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. 

Ringworld

This is my third science fiction novel this month. I am weary of this genre! So that is why I couldn't wait to finish this book. It never really grabbed me. Sigh. I am going back to my type of fiction. I am hoping to read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. More my speed and one I have wanted to read for quite some time. 

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

“Hard” science fiction—heavy on technical detail and informed with scientific precision—reached a pinnacle in the best work of Larry Niven, who, in his heyday, seemed to occupy a galaxy all his own. His headlong and engrossing novel Ringworld, which spawned several sequels, illustrates his most captivating qualities as a novelist.

NOVA

Meh. Not really gripping to me. 

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

A perfectly realized rehabilitation of the hoary space opera, Samuel R. Delany’s Nova is still as forward-looking and peerless today as at its birth, when it catapulted its twenty-five-year-old author to the top of the science fiction scene. The contending Shakespearean dynasties; the quirky, deeply inhabited characters; the poetic language (rococo, yet somehow still limpid); the portrait of a future radically estranged from ours, where our era is mythic to theirs, while they are myths-to-come for us; the layered symbolism—all these aspects are drawn from past masters, yet are fused into an organic whole whose likes had never before been seen. Most novas burn out to cinders, but this one—vital, prescient, affecting, a genuine work of art—blazes as brightly as ever. 

The Hours

Since I just read Orlando, I thought I would read this book about Virginia Woolf and the stories of two other women: Carissa (who is like a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway - a book I read years ago), and Laura (a LA suburban housewife of the 60s - the place and era in which I grew up). 

It is written so well. It is sad, but it is so beautiful at the same time. 

I even found the movie on Freevee TV. The acting is perfect. Beautifully done and the role that won Nicole Kidman her Oscar. 

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

Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, set on a single June day in London, is punctuated by the tolling of Big Ben, the bell inside the clock tower at the Houses of Parliament. Its regular marking of the time—“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable”—reminds Clarissa Dalloway of both the day’s passage and the evanescence of all things. This indelible symbol provided Woolf’s novel with its working title: The Hours. Seven decades on, Michael Cunningham, a writer of uncommon sensitivity and an unabashed Woolf lover, retrieved it for his best novel, a stunning invocation of Mrs. Dalloway and a masterful fiction in its own right. The Hours (1998) is a book that leaves the reader feeling hopeful and blessed, suffused with the ever-present, ineffable wonder of life. Really. 

Orlando

What an incredibly creative story. This is my third book by Virginia Woolf, and she really is a great writer. (But a tortured soul.) 

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

James Mustich

Woolf’s words invariably dance across her pages with an enthusiasm that engenders delight. None of her books is more joyful than Orlando, a mock-biography that follows the fortunes of its protagonist across four centuries, from the era of Elizabeth I to the stroke of midnight on the eleventh of October, 1928. Orlando grows up as a young nobleman in thrall to love and literature, travels as an ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, returns to the England of Pope and Dryden, and enters and exits the Victorian era, having achieved in the end the ripe old age of thirty. Traversing more than the borders of nations and centuries, Orlando is transformed along the way from hero to heroine, a willing victim of the author’s exuberant invention as Woolf engages, with playful abandon, themes of gender, biography, writing, and desire. Written in tribute to her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s biographical fantasy is a delicious celebration of the exhilarating powers of infatuation and imagination.

The Long Loneliness

I am part of the Order of the Mustard Seed, and this was a book club read, but I wasn't able to attend.

Here is the intro from the Order of the Mustard Seed that I thought was a good summary:

The Long Loneliness – Dorothy Day

Following our last book group read, “Making Room’, our next book opens up very practically, some of the themes it introduced. Christine Pohl mentions Dorothy Day frequently in ‘Making Room’ and so we are going to look at her life a little more and the ways in which hospitality and justice where completely interlinked for her. They were ways in which she determined to live.

Dorothy Day (1897 – 1980), was a brilliant, radical American social activist, writer and journalist. Along with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement.

 The Long Loneliness is her autobiography. It describes her faith journey and also the ways in which she determined to live her life in ways that worked for peace, justice for the poor, nonviolence and racial justice. Her story is an important one for anyone who longs to live, loving their neighbours as themselves. She demonstrates a faith in action and gives an insight into the sacrifices often needed to place oneself on the frontlines of the struggles for peace and social justice.

