The Secret Life of Fat

Candy sales went up during the Great Depression. "With an uncertain future, people were in a state of anxiety which took a toll on will power. This isn't just a convenient anecdote. Studies have shown that a lack of control in our environment chips away at out willpower and our ability to manage stress...if we feel uncertainty in our everyday lives, whether due to a medical test, job offer, or family situation, the lingering doubt depletes our willpower."

09.26.2018 The Rock that is Higher by Madeleine L'Engle

"One of the major discoveries of the post-Newtonian sciences is that objectivity is, in fact, impossible. To look at something is to change it and to be changed by it" (94).

[The Zen story in which a monk carries a girl across a river, and then a young monk questions the appropriateness of this act for a celibate monk.]
"How easy it is for us to project our own weaknesses onto other people.
"I was once criticized for telling this story because it is a Buddhist story and therefore had to contradict Christianity. But does it? Should we not learn from each other?" (95).

"I wish the church would be brave enough to acknowledge that there are questions to which, during our mortal lives, we have no answers. Too many answers lead to judgmentalism and to human beings (rather than God) deciding who can and cannot go to heaven" (97).

"The storyteller is a storyteller because the storyteller cares about truth, searching for truth, expressing truth, sharing truth" (103).

"And Henry James: 'Our task is to render, not report.' Show; do not tell. Thus, in fiction the verbs are active, not passive; 'did,' not 'was.' 'She lost her balance,' not 'Her balance was lost.' The great writer does not tell us what ought to be done, or what we think. The true writer shows what is done, avoiding author's comment. The storyteller doesn't talk about the story, but shows it, immediately locating the characters in time and space. [Example: the beginning of Anna Karenina.]" (104).

"Our Father which art in heaven. And where is heaven? It too is a word which has been abused. The good go to heaven and the bad go to hell. But who are the good and who are the bad? Only God knows that, and when we try to make such judgments we invariably blunder" (142).

"[The workmen outside my window] were certainly using the Lord's name in vain, but it was not a deliberate vanity. 'It's just their paucity of vocabulary,' I said. Such casual, careless language is not good, but it is far less evil than deliberate cursing, consigning someone to hell, rather than leaving that judgment to God" (143). Am I the only one who thinks that L'Engle is herself making a judgment here? This is bad but not as bad as this. All of this talk is outside orthodox Christianity, which states that the only right any of us have to get into heaven is to claim the righteousness of Christ, for all our righteousness is like a filthy rag, and every sin makes us guilty as a law-breaker.

"Today one of the temptations is to feel that we must be either politically correct, social activits, or that we must be withdrawn from the world in order to pray. Why should these two be exclusive? Won't our action more likely be God's will if we have prayed about it first? Won't we be more likely to correct some of the terrible social inequalities with which we are surrounded if we ask ourselves what Jesus would have done, and how? Don't we need to withdraw from the world for a while to ask God what we should do?" (153).

"Getting literal about the mighty acts of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ leads to dead ends.
"...But because Jesus Christ was wholly God as well as wholly human, he rose form the grave, to the astonishment not only of the Roman overlords and the powerful Jews in the Sanhedrin, but to the astonishment of all those who had been with him during his earthly life. The Resurrection, too, is beyond the realm of fact (Do you believe in the literal fact of the Resurrection? No! I believe in the Resurrection!) and bursts into the realm of love, of truth, for in Jesus, truth and love are one and the same" (174). So why can't we believe in the literal fact of the Resurrection AND in the Resurrection ["beyone the realm of provable fact and into the realm of mystery and marvel" (175)]? False dichotomy, I say.

"One of the many things the Bible stories have taught me is that God loves me, just as I am. I don't have to struggle for some kind of moral perfection impossible to attain. It is the biblical protagonists who, like us, far from perfect, show us how to be truly human. I don't believe God deliberately made me with one leg considerably longer than the other, but that is how I am, and I am loved that way resultant clumsiness and all" (175).

"What upsets me most, I think is that the anti-communists were against communism, rather than for democracy. And the Anti-New Agers are against the New Age rather than for Christ. It's being against rather than for the frame of mind which produces terrorism?....As I read the Gospels, one of the strongest messages is for; for love, for warmth of heart, for that love which dissolves hate and coldness of heart. When our religion brings hate to our hearts, it becomes terrorism, not religion" (186).

"The way we handle our little griefs, the petty irritations of daily living, is an indication of the way we're going to handle the larger griefs" (193).

"Fulfill yourself, that's what the world says is important."
"But the people I know, in literature and in life, whose chief concern is fulfilling themselves, are always empty" (202).

"I can't explain how these gifts come to me--at least not in the language of provable fact, but that is the language of human control, not the language of faith. And acceptace of the wonder of such gifts helps me to understand what Ezekiel is saying, or Daniel, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! I read their stories with sublime wonder, with rapturous joy, acknowledging that reality cannot be organized by us human creatures. It can only be lived" (214).

"Story helps us understand our humanness and our mortality. All grief is mourning over death--the death of a friendship, of a hope, of a career, of a marriage, of a love. If we try to circumvent the right and proper period of mourning, or repress it, then it will fester within us, and hurt both us and everybody we come in contact with" (267).

"With the discovery of antibiotics we have saved a lot of lives, but we have also come to think of death as unnecessary. We no longer have a mandated or permissible period of mourning. Though it is futile to assign a timetable for grief, it is eased if it is expressed" (270).

 "Only discipline and obedience to the strict law of love allow us to be free" (273).

To All the Boys I've Loved Before

"There's nothing cozier than a Christmas tree all lit up."

"I don't want to be afraid anymore. I want to be brave. I want life to start happening. I want to fall in love, and I want a boy to fall in love with me back!"

