Author Nancy J. Nordenson on Faith, Writing and Art

The clear and thoughtful writing of Nancy J. Nordenson, author of, Just Think: Nourish Your Mind to Feed Your Soul, first caught my attention on her blog. She was kind enough to agree to an interview and will respond on this discussion thread to questions or comments that readers may wish to direct her way.

Paul Martin: Nancy, thanks for stopping by. Please tell us a little about your faith perspective.

Nancy Nordenson: My faith perspective aligns with the ancient Trinitarian Christian creeds, such as the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed. These creeds with their statements of belief seem at once to be so concrete yet at the same time so mysterious that one's intellect and imagination could work forever on the possibilities of what is really going on in terms of reality, the flow of grace, and the nature of love. But they aren't just academic or philosophic exercises. They require something of their confessors, they require something of me. What difference does it make to have these words drip down into my life? How do I open myself up to their full meaning? How do I let the import of these words work in me and through me out into the world? These aren't questions with easy one-size-fits-all answers. It sounds cliché to say but it seems the older I get, the more I realize how immense this whole undertaking of belief really is because its consequence, just as its object, is apparently without end.

PM: In your book Just Think, you present thinking as “spiritual practice.” How is thinking a spiritual practice?

NN: The book begins with what Jesus called the greatest commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." Loving with one's heart or soul or strength seem reasonable and familiar. But loving with one's mind? We don't think so commonly about this kind of love. Just Think explores what this might mean. Once you disconnect the concept of thinking, or activity of the mind, from academics or get-ahead strategies for success, you see that thinking is really integrally involved in every longing, every spiritual pursuit. When the mind joins the soul, a holistic spirituality is possible. I wrote a blurb about Just Think on my blog and I think it does a fairly good job of summarizing the connection between mind and soul: Questions and searches deepen the soul. Knowledge invites the soul to join the mind in actions of service and belief. In prayer, mind and soul unite to participate in mystery. Through attentiveness, study, and contemplation, God is recognized and known, swelling both mind and soul with life.

Not every use of our mind has to have an overtly spiritual objective, however. Simply to use our minds well, as they were designed to be used, whether it is to learn a language or to record our thoughts can be an act of loving God and certainly makes our lives richer, as well as quite possibly increasing our contribution to the good of the world.

I think this is exciting stuff, but I realize some people--not necessarily your readers--hear the word "thinking" and are immediately turned off. Before the book came out, I had a couple sessions over the telephone with a media trainer who was going to help me prepare for interviews and talking about the book. Near the end of a session she said to me with a sigh, "This is so boring." We said our good-byes a few minutes later and I hung up the phone and was stricken by severe self-doubt. My skin is thicker now, but whether I or my topic are any less boring, however, I can't be sure.

PM: Hmm . . . Maybe somebody will come out with, Seized by Civility: Manners Training for Media Trainers. How did you come to write Just Think and what was your writing process like?

NN: This book started as a personal journaling project. One night, about a decade ago, I sat at my kitchen table with my head in my hands overwhelmed with how complicated everything was, how hard life seemed. No extraordinary story of hardship here, just the stuff of everyday life that keeps adding up and up and up until it seems like just too much to handle. It occurred to me in that moment of near despair that if I wanted to stay steady when things around me seemed unsteady, if I wanted to navigate life with a bit more satisfaction than just checking off my to-do list, if I wanted to dream and learn and do all kinds of other good things, then I had better make sure my mind was in optimal condition. So the question I determined at that moment to answer was: How can I make sure my mind was as strong and deep and clear as it could be? To answer that question I started reading like crazy. I read books on thinking and passages in the Bible on thinking. I started paying attention to how characters in novels thought. I took copious notes and wrote my thoughts and observations in my journal. One day some months later, also while sitting at my kitchen table, it occurred to me that I wasn't the only one who might need some help navigating life or a reminder of what a magnificent resource the mind was, and so I decided to try to make all of this into a book. It really hadn't occurred to me when I started that it would be a book.

It was a long process--from initial question to published book, about 7 years--partly because I'd never written a book before and so the learning curve was steep, partly because I had two children and a job to also give time to, and partly because it just simply was a lot of work. The writing of it was a wonderful experience, however, no matter how arduous the process. For me, there is a great joy in having a private puzzle in my brain that I can carry with me and keep working out.

At the start of the quest, I didn't fully appreciate how intertwined the practical and the spiritual would become by its end. As I said in response to your first question, the consequences to belief are far-reaching and here is an example. To use one's mind well became for me, impossible apart from a spiritual dimension, even when that spiritual dimension was not immediately apparent.

PM: Congratulations on having completed your MFA in creative writing. Please tell us about the experience and your future plans.

