All posts by Addie Zierman

What I’m Into: March 2019 Edition

You guys! We made it through March!

The thaw (or, my new favorite phrase for it, the break-up season) is in full swing here, and the St. Croix river is dammed up with mountains of sandbags so that it doesn’t flood the little river towns here in the valley.

My sons have been taking their coats off at recess, the tile floor is covered with muddy shoe prints and paw prints, and we are all shaking ourselves out of hibernation.

I spent a lot of time cozied up with the cats working on a fiction project, which has been all kinds of challenging fun. I read lots of books. We bought an infrared sauna, which Andrew has been wanting for years, and sitting in that warm, dry space in the middle of the damp, bone-chilling end of winter has been a gift.

It was a good month, for the most part.

Now, bring on the real spring please.

Because I didn’t get my act together on a What I’m Into post in, February, I didn’t get a chance to tell you about all the superb books I read then. So here’s a nice long list of books for you!

Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson: This YA book was a gorgeous book in every way – from structure to language to the way Anderson tackled the theme of sexual violence. I loved the way Anderson paired average moments of high school life with emotional depth and weight. This book just had its 20th anniversary reprint and holds up completely two decades later. I also noticed at a local bookstore the other day that they’ve come up with a graphic novel version, which I’m sure is excellent too.

“People say that winter lasts forever, but it’s because they obsess over the thermometer. North in the mountains, the maple syrup is trickling. Brave geese punch through the thin ice left on the lake. Underground, pale seeds roll over in their sleep. Starting to get restless. Starting to dream green.”
~ Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

Monster,Walter Dean Myers:This book won a whole bunch of awards, including the Printz Award and a National Book Award finalist. The structure is unique, the book written as a play that the main character is writing of his own life: “Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I’ll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.” And it’s another book that has a graphic novel edition now. Love that.

“When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy, you can bet he’s worried either about his story or about his ability to tell it.”
~ Walter Dean Myers, Monster

William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Conner Series (Iron Lake (Book 1), Boundary Waters (Book 2), and Purgatory Ridge (Book 3)): I have become a big fan of mystery novels lately, and since I loved William Kent Krueger’s novel Ordinary Grace, I thought I’d give his Cork O’Conner series a try. I love that the books are set in Minnesota and the way that they incorporate the fraught relationship between the Anishinaabe tribe and the townspeople with respect and complexity. Cork O’Conner is not my favorite detective of all time (I mean, he’s no Veronica Mars, amiright?), but the books are enjoyable and well written.

“Conscience was a devil that plagued the individual. Collectively, a people squashed it as easily as stepping on a daisy.”
William Kent Krueger, Purgatory Ridge

The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo: This is a stunning YA-novel-in-slam-poetry and a National Book Award winner. There were so many moments of illumination and truth and beauty in this book, and the struggle between the narrator, Xiomara, and her super-conservative Catholic mother will be familiar to readers here.

“It’s just when Father Sean starts talking about the Scriptures that everything inside me feels like a too-full, too-dirty kitchen sink. When I’m told girls Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. When I’m told To wait. To stop. To obey. When I’m told not to be like Delilah. Lot’s Wife. Eve. When the only girl I’m supposed to be was an impregnated virgin who was probably scared shitless. When I’m told fear and fire are all this life will hold for me. When I look around the church and none of the depictions of angels or Jesus or Mary, not one of the disciples look like me: morenita and big and angry. When I’m told to have faith in the father the son in men and men are the first ones to make me feel so small.”
~ Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown: This book was challenging, prophetic, beautiful and heartbreaking. I was so moved by it.

“Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort. It’s not a comfortable conversation for any of us. It is risky and messy. It is haunting work to recall the sins of our past. But is this not the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate truth and inspire transformation? It’s haunting, but it’s also holy.”
~Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

Little Fires Everywhere,Celeste Ng: I loved everything about this book from the quirky characters to the late-nineties setting to the masterful way Ng managed to use the omniscient viewpoint. Brilliantly written and one of those books I didn’t want to end.

“She had felt, finally, as if she could speak without immediately bumping into the hard shell of her sheltered life, as if she suddenly saw that the solid walls penning her in were actually bars, with spaces between them wide enough to slip through.”
~ Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

What I Leave Behind, Alison McGhee: This YA book had the most interesting structure: a hundred chapters, a hundred words each. It turned out to be a brilliant way to deal with subjects of tragedy and loss, which can only be tackled in a piecemeal way. Plus, the narrator, Will, is so open-hearted and likeable, in a teenage sort of way.

“Some days are just-get-through-them days. You focus only on what’s right in front of you, like sealed boxes and the box cutter zipping down each seal.”
~ Alison McGhee, What I Leave Behind

Still Me, JoJo Moyes: This book was the third of the Me Before You trilogy. While the first book in the series had me weeping actual tears, the second two are really just general rom-com goodness. Still, Louisa Clark is a fun and quirky character, and I was happy to see how her story finished.

