Religion: Not Yet, Not Here, Not Necessarily Available because It is Not for Now....

My fiction pushes against religiosity by exposing the wounds and the questions that result from being hurt by the church and accused by religious leaders who have become bullies instead of good news brokers. In his book, Kingdom Principles: Preparing for Kingdom Experience and Expansion, Miles Munroe distinguishes between religion and a kingdom-mindset. By unpicking how kings exercise dominion as well as lord over domains, Munroe challenges people, no matter their religious affiliation, to take Jesus' reply to Pontius Pilate at face value: "I was born a king." Munroe claims that "religion postpones the Kingdom to a future experience." When religion is focused on the attainment of something not yet, not here, not necessarily available because it is not for now, there is a space and a potential need created in our minds for some more enlightened guru without whom we might not be able to get to there then, who, if said guru is operating against us out of some impure agenda as a bully, competes against the Holy Spirit for our trust. This mismatch often twists how we understand and lean on God. My book, Pastor's Ex-Wife, is the story of one such victim's journey back to a place of vulnerability after having been bullied away from trust, overtaken by too much fear and chained up by so much religiosity. It takes her on a romp through inner city schools as well as to an assortment of Protestant churches until she finds enough courage to confront and disallow her abuser-pastor-ex-husband any additional power over her life and emotions. Although fiction, it is anything but imagined.

Courage and Camouflage

It is hard enough to honestly evaluate secret things in our deceitful hearts when we probe them through reflection, meditation, prayer, therapy. These means may allow us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves but certainly no therapist or spiritual counselor expects us to install a window into our heart for the world's peeping Toms vicariously to peek through the slats of its blinds.

Fiction forces us to wash our windowpanes.

More than that: writing compelling fiction takes a mighty courage that tears the blinds down in the plain view of perfect strangers and long time friends.

Of course there is the camouflage of the story.

A friend of several decades called yesterday to say she had finally read Pastor's Ex-Wife. She admired what she called my courage and also enjoyed the story in its own right. Perhaps it takes even more courage to read what a friend writes. And, perhaps the mark of a true friend respects the boundaries between fact and fiction by refusing to risk asking where those boundaries are....

Selective Memory

I picked up an old book by Hallie and Whit Burnett, Fiction Writer's Handbook, at the library. It starts with a preface by Norman Mailer and it's been a while since I've read a book on the craft. It is very well done - more about the philosophy behind the writing process than most books with similar titles and goals. The authors take a wide view because as the editors of Story Magazine, they had a large and diverse number of examples to choose from.

One statement matches my process in writing Pastor's Ex-Wife well: "We absorb, we sympathize, we reject, we present, it all comes from our own selective memory in the end."

And so it does in my story of how one woman, Terry Soldan, achieved enough personal courage to return to the church pastored by her ex-husband, incognito, in order to shut the door on that abusive season so that she could step into a new place emotionally.