On CNN this morning I saw an interview with a female Methodist pastor who has decided to become an atheist and has left the pastorate. She plugged some online support groups for clergy who are struggling with issues of faith as well as for laity who are leaving their faith. I understand the horrendous emotional and philosophic trauma that faith crises provoke - the more costly the stakes, the more isolated the struggle tends to be.
My fiction pushes the envelope for such struggles - when abusive Christians control and diminish other Christians in the name of God such struggles intensify with the twist being self-imposed by the victim due to her (largely it is a her) issues of conscience and naivete....
My fiction exposes what happens in the heart's inner space and behind closed doors and doctrinal confines.
My fiction demands huge levels of honesty and intellectual integrity and if it pushes someone to question the very foundations of their own faith, so be it.
God is big enough to defend His own faithfulness and as with the woman I heard on tv this morning, may He pursue us all in the midst of our storms and tantrums with His relentless mercy.
I find God where T.S. Eliot found Him: "at the still point of the still turning world...there the Dance is" ....
About Me
- Lesley
- I have discovered that walking a very narrow path leads to broad places of peace, contentment, and provision. After an eclectic career of nonprofit leadership, museums, education and social services, Dr. Lesley Barker is transitioning to retirement devoted to full time writing. Expect surprises to come from her pen.
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