“I have never really been an animal person. But I suddenly understood
what comfort could be gained from burying your face in the soft pelt of another creature, the consolation of the many small tasks that you’re obliged to perform for its welfare.”
~ JoJo Moyes, Still Me

I’m still watching all my usual shows: Grey’s of course (how stunning was that episode with the rape survivor last week??). I’m watching The Resident (the show itself feels kind of meh, but I’m devoted to Matt Czuchry and Emily VanCamp). I’m super jazzed that Jane the Virgin is back for its final season and am happy to get my telenovela drama fix.

Andrew and I are behind on This Is Us thanks to travel and busy-ness, but we’re catching up. We also tried The Order on Netflix, which seemed promising at first but just kept getting weirder and weirder. (The only saving grace was the 90s nostalgia of seeing “Big Russ” from Honey I Shrunk the Kids in a movie again…this time as the world’s worst grandpa.)

I’m also watching My So-Called Life for the first time ever — I somehow missed it when it came out. It’s fantastic in all the angstiest ways.

I’m upping my podcast game lately, listening while I drive to town for errands and while I shop. My won’t miss shows include:

Emily Freeman’s The Next Right Thing (Her book, based on the podcast, is out today! Buy it!)
Kendra Adachi’s The Lazy Genius
Rob Bell’s Robcast

Other shows I’ve been dipping into lately include:

10 Minute Writers Workshop (This show is unfortunately over, but there are some great short interviews with all kinds of amazing writers, including Tana French, Judy Blume, Celeste Ng, Colson Whitehead, etc. Pretty much a treasure trove of writing advice.)
Before Breakfast, Laura Vanderkam’s new podcast. (I’ve always loved her time management advice, and these short episodes are quick and practical.)
The Popcast with Knox and Jamie (I’ve loved Knox’s work since he wrote snarky recaps of The Bachelor episodes, and this podcast is gold.)

Book Art as a Creative Outlet

Dane had to create a diorama for school, and I found myself a little jealous. Queue Pinteresting “Dioramas for Grown Ups” which lead me to book sculptures, which lead me to this idea. So much fun.

Debbie Blue’s New Book, Consider the Women

I’ve been a fan of Debbie Blue’s work ever since Consider the Birds. So when I saw that there was a book release reading for her new book, Consider the Women, I quickly snagged a babysitter so that Andrew and I could go.

Debbie is tiny and fierce and lovely, and listening to her read and talk about her book was such a joy. The church where the reading was held, House of Mercy, was filled with the sacred art of women and the whole event was so beautiful, interesting and life affirming. So excited to read this book. Grab a copy now!

Spring Break Shenanigans

Going to a water park with friends is the best way I know to break up spring break. We spent the middle part of the week waterlogged, overtired and happy.

Having People Over

Last weekend, we had a full house: 8 adults, 10 kids, and 2 additional dogs besides Marty. There were shoes everywhere, coats and bags slung on every surface, kids grabbing puppy chow by the handful, paper plates and paper cups and Nerf bullets zinging around.

I sometimes get tricked into thinking that hospitality is supposed to be Pinterest-perfect, carefully curated and color-coordinated and chaos-free.

But real community? It turns out it’s messy and wild and exhausting and loud. It runs wild screaming through your heart and messes up your ideals. It’s a Nerf bullet to the head, belly-laughter that gives you a stomach ache, four pots of coffee and counting.

Guys, it’s a MESS. And it’s the best thing I know of.

I loved writing about seeing the sacred art collection at the Benedictine Center this month.

I also wrote about finding the right names for the seasons you most often find yourself in. This is such a helpful metaphor for me.

If you subscribe to my monthly letter (which will come out tomorrow — late, again), you’ll be getting some free new printables to help you think through your own faith seasons — their gifts, their challenges, and the things you might do now to recognize and prepare for them.

Not signed up for the newsletter? Do it now so you don’t miss that free resource!

Alright. That’s all I’ve got for March.

What have you been into this month?

Faith Journey

Break-Up, Freeze-Up and Other Understated Seasons

The calendar says that today is the First Day of Spring. I think that this is propaganda. After all, the pile of snow at the edge of our driveway is still twice the size of my kid.

The longer I live in Minnesota, the more I wonder why we even have spots on our calendar that say things like First Day of Spring. I understand, intellectually, that these dates are tied to the equinoxes and the solstices, to the astronomical workings of the universe, to the position of the sun as we circle around it, but it’s cruel to call it spring when your driveway still looks like this. (See picture above, taken MARCH 12 for crying out loud.)

