Of Bookstores and Crabapple Trees: Places Where I’ve Contemplated God

By Jacqueline Davies

Of Bookstores and Crabapple Trees:

Places Where I've Contemplated God

I was standing at the checkout counter of my local bookstore—a place where the booksellers know my name and chat comfortably with me about vacation plans and dogs—when a man walked in the door. Agitated, he seemed not sure of where to go, as we all are from time to time. He was carrying with him that strange energy of great forward momentum in the absence of any particular direction. I noted him out of the corner of my eye and continued talking to the store owner as she rang up my sale.

Within a minute he approached the counter and posed his question: “Where are the books written by Jesus?”

The store owner looked up from the book she held in her hand and asked, “Do you mean books about Jesus?”

“No!” he insisted. “I want the books written by him.”

Without missing a beat, the owner pointed to the Religion section and suggested he might find something he liked there. “I’ll be over to help in a minute,” she added, handing me the credit card slip for signature and bagging my purchases.

Many things went through my head as I signed my name. How readily the owner had been willing to meet the man where he was. How certain the man was that Jesus’ work was still collecting royalties. The wonder of independent bookstores and the miracle that they exist and even thrive. 

I noticed on the slip that the owner had extended the store’s “local author discount” to me, for which I am always grateful. It’s a small thing, that discount, but it always feels to me that by giving the discount the store is saying, Thank you for doing the hard work of writing books, to which I always respond silently in my head, Thank you for recognizing how hard it is and for showing that you care and that it matters. Your appreciation fortifies me. It might be that the store is not expressing this sentiment at all, and that I’m having a two-sided conversation in my head that is complete fabrication. It happens a lot. 

 Which led me to think about the fact that I’m an author who constantly makes things up and occasionally manages to get them down on paper. Which further led me to think on the fact that Jesus was not an author. The owner knew it, and I knew it, and soon this agitated man would know it. While historians and theologians agree and disagree about many things related to the remarkable life led by Jesus, it can be agreed by all that he never wrote a book. The man was going to be disappointed to learn that. He was certain that Jesus was the author of many books. Perhaps he expected an entire section of the bookstore to be filled with his titles alone. I wondered if he would think that this particular bookstore simply didn’t carry any of Jesus’ books (shelf space being limited, after all), and if he would continue his quest at another, larger bookstore (perhaps a Barnes & Noble?).

I stepped outside and felt the sudden, surprising sun that had blessed this one February day in a month of gray and dreary days, and once again was overwhelmed with a feeling of gratefulness. Oh! Thank you! I lifted my face to the sun and felt both the sunshine and gratitude wash over me. There was nothing more to say. Oh!

As I drove home, I was still thinking about the man in search of Author Jesus—not Savior Jesus or Spiritual Guide Jesus or Son of God Jesus, but the man who had written books. (The Bible, of course, which contains many quotations attributed to Jesus, is thought to have been written largely by Paul the Apostle, and while it can be said that Jesus provided great material, it was Paul who faced the blank page on a daily basis and who, no doubt, experienced that all-too-familiar fear that paralyzes many an author: Am I up to this task?)

I was deep in thought—there was a lot to think about—and on streets so familiar I could have driven them in my sleep, when I suddenly realized I was fast approaching a parked police car, lying in wait on a side street. Oh, please, no! I thought. I was definitely going over the speed limit on this well-traveled residential street, and as I looked in my rear-view mirror, just before taking the turn I always take to go home, I saw the police car slowly pull out of the side street and begin to follow me. No! No! No! I said again as I slowly continued my usual route home. Another turn. One more. I checked my rear-view mirror again.

No police car. 

Maybe the officer wasn’t trying to pull me over in the first place. Maybe I had cleverly evaded capture by driving my usual route at fifteen miles per hour. Whatever the reason, I didn’t get a ticket that day. And for the rest of my drive I home, I felt that special gratitude that is only felt when you realize that you’ve done something really stupid and somehow you’ve managed to walk away without paying the price. Think of all those times in your life, big and small, when you’ve been dumb lucky. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I whispered quietly all the way home.

