The Surprising Puritanism of Ann Voskamp

I remember well the day a displeased blogger made the indictment: Ann Voskamp had trespassed Christian boundaries by writing of her love for God in sensual terms.

There was a lot of back-and-forth, some declarations of "disgusting!", gasps of shock and groans of embarrassment. Some of those responses can still be seen over in the Amazon reviews of Ann's book.

No question, Ann had been... rather forthright. She spoke of consummation. Spirit skin on spirit skin. No self-respecting Puritan could accept such language. This must be the language of secular Enlightenment, or something like that, yes?

Let Chapter 3 of Ravished by Beauty set the record straight. Enlightenment thinkers were embarrassed by the Puritans. The Puritans, surprisingly (perhaps) spoke unabashedly of their relationship to God in sensual language.

While Puritans like Richard Sibbes looked "to consummated union as the ultimate goal of conversion," pastors like Thomas Shepard spoke in words that might have been stolen from Ann, "he makes love to thee... 'Tis fervent, vehement, earnest love...The Lord longs for this...pleads for this...Take thy soul to the Bride-chamber, there to be with him forever and ever..."

John Cotton said it this way, "It will inflame our hearts to kisse him again, if the kisse be from God." And Francis Rous, in a sermon on Isaiah 54:4-5, encouraged his listeners to "fasten on him, not thine eye only, but thy mightiest love, and hottest affection...that thou maist lust after him..."

[blush]

Ann Voskamp seems almost tame in comparison.

The Leaving

Wherever we go, we find ourselves, and God. I believe that.

One Amazon reviewer said she felt let down that Ann found herself, and God, away from home. There's that, yes— an odd surprise in a book that dares us to live fully right where we are.

But I take it differently. Right where you are isn't always the place you've called home. It's, well... right where you are.

I think this can be a little shocking; after all, we make our identity in the things we call home, think that's all there is... think that's all we are, all God is.

Then we leave.

In going away, we discover what we could have known all along... about ourselves, about God. It was there to see, wasn't it?

Ann recalls a letter from her father-in-law, asking who is ready. Ready for what? Maybe to live fully beyond the place we've called home? Beyond the person we thought we were? Beyond the God we had so nicely boxed up and put in a special room at home?

When we leave, we find we are not ready. Never will be. Home is too strong. Who we've been is too strong. The God in the pretty little box is too small. Yet, when we leave, we have the chance to discover—like Ann did— that we are ready. And ever will be.

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This is a response to the final chapter of Ann's book, One Thousand Gifts. For a thoughtful review of the whole book, join us today at TheHighCalling.

The Almost-Prayer of a Name

There is a certain way a child can carry on that simply *sends* a person. At least me.

This morning I feel tense from my toes on up. My Littlest has been doing *that* kind of carrying on. I am having minor fantasies of a spa with Japanese music and tropical drinks. Sighs :). Instead, I walk past Ann's book, and the calm fragility of the nest, the blue eggs, the hands extended, call to me.

I open pages to October rains, clothespins dripping grace, and I feel more like a wet puppy scratching at the back door, than a woman who is all eyes for the beautiful.

These words sit quiet on the page...

I am blessed.
I can bless.
So this is happiness.

Ann connects this almost-prayer to her name, which means "full of grace." And I stop. What is the meaning of my own name?

Barkat means blessing.

It is easier to bless in the *big* moments— money to missions, the cup of cold water to a man in Grand Central Station. Where I find it harder is right here, where the life-nest feels fragile and a voice has been grating. And a little child is —like me— growing her way towards this almost-prayer...

I am blessed.
I can bless.
So this is happiness.

___

Quote from Chapter 10 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

The One Cry

This is the chapter that made me cry. Not for what she found, but for what she lost...

Sister to truck, self to night fears, mother to asylum, daughter to time.

The words stay with me...

How long until we are gone?
If I don't close eyes, I won't die.
Why can't I hold on to now forever?

And in the center of it all, as a young woman, she courted death with shards of glass, bled onto the floor. It is that bleeding I want to stay with. That cry of "I don't want to die," even as it looks like death-invitation.

This is the cry of humanity, is it not? This is why we bleed each other, is it not? (Why can't I hold on to now forever?)

Jesus never gloried in death. He raised the dead, wept over them, asked to be exempt from his own. He made space for lament, became lament itself. He gave life-blood.

If I close my eyes, I can see Him holding Ann to his heart. "I'm sorry," he is whispering in her ear. "I am so, so sorry."

___

Quotes from Chapter 8 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

Bringing Beauty In

A boy pounds a plate with clenched fist. The other blithely butters toast. How do I fix this?

Ann has just gathered sunflowers and declared, "I bring beauty in." But now this. Brother against brother. Mother wondering, how do I fix?