The “Meteorological Seasons,” which begin on the first day of the months that include the equinoxes and solstices feel even less helpful to me. Perhaps in some places, spring begins on March 1 and ends on May 31, but Minnesota is not one of those places.

There has to be a better way to divide the seasons, to divide the year — one that doesn’t fill me with rage and an outsized sense of injustice.

I went searching the Internet other day for other ways of marking the seasons, which is what I do when I’m not satisfied with the language I have. And I came across the six-season cycle of the North American Cree. It’s a cycle that includes Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter of course…but that adds two additional season: Midiskāw or the “Freeze Up” of ice and Minoskamin, or “Break Up” of ice.

It makes sense. The Cree are a People whose world was, at one time, tied to the river and to their ability to travel on it. They were once a migratory people, traveling with the seasons and with the animals, so of course they understood that between fall and winter there is the season of “Freeze Up,” where the water is changing, solidifying — neither open water nor sturdy ice, but something in between, something in process.

Of course they knew that before the flowers and the berries and the drunken summertime honeybees, there had to be the tumultuous yet hidden “Break Up” season — the sound of drumming coming from the river the only hint of the vast changing happening beneath the remaining layers of ice.

It makes sense to me that a people that were so connected to the water would use a calendar tied closely to the ebb and flow of the river, seasons moving fluidly in and out of one another. It seems logical to name the seasons for the realities of your actual life rather than for the start dates on the calendar.

Sometimes in religious contexts, we talk about “faith seasons.” Spring. Summer. Fall. Winter. It’s a metaphor that, however cliche it may be, resonates with me.

My own faith deconstruction began after years of trying and trying and trying to thrive, to grow, to bear fruit, to be in the light and having no success. I had no language for this dryness except for that of my own failure and inadequacy. (If I just tried harder, read the Bible more, got better “plugged-in,” I would be certainly be on the rise instead of in this free-fall.)

When I began to understand the cyclical nature of the spiritual journey, it felt like an essential kind of naming. I wasn’t failing; it was just winter. While things may have looked dead, that didn’t mean that they were. Essential activity was happening under the surface, and the dormancy wasn’t failure but it’s own kind of growth.

It was a great paradigm shift for me. And now, learning the (probably inadequate) English translation of the Cree seasons — freeze up, break-up — feels like a deepening of that paradigm, a more robust vocabulary to describe my faith seasons.

The reason it doesn’t feel like spring yet at the ground level of my soul is because it isn’t. It’s that in-between place, that break-up of ice, where things are happening beneath the surface. The flowers are not yet blooming, the snow is still piled high, but underneath it all, the river persistently, invisibly drumming itself free of the ice.

Perhaps you have heard the “faith seasons” metaphor, but it never quite resonated with you. Maybe that’s because your soul doesn’t live at the perfect intersection of four, three-month seasons.

Maybe your soul has a subtropic climate where there is no fall, winter, spring summer — just the rainy season and the dry season swinging pendulum-like, back and forth.

Maybe the language of the lunar calendar better describes the rhythm of your soul — you seem to move through regular cycles of filling and waning…growing large and round and bright with the fullness of God…and then slowly diminishing until you feel like you’re almost gone…only to start to fill up again.

It seems to me that the weather of our souls must be at least as varied as the multitude of climates in this world. Where the patterns of my soul are irritatingly similar to those of northern Minnesota, there are others of you who experience the San Francisco version of the seasons or the Texas version, where winter is mild but summer is unbearable and oppressive.

There are those of you whose cycles follow the four seasons more closely but whose inner-landscapes are regularly overlaid with violent acts of nature: tornado season, where everything flies into chaos; hurricane season, where you find yourself underwater; wildfire season, where the whole thing seems to burn itself to the ground.

Maybe you’re not a train-wreck or an incurable cynic or a magnet for disaster. Maybe your soul just lives in freaking TORNADO ALLEY or Northern California or on the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe this is all just part of your regular, beautiful, essential cycle.

Like many other things in life and in faith, so much depends on finding the name of a thing.

If you know that your life swings from the dry to rainy season, you can name the scarcity and the drought for what it is: not failure, just the dry season. Necessary. Part of a whole. Temporary.

If you can name the space between tundra and tulips — the breaking up season — then you might have the patience to wait it out, to keep believing that better things are coming, that God is at work in the frozen places whether you can feel it or not.

If you understand, like Sara Groves, that your heart is just built on a floodplain, then you’re better able to understand the gifts and challenges that come when the river rises.

It’s a season. It comes. It goes. It’s part of it.

In the end, we name the seasons not to have fool-proof dates on a calendar. Rather we do it to locate ourselves in the narrative of hope. It reminds us that we are not failing, we are just cycling through our own particular seasons, and that the whole thing is always, ever circling toward Life.

