On Being Blog

Trent Gilliss, senior editor

If you haven’t, swell. This Sunday morning exercise is ripe for the picking. Then you’ll have a fresh perspective unencumbered by the content. You won’t get mired in the details of summarizing or full description. You are our target audience. You are the listeners we want to grab with the title and draw in. Now, if you have heard the show, that’s great too. Then you’ll have an insider perspective, an intimate understanding of the interviews and readings. The content may inform your decision. And you may sympathize with our plight.

Here are a few titles we considered:

» “The Poetry of Creatures”
» “An Exquisite Attention to a Fragile Land”
 » “Land, Life, and the Poetry of Creatures”

Show titles do a lot of work. They appear in one-minute bumpers to the show and within the show itself. They are part of promotional spots on the radio. The appear in iTunes podcast feeds and on our email update, websites, Facebook page, blog, Twitter. Duke University will uses it in their communication.

Which one would you have chosen? What’s an alternative you might suggest? Should it be just catchy? Should it tell you more about the show? Should it be a tease? How will it render in a graphic for our online channels. Will it help in our search rankings?

These are the few of the questions we ask when titling. And, as you can see, we struggle mightily with this task. We labor, we strive, we grope, we concede. But we always end up with something. For this show, I can’t help wonder if we could’ve done better.

Kate Moos, managing producer

“Everything I write is for spiritual reasons—to help people keep their spirits up, to help transform misery into laughter or healing, to help people remember the truth of their spiritual identities.”

So, when her new fiction, Imperfect Birds, showed up in the mail, the volume floated to the top of the stack of books on my desk — and I took it home and read it. And then I read the two novels that preceded this one and decided to put some questions to her about this very moving story of recovery and human frailty.

What follows are her replies that took place via email:

I appreciate you taking the time to discuss your new book, Imperfect Birds, with me. In this story you bring us back into the lives of the Fergusons—a story begun in your book Rosie (1983) and continued in Crooked Little Heart (1997). So, the first thing I want to ask is, what is it about this story that makes it necessary to write it in intervals of 13 years or so? Is that because it’s a hard story? A sad one?
Novels take a lot more stamina and time—at least two and half years—I much prefer self-contained stories and essays that I can begin and finish in a week. Novels are years worth of needing to keep the plates spinning in the air; hardly ever really knowing what you are doing, and lurching forward slowly, backtracking, flailing, falling, losing hope and confidence, getting back up, lurching onward.

The Fergusons, especially in this last book, really embody the idea that alcoholism is a family disease. (I am a recovering alcoholic and the daughter of a recovering alcoholic, so I am grateful for this portrayal.) Elizabeth, the mother of the teenager Rosie, is a middle-aged recovering alcoholic whom I found sympathetic at the same time her helplessness made me want to wring her neck. Of the primary characters in the novel, she seemed most incomplete, in a way, most damaged, even though it’s her daughter who is in trouble. Will she stop living her incomplete life through Rosie?
I don’t see her the same way you do. She has really been a late bloomer, not even getting to the full expression of grief following her beloved husband’s death, until Rosie is 13—8 years or so later.

I see her small actions towards truth and tough decisions as heroic, because emotional expression does not come easily to her, as it does to James and Rae. Truth does not come easily to most people in this culture—a good appearance is the dominating value. Rae and James’s adoration of her is one of the things that most helps me experience what a profound, if introverted, person she is—how brilliant and rare, to be able to have a husband and best friend of this quality.

Your portrayal of Rosie’s drug use seems to me to describe a sort of 21st century story about addiction. In an older sort of story about teenage drug use, the kid would hook up with a bad crowd, her grades would crash, and she would start stealing cars or running away from home. In this case, the teenage junkie is extremely high functioning—a model student who volunteers at church. But she’s morally bankrupt, a schemer and liar and manipulator. I think this change in the nature of story reflects a change out there in the world. Do you agree? What has changed?
The pressure on these modern kids is infinitely most intense than it was on me—I’ve heard it said by high school teachers whose kids are almost cracking up under the strain to get into the great colleges, that exceptionalism is the new normal.