Dorothy Day and those with whom she worked, intentionally lived alongside the poor, becoming poor themselves, giving up possessions and sharing all that they had. Through Houses of Hospitality, they gave refuge and home to those experiencing homelessness and also began farms where people could have work.

A dynamic, lifelong pacifist and passionate social activist, Dorothy Day was frequently on the frontlines of protests against racism, war and injustice. These protests often landed her in jail. Her story is one of a woman who engaged her entire life in the injustices that she saw here around her.  It’s a story that echoes with the words of Old Testament prophets and that is focused on the life of Jesus and the ways in which he loved and lived alongside those pushed to the margins.

Through the book, the theme of love is prevalent. To Dorothy Day, love was central to everything. “We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”

And so, in the spirit of that companionship and with the words of Dorothy Day as our guide, the next Book Group is on Thursday 28th April, 7:30pm (BST).

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

The Long Loneliness, published in 1952, is the autobiography of Dorothy Day, the American political activist, pacifist, and cofounder of The Catholic Worker newspaper and movement. While Day has lately been put forth for canonization by the church, she might bridle at that idea: “Don’t call me a saint,” she once wrote, “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” In any case, like Saint Augustine, she spent her early years in the embrace of worldly pursuits—“the wisdom of the flesh is treacherous indeed” she would later reflect—before a conversion led her to focus her considerable energy on “[making] it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.” Her personal testament is as revelatory as Augustine’s Confessions, although the difference in the two books’ perspectives is striking: Where Augustine’s autobiography is a conversation with God, Day’s narrative is a conversation with the world.

The Day of the Triffids

This was a really engaging story! I loved it (surprising for me since science fiction is not my thing). 

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

James Mustich

Yes, in The Day of the Triffids the human race does go blind and people die in immense numbers from sheer sensory incapacity—to say nothing of the genetically engineered predatory plants given star billing in the book’s title. Yet, the novel exudes a holiday air, a sense of liberation from artificial constraints and social falsities, and seemingly welcomes the prospect of a fresh relaunch of civilization and its contents. The fate of the masses might be horrific, but the plucky survivors on whom the narrative instinctively focuses will inherit a planet full of treasures, both natural and man-made, and—just maybe—find beyond the dark days of collapse a new Golden Age. And, of course, over all looms the menace of the rampant triffids, carnivorous plants with an urgent hunger that gives their energy what appears to be a malevolent intelligence. These inspired inventions give Wyndham’s book a creepily delightful, uncannily titillating appeal.

The Big Sleep

It is no Maltese Falcon, but I liked it, especially since it is set in LA where I grew up. The writing is also engaging. 

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

James Mustich

Dashiell Hammett may have invented the hardboiled detective story, but nobody wrote it better than Raymond Chandler. With his stylized prose and flair for similes, he gave his detective Philip Marlowe a voice that would become the hallmark of the genre. Marlowe is the protagonist in all of Chandler’s novels, and the movies drawn from these fictions proved to be a heavy influence on American film noir, just as the books influenced generations of detective novelists.

Saturday Sixteen Freewrite

I am listening to the woman with the hemorrhage on Pray as You Go. 

"Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well." How do I encounter the Lord in the busyness of my day? 

I try to look up continually throughout the day, and I do that more naturally now than ever. It has been a good few years, Lord. 

My biggest desolation over the last couple of days was getting the response of a pastor to my friend who is in an abusive marriage. I was angry. He was condescending and "I am the authority here, and you are not in an abusive relationship. You are in sin. Your friends and advisors don't know how to handle accurately the Word because I am a pastor and a man, and those people don't know anything because I am a big cheese in the evangelical world." (Not those words, but that is how it comes across IMHO.) It was arrogant and judgemental and I need to pray about it because I am angry. 

No address of the many years this woman has had to endure a narcissistic husband. It is always the woman who has to adapt to narcissism. The narcissism doesn't get addressed, and everyone is reacting to the action of the wife who is tired and just wants help. 

So, I need to pause and listen to You, Lord about this. 

"I am always on the side of the innocent." 

Thanks God. 

I am out in my deck sanctuary (my sanctuary sign is coming very soon). I have been here since about 4 am. I am so glad we didn't do a closed room. I have listened to the gentle sounds of the morning so many times this summer. It is lovely. I now know the deer love to eat the leaves on our apple tree, and they start even before sunrise. 

