Robert V. Taylor, Interview #181

Name: Robert V. Taylor

Where you live:
In the spectacular Pacific Northwest where I’m blessed to live in Seattle and on a farm in the high desert of rural Eastern WA. The contrast of the desert and the lushness of Seattle are soul food!

What you do as a vocation or avocation?
I’m the author of A New Way to Be Human: 7 Spiritual Pathways to Becoming Fully Alive. It’s an invitation to a life of compassion and love in which we discover our oneness as we allow the breath of life to flow through us, unstopped and unstoppable. I’m deeply honored by the endorsements it has received from Deepak Chopra, Bernie Siegel, Nora Gallagher, Desmond Tutu, Helene Gayle and a cross section of spiritual, philanthropic, corporate and transformational leaders.

I blog for Huffington Post and am a commentator on the inter-section of social justice, mindful living, well-
being and spirituality.

I’m also a speaker and love the diversity of audiences I speak to from professional associations, colleges,
community organizations, and religious or spiritual groups.

When I’m not on the road I adore cooking and gathering friends, family and strangers around our table!
In each of these areas of my work and life I’m enlivened by my interactions with people and feel privileged
to be part of the journey of so many remarkable people!

Your two favorite books:
The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Your two favorite songs:
Born This Way by Lady Gaga and What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong

Why you are interested in spirituality?
I believe we are all hard wired for compassion, love and goodness – it is the essence of what spiritualty
invites us into. I adore the transformative path that emerges when we are tender with ourselves and
others. Spirituality is like a labyrinth inviting us deeper and deeper into our belovedness as we claim the
unique and ancient truths revealed in the arc of our story and life. Our own story offers a meeting ground
with the Holy and others in which we become awake to the spiritual truth of the oneness we share with
the human family, Creation and the Universe. On the spiritual path you realize that your own well-being
and happiness is bundled together with the happiness and well-being of others. I never cease to be
amazed by new awareness of the delight that the journey reveals as we practice mercy, kindness, justice
and love.

Your favorite quote:
"Everything in the Universe has a rhythm; everything dances" – Maya Angelou

Your favorite web sites:
Huffington Post with its variety of platforms and the On faith blog at the Washington Post

Your hero?
Anyone whose intention is to live a life of generous and unconditional love. And of course the Dalai Lama,
Desmond Tutu and Mary Oliver.

A spiritual lesson you hope to learn?
That the most vexing and offensive people are on a journey also.

A place in the world where you feel spiritually "connected?"
Anywhere near mountains or water. My dog Lucy is always inviting me into the playfulness of life and my
spouse reminds me of the joy of life.

Editor's Note: See more of Robert's work and writing at www.robertvtaylor.com

David McGlynn, Interview #180

Name: David McGlynn 

Where you live: 

Appleton, Wisconsin. About 30 minutes south of Green Bay, Wisconsin. About an hour south of the North Pole (not really).

What you do as a vocation or avocation? 

Besides being a writer, I'm also a professor at Lawrence University,a small liberal-arts college in Appleton. I love it: the students are smart, down to earth, and generous souls. I'm also an avid, devoted, life-long swimmer. Much of A Door in the Ocean is about my love-affair with swimming, and even years after my last big meet, I still swim every morning. In fact, in a few weeks, I'll be swimming from the tip of Wisconsin's Door County Peninsula to Washington Island—a 4 mile stretch of water famously known as Death's Door.

Your two favorite books: 

I read constantly, which means that my favorite book is never fixed. But I started writing A Door in the Ocean (in a very different form, many years ago) after reading Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart. It's an amazing work of nonfiction that I go back to again and again. Another memoir that helped me understand the form and direction of my book is Debra Monroe's On the Outskirts of Normal. Debra's a friend and her work has shown me how to be simultaneously smart and vulnerable, academic and accessible. I recommend her book to everyone I know, and I keep it beside my computer on my desk. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Andre Dubus' story, "A Father's Story." I read it years ago and it completely captivated me. It gave me the courage to write about spiritual matters.

Your two favorite songs: 

Van Morrison's "Caravan" and Ben Harper's "Amen Omen"

Why you are interested in spirituality?: 

There’s a stark division in the American media between how evangelical Christians (a subculture at the heart of both my fiction and nonfiction) are portrayed by so-called “outsiders” and how they portray themselves. Evangelicals are often interested in portraying themselves as enlightened, that they have found the truth and can rest comfortably in the knowledge that they are right. Secular, or otherwise unsympathetic, observers often paint them as crazy or myopic. Neither portrayal, in my view, tells the entire story. I believe that people come to faith in the same ways we come to friendship and marriage and our political affiliations: informed by our experiences, fueled by our passions, driven by complex, contradictory psychologies. I wanted to tell an honest story about why evangelicalism drew me in and why it couldn't keep me, to show both its good and bad sides. I wanted to paint a complex picture of a culture that’s most often drawn (and draws itself) in crayon.