In fact, I whispered, Thank you, God. As I had when I felt the sunshine on my face, and as I had even when receiving the local author discount. Thank you, God, for all the remarkable advantages that have allowed me to become an author, the only thing I ever wanted to be. Thank you, God, for sunshine, which never fails to astound and delight me. Thank you, God,for letting me get away with one—and, yes, I will try really hard to remember to drive more slowly next time.

I would guess that I thank God about five to ten times a day, every day. Which wouldn’t be so remarkable but for the fact that I’m an atheist. Not an agnostic, not a wandering spiritualist, not a faint checkmark in the box labeled “Other”—an atheist. I was raised an atheist by two atheists, and it’s what I believe. It’s what I’ve believed since my earliest consciousness. I didn’t choose it. It’s who I am.

And yet, when expressing gratitude—which I feel so greatly and continually and ever more as I age—it just feels right to express it to someone. Some thing. Some other. To say thank you into a void feels incomplete to me. And so, I follow the easy path, and just tack “God” onto the end of my gratitude. It seems to finish the thought for me.

To be clear, this well-thanked God of mine isn’t New Testament or even Old Testament. This God isn’t drawn from any of the major religions—Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism—all of which I’m embarrassingly ignorant of. (Remember, I was raised an atheist, so I missed Sunday school and its equivalents.) What I call God isn’t a god. It’s something much more complex: an awareness, a cohesion, a gathering spot, a center. A place or a feeling or an acknowledgement that there is great beauty and heartbreaking loss and an aching need for love and community and compassion and acceptance. That sometimes we are lucky, and sometimes we are smited. That people can be kind and people can be cruel, and kindness is always the better path.

My oldest sister (also a born-and-bred atheist) becomes really irritated with me when I use the word “blessed,” which I do occasionally in the broadest of ways. Perhaps it’s our different approach to words. She’s a lawyer, and sometimes the precise definition of a single word changes the meaning of an entire law. I’m a fiction writer, and I delight in the fungibility of words, the playful bending of them. For me, words like “blessed” and “sacred” can live comfortably in my atheistic world. They are beautiful words with beautiful meanings, and I choose not to exclude them from my vocabulary simply because I don’t believe in “God.” (I’ve never told my sister that I regularly thank God; she’d have a coronary, and I love her much too much for that.)

I’m reminded now of one of the earliest conversations I remember about religion. It didn’t take place in a church or around a dinner table, but rather in a crabapple tree. I was six, and my best friend and neighbor, Lynn, was five.  We were sitting on our favorite branches when she said, “You’re going to hell.” I asked why. She said, “Because you weren’t baptized, and anyone who isn’t baptized goes to hell when they die.” Her older sister, Lori, was preparing for her first communion, so no doubt the sacraments were on Lynn’s mind. She wasn’t being mean when she told me I was going to hell. Rather she was stating a fact. Something she had worked out in her mind. (Still. Rough stuff to hear at the age of six!)

Now, I was positive this couldn’t be correct. If it were true, my parents would have told me, and they would have done whatever needed to be done to make sure I didn’t end up in a state of everlasting damnation. (Back then, I imagined hell as a desert. I had seen Lawrence of Arabia, and I figured hell was something like that. Endless. Hot. Sand in all the wrong places.)

But Lynn was so implacably certain. It got me flustered. I sputtered, “That isn’t true.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Yes, it is!”

“No, it’s not!” (This is the level of theological discourse that five- and six-year-olds are capable of.)

“Yes, it is!”

“Then prove it!” I said, knowing that science was on my side; my parents were on my side; my whole six years of lived experience were on my side.

“It says so,” replied Lynn coolly. “In a book.”

Gasp! She was right. And it was a BIG book. And an important one. In fact, the best-selling book of all time.

