Anne Lamott and Annie Dillard have both encouraged me (not personally, of course, but through their books) that if I want to practice writing, one of the best places to start is with what I know best, my own story. I'm making some of the first chapters available in this way because I do want to share what I'm writing, but the ephemeral nature of a blog is about the level of permanence this first draft deserves.

As we begin, I'll share a couple of quotes from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life that express so well how I'm feeling about this enterprise.

“Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.

“The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality…Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already – worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones…Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?” (p. 11,12)

“Much has been written about the life of the mind. I find the phrase itself markedly dreamy. The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living. It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author’s childhood. A writer’s childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.” (p. 44)

Why Write?

No one else can tell this story. There are several reasons for that. The most obvious is that I am the only person who lived the story as I saw and felt it. But there are other factors that compel me to tell it. Neither of my parents is still living, but even when they were alive, ours was not a family that told many family stories. We didn’t hear much about our parents’ childhood, and as we grew older, we didn’t hear much about our own childhoods. In my twenties, or maybe thirties, I realized what a void I felt and I bought a “grandmother” book and gave it to my mom one Christmas. I asked her please to fill it with her memories of our family. It was all laid out with questions and brief, doable doses of information requested, but she still refused, saying, “I don’t like to remember the past, I like to look forward.”

Another reason this story is mine to tell is that my brother Chip is seven years older, was a compliant child (I was not), and is a male person (I am not), and therefore experienced our family very differently than I did. My parents were in a very different place, literally and emotionally, when he was little (Europe) and when I was little (West Texas and Arkansas). His memories sometimes coincide with mine, when I ask directly and he’s feeling verbal, but most of the time he follows the family tradition and does not talk much about the past.

My cousins and I grew up in such different parts of the country, they in Nashville, Tennessee and I mostly in Los Angeles, so although we share all the same relatives, we did not have the same relationships with them or memories of them. My cousin Bonnie Kay is a genealogist and archivist by inclination, and I’m grateful that she shares the products of her labors with me, but her history does not feel like mine.

My childhood was largely spent with two sisters who became my sisters as well. The one I was closest to, Marilyn, has been dead now for three years. Her sister Sara, though thirteen days younger than me, born in the same Texas hospital and still my friend, is not a journal keeper or diarist, though she did write articles and speeches quite often in her work as a marriage and family counselor. (She became a full-time fundraiser last year, and I doubt she has any time to write at all these days.) So, although Sara and Marilyn and I shared fifteen of my first twenty years on earth, I am the only one of us three that will tell that part of the story.

And it’s still more than that. I have slowly learned that no one else feels or sees or hears or remembers even one day of this life in the same way as another person does. Each of us has our own unique, passionate and incomplete take on life as we lived it. We’ve all missed events, mistaken comments, avoided facing realities, misunderstood meanings, and misremembered facts as we have created our own memories. They are nevertheless important because they are ours. Because they shaped us. Because they motivated us to act, or refrain from acting, in a million choices down the days. And because, ultimately, they are what we carry with us when we die. It is my conviction that the relationships we have formed and nourished throughout our lives will await us in the next world, the place we call Heaven. Relationships are built upon shared memories. I want to remember it all, as best I can, for my own sake. And if anybody else has the patience to read these words, and if they can benefit anyone in any way, I’ll be glad of it.

From Birth to School

I am lying on an Army cot, the kind made of canvas that folded up, and seeing a brown paper barrel as tall as the cot next to me, where my toys were kept. This is the first place I can remember. I don’t think that was my room. We must have been in the process of moving from Lubbock, Texas, where I was born, to Searcy, Arkansas, where I was three and four years old. I’ve heard a lot about Lubbock, about dusty West Texas, the heat, the sand storms, the flatness, the dearth of education and culture.

I met a woman in Nashville many years later named Mrs. Mann. She told me, “I drove with your mother to a baby shower in Lubbock when she was pregnant with you and I was pregnant with my daughter, Marita. So you two have known each other since before birth!” That’s one of two stories I know about my mother’s pregnancy with me. The other was told when I asked my mother if she and Daddy ever prayed out loud together, other than at meal time. She answered, “Just once. They were wheeling me into the delivery room and he prayed out loud for me then.” Later on I learned that two years before my birth, my mother had delivered a still-born boy, with the cord wrapped around his neck. They were both probably very frightened that another devastating disappointment could occur at my birth.

