Today we delve into a book about the world’s best-selling and most widely distributed book: the Bible.  Rachel Held Evans addresses Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again to:

• People with an Evangelical background who find themselves navigating the great chasm between Scripture as they learned it and Scripture as what it actually is; and
• Those Christians affiliated with progressive mainline traditions who are itching to explore more deeply the background, significance and relevance of the texts sampled in the liturgy each week.

I would add, that anyone who has read the Bible and has an opinion about it (even a literary one) will get something out of this book, whether they profess to be Christian or not.  

So, welcome one and all as we explore what’s good and what’s bad about how Rachel Held Evans recommends we respond to the Bible.

The Good

Rachel Held Evans writes to us as a story-teller and literature lover, not a theologian. She has read many theologians in the course of her journey back to the Bible, and she shares what they have to say in this book.  

The author accomplishes a tour de force by reviewing the different genres and characters present in the Bible: origin stories, deliverance stories, war stories, wisdom stories, resistance stories, gospel stories, (big) fish stories, and church stories.  She talks about the stories of the prophets, women, widows, slaves, disabled people, sexual minorities, exiles, foreigners, people of other faiths and outcasts.  She demonstrates how the Bible is generally written in a way that shows up the childishness, injustice and violence of empire in contrast to the care and concern that God has for all of creation.  In this sense, she highlights and centres the voices of the marginalised during Biblical times and now.  If you have at any point had the experience of being a social outcast, I believe you will feel welcomed.

Inspired models different formats of how to practice the Jewish tradition of Midrash — inventing a backstory, interpreting the text behind and beyond the text, and the text between the lines of the text.  It is playing with the stories, the intent of which is to open the conversation, as opposed to be the final word  It’s a practice I will tell you more about in the how-to section below.  Along with the Bible stories, she tells her stories and the stories of others to make her points and invites us out of our own self-centred story into God’s story of reconciliation and restoration. 

Each genre in the Bible is introduced by way of the author’s retelling of a Biblical passage as if it were happening today.  The writing style is easy to follow and clear.  The telling is done with a great sense of humour too.  Because she covers the great breadth of genres in the Bible, you will have a sense of context, history, and how all of them fit together to form a complete, yet not totalising, narrative.  Perhaps the most important lesson you will walk away with comes from the wisdom literature of the Bible, along with the Epistles (letters):  “to engage the Bible with wisdom is to embrace its diversity, not fight it.  Wisdom is situational.  It isn’t just about knowing what to say; it’s about knowing when to say it.  It’s not just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true.”

Held Evans faces the problems of purportedly God-induced genocide, crimes against humanity, clear contradictions, multiple versions of the same events, miracles that go against the laws of physics, offensive laws and prescripts, whether Revelation is future telling, and the problems with Paul and whether he is a misogynist.  She also looks at whether to read the Bible as literal and fundamental, allegorical (with a Jungian or Gestalt approach), or inspired.  You can already guess where she is going to come out… some combination of it all.

The Bad

Like Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, Held Evans writes about her own experience and invites you to try out what she has tried.  So, while the book draws the reader in, it is difficult from the table of contents to identify the steps she proposes you take.  But see the end of the How To section for a list of the things she suggests.

It is easy to identify an area / theme of the Bible that you may have questions about or trouble with, and then dive deeper from there to tease out how to approach the issue at hand.  However, you won’t find a ready list of resources to fall back on, other than the notes at the end of each chapter.  You won’t find a way to measure your progress or successes either.  These are the issues that lead to a 3.5 out of 5 stars rating for this book.

This is a difficult book to take on, hence being classified as scaling the highest peaks.  This is not bad in and of itself.  It is difficult because the author does not shy away from controversial topics and she will come out at a non-fundamentalist, non-self-righteous position on them.  It is also difficult because I think that you, as the reader, have to have some experience with the Bible and you have to be ready to be real about yourself and about life.  You also have to be open to being challenged with regard to your own lifestyle and being urged to do things differently.  Held Evans is not judgemental; far from it.  She just stands firmly in the Biblical tradition of redemption for sin, not condemnation for sin, and this is ultimately offensive.  As she says, “the apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget — that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.”  

The question she will ask you to ask yourself is: “Am I behaving as though life is more than a meaningless, chaotic mess, that there is some order in the storm?”  As she says, fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us they can be defeated.  The same holds true of the Biblical narrative.