Today is going to be hot. So after this freewrite, I am going for a walk (or maybe a bike ride). At 9:30 am, we are going to go to Beaver Creek for kayaking/Stand Up and Paddle with Maddy, Katherine, and John.

Then, I will come back and put the final photos in the book that is supposed to come sometime today and write dates in the other book that I just finished and in my Christmas album.

I also need to find the November/December 2022 pictures. (I probably should order the Amsterdam/Dublin/Belfast/Castlewellan from October-November since I decided not to include them and just have the book be of the Camino since that is the most meaningful thing.) 

I will do freewrites all this next week. I am in-between devotionals right now. I will continue with Celtic Daily Prayer.

This went over 16 minutes. Time to go walk. 

The Life of Jesus: Harmonized Gospels Passion Translation

I purchased this on Kindle several months ago, and I gave the gorgeous leather-bound copy to a friend we visited in Turkey. 

As soon as I was done with the Bible Book Club reread/update (cleaned up broken links, added YouTube videos and exercises to facilitate encounters with God) that took me from April 23-June 23, I went into the Gospel Harmony Book Club, reading through this translation as I did the same kinds of updates. What a joy to read where I was all those years ago and where I am now. 

It was lovely. Some of the chronological order in this rendition of the Harmonized Gospels differs from the chronologies I used to craft the book club. But it was close enough, and I enjoyed a fresh translation (it is more of a paraphrase). 

Flaubert's Parrot

This was not my cup of tea. It took me FOREVER to read, but it must not be very popular because I checked it out multiple times. Usually, there are people waiting in line and I cannot renew it!

Flaubert was a dreamer and a lost soul, but I have read Madame Bovary, and the guy could write!

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

Sophisticated literary inventions are seldom as charming as this one, an intricately composed but inviting exploration of the nature of desire. The intricacy of the composition comes from Julian Barnes’s playful orchestration of a variety of styles, combining fiction with literary criticism, biography, diversions scholarly and reflective, a chronology, even a mock exam; the charm comes from the unfailing tunefulness of his sentences—they are shaped with a confidence, clarity, and concentrated energy that give great pleasure. With digressive progress, Barnes leads us on a delightfully comic pursuit of large questions: Is love, like art, finally unknowable, except in the imaginative experience of it? Is memory itself an art, in which we shape, in story, our subjectivity? Filled with literary fun of a very high order, Flaubert’s Parrot is a seriously delicious confection.

Diary of a Provincial Lady

This was a delightful break from the more sober books I have been reading from the 1000 Books list! LOL!

The narrator on this is excellent, and I am glad I don't live in that time anymore! 

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

E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady first appeared in 1930. Her first Diary would be followed by three more in the course of the next decade. These charming volumes proved immediately and enduringly popular, and Delafield’s creation is today seen, in her deceptively casual chronicling of her domestic activities, as a style-setter for later writers who deployed aspects of her mode of self-address in both journalism and fiction. Readers seeking astute yet gentle social satire at its British best will be richly rewarded by acquaintance with Delafield’s wonderful Provincial Lady.
 

A Clockwork Orange

This glossary would be really helpful for you if you read this!

A Clockwork Orange Appendix

I was afraid to read it, and I skipped the movie when I was going through the AFI Top 100 (#46) because I wouldn't want to watch what is described in the book, but it is really well written, and it deserves to be on the 1000 Books list. I have this weird liking of dystopian novels. Cautionary tale maybe? This book truly is a "philosophical inquiry into good and evil." 

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

Alex, the frightening narrator of this brutal and brilliant novel, is an amoral, Beethoven-loving gang leader in a near-future dystopian Britain. Whether adolescent girls or a schoolteacher returning from the library, the gang’s victims are treated with an exuberantly vicious disregard: They might as well be faceless, inhuman targets for the random acts of violence, the gratuitous venom of Alex and his thugs (sex, unsurprisingly, is reduced to its mechanical coordinates: “the old in-out-in-out”). The linguistic bravura of the book and the unbound rebellion that is described do not hide for long the philosophical inquiry into good and evil at the core of A Clockwork Orange. Though it’s often compared to 1984 and Brave New World, Anthony Burgess’s book—in part a vision, both prescient and exaggerated, of the coming trauma of youth culture—has an extra layer of surreality and menace. Burgess is more interested in invoking questions than answering them, and he puts his considerable imaginative powers to work in the service of his inquisition. The result for the reader is a vivid tour of an unforgettable future—a journey that remains both intellectually invigorating and deeply unsettling.