I’ve gone back to dusty West Texas just once, for the wedding of Nita Bovarie and Russ DiNapoli. They were students with me in the summer of 1972 in Heidelberg, Germany. They fell in love and decided to be married in Lubbock, her home town, at her parents’ church where I too was on the “Cradle Roll” as an infant. (I still have the certificate.) It was the Broadway Church of Christ, where Norvel Young, my second father, was the preacher while my parents were missionaries in Germany. That church was the chief financial support for the missionary group that followed Otis Gatewood to Germany in 1947.

When my parents’ five years in Germany were complete, and they didn’t know what to do next, Brother Paul Sherrod, an elder at the Broadway church, offered my dad a job in his hardware store in Lubbock. That’s how I came to be born there in 1953 (in Lubbock, not in the hardware store). There’s a photograph of me as a baby almost five months old, sitting in my brother’s lap in the hardware store window in front of a Christmas tree and abundant toys. (One of my dad’s jobs there was window dressing.) I remember a tale about my dad’s kneeling in the hardware store and getting a tack stuck in his knee. I’ve been picking up tacks and pins and discarded staples off floors ever since.

At any rate, that hot summer of ‘74 in Lubbock when we witnessed the marriage of Russ and Nita, we spent most of our time in the cool hotel bar, and I had long talks with Russ (a New York actor). He was so put off by the rigid, dull, judgmental, half-dead existence he had thus far witnessed among churchified people. I talked about living in the Spirit and how being a Christian actually makes life the most vibrant it can be. At their wedding I sang (a cappella, because it’s still a Church of Christ) the Beatles’ “In My Life,” which at the age of twenty already meant much to me.

Back to Texas in the ‘Fifties. I have a memory of being in a car with a young woman babysitter, and seeing a tornado twisting towards us. She drove us to a shelter, and there was no tornado damage afterward that I remember. I am not sure if that memory came from Lubbock or Searcy years, because tornadoes were certainly possible in both places.

I don’t recall it, but I do know of another significant event that happened in Lubbock. The story goes that I was on the kitchen counter when the phone rang and my mom turned to answer it. I fell off the counter and broke my collar bone and my leg. I’ve seen a photograph of me trying to ride a tricycle with a huge cast on my leg, but have no remembrance of that. Another sense memory I have could either be Lubbock or Searcy. I wore a thin, synthetic little dress that didn’t close in the back, but just tied at the neck. It was off white with tiny pink flowers, and had little cap sleeves barely there. I remember the feeling of wearing that dress, the texture of the material, and I remember getting old enough to worry about the back not closing. Modesty set in early with me.

Then came Searcy, Arkansas and more memories pile up. In Searcy, my dad worked for Brother George Benson, the president of Harding College, as his assistant. Many years later I read an article in The New Yorker by William F. Buckley describing his dealings with Benson and other ultra-conservatives who served on the board of a foundation which distributed the wealth of another deceased arch-conservative. I was amazed that my dad had apprenticed with such a character. In his own words, my dad reported that he asked that the position be created because he “wanted to see how Brother Benson operated.”

I have no recollection of how it felt to be adorable, but I met a lady in Nashville many years later who told me that I was. Marilyn Williams was in college at Harding while we lived there, and she worked part time as my dad’s secretary. She said that my mother would bring me to my dad’s office sometimes in the afternoon, and she would have me all dressed up to show off for him. When I hear about that, it sounds like something that happened to another child. Somehow that reality was stripped away by later feelings. I would have been three or four.

It was in Searcy that I had my first experience with extreme fear. My mother had a degree from Peabody College as a librarian, and she decided to go back to work at Harding College, where my dad worked. They hired a black lady to keep me, but I didn’t understand (or wasn’t told) what was happening. On that first morning that Mommy left me, I remember being frightened of the black lady, because she was the first black person I had ever seen. Then I realized that my mother was leaving and I couldn’t go with her. I went berserk, screaming and kicking against a closed door (I guess it was my bedroom?) while this was happening.

I feel so sorry for that lovely woman now, and I have a very sweet memory of her to balance the traumatic one. She and I were walking down a sidewalk, holding hands. I think we had been to a park. It was a hot day, and she had the courage to walk up to the front porch of a white person’s house and knock on the door. She said, “M’am, this child is thirsty. Could you give her some water?” She did not ask for any water for herself. (She probably knew that she would be denied.) I felt a warm rush of tenderness, because she cared about me and was trying to take good care of me. Could her name be Annie? I think it might have been.