I know this hard song, this strife, though in my house it is sister against sister. The tussle of... what? Growing, reaching, wanting, not yet knowing how to navigate life. Girls discovering they are capable of scratching, hair pulling, even kicking, when Mommy isn't there to see.

How much to take upon myself?

When they were little I took it all. Sent girls to separate corners. Ordered sorry's. Wondered where I'd gone wrong.

Sometimes, for the sake of peace, I still take their struggle upon myself. But more often these days I let them have it out. It is hard to hear them discovering what they are capable of. I stand in the kitchen, hear doors slam, hear hard words. And I don't intervene. This is their journey, this discovery of the human heart and how much we want to and can hurt each other.

In the end, Ann tells her son a story of Jacob and Esau. I tell stories too. I tell stories of me and my own sister, how we loved each other one moment and the next moment pushed each other off the edge (sometimes quite literally). I ask questions, "Do you really hate her? Her? Or just hate what is happening?" I ask too,"What IS happening?" I wait until they have chosen their own separate corners, and I hold them against the darkness, remind them wordlessly what love feels like and stir, once again, a longing for sister-communion. When I remember, I pray.

Then I wait for them to fumble towards forgiveness, bring their own beauty in.

Quote from Chapter 7 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

The Seeing Prayer

I open Ann's book.

"You will want to see this."

I had just closed Juliet Benner's book Contemplative Vision, where I'd marked, "From its beginnings Christianity has been a religion of seeing."

Stand by and see the salvation of the LORD
Behold the beauty of the LORD
O taste and see

Ann's husband is the seeing-guide, pulling her away from dishes, carrot peels, prayers weary.

"He leads me the impossible distance of a whole two steps to the windowsill. I'm transfixed."

And within moments he releases Ann to the night, to the fields, to the moon. I think on this. To be the one who releases others into seeing. Is this not a holy thing? I think on this. Who in my life opens me to sight? I think on this. Do I believe that prayer is sometimes as simple as the lived-prayer of go-see and come-see and I-see?

As a child of El Roi (God-who-sees), I think on this.


Quotes from Chapter 6 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. Scriptures in order of appearance: Exodus 14:13, Psalm 27:4, Psalm 34:8.

Of Lost Boys and Suffering

"The family accepts. God meant it this way."

The words of a family who lost a boy. The words of a family who will sit with his empty chair for the rest of their lives. Who will mourn the lost voice, the laughter, the future they thought was theirs.

I keep arguing with myself, keep going 'round on this. But now I finally want to write it down. Even if the family accepts it, I do not believe God meant it that way.

I have wanted to glide past this part of Chapter 5. For days now, I have wanted to glide past it. This dialog raised by eight little words: the question of suffering and evil in the world. Why the little boy lost? Why Haiti? Why the girl in the brothel? And the mother lost to suicide? Why?

I do not believe God means it this way. This "creation groaning,"* this fallenness, this "human beings sold as slaves."**

I do believe God works to transfigure, as Ann says. And that we are transformed when we can give thanks "at all times because He is all good."

But who am I, in this great dialog that has been going on throughout the ages? Just one little voice.

There are bigger voices who can continue this dialog better than I, and I hope to read them in the days to come. One is After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken, by Kent Annan. The other is The Innocence of God, by Udo Middelmann.

And I am curious to hear what they have to say.


*Romans 8:22
**Revelation 18:13


Quotes from Chapter 5 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

The Final Dare

I am so, so taken by the dare of writing 1,000 gifts.

I am sorely tempted.

It is Chapter 5 that does it to me tonight. Ann is somewhere in the 900's, and I want it. I want the life that can write...

Brown eggs fresh from the henhouse
Pinky skin of newborn pigs
Opening jars of preserves
Earthy aroma of woods

I want to be the woman who looks out over her farm and finds the moments that...

drink the sweet right out of now.

You have no idea how much I want it.

I want it so much that I would pretend I could find it by tracing the same lines through the same dots.

But I already know it is not me. Me, who lives urban, shovels snow off concrete, looks for beauty somewhere in the cracks of the sidewalks and the streetlights iced. Me who traces for eternity in pastels and the dance. I know it is not me. And I can hardly say it, for fear that someone will say, "But it should be you. This is the way."

And now I think that the dare is finally this: to be spiritually beautiful right where I am, in the way He has gifted and wooed me to be.


Quotes from Chapter 5 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

After the Running, the Lullaby

"Hurry and impatience are sure marks of an amateur."

Ann quotes Evelyn Underhill, and I think of my favorite unhurried moments right off... the slow tracing of fingers on a face and arm, the slow lullaby singing to my Eldest just a few nights ago ("Will you sing to me, Mommy?" that 13-year-old asked like a child), the slow mornings and evenings of sitting on my girls' sled and just sipping tea.

I like slow.