The How To

Tell a Story

It is no surprise that the power of story comes through so strongly in Inspired.  The Bible is a collection of different types of stories written over thousands of years.  We are invited to tell our own stories and link them with this grand narrative.  The promise is that as we imagine the details within and surrounding the stories of the Bible, we will learn to love what this book has to offer us and what it teaches us about how to live.

Midrash is the most common form of biblical interpretation in Jewish tradition.  It consists of an imaginative exploration and expansion of Scripture.  It is about inventing symbolic meaning for elements that appear in the text, or creating side stories that explain the background to what happens in the story.  It’s about engaging with the tensions and questions produced in Scripture.  It’s also about reading between the lines — what is left unsaid?  It’s an invitation to play with the story and add your layer of interpretation and explication to the text.  The point is not to come to a definitive conclusion about the text but rather identify what is up for questioning and debate.  Ideally, you will also share your ideas with friends and theologians over a meal or coffee.  In so doing, we will learn something important about our faith, our community, and ourselves.  We are invited to engage with the text as a conversation starter, not a way to end the conversation and have the last word.

Later in the book, the author tells us about a practice she learned from Lauren Winner called “dislocated exegesis”.  This is about reading Scripture in unexpected places and encountering familiar passages in striking environments.  It’s based on the idea that where you read the Bible changes how you read it and what you get out of it.  It’s kind of like an embodied Midrash, rather than an imaginative one.  

A friend of mine living abroad found the answer to a question she was asking herself about her experience there.  She was unhappy in her workplace and was wondering whether she was turning her back on her calling by quitting.  Was she being a coward by running home to the US?  One Sunday she listened to a sermon in church about the parable of the seeds.  Of course the sermon did not stray far from Jesus’ own interpretation of the text.  But my friend is a gardener, and rather than thinking about whether her heart was in the right condition to receive the word, she wondered whether the country she was in was the right soil for her to be planted in.  It is the antithesis to that poster or bumper sticker we see so often: “grow where you are planted.”  Each plant needs its own kind of soil.  South African fynbos will not grow in rich soil.  It needs poor soil.  My friend realised that the context she was in was not conducive to her growth, that she could not bloom and contribute there as a result, and that it was time to move one.  Now she is flourishing.  I learned a new way to think about this text because she shared her embodied alternative reading of the text with me. (Back to The Good)

Here are some of the other practices you will learn that will draw you into the richness of the Bible:

Back to The Bad

Conclusion

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water ,and Loving the Bible Again is a wide-ranging exploration of the power of stories that have stood the test of time to inspire us.  They invite us to live in accordance with our belief that God is a reconciling and restoring presence in our lives and our communities across time and space.  In this book Rachel Held Evans will offer you ways for how to take on the thorny issues in the Bible.  She will also dare you to read it with an open heart and mind, and open yourself to all those people you may have been keeping out of your Bible, your life, and your community.  She does it simply, mercifully and with a sense of humour.  I hope you will dare to slay the giant and walk on water with her.

The Good

Bird by Bird is to writers what good sex education is to teenagers or good period preparation is to soon-to-be menstruators.  Mechanics without meaning get everyone nowhere fast.  Facts over feelings and foibles isolate and silence us.  Anne Lamott keeps these mistakes miles away by addressing mechanics and meaning, facts, feelings and foibles all together.  In the book we learn about

• why we write, 
• what and who we write for, 
• what we write about and how we write it, 
• as well as what gets in the way. 

The challenges that come with trying to write, be it for private or public consumption, take center stage.  

Writing is not for everyone, but if you try it on for size, you might be surprised.  Who better to go on the journey with than Anne Lamott?  She will make you laugh and cry and cringe.  She will also get you to the goal while teaching you a few things about life along the way.  It’s not for nothing that a 25th Anniversary edition is now available both in print and electronically.

The author takes you on the adventure of your life.  You will have mindfulness down pat by the time you have learned to think and act like a writer.  If you do the exercises in the book, you will get in touch with reality and identify options for dealing with it.  Awe will take you by the shoulders and shake you awake and then heal you.  Add a dose of Lamott’s humour with a serving of stream-of-consciousness insight into the human heart and brain and you are away laughing.  Then get on the rollercoaster of human connections via friends and writers’ groups who read your drafts.  If you put your hands in the air and scream loud enough as you go through the loop-de-loop, you will breath a sigh of compassion and grace when you reach the end of the ride.  Lamott also tells you what your therapist and priest ought to tell you, but are too scared to because of what society might think.  The book is full of pithy wisdom from everyday life, local heroes, writers past and present.