Regeneration: Book 1

This is so well-written. I was almost done with the book before I realized it is based on real-life characters. I liked this. 

War sucks. Just sayin'. 

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

James Mustich

Jul 27, 2018

In 1917, Siegfried Sassoon—poet, friend of the celebrated Bloomsbury circle, and decorated military hero—had a crisis of conscience about the war he was fighting and penned a letter of protest that was sent to Parliament and published in The Times of London. For this very public refusal to fight he might have been court-martialed, but was instead sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, in Scotland, to be treated for “shell shock.” His months there have been recounted in autobiographical works by at least three men: Sassoon himself (Sherston’s Progress, 1936), fellow poet Robert Graves (Good-bye to All That, 1929), and Sassoon’s doctor at Craiglockhart, noted psychiatrist and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers (Conflict and Dream, 1923). They have also, more recently, been brilliantly imagined by Pat Barker in her award-winning Regeneration Trilogy. In these meticulously researched novels, as in life, Sassoon is surrounded by genuine shell shock victims—men who have variously lost the ability to sleep, eat, or speak. The trilogy’s central figure, Dr. Rivers, has the increasingly troubling job of “fixing” these men so they can be sent back to the trenches for more of the infernal combat that broke them. If not mightier than the savage sword that inflicted the wounds of World War I, the pen, in Barker’s hand, bears powerful witness to the scars it left behind.

Between the World and Me

 I will never be able to fathom what it would be like for a black man to grow up in America. This was helpful.

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

James Mustich

Jul 30, 2018

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book is prompted in part by his inability to offer any comfort to his son after the latter’s disillusionment in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the exoneration of the police officers at whose hands he died: “I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay.” The paternal anguish of a parent who knows he cannot protect his child from the embedded racism he has seen claim with impunity the lives of friends and relations brings a new dimension to a familiar fear, the one Coates felt as a constant companion of his own Baltimore childhood and coming-of-age. Unforgiving and unforgettable, Between the World and Me is a book to be reckoned with, its raw feeling as searing as its formidable eloquence; the questions it raises are weightier than any answers, one fears, can lift.

Fenwick to Holy Island - St Cuthbert's Way - Long Distance Walk through the Borders Scotland, Northumberland England, Melrose and Holy Island

Fenwick to Holy Island - St Cuthbert's Way - Long Distance Walk through the Borders Scotland, Northumberland England, Melrose and Holy Island: St Cuthbert's Way is a 62 mile long distance trail between Melrose in the Scottish Borders and Lindisfarne of the coast of Northumberland in England.

I am following Pete Greig's journey from Iona to Lindisfarne on Lectio365. 

Ficciones

This was SO HARD for me to get, but then I found the Course Hero videos:

There is one in each of the short stories! Hallelujah. (What is it with me and South American authors? I have the hardest time with them!)

Course Hero Ficciones Link

I still think it was pretty stupid! But here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Jul 28, 2018

Because Borges’s uncanny fables seldom resemble typical short stories, his works are frequently called “fictions”—which is precisely what Ficciones means. In addition to “Pierre Menard,” the volume includes sixteen pieces, including several masterpieces, such as “The Library of Babel,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” and “Funes, the Memorious.” The latter is a brief, haunting memoir of a man who, after an accident, finds himself possessed by cripplingly acute mental powers. His “implacable memory” makes life literally unforgettable. That’s also the word for Borges’s intricate, erudite, playfully dream-weaving work.

Spare

He is getting so much flack for this, but the Royal Family is MESSED up and dysfunctional. I couldn't put this down, and I hope He and Meghan and their kids can find peace and a healthy family dynamic! I also pray he can find health and a peaceful resolution of conflict with his father and brother. 

The Amplified Bible

I finished my time in The Reservoir, and I was trying to read through the Bible along with it, but I wasn't able to do both. So, on April 23rd, I decided that I would just catch up with where I want to be on a three-year reading from the Bible Book Club. But then I thought, I am going to get The Amplified Bible in an audiobook and just listen to it while I walk and go by the way. I also quit reading other books for a while and just read the Bible (other than the ones I am reading for the class I am taking). 