"I think Grandma's right: it's not good to be alone." (of course, this seems to mean it's not good to be single, or at least not in love or heartsick)

"Sometimes you just feel sad and you can't explain it."

Searching for Spring by Christine Hoover

"This is the work of the Christian, to say without equivocation, ' As the clay, I am the thing being shaped, and I certainly don't now more than the providential Potter.'....Certainly, we must wrestle our hearts into rest, but in continually wrestling without finally resting--and God will give you this option, waiting patiently by--we will ask why for our entire lives. In resting, we don't escape suffering, grief, or inconsolable things but we stand in a hope that a greater story is unfolding and, in seeing the story arc, we're able to see our own lives in sharper focus, through a lens of beauty" (92).

"The Spirit-led aren't trying to change the world so much as they are trying to allow God to change them in a way that spills over like a song into the world" (107).

"We must think in order to be thankful. And we must be thankful in order to experience joy. The greatest tragedies of our age are our constant motion, our overscheduled lives, and our obsessive attachment to our screens. We tend to believe we'll be robbed of happiness if we fail to match the world's pace step for step when in fact this pace robs us of the simplicity that displays beauty, which in turn leads to thanksgiving and, after thanksgiving, joy. If busyness mutes beauty, what mutes busyness? Beauty, of course. Paying attention to small gifts of everyday life helps us see and savor and, in turn, makes our distracted, numb hearts beat with thankfulness. Thankfulness will lead to joy, because when we're still, God himself will whisper it into our hearts" (171). 

"God is not often found in our excessive busyness" (172).


"I read somewhere that when you do something that feels like worship, you've found your calling" (189).

"Although my life was characterized for years by self-condemnation and self-flagellation, I didn't realize how much I needed this grace. I didn't want to look at the reality of my life nor the reality of this world. It took me so long to see, and when I finally did, I saw darkness all around for perhaps the first time. This is, in fact, not morbid but rather a key component to understanding the gospel and, as a result, creating as a Christian. Our Christian kitsch betrays our preference for turning blind eyes to the reality of sin, darkness, and hopelessness in this world. We throw verses around like Band-Aids. We wrap up suffering in neat little bows as if the thirty minutes in the sitcom are almost up. We require that our songs consist of overtly Christian words and major cords. We have no patience for mystery, for nuance, for poignancy. We must not be afraid to look, really look, at the realities of life. We must not convey that the inconsolable things don't exist. We of all people should be able to do so, because we know the extent of grace, we know the power of the Holy Spirit to transform hearts, we know a hope that holds like an anchor" (193).

The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah

"He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted, to be loved an admired. Now I think perhaps, I'd like to be known" (Chapter 1).

"A girl leading pilots across the Pyrenees? Will wonders never cease?"

"She wanted to kill him. She wanted to kill herself. What would Antoine think of her now? Truthfully, the biggest part of her wanted to curl up in a ball in some dark corner and never show her face again. But even that, shame, was a luxury these days. How could she worry about herself, when Isabel was in prison?" (Chapter 34).

"'Why have I never heard anything about all this? And not just from you. Sophie never said a word. Hell, I didn't even know that people escaped over the mountains or that there was a concentration camp just for women who resisted the Nazis.'
"'Men tell stories,' I say. It is the truest, simplist answer to his question. 'Women get on with it. For us, it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war. And when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started over.'" (Chapter 39).

And So To Bed by Adrian Reynolds

“...there may be medical (or physical or mental) or environmental reasons why sleep is hard to come by. 
But, I don’t think sleep is at any time less than a spiritual issue. Let me explain. Our beings cannot easily
 be separated into physical and spiritual elements. We are whole beings. Even very straightforward 
physical ailments hae spiritual elements and significance to them. For example, let’s say I broke my arm
 badly....Now, that was a purely physical issue, wasn’t it? My arm was broken in several places, my wrist 
was damaged and it just needed time and good medical care to sort out. Right. Well, sort of right. 
There’s no indication that there was anything deeply spiritual doing on behind the injury...However,
 here’s the thing: how I reacted to the injury was a spiritual issue: how I dealt with the disappointment of 
a promising tennis career...how I coped with the worry of falling behind in school because I couldn't write;
 how I kept my spirits up and my Christian joy intact; how I would serve in church playing the piano with 
only one hand...the list goes on and on. It was a physical issue which needed medical treatment and
 resolution. But it would be naive to say that it had no spiritual resolution...So, there may well be
 medical reasons for your struggle with sleep. These may be very complex and difficult mental health
 issues, for example, that take a lot of sorting. However, there will still be spiritual elements ot address.” 
(69-71).

I loved this little book. I wish it had been longer, but it’s a great start to discuss a long-neglected subject.
 I had never thought about sleep from a spiritual perspective, and I’m so glad this book helped me start. 
My favorite part was the work Reynolds did elucidating the dynamics between the physical and spiritual.

“I don’t think sleep is at any time less than a spiritual issue.” He goes on to explain that we are whole
 people, and cannot be easily separated into the physical, spiritual, emotional, etc. Then he gives the 
example of breaking an arm and how that is indeed a physical issue, and the odds of it being caused 
by some deep spiritual issue are very small. “However, how I reacted to the injury WAS a spiritual issue.” 
How he reacted to all the ways this affected his life (unable to pursue a tennis career, falling behind in
 school due to inability to write, unable to play the piano in church, etc). What is clear to see in this 
example is also true of sleep: there may be medical / physical / environmental issues that need
 addressing, but there will also be spiritual elements that shouldn’t go neglected.

I don’t think I ever understood this concept before, but it definitely applies to a myriad of life’s issues.

I also learned about sleep as a metaphor for death for the believer, something clearly Biblical...but 
somehow previously missed by me! So, thank you Reynolds!