Faith and Art + Prayers & Psalms

The Benedictine Sisters are Shuffling Toward Prayer

It is nearing 5:00, and the Benedictine Sisters are shuffling toward prayer.

They are not wearing the black habits that I expected based on a lifetime of made-for-TV movies that I’ve watched about nuns. Instead, they wear the normal wardrobe of elderly women: slacks and tennis shoes, turtlenecks and sweaters, cross icons resting on their chests.

They come down the hall one at a time, their hair soft and white and downy. They are observing a day of silence, and they do not look at us as they work their way from the Monastery to the chapel in the Benedictine Center. They are wholly focused on something that we cannot see.

Andrew and I have come to the Benedictine Center to view the art gallery. The exhibitions here are continuous and change with the seasons, but this is the first time we’ve made our way out to see one of them since we settled in Scandia.

The collection up now is called Seeing God: A Juried Collection of Sacred Art, and it includes paintings and weavings, sculptures and carvings. Some of the art tells the glory of God in abstracts — textures and colors and the curvature of wood. Other pieces are more exacting: the gossamer web of a spider spun across the flowers. A trio of dead trees standing alone in a field mirroring the three crosses at Golgotha.

Andrew and I pause and move in our own rhythms — both of us stopped by different pieces, both of us lost in our own contemplation. Behind us the sisters’ walkers etch the floor with the sound of their movement — the puttering of metal legs and rubber soles.

As the sisters pass, I idle at a canvas textured in shades of blue by artist Jean Wright. The placard next to it says this:

“My work is an expression of the questions I have about my relationship with God. How do I give form to that which is formless? How do I paint trust? How do I convey glory? The questions I wrestle with vary from day to day, as do my answers. Painting for me is how I hold a question long enough to gain clarity. I paint to understand what I believe.”

I stand and look it it for a long time thinking about how I was never taught this: the art of holding questions in my hands.

Along the walls, there are so many renderings of grace and love and mystery. I feel at home in the vibrant colors of hope and doubt which exist both in tension and in harmony in the same pieces of art.

In one picture, the Israelites dance through the wild heart of the sea. Another, a fiber tapestry, is dotted with thousands of french knots, a picture of “spontaneous, unstructured prayer,” and I wonder what my own prayer life would look like in a constellation of knots.

None of my interactions with God seem to fit into the neat categories that I have for prayer: confession, gratitude, supplication. My children both learned, somewhere, about folding hands, bowing heads. I can’t remember the last time that I did either. For some reason all my best prayer involves the movement of my hands, and the movement of my hands is always my best prayer.

I am thinking about all of this as the last of the sisters shuffle in to pray, and the chapel grows loud with the music of an organ. The voices of the sisters rise and fall on the waves of the music, most of them threaded through with age, their voices shuffling, too, along the familiar prayers.

It is nothing like the slick-backed worship songs of the mega-churches and Christian radio, and yet I want to sit down in the middle of it. I want to record it with my phone so I can have it with me…though I sense that to do so would be a breech of privacy. The reedy prayers drifting from the chapel and along the walls of the gallery are the deepest kind of intimacy. So I don’t.

And I don’t know how to give form to what is formless. I don’t know how to write trust, how to speak of glory. I’m not really sure I even know how to pray.

But the Benedictine Sisters shuffle day after day toward prayer, and I think that there is more to this slowness than meets the eye. It is not, perhaps, creaky knees and clanking walkers that slow them, but rather the long work of bringing your own tremulous heart near to the heart of God.

*Hitbodedut (Spontaneous, Unstructured Prayer),* Sandra Brick

“Take your time,” the Sisters seem to be saying. “Shuffle forward into the arms of the community that will give structure and dimension to your threadbare prayer, to your unanswered questions.”

The art sings from the walls — a hundred ways to See God, the collection seems to say. The sisters voices sing from the chapel.Outside, the winter wind whips our hair as we shuffle out into. We move slowly, as if entering a holy place.

After all, isn’t the whole world a chapel: quiet routine movement alongside vibrant, abstract glory? Aren’t we always invited closer, whether we walk haltingly or “run a good race” or swerve off and on the path?

The bells ring and the silence breaks, and here we are:

Our voices have always part of the ongoing tapestry of creation, knotting us into a whole, pulling us toward Love.

Church & Community

7 {FREE} Empathy Cards for Your Friends with Faith Baggage

I spent a lot of time last week laughing at amazing Galentines Day cards online. I even printed a bunch out, meaning to send them, but then winter got the better of me and I did nothing. Bleh.

As I fell down the Internet rabbit hole of great cards for friends, I noticed that the best ones look unflinchingly at your pain with a mix of truth, humor, and understanding.

And then I decided to make one specifically for people with faith baggage. Because I’m all about doing anything to procrastinate writing right now.

Enjoy the fruits of my avoidance!