In Crooked Little Heart, it seems like Rosie’s moral education really begins, or anyway gets interesting, when she is becoming a competitive tennis player, and she starts cheating, and then she keeps that secret, and we begin to actually feel the spiritual corrosion that secret causes. She starts lying to herself first, about whether she is even cheating. As I read it I actually started thinking about my own reflexive dishonesty and the perils of that. Is there a connection between this cheating and keeping it a secret and where Rosie ends up at the end of Imperfect Birds?
I don’t think so. Almost all of us are pretty secretive, and maybe especially those who had a genetic predisposition to substance abuse, as Rosie does. Then you hear that we are only as sick as our secrets, and it takes a little while to truly get that, and to make the decision to try living a different way.

In the last year or so, I was aware of five people in my orbit who died of alcoholism. I wasn’t close to any of them—they were family members of co-workers or uncles of friends. The people who died were in their 50s (roughly my age) and they just finally wore out. One of them died with full-blown cirrhosis but others were just-you know, their heart gave out, or they fell off a roof, or just came to the end active drunks inevitably come to. It’s such a staggering thing to see people come to that end. Why do you think some of us manage to get better and some of us don’t?
I literally have no idea. Grace?

Elizabeth’s good friend Rae at one point counsels her that she needs to accept the truth, and that even if it is bitter and frightening and difficult, it is beautiful and she should find a way to be grateful for it. That seems like hard advice. Does Elizabeth come to terms with her hard truth? Doesn’t it take her a long time?
It does take her a long time. It has always taken me a long time, too—as a parent, as a daughter, as a sister. You just keep trying not to see what is going on in front of you—especially if you were raised among alcoholics, it’s one of the first things you learn: that what seems to be going on between your parents can actually be explained so that they do not seem crazy or out of control. So you develop a habit of not seeing what you’re seeing—of colluding with the lie machine. And this is a very hard thing to turn around, which is why I said earlier that Elizabeth’s growth, while slow, is so heroic.

I hope this isn’t too personal. You’ve spoken in interviews and in your other, nonfiction writing, about your own experience of addiction, and how your religious awakening happened. I remember, in the interview you did with Speaking of Faith several years ago, you told a story about coming down from drugs on a houseboat, and that—I believe the story was—Jesus was there with you. And I seem to remember that for a while, you said, Jesus was nipping at your heels like a little kitten. Not like Deus Omnipotens, but like a playful lovely kitten. That image is so unexpected and has always sort of stayed with me. Do you still have the experience of Jesus, or of grace, like that? Do you see these novels as religious or spiritual stories?
I have a very unsophisticated relationship with Jesus. I do not have one interesting theological thought in my head. I just feel him, and did from the beginning: I feel the intense love he has for us, especially when we are suffering, and I feel his delight in me, which is something most of us are starved for most of our lives, and I feel his unwavering companionship. I feel his purity and goodness, and I see it wherever people are suffering, and others show up to help. I see Christ Crucified in the world’s abject poverty and despair and unfairness, how horrible horrible horrible it is for most people, and when I see this, I desperately want to be there beside him, helping in any way I can. Maybe just bringing a glass of water, or sitting there breathing with him, like you sit with someone in child birth.

Everything I write is for spiritual reasons—to help people keep their spirits up, to help transform misery into laughter or healing, to help people remember the truth of their spiritual identities. I try to shine a little light in the world, to be the light for whomever is there, whether at the market, or in a bookstore. It is my spiritual calling. I do a very meager job most of time, but this is my intention.

(photo: James Hall)

Colleen Scheck, senior producer

As noted in this week’s broadcast of “An Architecture of Decency,” our production trip to the Black Belt of Alabama in October 2007 was the birth of our staff blog, SOF Observed. Since then we’ve offered many different types of posts under the guidance of our senior editor, Trent Gilliss. As we’ve experimented with various levels of tone, length, personal disclosure, and multimedia elements, we’ve done so with an overarching philosophy to pull back the curtain, share our production experiences, and highlight what we are seeing in our big world of “religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas.”