Your favorite quote: 

It's the epigraph to A Door in the Ocean, from Mark Jarman's book of prose poems, Epistles: 

Out of chaos, beyond theory, into a life that peaks and breaks, the wave emerges. The shore where it dies lies ahead and waits, unseen. A life must peak as it rides up the shallow approach, steepen, and break. I want you to think of yourself like that, of your body and soul like that, one flesh traveling to shore, to collapse, all that way to end by darkening the sand and evaporating. Where do you go? You repeat in other waves, repeat and repeat. Each bears a message.Each has a meaning.

Your favorite web sites: 

Slate.com and ReligionDispatches.org

Your hero?: 

My wife. She's a social worker in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at a hospital in the town where we live. She confronts mortality and the limits of human emotion on a daily basis, and she remains a generous, loving, and hilarious person. She's strong in ways ordinary people are not, and in ways most of her friends never see. 

A spiritual lesson you hope to learn? 

I’ve managed to hold onto faith—despite my break with the evangelicals—because I still believe in a grand meaningfulness to human existence, that I am part of something larger than myself. Many people can find such a meaning without faith, without a conception of God, but I cannot. I have spent too much time puzzling out Christianity to suddenly jump to another faith, another system. And religion is a way of expressing what it means to be human. As I write late in the book, I like being part of the broad cloth of humanity. In that way, faith is, for me, like music and literature and art: an ongoing conversation about who we are, and why. The "why" is the ultimate spiritual question, and one I'll likely pursue for the rest of my days. 

A place in the world where you feel spiritually "connected?"

I love old, musty churches with worn-out wooden pews and stained-glass windows. And whenever I get in sight of the ocean, I feel my heart-rate slow a bit, a sense of serenity creep in. The ocean—as the title of my book suggests—is my doorway to the spiritual realm. 

Editor's Note: NPR's Book Review of David's book A Door in the Ocean

Chana Keefer, Interview #179

Name: Chana Keefer

Where you live:  Santa Clarita Valley, Southern California, USA

What you do as a vocation or avocation?
Along with my full-time job of wife and homeschooling mom of four, I am an author. My first novel, THE FALL (Rapha Chronicles #1) gives the story of the fall of Lucifer and creation through the eyes of an angel, Rapha, who was once best friends with Lucifer.

Your two favorite books:
The Bible is more than a book to me so I am excluding it from this short list.  Therefore, my two favorite books would be J .R R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy (forgive me if that’s cheating) & Gene Stratton Porter’s “Girl of the Limberlost,” a beautiful tale of a young woman raised without love who finds meaning and the means to clothe and educate herself through the riches of the Limberlost swamp.  That novel is a naturalist's dream.

Your two favorite songs:
You’ll laugh.  I’ve told my family if ever I was in a coma, they should play Michael Jackson’s “Shake Your Body.”  If there was the slightest trace of life in me I’d have to move ☺.  Wow, it’s hard to limit this to just one more since music ministers so deeply to me in all my moods.  Okay, since you force me, I’ll choose Sting’s haunting tribute to his father, “Ghost Story.”  It contains some of the most gorgeous lyrics ever written.  “What is the force that binds the stars?  I wore this mask to hide my scars.  What is the power that pulls the tide?  Never could find a place to hide.  What moves the earth around the sun?  What could I do but run and run and run… afraid to love afraid to fail… a mast without a sail.”  (heavy sigh)

Why you are interested in spirituality?
There is a wonderful C.S. Lewis quote:  “You do not have a soul, you are a soul.  You have a body.” To ignore my spirituality would be to ignore what will last for eternity.  Besides, I have found my deepest meaning and fulfillment through the spiritual pursuit of prayer, communion with my Father God, and this gives direction and purpose to every other pursuit and relationship.

Your favorite quote:  
Hmmm.  I think I gave this answer above.

Your favorite web sites:
The Pioneer Woman, The World of Steve Quayle, Unleashed Beauty, One Roof Africa, 24/7 Prayer—in whatever order the current mood dictates.

Your hero?
Jesus, all the way.  Even though He is the Son of God, He took on the role of a servant and obeyed all the way to the cross.  Therefore He fulfilled God’s highest calling for His life and made a way for ALL to return to Father God.  My deepest desire is to fulfill God’s highest calling for my life and Jesus is the best example there is.  There are a couple normal human examples, though, who show that mere mortals can make a huge difference in eternity—Mother Teresa and Kemper Crabb (I am working on the biography of the latter—he worked alongside Mother T. and has built hundreds of churches and orphanages, even hospitals, in Africa and India.)

