I came across this quote from poet Rita Dove the other day:
If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.
Although I am not always the poet I want to be, I am a chooser of words. And in my work as a writer and a minister, I know that learning how to talk to one another also means learning how to listen to one another.
What does it mean to really, truly lean in and listen? What does it mean to honor and give life to the stories buried within us? What does it mean to hold another person’s story, even if you disagree with their perspective or hold a different understanding of an event altogether?
As I told you last week, I recently signed another book contract. In the publishing world, when you sign a book contract, you receive an advance against future royalties (or sales of the book). I’ve never been one to garner a whole lot of money when it comes to book advances1 — mostly enough to purchase copies of the books2 I want to read in preparation for my own, book a weekend away to hole up and write, and carve out a handful of hours during the week to work on the project.
Some publishers give you a year to finish the first draft of a book,3 others six months. Even though you’ve written a couple of chapters and thought a whole lot about it for the last year or two,4 there’s also a period when you don’t write.
Instead, you listen.
For me, listening happens when I interview those whose stories I need to hear and it happens when I’m standing over the kitchen stove, stirring a pot of tomato jam.5 It happens in silence, when I’m taking thousands of steps up a really tall mountain, and it happens when I’m looping up and down the blocks around East Oakland with Rufus the dog.
Listening, in this case, is a form of sifting and holding, of letting the pieces all come together naturally instead of forcing them into place.
This holy act of listening is one of my favorite parts of the book-writing process.
Over the last couple of weeks (and in the week and a half to come), I’ve gotten to sit across the screen from half a dozen people and hear their thoughts and experiences of church camp.
I’m not gonna lie: it’s intense. Moments of joy and ecstasy and laughter live alongside deep wounds and festering hurts. The both/and inevitably shows up in every conversation, perhaps, because it’s at the heart of this project. As a white, straight woman, I don’t always know how to hold the experiences of people of color or of the queer community who often experienced pain and disillusionment in the name of Jesus at church camp. I don’t know what to do except listen, and watch my fingers furiously fly and say thank you, thank you, thank you to them for this sacred gift of story.
For now, I listen, maybe because it’s the only thing I can do.
Of course, in a couple of weeks, this listening will turn a corner. A million fragmented ideas will start to bubble and well up inside me; inside of taking in, I will pour out. I will grab large pieces of paper and jot down thoughts and connection points and tiny inklings that only make sense to me.
The listening I do won’t stem so much from the thoughts and ideas of others as much as from the impact of other’s thoughts and ideas upon me.
And when that happens, one thing will be true: we will have started to solve the problems of the world.
We will have learned how to talk to one another, as Rita would say.
Maybe someday.
Books purchased this last week? Love Wins (Rob Bell), which I read years ago but can’t find the copy of now. Also, Women and the Gender of God (Amy Peeler), and Her Gates Will Never be Shut (Bradley Jersak).
This is generally true in the nonfiction realm. Fiction is entirely different.
Or so it’s gone for me.
Last night’s tomato jam recipe.
In a more perfect world, for the benefit of blue dresses and laundry stains all over America, former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton would be now making television commercials for Spray 'n Wash®, or as the late Rush Limbaugh so cleverly positioned the advertisement’s timing on his radio program, Spot Shot®.
If you cannot be honest about the sex, what can you be honest about?
When Arnold Schnitzel-wagger got caught impregnating his voluptuous maid, the tsunami of faux moral outrage swept across television and computer screens from people who have the slenderest claim to any semblance of fidelity or ethics of any kind.
Arnold couldn't admit he likes fat girls and Maria couldn't admit she was too anemic to get the job done anymore . . . After all, marrying into the Katholic Kennedy Klan should come with special social privileges, should it not?
Monogamy is an unnatural order created by Zionist churchmen to attach vicarious liabilities in the secular law, to control monarchial successions, as well as to establish ecclesiastic control over white female procreativity and individual white male posterity . . . All men are born of a woman, married or not.
The older pagan sexual mores were much more conducive to the health of Nordic-Scandinavian societies, and much more supportive of women than those of the Jewish god Yahweh, the locust master, the one who drowned the world and demanded a witch be burned alive, or an adulteress be stoned to death . . .
Heinrich Himmler on How Bolshevik Christianity Spreads Homosexuality and Hatred of Women . . . https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/heinrich-himmler-on-how-bolshevik-christianity-spreads-homosexuality-and-hatred-of-women