I like fast too. I admit a certain thrill to riding through the woods on horseback (oh, that was long, long ago). A thrill to meeting deadlines. The joy of racing around the block (My lullaby-girl likes to dare me, "Run, I'll beat you!" And, long-legged, younger, she always does.)

Suddenly curious, I look up the word deadline. I know what it means, of course. But I want the roots. The formerly-meant meaning.

A boundary around a military prison beyond which a prisoner could not venture without risk of being shot by the guards.

I think about this. When does fast mean death to me, the kind of death Ann hopes to save us from? Is it fast itself that's the problem? Maybe the formerly-meant meaning of the word deadline holds the answer (the questions?)...

Am I a prisoner to my deadlines? Have I surrounded myself with unforgiving guards? Am I myself sometimes the unforgiving guard?

God is the first guard, and He is forgiving. He gave us work, he did. I don't know that he minds fast. But he gave us Sabbath too. Permission to rest. After the running comes the lullaby, the tracing, and tea sipped glory-slow.

Or, like Ann says it, Suds...all color in sun.


Quotes from Chapter 4 of the beautiful book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

Was it Really the Lists?

There is a part of me that feels like a failure reading a whole book about the saving power of gratitude lists. My lists never saved, only fell flat. I wonder now, did I forget the poetry?

Because, reading Ann's lists, I am struck. She says she's writing simple things; she believes she's being grateful by number after sweet (and sometimes hard) number. But, maybe because it is all written down in one place now, I see it within seconds. She is doing more. She is writing poetry, folding beauty into single words, lines, phrases. Mining the moments for images that seer and sing, wonder and woo.

Morning shadows across old floors, she writes. Then, jam piled high on toast. Her words are what begin to pile high for me. If I take out the numbers and just stack the words, the poems appear...

Wind flying cold wild in hair
Grandma's pressure pot still dancing
Old men looking for words just perfect.

I know she experiences this as a kind of thankfulness, this putting down of poetic words. I wonder if it is something more... the beginning of a dance she engaged in with the Spirit...

and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters...

And what did the Spirit of God do but begin spilling words in pure Genesis poetry, the refrain being "it is good"?

Suddenly I do not feel like a list-failure anymore. I make my lists, I do. Lists without numbers. A thousand lines, like Ann? Maybe in time. Poem after poem after poem, naming the world and grief and spirit and dreams.


Quotes from Chapter 3 of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

A Mirage of the Moon

She wakes from nightmares—friend Ann— only to feel her sheets and realize, It was all a dream, a mirage of the moon.

Today I am still dealing with a string of mini-crises— the latest being a flood in the basement (how can this be, when we got trenches dug and a sump put in last year? Well, the rains have nowhere to go, so this year they are welling up from under the house itself, where frozen ground has said, 'there is no room.')

A few minutes ago, before reading Ann's words, I'd been climbing the stairs and thinking of the beauty of this small house, despite the current troubles. I'd been thinking of Lemony Snicket, who made me laugh with his running theme on perspective, in A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Then I opened to these words, It was all a dream, a mirage of the moon, and suddenly I was back on the stairs with Lemony and his perspective, thinking, There is some way in which all the crises we encounter are mirages. Our end is glory.

There are stars, says Ann, when she wakes from the nightmares.

There is glory beyond this moment, I say.

Maybe even a strange kind of glory in this moment— me moving sopping boxes, me being resourceful and finding another sump to use to direct the new water towards the new-last-year sump, me climbing old red oak stairs and opening the book of a friend. And just now, the sun over the river, over snowy trees— a lick of red welcoming the new moon rising.

Perspective. It doesn't take away the pain. But it does sift through for the glory.


Quotes from Chapter Two of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

Writing in the World Together

I open the package and find Ann's words— these words that stole so many hours, so they could become gifts to others.

These are not just the words of a stranger, these hard-wrought words. They are the words of a friend. I know how hard they were to put down, to pull out. And I'm not talking about the effort of craft (which seems so effortless to me when I watch her do her thing). I'm talking about the effort of laying out the heart bare.

It is a strange thing to put our hearts in a book and see that book travel on. It is a sacrifice, this writer's life— if we write true. Because someone is going to say something or even simply ignore us. And a thousand beautiful compliments can be so easily wiped away with one dour response. Likewise, a thousand beautiful compliments can fool us into thinking we are not who we really are.

This is why we must write in the world together. A cord of three strands (or more) is not quickly broken.

I always wished I could have what the "great writers" had. Shaw had L'Engle. Lewis had Tolkien. Just friends, you see, to be there before and after and during the words. To see the heart that went in. To know the heart that is also outside the words.

In some ways, the online community is just that. My L'Engle. My Tolkien. And for today, on the table, my Ann. And so many days, my you.

Writing is not, cannot be, the solitary thing it's made out to be. Maybe this is true of any art, of anywhere we dare to put our hearts.