A spiritual lesson you hope to learn?  
I hope to learn that the spiritual really does trump the physical realm.  It’s easy enough to say I believe in God’s power and that I know Christ’s life, death and resurrection give me authority over darkness, but dang, the darkness can sure be overwhelming.  Please God, give me faith!

A place in the world where you feel spiritually "connected?"
Anywhere there is heartfelt worship music and people singing praise is wonderful, but my favorite place to “be still and know He is God” is an old barn that was next to my parent’s property when I was growing up.  That barn became my quiet retreat and a sort of weather-beaten cathedral for me.  Even nowadays, just to close my eyes and see that quiet, dusty, bleached wood with the huge openings on the top level that framed views of the East and West horizons, ah! My heart slows, the daily grind fades away and I breathe in peace. 

Kaya Oakes, Interview #178

Name: Kaya Oakes

Where you live: Oakland, California

What you do as a vocation or avocation?
I’m a writer, and I am lucky enough to teach writing for a living. My most recent book, Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church, is a memoir about my life as a progressive, feminist Catholic, and the many, many other progressive Catholics I’ve been lucky to meet, read about, and learn from.

Your two favorite books:
Two? Yikes. I’m surrounded by books day and night, so it’s really hard to narrow down. Since this is a spiritual blog let’s do the Gospel of Luke and Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is.

Your two favorite songs: 
Two? Yikes again; not only am I married to a musician but I’m a musician too. Again, since we’re going spiritual, I vote for Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater, which I just heard for the first time (amazing; check out the Andreas Scholl version), and Leonard Cohen’s The Window, which quotes from the great work of Christian mysticism The Cloud of Unknowing.

Why you are interested in spirituality? 
Because I can’t help it. Like a lot of Gen X people I lived in denial of my interest in spirituality and religion for a long time; it was seen by my peers as unfashionable, regressive, and oftentimes straight up dumb. But maturity lead me to recognize the fact that I not only have a soul, I have a thirsty soul.

Your favorite quote:
Right now? “All things counter, original, spare, strange/ Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)/ With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers forth whose beauty is past change.” That’s the great Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Your favorite web sites: 
I’m a huge news junkie so I’m a New York Times addict in addition to reading lots of news feeds and keeping up with stuff via Twitter and Facebook. For Catholic news the National Catholic Reporter is my favorite. For spiritual sites, I’m a big fan of Killing the Buddha, Sacred Space, Occupy Catholics, and a couple of sites I recently discovered: Anarchist Reverend and The Jesuit Post.

Your hero?
A brown skinned feminist rabbi who practiced radical inclusion. You may have heard about him.

A spiritual lesson you hope to learn? How to keep my mouth shut!

A place in the world where you feel spiritually "connected?"
The women’s homeless shelter where I volunteer; the living rooms of the women in my contemplation group; my sofa; Lake Merritt in Oakland; the beaches in Gualala and Point Reyes, California; and in the Basilica of Saint Francis, in Assisi, Italy.

Melanie Rigney, Interview #177

Name: Melanie Rigney

Where you live: Arlington, VA

What you do as a vocation or avocation?
By day, I work in marketing for the federal government; at night and on the weekends, I write, primarily in the Catholic space for Living Faith and Your Daily Tripod. I’m also the co-author of When They Come Home: Ways to Welcome Returning Catholics (23rd Publications), a book for parish leaders, and am working on a sequel for people who have been away from Catholicism.

Your two favorite books: 
In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister and The Spiritual Life by Evelyn Underhill in the spiritual realm; secular, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner and A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

Your two favorite songs: 
Mysterious Ways by U2; The Servant Song.

Why you are interested in spirituality? 
I was away from the Catholic Church and a relationship with God for most of my adult life, from shortly before I turned 16 until I was 49. I’ve tried life without a lot of God and faith community, and it wasn’t miserable, but it’s so much easier when you have both. The value of faith in some form cannot be overestimated in our lives. Allowing a higher power to love us and move within us and change us can’t be beat.

Your favorite quote: 
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” from Julian of Norwich.

Your favorite web sites: 
I’m at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (www.usccb.org) Web site daily, as well as www.yourdailytripod.blogspot.com, for which I’m a columnist. Also enjoy www.sacredspace.ie.

Your hero? 
My great-grandmother Johanna Swierbut Organist. She left Poland when she was 22 with little command of the English language and became a domestic in an iron mining/lumbering town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Within two years of her arrival, she had married my great-grandfather, gave birth to my grandmother, and with her husband had bought a farm about 12 miles from the town where she’d been working. She didn’t see any of her Polish family for nearly 20 years after she left, and never saw her parents again. She was feisty and hard working and didn’t take a lot of time to feel sorry for herself when things went wrong. I think about her when I feel overwhelmed or challenged.

A spiritual lesson you hope to learn? That God loves us just the way we are, flaws and all.