I listened through it for TWO MONTHS! I loved it! 

I have referred to the Amplified Bible for so many years, and I love it. I have George's Aunt Dot's copy that is so lovingly worn! But it was so fun to listen to it cover to cover! I couldn't stop. :) 

The only thing about this audiobook is that it is by chapters but not by books and chapters. So, it would be hard to have it for someone who was trying to find a chapter in the Bible. As I went along, I bookmarked the beginning of each book to make it easier for me in the future to do that. 

The Journal of a Disappointed Man

I found this pretty monotonous. It is a first-hand account of a person dying with Multiple Sclerosis. So, I see why Mustich thought it was important. 

This chronology helped me get an overall picture of what was going on. 

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

Illness is usually a private matter; a diary, too. But The Journal of a Disappointed Man, a wrenching but deeply humane diary by a young Edwardian suffering from a terminal condition, places the most private ordeal in public view—with extraordinary consequences. For anyone who has ever suffered, or seen a loved one suffer, Bruce Frederick Cummings—who, two years before his death, published his diaries under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion—offers a candid but ultimately uplifting portrayal of the ravages of disease and the larger mysteries of mortality. In its unsparing recapitulation of a life cut short, his diary stands as one of literature’s great monuments to endurance in the face of adversity; it is also, as Noel Perrin calls it, “one of the great affirmations in our literature.”

The Joy Switch: How Your Brain's Secret Circuit Affects Your Relationships--And How You Can Activate It

This was recommended in the class I am taking with Life Model Works. And it was a pleasant read while I was walking.

I am already applying many things. It has a lot of overlap with the previous book I reviewed, but it was an enjoyable and easy read. 

I had a friend who was very distraught last week, and I said, "Can we do something that will activate your joy?" She was all up for it, and God met her SO POWERFULLY!

The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation

This all started when I read Renovated (because a directee was reading it, and she knew I loved Dallas Willard). I had also read brain science books like Anatomy of the Soul, and Hardwiring Happiness and had been applying the principles in my spiritual direction. 

Then my word for the year was JOY, and somehow Amazon knew this and recommended Joyful Journey: Listening to Immanuel. So, I read that and started Immanuel Journaling and recommended it to my directees, and they were loving it. Then it led me to Life Model Works and getting on their mailing list. Then, someone trained in the Life Model came and stayed with me, and we talked about it. 

Then I got an email about this study group:

Learning to Become a Full-Brained Christ-Follower - Life Model Works

And this book is what we study. In the class, he recommended The Joy Switch, and I read that (review coming). 

I love all that I am learning in the group, especially the exercises we do as a group. It is six lessons every other week for three months. The next one is in October. 

On top of all of this, I started talking with women who think they are married to Narcissists. One of them said that she had this book recommended to her:

The Pandora Problem: Facing Narcissism in Leaders & Ourselves (still reading) 

She said it was by "Jim Wilder," and I said, "Is this the same guy?" And it is! 

So, I am on a major God-ordained bunny trail with all of this! 

Union and Communion

I have this book in the Song of Solomon posts on the Bible Book Club. So, I reread it again and still love it. James Hudson Taylor is my hero!

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth

This was the last book in the 2022-2023 Renovare Book Club season. I think this was my 7th year leading a group. It has grown to 9 people, and I love each and every one of them!

This is a beautiful and poignant book. I appreciated the book club leaders of this book. Here is an interview with them: 

I also loved this SOMA DIVINA from one of the leaders.

The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling

I read this in late April/Early May but am just getting around to a review (My focus since April 23rd has been reading the whole Bible and proofreading the entire Bible Book Club blog. I am so glad I did. So good to read reflections from 10-15 years ago.)  

I remember watching the BBC adaptation of this many years ago, to a point. Then I couldn't watch it anymore. But there is a new adaptation, and I decided to give the book a try and then watch the adaptation. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it!

(Looking closely at this book cover. It is quite racy!)

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

James Mustich

Henry Fielding had begun his literary career by parodying the most popular novel of his day, the sanctimonious Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, in two works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (the title says it all). Having upended Pamela, so to speak, Fielding set out to write a novel that was truer to real life, with a hero who, though undeniably good at heart, is also a high-spirited young man with lusty appetites. One of the first great comic novels in English, and still one of the most entertaining in any language, Tom Jones is a gloriously robust and bawdy adventure boasting what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “one of the most perfect plots ever planned.”