Meet my parents, James Carlyn Moore, Jr. and Dorothy Long Whitesell Moore, and my brother Chip (James Carlyn Moore III), and me, Gwendolyn Moore. I have no middle name. Apparently when I was born, my father said, "Gwendolyn Moore - that's enough."

While we lived in Searcy, Norvel Young and his family came through town on their way to California. My only memory of the visit is an unhappy one. I had been enrolled in the Harding Academy nursery school (where I spent most of two years), and at school I had made a little cart with wheels out of cardboard. I had brought it home, and I remember being in the top bunk of a bunk bed and having the Young girls brought in my room for me to tell them goodbye. Sara had my cardboard cart! I wanted it back! My mom made me give it to her, since she was company and she wanted it. I felt betrayed and angry about that. It was mine, all the more because I made it! How could somebody else’s desires be more important than mine?

There’s a story I heard more than once and I think it may have happened on this visit. Apparently my dad was babysitting the kids one night. Emily, the oldest, called out from the bedroom, “Mr. Moore, I need to get a glass of water.” That was okay with him. Then it was “Mr. Moore, I need to go to the bathroom.” She got permission. But then a bit later, there was another stirring, and my dad found Emily in the bathroom again. “What are you doing this time?” he asked. “Mr. Moore, I have to wash out my slip to wear tomorrow.” That tells you a lot about little Emily Young.

In Searcy, we lived in a house that had windows on both sides of one corner. In that corner, my mother set up a table and hung shelves in the window, and filled them full of African violets. It was the first time our family had any extra money, and her mother had taught her to love gardening, so she went a little crazy. I think I heard that she accumulated at least fifty plants. She took such care not to get water on the leaves. Once in Searcy it rained for forty days and forty nights, and the grown-ups talked about Noah and the Flood. I watched the rain filling up the gray sky outside the African violets windows day after day.

There were summer days so hot that the grass burned my bare feet. I ran to get from place to place, the grass burned so hot. We lived on a street that ended in the woods, and at Easter our folks got Chip and me a baby duck. A neighbor boy told me he had taken the duck down to a snake pit in the woods and it had been eaten up by the snakes. Who knows if that really happened, but it was my first experience with a bully.

Another day, I was playing on a swing set in a neighbor’s yard, and suddenly the sky begin to darken and there was thunder and lightning. The loud crack startled me so that I hit my chin on the cross-bar of the swing set and bit through part of my tongue. I remember running home bleeding and being so scared by what I had done.

Our family was never quick to embrace new technology, and we were not the first on our block to buy a television. My brother would go to a neighbors’ house to watch TV, but it was in Searcy that I remember we bought our first set. My dad would sit and I would stand between his legs, and we would conduct together the Lawrence Welk orchestra, the Champagne Music Makers.

Chip and I watched the Howdy-Doody show, and we actually had a little plastic Howdy-Doody doll the size of my hand whose mouth moved when you pushed on a little plastic lever in back of his head. I’m not sure what age I was when I fell in love with the Mickey Mouse Club and just had to have those white cowgirl boots with the tassles, so I could participate in Roundup Day. (Was it Tuesdays? They had a regular schedule where special programs landed on the same day every week.) I would stand in front of the TV and imitate the dance the girls did in their white boots.

I had a doll named Tiny Tears. You would feed her real water in a bottle, and it would come out her eyes as tears. I loved that doll. We were at some big event like a church potluck or a college program at Harding, and I accidentally left that doll behind. I must have put up a big fuss, because we drove back to look for it, couldn’t find it, and I somehow convinced my folks that I would not be consoled until they bought me another Tiny Tears just like her.

Another physical memory was holding both my mom’s and dad’s hands and being swung between them down some big church steps. I don’t know which church had those big, long steps, so I can’t be sure what age I was or which city I was in. I felt secure and happy when I was between them at church, or being swung like that. It was when my mom and I were alone that I started to be miserable.

In the Searcy house, I was three or four years old. I was sitting in our green chair with the ottoman, curled up and crying. My mom was just across the room talking cheerfully on the phone, and then she spoke kindly to our fluffy white dog, Snowball. I said, “Momma, how come you can talk so nice to other people and to Snowball, but you can’t talk nice to me?” This feeling of not being safe with her, and not being treated kindly by her, characterized our relationship until she died at 82. What a sad, difficult and mutually painful relationship we had.