There are anecdotes and nuggets of wisdom for anyone interested in living an authentic life as well. “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there, shining.”

Lamott is less concerned with teaching you to write well than she is with getting you to just write and understand why writing is important!  She promises that if you write you will become a better reader and a better person.  If you write you will start to pay attention and soften.  You will acknowledge and touch some of your deepest needs:  to be visible, to be heard, to make sense of your life, to wake up and grow and belong. Forget Matthieu Ricard, David Steindl-Rast, and Eckhart Tolle — she may just be the only guru you ever need. The author is a friend to herself, and if you pay attention you will find she teaches the rest of us how to befriend ourselves too.

The Bad

The by-line for Bird by Bird is: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  It’s important to know what this book is not…

It is not a manual on learning to write.  If you want a list of drills on how to use adjectives, or tricks for making time move or stand still, or an agenda for running a writer’s group, step-by-step instructions on how to get published, or what you need to include in a good how-to book, you will be disappointed.  You will also be disappointed if you are looking for tips and criteria for producing great non-fiction.  Lamott’s focus is on writing fiction.  Good fiction for her is about seeking truth by telling lies every step of the way.  “It’s a lie if you make something up.  But you make it up in the name of the truth , and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.” I also love that she says “You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth.  You can point with it, too.”

If your primary goal it to get published, this book is probably not for you either.  Lamott does talk about getting published, but more in terms of the motivation for doing so and the sensations when it happens.  She sees it as one of the lesser by-products of writing. You might remark that this is easy to say for someone who is already published.  She will tell you that is is precisely because she is published that she is most qualified to say so.

It is a book about the process of writing, and the experience of it.  She lets you into the head and heart of wannabe and professional writers.  She does this in a humorous, ironic and, at times, exaggerated way.  This can become annoying for some readers who are not as paranoid and self-critical as she or I.  It might also be off-putting for people who are only just starting out on the writing journey.

The book reads like a story – the story of Anne Lamott’s personal forays into the writing badlands as well as the writing classes she teaches.  The table of contents acts like a course outline.  Because there is no index of exercises, you will have to read through each chapter to find the practices that will help you weather the storms that batter every writer of fiction and non-fiction alike.

For reference sake, here is a list of some of her exercises that might tickle your fancy but that you will have to read through the whole book to find:

The How To

Short assignments are the mainstay of Lamott’s approach to writing, and the backstory to the book’s title.  She will come back to them over and over again throughout the book.  They are her antidote to overwhelm and the ship that will keep your writing afloat and heading somewhere.

Actually, this review came together around a series of short assignments.  I was at sea and didn’t know where to begin because the book is complex and covers so much.  So I started with drafting my Instagram mini-reviews.  Each Instagram post functioned like the one-inch picture frame.  

The one-inch picture frame is something Lamott keeps on her desk to remind her that all she has to do is write down as much as she can see through it.  It’s a bit like that exercise that people sometimes do when learning to draw.  The teacher puts an empty frame around an object and tells the student to only draw what they see in the frame, or to draw the negative space between the frame and the object. So, you pick one small scene, one memory, or one exchange to write about.  And you take one thing at a time — bird by bird!

To emphasise her point, she quotes E.L.Doctorow as saying, “writing a novel is like driving a car at night.  You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

A short assignment is a short piece of writing, NOT a piece of writing that takes a short period of time to accomplish.  It’s important not to confuse the two.  The rest of the book is about all the subsequent work that goes into shaping that short piece into useful and satisfying writing.

You don’t have to have it all figured out from the start.  One short thing will lead to the next and suddenly you have what you were after even though you didn’t know what, exactly, that was to begin with.

Conclusion

I first read this book 22 years ago and got a lot out of it. I didn’t really get it, though, until I read it again now.  Lamott recognises that the craft of writing is not easy and she requires a lot of you!  A certain amount of life experience along with a willingness to look yourself squarely in the eye and delve into the hole in your heart is necessary.   Beware!  The humour, easy-going style and humanising stream-of-consciousness writing can lull you into a false sense of security. Bird by Bird is brimming with all kinds of practical ways to get writing.  Simplicity notwithstanding, they will exact everything of you if you do them sincerely.  They will also help you deal with the challenges that come with the writing life.