Freewrite - Summer Goals

Deck Reflections

Summer Goals that Start with the Letter S!

FOOD
1) Slimming - Not too much over but want to fit well in summer clothes
2) Stress Less - Do things that lower dopamine and serotonin that do not involve munching
3) Subtle Six (especially SHAME) - Immanuel Journal when these problem emotions arise

ATTITUDE/ACADEMIC
1) Scribe - Interactive Gratitude 3x/day for 5 minutes.
2) Seven to Six - Books left to the #6 spot on the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die List Challenge. 
3) Spiritual Books - Pandora Problem, Screwtape Letters, Immanuel Approach

COMMUNION
1) Sanctuary - spending my mornings with God in my deck sanctuary
2) Scripture prayer walk - Going back to praying through Face to Face and walking (also Lectio365 and Pray as You Go)
3) Slow Soul Care Sabbatical - Halting all spiritual direction for the whole month of July (except my supervision of spiritual directors because I am contracted to meet with them for two hours in July). Going hiking with the family in the North Cascades and Seattle friends. We also might do a cruise in July.

EXERCISE
1) Strengthening - Pilates best bet - a little arm weights
2) Stretching - Roll and stretch 1-2x daily
3) Stamina - 6.7 miles of the Corvallis to Sea (C2C) Trail left. All this hiking has raised my VO2MAX to the 40-year-old athlete range. WOOHOO!

DAILY CARE OF HOME and FAMILY
1) Snapshots - Sort through pictures back to the Fall of 2016 (when I went to work at the university)
2) Simplifying - Tossing from every closet and drawer (used to do this every August and have not in ages)
3) Sanctuary - Cooling and heating unit for deck, screen to close it in cold weather, a sign made by Ted or Kevin,

I wrote these all on my shower wall. I resurrected FACED with Katrina and Rachel, and I posted them on LoseIt! I cannot believe how much better I am with friends keeping me accountable in these areas:

F: Food

A: Attitude and/or Academic

C: Communion with God and Others

E: Exercise

D: Daily Care of Home and Family

I started a FACED group back in the 2000s, and these two were the most faithful. It was time for me to kick it back up because I was trying to keep my weight down, and it was not staying down. For the better part of ten years, it was great. You must constantly readjust because of the reduction in Basal Metabolic Rate as we age. I need 100 fewer calories a day than when I lost all my weight in 2013. So, this is the "10-years older correction" to this, and it is going well.  It really makes a difference to have others in the battle. 

I am doing really well all the way around. (I can hear a deer eating our apple tree. I sit on the deck most mornings now, and it has been so nice to hear all the goings on with the fauna around here!)

I am really happy that I went through the Bible Book Club. I was going to start reading through the Bible in three years starting in January, but I got carried away with the Reservoir Devotional (loved it). So, after I finished that on April 23, I decided to read through the Bible and listen to the Amplified Version audiobook. I followed along in the Bible Book Club, and it was SO ENCOURAGING to read through all my reflections from 10-15 years ago! Wow! There is a reason why God tells us to "remember" because it so bolstered my faith to read a record of God's faithfulness time and time again. I am sold on this life of faith! LOL! 

Update: I posted this at 7:09 am, and it is 7:41 am, and I read this in An Ignatian Book of Days: 

Memory has a fundamental role for the heart of a Jesuit: memory of grace, the memory mentioned in Deuteronomy, the memory of God's works that are the basis of the covenant between God and the people...

Seek the LORD and his strength
seek his presence continually
his miracles and the judgments he has uttered.
 Psalm 105:4-5 

Spend some extra time today reflecting on memories that you especially cherish. How do you see Christ in them? (p. 144) 

I looked at my calendar today, and there is nothing on it! How did that happen? I am shocked. Maybe we are supposed to go and hike that last 6.6 miles of the C2C. It was supposed to rain today, but it looks like it will not after all. :)

I am going back to some more time with God. As soon as it warms up a bit, I will go for a walk. But right now, I am enjoying my deck. The umbrella for our table comes today. So I am done decorating for now. Maybe another plant or two.