

Our progress can be measured by one thing.

1. How we love our enemies.

All human brains come wired with the desire to be members of a joyful, peaceful, and protective people. How we love our enemies, therefore, becomes the effective focus for communities who are creating disciples of Jesus.

Born as lions we become as lambs. (p. 255)

This is a valuable book that I am reading with two wives who are married to probable narcissists. (To clarify, I am not married to one [the antitheses of one, in fact], but for years, God has been putting wives in my path who are married to them, and I think this book is helpful.) It astounds me to read the condemning emails from the pastors to one of the wives who has enabled this behavior in her husband for decades. The message: keep enabling the behavior because that is your duty as a wife.

RUBBISH.

I think anything James Wilder writes is so good for the body of Christ. I started with Renovated and then The Other-Half of Church.

P.S. In the midst of reading this, I had a difficult exchange with a friend of 40+ years, and I applied the principles of this book, despite the potential for "enemy mode," it was so beautiful how the situation turned out.

View all my reviews

The Age of Innocence

I read House of Mirth years ago and loved it. This book is exquisitely written. Many of the books I have read on Mustich's list this year have been "bombs" in my estimation, but this one has returned me to hope that there are many more great books to be had on his list. 

It is one of the best books I have ever read. I agree with everything that Mustich says in his evaluation of the book below.

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Edith Wharton’s best fiction is a form of intelligence, a gathering of detailed information that turns revelatory under her persistent and insightful gaze. She wrote about the world she knew—New York high society at the turn of the twentieth century, where rules were unbreakable, money was silent, and retribution for social transgression was severe. Her novels are both art and espionage. Compared with her earlier novel, The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence paints a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of the upper crust, both acknowledging and exposing the machinations that take place behind its genteel façade. It’s a brilliant social critique as well as a sweeping love story. Alongside The House of Mirth, it stands among the best novels ever written about the unraveling of individual destinies in the seductive—and enduring—bear pit of New York society. 

Tender is the Night

I loved this book. The ultimate enabling/codependent relationship! Wow! So insightful, but Fitzgerald knew from personal experience what it was like to enable a mentally ill spouse. 

I liked it even more than The Great Gatsby. It was also appealing because many of the places they traveled were places that I have been. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Tender Is the Night—the last of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s four completed novels, and the author’s favorite—sprawls among dozens of characters and settings across Western Europe before and after World War I. Although its messy, heartbreaking story of mental illness, alcoholism, and the disintegration of a marriage is somehow unsatisfying compared with The Great Gatsby’s perfectly balanced narrative, Tender Is the Night is for many readers more powerful in its enduring pull: As Fitzgerald unfolds the tale of Dick and Nicole Diver, we pass through infatuation, seduction, and ardor only to end in a kind of strange regret. Few other fictions evoke as well as this one the emotional weather of real life, the currents and temptations that envelop us without ever quite finding rest in an embrace.