What captures your interest informs us, and sometimes surprises us. Rossini’s “Meow” by “The Little Singers of Paris” (fun) and Spiritual but Not Religious (reflective) had distinctly high responses. We’ve kept our eyes out for thoughtful perspectives on headlines, such as Hendrik Hertzberg’s commentary on the Catholic abuse crisis. Guest contributions (want to be published?) like Chelsea Roff’s entry on the meaning of sacred space have also grabbed your attention. We’ve focused on visuals, Purim Around the World, and sound, Forgiveness and Revenge, A Call for Music Ideas, and good behind-the-scenes stories: Archbishop Desmond Tutu is “Mad About Mango”.  

So, we thought this was a good occasion to ask you: How are we doing? What are your impressions of SOF Observed? What would you like to see more of?

Krista Tippett, host

Our friend Pankaj Mishra writes a provocative, helpfully informative piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine with this title, “Islamism,” on Aayan Hirsi Ali and Western reactions to her. How should Western intellectuals respond to Muslim scholars? Mishra’s unusual perspective carries wisdom.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, guest contributor

These days, the phrase invokes yet another, completely different meaning to me. I now think of a defender of the faith as anyone who attempts to wrestle the reputation of his faith out of the hands of those who, through their actions or speech, disparage it.

Take, for example, the phenomenon that accompanies many terrorist attacks, attempted or carried out, in our contemporary media landscape. After each incident — the latest in Times Square is no exception — scores of moderate Muslims take to the airwaves to defend their faith against the violent portrayal of the (would-be) terrorists. It is sad to say that mainstream media outlets seem to have developed a routine for reporting on such incidents. Hearing from outraged and apologetic followers of Islam is a prominent feature of that routine.

But this phenomenon isn’t unique to Muslims; many Christians also feel the need to salvage their faith’s reputation from extremists. Certainly, this includes the kind of extremism seen back in March in the form of the “Huratee,” the Christian militia whose outfit was raided in Michigan. Other non-violent forms of extremism, however, warrant Christian defenders of the faith as well, like in Austin Carty’s recent Huffington Post article entitled “Nice Christians: We’re Out There.”

Lately I have been asking myself: what is the point of these predictable defenses? Is anyone’s opinion changed in this way? I don’t think so. It is not as if a person who believes that all Muslims are extremists is going to listen to a self-proclaimed moderate Muslim and feel certain that his assumptions were wrong. Neither will being reassured by a talking head that there are extremists in every faith comfort someone who already knows this to be true.

Rather than increasing tolerance or expanding dialogue, this knee-jerk defense actually plays further into the broad dichotomy that the American public has come to expect from mainstream news sources. When a moderate Christian such as Mr. Carty makes a well-meaning case for others like himself in the Huffington Post, he’s not making it easier for acceptance and understanding to grow. He is distancing himself from those he’d rather not associate with. In this way, the defense that is made is not a defense of one’s faith but of one’s self at the expense of those other religious people whose practice he judges to be misguided.

Yet, certainly I have found myself on the wrong side of this coin on more than one occasion. I can distinctly remember several conversations with my best friend, a Roman Catholic, in which we tried to imagine a different way to define ourselves that would highlight the commonalities of our faiths rather than differences. But even that endeavor was a reaction to those around us, those intolerant people on both sides, Catholic and Protestant, who, for one reason or another, discounted the other. We lamented that the term “Christian” — let alone “born-again” or “evangelical” — was lost to negative stereotypes and a bad reputation, and thus we wanted to update it.

Nowadays, I laugh to myself when a Christian friend on Facebook identifies his or her religious views as “Christ follower,” for it is this same sense of self-defense that pushes me to disassociate from those intolerant believers of whom I am embarrassed.

Let us not alienate fundamentalists within our own faiths. Instead of separating ourselves and pointing the finger of blame at those with whom we disagree, perhaps a true defense of faith is called for — a more complete wish to understand how someone could aggravate the tenets of a religion to a violent state.

We have an opportunity with each unfortunate and sometimes-deadly act by extremists of all religions to, rather than estrange ourselves from them, attempt to bring them back into the fold by means of understanding our common identities as adherents of a particular religion. Only then will we truly be defenders of the faith.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on SOF Observed. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.