In Searcy, we had several animals. Tweety-Bird was a yellow parakeet who lived in a cage in the bathroom. (Or do I remember the cage in the bathroom because it was being cleaned? I’m not sure.) We had the big white dog named Snowball. We had the ill-fated Easter duck for awhile. Most special of all, though, was that my dad decided to buy a horse. We boarded her in someone’s stable further out in the country. Her name was Big Red, and I must have ridden on her, but that part I don’t recall.

What I do remember was sitting on her back one day in her stall. Another horse was able to nibble at her tail from the next stall, and she got irritated and bucked. I flew off and landed in her feed trough, hitting my arm on the side. The doctor said I had a “green twig fracture” which he explained meant the bone did not break but fractured when it bent on the edge of the feed trough. So I’m only four years old and have already broken two appendages and a broken collar bone. Before we left Searcy, Big Red had a foal, and it broke my heart to say goodbye to them when Daddy told us we were leaving for California.

We packed the car, sold Big Red and her colt, gave away Tweety-Bird, but took Snowball with us. He sat on the floorboards under my feet. I remember that car, a dark green Chevy with running boards. I was still little enough to sit on the pull-down armrest, and I called it “my seat”. So we headed out on the long drive to California, across the desert, and at one point we stopped for gas. Gathering us back to the car, my dad called out to Snowball who had wandered across the highway. Obediently, he started back toward us and was hit by an eighteen-wheeler.

It was my first experience with death (The duck doesn’t count – we hadn’t bonded.), and I remember the shocked feeling that Snowball was no longer with us. The floorboards kept feeling so empty without him under my feet. I know my dad must have been terribly upset by what had happened, but all I remember feeling was the shocked numbness. I didn’t grieve by crying or being angry or talking about the loss. This was my pattern for many years afterward.

We went to Carlsbad Caverns on our way, and I can still feel the damp cold and the majestic hugeness of the cave system. I was scared when they turned out the lights and everything was blacker than I had ever felt. I think that’s all I know about the trip until we started to approach Los Angeles. It was night, and my dad woke Chip and me up to look at a new sight. It was a river of red lights going one way and white lights coming the other. He said, “You won’t see this anywhere else, children. This is called a freeway, and it’s only here in California that you can see this kind of sight for miles and miles.”

The latest post from Brene Brown

The biggest risk I ever took created a space filled up with disappointments. The cracks in my foundation, the fissures in my universe Meant the breaking of my chains… but How could I see that then? What I knew then was this: The most tender-hearted man I’d ever met was using me to reject all womanhood The most world-renowned spiritual figure I’d ever known was asking me to follow her into crazy The most evolved and creative person I’d ever lived with was treating me like a child. The silver pressure cooker that is Jerusalem exploded all the skins off my beliefs like lima beans What I know now is that I was being born The umbilical cord that connected me to that which had given me nourishment had to be cut or I would die The silver lining in that cloud turned inside out my desperate need and what I once controlled was opened up by possibility. The mourning doves have been released and their wings beat the sky with joyous freedom. © 2013 Gwen Moore

As I've watched Occupy Wall Street unfold, I've been reminded of William Stringfellow's My People Is the Enemy (1964). He called on Christians to take a moral, ethical, prophetic stand against the machine of corporate America. That's the way he chose to live, and that's the way Jim Wallis has chosen to live. I'm grateful that I lived to see this, and pray that the young people whose hearts have been stirred to activism will live ethically and not lose heart.
I couldn't have said it better, and I began reading what Jim Wallis had to say back in the 'Seventies. So I quote:

An Open Letter to the Occupiers from a Veteran Troublemaker
by Jim Wallis
10-13-2011 10:18 am
You have awakened the sleeping giant, too long dormant, but ever present, deep in the American democratic spirit. You have given voice and space to the unspoken feelings of countless others about something that has gone terribly wrong in our society. And you have sparked a flame from the embers of both frustration and hope that have been building, steadily, in the hearts of so many of us for quite some time.
Throughout history, often it has been left to the youth of a society to do that, and you boldly have stepped into the role of the emerging generation, which sometimes means saying and doing what others only think. You have articulated, loudly and clearly, the internal monologue of a nation.
Some of you have told me that you expected only to foment a short-lived protest and that you were as surprised by this “movement” as anyone else. Try to listen and learn from those whose feelings and participation you are evoking by encouraging more reflection than certainty.
While there are some among us who may misunderstand your motives and message, know that you are an inspiration to many more.
One of you told me in New York City last week, “This is not a protest, but a think tank.” Another of your compatriots wanted me to understand that you are trying to build something in Liberty Square that you aspire to create for our global village — a more cooperative society.
Most telling to me was the answer to the first question I asked of the first person I talked to at the Wall Street demonstrations. I inquired of one of the non-leaders who helped lead the first days of Occupation as to what most drew him to get involved in the demonstration and he replied, “I want to have children someday, and this is becoming a world not good for children.”
My 13- and 8-year-old boys came to mind when I heard his answer, and I felt thankful. It is precisely those deepest, most authentic feelings and motivations that should preoccupy you, rather than how best to form and communicate superficial political rhetoric.
You are raising very basic questions about an economy that has become increasingly unfair, unstable, unsustainable, and unhappy for a growing number of people. Those same questions are being asked by many others at the bottom, the middle, and even some at the top of the economic pecking order.
There are ethics to be named here, and the transition from the pseudo-ethic of endless growth to the moral ethics of sustainability is a conversation occurring even now in our nation’s business schools (if, perhaps, secreted inside the official curriculum).
Keep pressing those values questions because they will move people more than a set of demands or policy suggestions. Those can and must come later.
And try not to demonize those you view as opponents, as good people can get trapped in bad systems and we’ve seen a lot of that. Still, you are right for saying that we all must be held accountable — both systems and the individuals within them. It is imperative that we hear that message right now.
The new safe spaces you have created to ask fundamental questions, now in hundreds of locations around the country and the world, are helping to carve out fresh societal space to examine ourselves — who we are, what we value most, and where we want to go from here.
Instead of simply attacking the establishment “economists,” you can become the citizen economists, like the young economics major I met at the Wall Street occupation who discussed with me new approaches for society’s investment and innovation. We desperately need new vision like hers to come up with alternative ways of performing essential functions.
Keep asking what a just economy should look like and who it should be for. They are noble questions. But you’d do well to avoid Utopian dreaming about things that will never happen. Look instead at how we could do things differently, more responsibly, more equitably, and yes, more democratically.
Don’t be afraid to get practical and specific about how we can and must do things better than we have in recent years. One of our best moral economists, Amartya Sen, says that “being against the market is like being against conversation. It’s a form of exchange.” You have begun such a conversation about what markets could and should be. Keep talking.
Even in forums where business and political leaders meet, they too are asking those questions and using terms like “a moral economy” as a way to interrogate our present and failed practices. I’ve been in such a gathering this week — just days apart from visiting yours — where the participants slept on featherbedding in five star hotels rather than in pup tents on the sidewalk. And yet, surprisingly, they were asking many of the same questions you are.
Keep driving both the moral and practical questions about the economics of our local and global households, for that is what the discipline was supposed to be about in the first place.
I know you believe that the leadership on Wall Street, and Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues have all failed you. Indeed, they have failed us all. But while you feel betrayed by both our business and political leaders, don’t give up on leadership per se.
We need innovative leadership now more than ever. And you are providing some of it.
Think of stewards rather than masters of the universe as the model for leadership.
And remember, non-violence is not just a critical tactic but a necessary commitment to moral and civil discourse that can awaken the best in all of us. There is much to be angry about, but channeling that energy into creative, non-violent action is the only way to prevent dangerous cynicism and nihilism that also can be a human response to the injustice and marginalization many people now feel.
The anarchism of anger has never produced the change that the discipline and constructive program of non-violent movements has done again and again.
I remember what it feels like to see your movement as a lead story on the evening news every night, and the adrenaline rush that being able to muster 10,000 people in two hours time to march in protest against injustice and inhumanity can bring. I was in your shoes 40 years ago as a student leading demonstrations against the Vietnam War, racism, and nuclear proliferation.
I would advise you to cultivate humility more than overconfidence or self indulgence. This really is not about you. It’s about the marginalized masses, the signs of the times, and the profound yearning for lasting change. Take that larger narrative more seriously than you take yourselves.
Finally, do not let go of your hope. Popular movements are the only force that truly brings about change in society. The established order is never as secure and impervious to change as those who preside over it believe it to be.
Remember that re-action is never as powerful as re-construction. And whatever you may think of organized religion, please keep in mind that change requires spiritual as well as political resources, and that invariably any new economy will be accompanied by a new (or very old) spirituality.
So I will say, may God bless you and keep you.
May God be gracious to you and give you -– and all of us — peace.