NN: After I finished Just Think I had a longing to become a better writer and thinker and to fulfill a long-standing desire to go back to school. Through reading Image journal and attending the Glen Workshop, I'd heard that Seattle Pacific University was starting a Masters of Fine Arts graduate program in creative writing. It was going to be unique in that it would be the only MFA program in the country that had an emphasis on art and faith. When I heard about it, I wanted in badly and so applied and was accepted to its first cohort. Two years and hundreds of manuscript pages later I graduated this past August. It was an incredible experience. Let me first say it was hard hard work. Between paid work (I'm a freelance medical writer) and school work, I led a nearly monastic life at either my keyboard or in front of a book for those two years. I learned so much, about writing, about faith and art. I learned, not through head knowledge, but by doing, that writing is a spiritual discipline, a spiritual vocation. I started the program thinking I would learn to write, but I realized I was learning to live also. I was blown away by how life-changing those two years were for me. Now, since graduating, the challenge is how to live with this heightened awareness of and longing for beauty and a greater hunger for solitude at the writing desk outside the direct circle of that community.

Right now I'm working on another book, a collection of essays exploring issues of work and leisure. By leisure I don't mean the leisure of Caribbean cruises—although I wouldn’t mind a dose of that kind of leisure--but the leisure of contemplation. I've been influenced in the last several years by the writing of Josef Pieper on these issues and would recommend to your readers Leisure: The Basis of Culture. I have enough written that I'd like to soon start circulating a proposal. I'm also submitting some individual essays to literary journals. One essay was recently accepted at North Dakota Quarterly. Another essay was published about a year ago in Relief journal, and is included in their recently published first anthology (and available on Amazon). I'm also considering a new edition of Just Think: adding some new material, including questions for reflection after each section, and changing its look somewhat. When it was published, it was marketed as a book for women, when actually the content is quite gender neutral. I'd like to see it come out in a new edition without the female marketing spin. This revision project, if it happens, would likely be a couple years down the road. My blog is also in need of some attention, after being demoted to low priority while I was in school. And since I still need to buy groceries and pay my electric bills--oh, and pay back that student loan--I won't be giving up my paid writing gigs--that is, the medical writing--anytime soon.

PM: Do you have any books to recommend to the readers of Original Faith on the topic of art and faith?

NN: For starters, I’d suggest Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor; Art and Scholasticism, by Jacques Maritain; The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken; and Alphabet of Grace by Frederick Buechner. I'd also suggest reading the journal Image, a quarterly, edited by Gregory Wolfe, which publishes poetry, fiction, essays, and visual art that address art, faith, and mystery.

PM: Thank you, Nancy, for such an informative interview. I look forward to your next book – vocation and spiritual leisure or re-creation, so to speak, are both key topics in my view too.

For more information on Nancy J. Nordenson’s books, essays, and current activities, see:

NJN Author’s Guild web site
Just Thinking - blog
Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in creative writing program

Getting Religion, Sort Of

I liked going to confession. There was a little built-in cage with a sliding door like for your hamster, but a whole priest could fit inside. Only you could just make out his face.

I would say, “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.” The priest would say something like, “And how have you sinned, my son?” I could never think of anything, but I always wanted to help out because I liked being called “son,” plus there he was, stuck in the cage all the time.

“I lied, Father.”

“And whom did you lie to, my son?”

“My friend.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said my mom was twenty-seven.”

“Oh. . . And how old is she?”

“I think twenty-seven.”

“That’s not a lie, son. . .”

“But she might be twenty-six.”

God Be With Us

Blessed are the oppressed who do not become their oppression. Blessed are the God-forsaken who do not forsake God (Cf. Matt. 27:46).

Blessed are the great-hearted. For great-heartedness is God-be-with-you not as hope or prayer, but in fact. Great-heartedness is really living what the world under the sun still dreams of.

Blessed are those who identify themselves with God and not God with themselves.

Tuning In (to MLK)

This is something I wrote for morning announcements at Patrick Henry Elementary School around this time of year during one of my last years at work.

When I was a boy I didn’t watch the news much. When I watched TV, I’d usually skip right over it and change the channel to something I thought was more interesting.

But once in a while when I got to the news, I’d hear this -- voice. It was just a man speaking, but his voice sounded almost like music – the way that it would rise and fall, the way that sometimes he would hold a word long, almost like a note in a song, then let his words rest for a moment – to suddenly pick them up again with even greater power and purpose and energy than before. I had never heard anybody talk like that.

So my arm would be getting tired, because I wanted to change the channel – because back then there were no remotes, and you had to have your hand up on the knob on the TV to do that – but I couldn’t seem to change the channel while this man was talking.

And so I started tuning in to what he was saying – and the meaning of his words was as wonderful as the sound in the music of his voice. He was speaking of great ideas, of things like freedom, equality, and fairness. He was talking about treating other human beings as if they really were other human being – which, of course, is what we all are. This was in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement. By now I bet you may have guessed that the voice I was hearing belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King.

