Monday Whatevers

August 15, 2022

Last week, I took a luxurious week off to just read and read and read for the sheer pleasure of reading. So this week, I dedicate our Monday Whatevers to the books that I was finally able to start last week and the books I was finally able to finish.

I’ve opened each Monday Whatevers with this disclaimer for the bits and bobs that I share: All of them add to a greater knowing of God’s presence in this world, within our humanity, and out in the great beyond. And, they all prove there’s an abundance of spectacular, breathtaking tangible and intangible cosmic matter between us. This claimer holds true for this list of books as well.

Please share in the comments what you’ve been reading as well! 

---

WHATEVER IS TRUE…

The chaos of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, was bewildering for many. In part, because the violent riot was also a riot of images: a wooden cross and a wooden gallows; Christian flags and Confederate flags; “Jesus Saves” and “Don’t Tread on Me” banners; button-down shirts and bullet-proof vests. But these confusing—and even seemingly contradictory—symbols are part of an increasingly familiar ideology: “white Christian nationalism.”

This book is a primer on white Christian nationalism, what it is, when it emerged, how it works, and where it’s headed. White Christian nationalism is one of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics.

WHAT MAKES IT TRUE:

This book along with a slew of others has been insightful and liberating. When I moved to Texas, I encountered a whole new kind of Christianity that I didn’t recognize because I was raised in the Black Church up north. So, I never heard a sermon or Sunday school lesson that taught me that America was morally good and inherently Christian, or that the Constitution was divine. I was the daughter and granddaughter of a generation of ex-sharecroppers whose grandparents—and sometimes parents—had been enslaved. But this book has helped me to understand that Christian nationalism isn’t on the rise, it’s always been. 

**FYI there are other books that have a similar title and cover. So, be sure that you have the correct authors if you want to buy or listen to this book. 

---

WHATEVER IS HONEST…

This is not a coming-out story. It’s not a down-low story either. I never could have passed for straight, even if I’d wanted to, and so I never had the dubious luxury of living a lie.

By the time I was five, it was all too clear that something was wrong with me. Everyone knew it, and I knew it too. It was why grown-ups shook their heads and spoke in lowered tones whenever I was in the room…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To render a childhood in which I was continually urged to seek the Bible’s guidance in all matters, let us do as that Good Book does, and start in the beginning.

WHAT MAKES IT HONEST:

Yes, this is a memoir. But my goodness—it is a testimony that takes the Church and its treatment of the LGBTQIA community to task. I listened to it on Audible but I also bought the Kindle version so that I could go back and read many, many passages over and over again. But, if you can’t do both, do the audio version. Billy Porter is a performer and he performs his story as only he could. 

---

WHATEVER IS JUST…

After traveling for over a year through Houston; Minneapolis; Washington, DC; and beyond—walking the streets where Floyd watched friends die, standing on the fields where he chased athletic stardom, listening to the mixtapes on which he rapped his insecurities, reading the diary entries where he agonized over his sins, sitting in the treatment centers where he sought redemption—we ended up with a sense of George Floyd’s motivations, his limitations, and his soul…

Here, we have documented Floyd’s struggle to breathe as a Black man in America, a battle that began long before a police officer’s knee landed on his neck.

WHAT MAKES IT JUST:

A very hard but very necessary read. I’m listening to it but also bought the Kindle version so I could take notes. When a book is heartbreaking and is very close to my own experiences, I find the audio version easier for me to take in small doses. It’s hard not to cry throughout the entire experience of this book. I still weep for George Floyd. I still weep for Sandra Bland. I still weep for Tamir and Trayvon and Michael and Breonna and… and… and… Each of them reminds me of my own family and friends. Floyd is so much like my brother who is a tall and gentle man who has battled drug addiction all his life. Like Floyd, my brother loves everyone and often says it those he loves and complete strangers. He’s my big brother and I can’t listen to Floyd’s story without inserting his  and our family and our history. This book is profound and should be required reading. 

---

WHATEVER IS PURE…

“Astronomical mindfulness” is simply practicing mindfulness when you observe the universe, in the same way that you might mindfully make tea or wash the dishes. When you’re observing the universe, that should be what you’re doing. When you’re looking at the Moon, say to yourself, I am looking at the Moon, even though it seems obvious. Be present in that magnificent moment. 