http://blog.sojo.net/2011/10/13/an-open-letter-to-the-occupiers-from-a-veteran-troublemaker/

I haven't posted for quite awhile, one reason being that I re-entered Divinity School after a thirty-three year hiatus. I did a lot a things new to me in taking just one course. I had never been in a study group before, so I invited a few folks and we had a wonderful time helping each other study and getting to know a bit about what brought each one to this adventure, each a non-traditional student returning to school after much life experience. I had never been in a discussion group before, and one feature of that experience was writing six brief papers, one prior to each discussion. One of those appears below - it's my favorite because I let myself have a bit more than average fun with it.

Grace Abounding

“Hi, I’m Gwen. I’m a recovering Pelagian…” What an opener for a 12-step meeting! Many times I have remembered a sermon from my youth. I knew then that it was misguided but I had no theological label for the belief system behind it. A much-beloved Bible professor from my college, also the minister at my parents’ church, did a series on the Beatitudes. He focused on each one in turn and admonished the congregation to “try harder” to demonstrate those qualities that Jesus called “blessed”. I knew even at that age I could never achieve blessedness by my own efforts. I had been trying, and failing, to do better ever since I was five. And I had begun to hear rumblings of a different way of life, a life dependent upon and empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit. I sensed it was real, and I wanted it.

I never knew until today that I grew up Pelagian. I did know that I have long struggled against a tendency within myself to think will power is the key to success in the spiritual and well as the natural life. I saw in scripture, particularly in Romans and Galatians, that such self-reliance was counter to the message of the gospel. It has required a life-long series wrestling matches for me to relinquish my imagined strength and determination to achieve spiritual goals by my own efforts.

Along the path to recovery I have fallen into each of the pits which Augustine warns await us if we learn the moral law without receiving assistance from God to perform it. Pit 1: I thought that revelation and enlightenment and insight were going to change my behavior. Pit 2: I spent much too long a time under the condemnation of the Law, and then reacted by “presumptuously endeavor[ing] to accomplish [my] justification by means of free will as if by [my] own resources.” Pit 3: I was most definitely “puffed up” by knowledge, spending more than a decade in a church so characterized by religious striving that we were proud of our emphasis on humility.

I resonate with Augustine’s assertion that “the man…who has learned what ought to be done, but does it not, has not as yet been ‘taught of God’ according to grace, but only according to the law, not according to the spirit, but only according to the letter. Although there are many who appear to do what the law commands…” That was Pit 4. It was my experience and that of many in my Pelagian church that within the strictures of that setting we could perform according to the higher standard to which we had aspired, but outside it we found our old addictions and attitudes rushing back to prominence. Indeed, “That love…which is a virtue comes to us from God, not from ourselves.”

Once the veil of Pelagian self-reliance has been dissolved, one can clearly see that all one’s own efforts lead to, at best, temporary and shallow results. I bear witness to Augustine’s assertion that “it is not by law and teaching uttering their lessons from the outside, but by a secret, wonderful, and ineffable power operating within, that God works in people’s hearts not only revelations of the truth, but also good dispositions of the will.” To rely on God’s work, God’s grace, God’s sufficiency is to accept my role in our relationship as His creature. He initiated the relationship (I Jn. 4:19) and His love and grace must sustain it. As the old Sunday school song taught us, “They are weak but He is strong.”

When I read Pelagius for the first time today, I was reminded of Paul’s rhetorical question in Romans 6:1, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” That’s just the kind of question Pelagius would be likely to ask. Pelagius’ concern for the bolstering of the human will reminds me of the modern concept of “learned helplessness”. He’s afraid all this talk of grace will be enervating and lead to spiritual sloth, while also reflecting badly on God Who, as the source of our competency and free will, could be blamed for our failures as well as our successes. Pelagius wants to empower people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Augustine would counter, with Paul, that “God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work” (2 Cor. 9:8).