We revered books in my house. Classics and bestsellers. Things that were in books held special sway in my family. I had no come back. My six-year-old self couldn’t argue myself out of damnation. 

I was so angry in that crabapple tree. Angry that I couldn’t beat her argument with one of my own. Angry that I’d been bested by someone who was a whole year younger than me. And angriest of all that my defeat was the result of a book.

I don’t have any grand conclusion to present here. I’m just pondering about a man who wants Jesus to be an author; and a little girl who argued that a book itself was as powerful as God, and a slightly older little girl who grew into an author and who needs to invent a new word that somehow encompasses the concept of a great, loving, multitudinous yet connected, bountiful, generous something that exists on some plane, in some form, deep within every microcosm and spread wide throughout the universe. It is the thing that inspires awe: a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder and gratitude. That. I need a word for that. And of course, it has to go well with thank you.

Ms. Jacqueline Davies has eleven published children's books to her credit, including Where the Ground Meets the Sky (Cavendish, 2002),  The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon (Houghton Mifflin, 2004, illustrated by Melissa Sweet),  The Night Is Singing (Dial, 2006, illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker), The House Takes a Vacation (Cavendish, 2007, illustrated by Lee White), Tricking the Tallyman (Random House, 2009), Lost, and  The Lemonade War series. Her most recent titles include Panda Pants (Random House, September 13, 2016) and Nothing But Trouble (HarperCollins, 2016). Her books have won numerous awards, including the NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12, the John Burroughs List of Nature Books for Young Readers, The Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the New York Library’s Best Books List, the NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People, the IRA/CBC Children’s Award Notable Book for Fiction, the Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books, and the CCBC Choices Award. Learn more about her work at: http://www.jacquelinedavies.net

The Journey Behind the Words

by Pat Collins©2019

The Journey Behind the Words

This morning I unearthed a journal that I kept during three Lenten seasons (2008, 2009, and 2012) while I still considered myself a Catholic.  In it I recorded my daily reflections on Thomas Merton’s suggested meditations in his book “Lenten and Easter Wisdom.” I apparently skipped over two years and in 2012, I only made it to the Saturday after Ash Wednesday. The rest of the journal is blank.

            In the missing two years, my husband was heading towards the advanced stages of dementia. By Lent of 2012, he had been admitted to the dementia care unit of The Soldiers Home in Boston, MA, and I was living alone. At the time, I was still teaching writing at Lesley University, and I began to conduct a workshop at the The Soldier’s Home called “Telling Our Stories” which proved helpful to a number of men and women there and meant a great deal to me in understanding the many layers of a disease that has become more prevalent as our life spans expand.  The intact personhood of each man as displayed in this group was astonishing. 

I wonder now why nothing about that difficult period was included in my spiritual journal. In the years I did chronicle, however, the pages are not only full of pain and loneliness but contain the concrete formation of the many realizations and questions about my religious life that had been haunting me for a very long time. 

            On the Thursday after Ash Wednesday in 2008, Merton’s meditation is: What are the illusions in my life that I accept as reality?

My answers are:  That I may have built my house on myth, That my faith is stagnant and cannot grow, That I am not strong enough for what is in store for me. 

On the first Sunday of Lent in 2009, the meditation is on Complacency, and I wrote, I often wonder if my faith would be stronger if the news of the coming of The Son of God had startled me as an adult. I pray for fervor. 

Throughout, my jottings are interspersed with anger at the church hierarchy and at certain doctrinal conclusions that seemed more magical than mystical. Many church laws confounded me as well such as the exclusion of women from ordination  and the elevation of Mary as a mediatrix of grace so as to satisfy the female worshippers and provide a mother figure.  My need to make a distinction between religion and spirituality was also growing. The discovery of rampant pedophilia, though repugnant to me, was not the last straw as it was for many others, but one in a whole broom-full of straws.