WHAT MAKES IT PURE:

My dear friend Nya Abernathy texted me a pic of this book while she was shopping at a bookstore. Immediately I went online and bought it. Y’all it is purely delightful. There’s nothing but pure, wholesome ingredients in this book. I mean, it’s just a good shower of healing. Each page is a deep inhale and exhale with practices and projects. I couldn’t love it more. 

---

WHATEVER IS LOVELY…

It had stopped raining.

Nobody in Faha could remember when it started. Rain there on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a dreeping, and an out-and-out downpour. It came the fine day, the bright day, and the day promised dry. It came at any time of the day and night, and in all seasons, regardless of calendar and forecast, until in Faha your clothes were rain and your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace. It came off the grey vastness of an Atlantic that threw itself against the land like a lover once spurned and resolved not to be so again. It came accompanied by seagulls and smells of salt and seaweed. It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgement, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes – why not? – on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them.

All of which, to attest to the one truth: in Faha, it rained.

But now, it had stopped.

WHAT MAKES IT LOVELY:

I am partial to Irish stories. But this book is so Irish and so ridiculously beautifully written and utterly enchanting that almost every page of my copy is dog-eared with phrases and passages highlighted as if while reading I was mining for gold and found it! Niall Williams is loquacious without being pretentious. He’s charming and funny but deep and wise. His characters are completely vulnerable but his writing of them is very reticent and protective.  I loved this book and didn’t really want it to end. I hope they turn it into a TV series. PBS’s Masterpiece Theater should really get on it. Faha would be a lovely place for viewers to visit weekly. 

---

WHATEVER IS GRACIOUS…

While our television communication might look simple to some, it really isn’t. Children are not simple ... neither are adults. I have always given a great deal of thought to how I present ideas during our television visits, and I’m always fascinated to hear how people have used what we have said—on television, in speeches, during interviews, and in our books. Often they’ve used our ideas in creative, productive ways I had never dreamed they could be used. 

So may it be with the words in this book, which have been gathered from my speeches, songs, newspaper columns, books, and television programs. Once you’ve read them and made them your own, may they find their place in the innermost part of you—in that essential part of you that inspires you to be who you really are.

—Fred Rogers

WHAT MAKES IT GRACIOUS:

It’s words of wisdom from Mister Rogers one of the most gracious human beings to ever walk the planet. Need I say more? 

---

WHATEVER IS EXCELLENT…

First of all it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.

WHAT MAKES IT EXCELLENT:

No one writes nostalgia quite like Ray Bradbury. He’s just a boy at heart who carries an arsenal of words in his pocket of tricks as if he was a boy carrying a bag of marbles and a sling shot ready to shoot, aim and fire. I adore Bradbury in all his chiaroscurist ways. In his books, every lurking shadow brings with it a ray of sunlight. He’s a master storyteller.

---

WHATEVER IS WORTHY OF APPLAUSE…

WHAT MAKE IT WORTHY OF APPLAUSE:

Toni Morrison famously dedicated Beloved to: 

Sixty Million
and more

This is a reference to the estimated number of Black lives that never made it across the Atlantic but were snuffed out aboard slave ships and buried beneath the ocean. 

And really the dedication is where the story begins. 

The book’s heroine is Sethe and because Sethe’s story isn’t one for the fainthearted Morrison tells us this about her in book’s forward: 

The heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom. The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless.

But another heroine in this story is the house—124. Again, in the forward, Morrison eases us through its front door: 

There would be no lobby into this house, and there would be no “introduction” into it or into the novel. I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense. 

It was important to name this house, but not the way “Sweet Home” or other plantations were named. There would be no adjectives suggesting coziness or grandeur or the laying claim to an instant, aristocratic past. Only numbers here to identify the house while simultaneously separating it from a street or city—marking its difference from the houses of other blacks in the neighborhood; allowing it a hint of the superiority, the pride, former slaves would take in having an address of their own. Yet a house that has, literally, a personality—which we call “haunted” when that personality is blatant.

And so, Beloved opens with: 

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.

This book is not a ghost story but a true story about the ghost that haunts our history. 

---

May your week be filled with whatever is true, honest, just, pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, and worthy of praise.

Much Peace,
Marcie