Quotes are from Aurelius Augustine, On the Grace of Christ

2009 Inventory

Regular meetings I cherished:
Book Club (monthly)
Artists’ Way (co-leading a group bi-weekly with Carol Pigg)
ACA Book Study (weekly; http://www.adultchildren.org/)
Yoga with Emily Lange Epstein (12 weeks)

Concerts/Events I enjoyed:
The Book of Revelation (read aloud with sfx & music at Belmont Church)
Yale Whiffenpoofs (University School)
Tim Keller (Christ Presbyterian)
St. Olaf Choir (War Memorial)
One Night>One Voice (Women of Darfur) (Vanderbilt Divinity School)
Amy Courts Koopman (French Quarter)
Tokens Shows (Lipscomb)
Madeleine Albright (Vanderbilt)
Natan Sharansky (Vanderbilt)
Carol Pigg’s 60^th Birthday Gala
Shana Kohnstamm Art Show (Twist Gallery)
Women in the Round (Bluebird Café)
Nashville Film Festival (especially two shows with Chris & Jan Harris: “Thanks, kids!”)
Sojourners Mobilization to End Poverty (Washington, DC)
A.-J. Levine (Blakemore United Methodist; Christ Church Cathedral)
Christian Scholars Conference, where I heard authors Barbara Brown Taylor, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Hughes and Shaun Casey, among many others. (Lipscomb)
Diana Krall (Schermerhorn) (Note to self: Don’t go to this alone again!)
Michael W. Smith & Marty Goetz (Belmont Church)
Robert Hicks’ Primitive Art show & explication (Vanderbilt Divinity School)
Nashville Symphony: Russia’s Greatest Hits and A Space Odyssey (Schermerhorn)
Fred & Martha Goldners’ pre-Yom Kippur Seder
Landon Pigg’s role in Drew Barrymore’s first directorial outing, Whip It!
Southern Festival of Books: I especially enjoyed hearing from Shaun Casey, John Siegenthaler, Chip Arnold, Ben Pearson, and Robert Hicks
Anglicanism 101: 6-week class (St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church)
Our Town presented by Studio Tenn Theater Company (Loveless Barn)
John Keats Birthday Tea (Savannah Tea Room)
Doris Kearns Goodwin, award recipient (Nashville Public Library)
Lighting of the Green (Lipscomb)
50+ Christmas Dinner: Jan & Chris Harris singing Light in the Stable; Chip Arnold reading Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. Unbelievable richness. (Thanks, TVC!)

Essays I wrote:
See http://www.gwenmoore.blogspot.com/ for most of these.
A Tribute to My Brother
Musings on Aging in Tabula Rasa (Vanderbilt literary publication)
Sharansky & Obama
A Light for the City
And That More Abundantly
Workplace Wisdom

Songwriting: Several co-writing sessions with new friend Laurie Smith and one song with Laurie and dear friend Gabe Pigg

Singing I did:
The Nashville Choir in Hymn Sing at the Schermerhorn
TNC recording session for David Huntsinger & Kris Wilkinson at RCA studio
TNC recording session for Disneyworld with David Hamilton
Worship team at church (“Back in the saddle again…”; just once, but it felt good.)
The Village Chapel Choir
Christmas caroling at Sommet Center

Praise God, He brought these loved ones back from the brink:
Julianne Hannaford
Gabe Pigg
Brian Carr
Michael Shumate
Marty McCall

Remembering this year’s graduating class:
Danny Petraitis
Nina Harmon
Mabel Harding Bean Wood
Henry Martin

Celebrating new lives:
Carson Jerde
Sam Bruce
Isaac DePaula
Lylah Nash
Carla Sullivan’s nephews (newly adopted)

House guests I enjoyed hosting:
Ted and Jane-Ann Thomas
Dorothy Dresser
Michael and Ilona Haag
Clyde Barganier

Special thanks:
…to Mark Hollingsworth for providing this format with which to reminisce, for his community organizing and his zest for event attendance. He has been very inspirational.
…to Carolyn Naifeh for hosting me a whole week while in D.C. What a treat!
…to Rhonda Lowry for inviting me to reconnect with my roots.
…to Jeff and Amy Cary and David and Angie Lemley for giving me such hope for the next generation of my roots.
…to Clyde Barganier for deciding to write that first email.
…to all who have prayed with me and for me this year. You have touched and blessed the lives of hundreds of medical students and only God knows how many more.

I love all four seasons.
I love the exuberance of spring,
the laziness of summer,
the busyness and anticipation of fall,
and the coziness of winter,
with its magical ice
and snow
and crispness,
its hot drinks and crackling,
popping fires,
and its sacred, reverent hush.

Happy Epiphany! May we all be surprised by joy in 2010.