            I was still wondering why I have been subservient to a church that often seems removed from the real problems of its people, but I was not yet aware that I would soon decide that the only honest thing for me to do was to leave that community altogether.  

When I made this decision, I was eighty years old.

            It is now six years later.  Though I miss the liturgy, ceremony, and worshipful singing, I feel more spiritually strong than at any other time in my life and more in tune with the God of my younger years, whom I described in the Lenten journal as, “ the God that I know from within without visualization or pre-conception.” If prayer is the lifting of the heart and mind to God, that is still something I do on a regular basis.  Gratitude is also a constant in this long life I’ve been privileged to live.

            And as I go about the adventure of growing old, I find new discoveries and enlightenments with every new day.  One such is that as the body declines, the spirit continues to grow and that while some things change (new friends, fresh ideas), others remain the same (old friends and attachments, long-held truths.)  

On the First Sunday of Lent in 2009, in answer to a prompt on Significance, I wrote: The most significant part of the day for me is morning. It is a beginning. There is always hope in it.  It is full of possibilities. The most significant part of the year is fall when nature goes to sleep while still on fire. There are profound messages in this advance towards winter – glimpses of the eternal, the way in which to die, how to endure what is left of living.

            Ten years ago, this essay would have been very different. I had many more answers then, or thought I did, even as it didn’t escape me that God is worshiped in multiple ways throughout the world and that many wise and wonderful people don’t believe in Him at all. Now, the older I get the more questions I have and the more comfortable I am in this universe of paradoxes.

Pat Lowery Collins is a poet, painter, and author of many award-winning books for children and young adults which include I Am An Artist, The Fattening Hut, Hidden Voices, and Daughter of Winter. 

She recently retired from teaching creative writing in the low residency MFA program at Lesley University and is now concentrating on writing for adults in Rockport, MA, where she lives and works. 

Follow her blog Aging and the Creative Process at www.patlc.wordpress.com and find out more about her many contributions to literature for young people at  www.patlowerycollins.com.

Consecration

By Linda Boyden©2019

The cedar wreath burned.

Sparked against the night,

a full moon glowed

in sympathy with the cedar.

On the earth,

this red earth,

the cedar flamed.

The moon,

etched among

the boughs of a tree,

a foreign tree in full bloom,

the wind dipped and swayed

through the boughs

and the moon blossomed.

Tongues of flame

from the burning cedar

sparked high,

higher than the blooms,

higher than the boughs,

to the moon

they reached,

to paint it with fire.

A horse and rider passed,

unexpected, startling.

The muffled hooves stirred

the red dirt road,

raising dust.

Like the cedar smoke,

the dust flared

into the night,

spiraled

to the clouds

like a wish,

like a prayer,

an offering

to the moon. 

Linda Boyden is an author, illustrator and storyteller who used to be a teacher. Her first picture book, The Blue Roses, was released in 2002 by Lee and Low Books; it was the winner of their New Voices Award. Since then, she has also published other acclaimed picture books, including Powwow's Coming (University of New Mexico Press).

Her Giveaways: An ABC Book of Loanwords from the Americas is an amazing addition to alphabet books - and she illustrated it as well. In 2013 she wrote an illustrated her fourth picture book Boy and Poi Por Puppy and she celebrated the completion of her fifth picture book, Roxy Reindeer in Fall 2014.

In addition to writing for children, Linda Boyden has contributed to the following collections for adults:

Linda Boyden enjoys school visits, storytelling programs at libraries, and presenting at writing conferences and other events around the country and is an active member of SCBWI, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers and the Redding Writers Forum. 

I was honored and grateful to receive the gift of her permission to showcase her beautiful poem. I hope you enjoyed her poem as much as I did and that you'll learn more about her and her work at: 

http://www.lindaboyden.com/

SAIL this summer

This summer, I'm going to SAIL the ocean of compassion and storytelling by launching a blogging project. I plan to showcase the thoughts of other authors on the topic of Spirituality, philosophy And religion In Literature for young people. And if you're wondering what my thoughts are on this topic, see my previous posts on this blog (my essay ALL THE UNSEEN and my poem WORDS, WHITE SPACE AND SPIRITUALITY) or the article I was honored to be invited to write for Kirkus Reviews (Accept, Don't Tolerate). 