A place in the world where you feel spiritually "connected?"
The Oahe Dam near Pierre, South Dakota. I’m a South Dakota native and lived in the Pierre area for a couple years. You drive up some lonely roads, filled with beautiful bluffs, and come upon the winding Missouri River. It’s a peaceful place; sometimes, the only noises you’ll hear for an hour or more are the chirping of the birds and the sound of the turbine. It’s a moving example of how we as people at times harness nature… and yet, at the end of the day, we can’t control it or permanently change it.

Leslie Leyland Fields, Interview #176

Name:  Leslie Leyland Fields

Where you live: Kodiak Island, Alaska

What you do as vocation or avocation: 
 I’m the author of seven books; a columnist and contributor to Christianity Today magazine; a speaker; a mother of six; and I work in commercial salmon fishing.

Two favorite books:  Frederick Buechner’s novel Godric and Eugene Peterson’s five-book series on spiritual theology: Tell it Slant, Eat This Book, Christ Plays in a Thousand Places, The Jesus Way, Practice Resurrection

Two favorite songs:
Joan Baez singing The Byrds “Turn, Turn, Turn” [To everything there is a season...]
and  Bach’s Double Violin concerto (I know. No lyrics to this “song”---yet!)

Why are you interested in spirituality?
For the same reason I am intensely interested in science and beauty and the intricate workings of all this world. I see the presence of spirit in all things, and know that everything good has somehow come from God. If I am to begin to understand anything of human existence, I must pursue the visible and invisible. If I am to begin to understand anything of God, I must pursue the visible and invisible. When we divide and dissect the world, separating spirit from body and spirit from matter, we do violence to what is real. Wholeness is possible; healing and reconciliation between people, between people and God, between people and the earth---all this is possible, at least in part.

Favorite quote:
He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
                             ---Aeschylus (from Agamemnon)

Favorite websites:
http://www.utne.com/ (The Utne Reader)
www.christianitytoday.com
www.rottentomatoes.com
And, my new blog, Far a-Field Notes, because I’m having so much fun with it

Your heroes?  
 My brother Todd, William Wilberforce, Flannery O’Connor.

A Spiritual lesson you hope to learn:
I hope to see God’s radiance and goodness in all things and in all people, and to write about it in the most beautiful language I can find. This is not easy for me—either the seeing or the writing! I have a  naturally critical spirit that needs to be humbled and poisoned—by love and by the truth. Here is the truth: so much mercy has been shown to me, I am a debtor to all.

A Place I feel spiritually connected: 
Among the lovely sinners and saints in my new church and out at our fish camp, Harvester Island, a small one-mountain island off Kodiak Island, inhabited by just my family and I.  There we are intensely alone, together, among ocean, whales, falcons, mountains, storms, sea lions; among grandeur and loneliness I sometimes glance the visage of God.

Editor's Note: Leslie is author of numerous books, she's also a speaker, a professional editor, and a columnist for Christianity Today. You can see her memoir Surviving the Island of Grace: Life on the Edge of Wild America here.

Her sites are: www.leslieleylandfields.com and www.leslieleylandfields.blogspot.com

Katherine Willis Pershey, Interview #175

Name: Katherine Willis Pershey

Where you live: Western Springs, Illinois

What you do as a vocation or avocation? 
I’m the associate minister of First Congregational Church of Western Springs and a writer. I just published my first book, Any Day a Beautiful Change: A Story of Faith and Family.

Your two favorite books: 
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Sensual Orthodoxy by Debbie Blue.

Your two favorite songs: 
“Beautiful Change” by The Innocence Mission and “Jesus in New Orleans” by Over the Rhine.

Why you are interested in spirituality? 
The biblical witness that we “live and move and have our being” in God resonates with me. In the same way that I try to pay attention to my daughters’ growth and the turning of the seasons, I also long to pay attention to this God who is love and home and radical presence.

Your favorite quote:
“Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

Your favorite web sites: 
GoodReads (GoodReads.com) and The Young Clergy Women Project  (www.youngclergywomen.org).

Your hero?: 
I haven’t really thought of her as a hero, but I’ll say Fidelia Gillette, who was one of the first women ordained to serve as a minister. She’s the inspiration for Fidelia’s Sisters, the publication of The Young Clergy Women Project. I am deeply grateful to all the women who had the courage and vision to hear and respond to God’s call. I have it incredibly easy as an ordained female minister, but this has not always been the case.  

A spiritual lesson you hope to learn? 
How to pray. I’m a beginner, always a beginner, when it comes to prayer.

A place in the world where you feel spiritually "connected?" 
I have felt spiritually connected in the sanctuaries of the congregations I’ve served as a minister. There’s no place I’d rather be on a Sunday morning but in church, worshipping God with my community of faith.