This spring, I approached my colleagues in a haphazard way (as a scientist I have to admit there was no systematic random sampling). I asked many - whoever I happened to meet - if they were interested in contributing to this project. I also sent out a call for submissions (any length, any form - poetry, story, essay) on the topic of Spirituality/philosophy And religion In Literature for young people. 

Why? Because today, I see religious intolerance and hatred all over the world. Maybe it's always existed and I was just oblivious to it. Then again, I'm convinced that religious tolerance has also always existed. I'm convinced that one way to move toward peace is through mutual understanding. Mutual understanding cannot come about when we ignore or hide our feelings and ideas, and so I seek to have a safe space for us to speak out and share our views on religion (or the lack thereof) in our own lives, and issues related to our personal philosophies (agnosticism and atheism included). 

I encouraged authors to share their personal takes on this important topic in some way, or reflect on current trends or review books that contained substantial content on this topic. I explained that all I wanted was to encourage authors who write for young readers to reflect on this aspect of diversity in a manner that is open, egalitarian and all-embracing. I promised to include any and all contributions I received so long as they stood by principles of tolerance and mutual respect. 

I received a wonderful list of contributions by many brilliant (listed below) authors, and I'll be publishing them on this blog in the weeks to come. Feel free to share the posts if you enjoy them, but note that given the sensitive nature of this topic and the fact that my colleagues have so courageously agreed to discuss something that is so deeply personal, I have turned off comments. No internet platform is ever safe but I really hope that this summer we can merely listen and think rather than react and respond; and that if we do feel compelled to respond, we do so quietly and calmly and in a manner that supports and doesn't destroy (I've always held that if one would feel comfortable standing on a stage and addressing the entire world audience about a topic, it's okay to write about it on the internet; if you'd hesitate, then maybe you shouldn't). 

Whenever, as an oceanographer, I planned a scientific cruise, I was always a little afraid of what would happen. As I launch this project, I am afraid. But just as when I was an oceanographer, I also feel excited and hopeful. I hope most deeply, that like my characters Viji and Arul in THE BRIDGE HOME, the readers of these posts will discover that although they may differ widely in their views, they can still form deep bonds of respect, admiration and friendship.

If you'd like to contribute a piece for next summer (yes, I plan to SAIL every summer), please contact me via social media (twitter at padmatv; fb venkatraman dot padma) or use the contact form on my website www.padmavenkatraman.com 

If you'd like to connect with me for the #globalreadaloud project or find teacher resources for THE BRIDGE HOME, please visit the author website and follow my blog posts there. I will be posting updates on my plans to answer student questions, weekly videos, giveaways and contests associated with #GRA19 #GRABridge on

https://padmavenkatraman.com/

This summer, I hope you'll enjoying SAILing with 

Linda Boyden the week of June 9th (Consecration)

Pat Lowery Collins the week of June 16th (The Journey Behind the Words)

Jacqueline Davies the week of June 23rd (Of Bookstores and Crabapple Trees: Places Where I've Contemplated God)

Margarita Engle the week of July 14th (Excerpt from an interview I conducted)

Nancy Bo Flood the week of July 21st (Prayer)

Leah Henderson the week of July 28th (The Unconscious Power of Faith)

Veera Hiranandani the week of August 4th (What are you?)

Abbey Nash the week of August 11th (God in a Carton of Eggs)

Kelly Mullen McWilliams the week of August 18th

Rachna Gilmore (reblogging her answer from a WNDB roundtable I conducted ages ago) August 25th

Ruksana Khan, Mitali Perkins and Uma Krishnaswami (reblogging answers from the WNDB roundtable I hope; I am still waiting on permission).