Many years later, I finally figured out what filled that voice with such power and purpose and music and beauty. His voice was filled with the sound of someone who cared about the whole world. Everybody. He never had the opportunity to meet you, but he cared about you – and about the children you’re going to have, and about the children your children will have. He was looking way ahead. He had been to the mountaintop of his own caring. He was dreaming the great dream of a world where all people treated other people as if they mattered, as if they really were – people – which, of course, we all are, wherever we are from, however we look, however we dress, and whatever languages we speak.

So what Dr. King helped teach me is that one person, one single human being, can literally care about the whole wide world. Which is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it. One person: the whole world.

And I hope very much that as you begin to get a little older, you’ll start asking yourselves the question raised by Dr. King: How big can I care? Because a whole lot depends on how you will decide to answer that question.

Because finally, even though Dr. King accomplished so much, his dream will come true only when enough of us start that long climb up the mountain to discover the content of our character and the far horizons of how much we can care.

This Is Not My Real Post

I don’t normally post two days in a row – my real post is the one under this one. It isn’t my fault that contemporary politics, like all great art forms, has power to inspire.

The Times They Are A Changin'-O

“Change” is all the rage today,
At least this week it’s what they say;
O Change, O Hope, O Vagueness Great,
I think I’ve got a belly ache.

But then HC is so specific
You’d almost think there’s nothing to it
But to suggest that she’s the best
By virtue of experience

That knows pie charts and power point
Like Colon Powell’s give-a-show
That demoed danger at the time
And made her say: “You're right; let’s go…”

Money Talks: Our present system of financing political campaigns, which protects monetary donations as free “speech” under the First Amendment, assures us a steady supply of political animals in leadership positions as collared and leashed by wealthy individuals and corporations for as far as the eye can see. (Not to say, of course, that we can’t do better than the present administration.)

Until and unless this changes, it's hard to see how real change happens.

Does Right Religion = Right Politics ?

Last post there seemed to be general agreement with my position that religious affiliation has no bearing on how well equipped a leader is to govern. Yet I thought that a couple comments on last post’s thread suggested that some of you might be inclined to modify my position into something like “Religion may tend to have a positive influence on fitness for leadership, but it isn’t the main thing.”

Crystal: I'd be happy to have an atheist as president rather than a religious fanatic. I think that it is true, though, that a person really cannot very well compartmentalize their life - what you believe will affect every part of your life, even the public spectrum.

A.V.G. Warrier {this is my paraphrase of part of his comment}: The morality of power depends on the ideals and values of the person in power. Few people derive their ideals and values from abstractions; most depend on guidance from institutions.

What these remarks suggest to me – my own inference, I’m not trying to represent what Crystal and AVGW had in mind – is that 1. The ideal political leader would hold religious beliefs, and 2. We might generally expect candidates affiliated with religious institutions to be better leaders than those without religious affiliation.

A couple thoughts arise for me: 1. What is it that makes a belief a specifically “religious” belief? 2. While there’s clearly a relationship between religious beliefs and the “ideals and values” to which AVGW refers, people who don’t consider themselves religious also have ideals and values. The relationship between religious beliefs and ideals/values doesn’t appear to be a necessary one.

In brief, and to borrow from Buddhist phraseology: Does Right Religion make for Right Politics? What do you think?

Christian Presidencies and God’s Politics

On Jim Wallis' “Two Fundamental Shifts”

When I began reading Jim Wallis’ “Two Fundamental Shifts” on his “God’s Politics” blog, I thought I was about to disagree. Early in his article, Wallis finds encouragement from the fact that “. . . Democrats now speak as much about faith and values as the Republicans do.”

Then my mind did a fundamental shift. I found the general tenor of the remainder of Wallis’ remarks more in line with a trenchant observation that he soon proceeds to make: that Martin Luther once stated that he would rather be “governed by a competent Turk than by an incompetent Christian.”

An Adjective-Free Presidency

Me too. I want a president – and not the “Christian president” that I heard, in a recent sound bite, that Huckabee would be. Eight years of Christian presidency, if we must call it that, has been more than enough. But neither do I want someone proclaiming him or herself a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist, atheist or agnostic president. Where religion is concerned, I want a president who’s adjective-free. Because at best, what you get for your adjective are public piety-displays that pander to a segment of voters whom politicians know they can count on to mistake holier-than-the-competition talk for something more significant.

At worst, you end up with a president who uses an ego-validating idea of God to buttress his own “unwavering” sense of righteousness as he implements policies like preemptive war, torture, and inaction on heath care and the environment that allow corporate benefactors of the status quo to continue raking in short-term profits at the long-term expense of this nation and the larger world.

Politicized God-talk reveals nothing about a candidate’s leadership abilities and moral life. I was a kid back in the sixties, but if memory serves, in his public life outside of church, the Rev. Martin Luther King didn’t even halfway measure up as a God-talker as compared with the perhaps less reverend George W. Bush.

MLK’s God was the big God, the real One – the God whose greatness is so big and apparent that even folks who don’t use the word God can get behind anyone who’s working for that God. That God’s efforts are for the sake of the whole nation and the whole earth – and decidedly not aimed at the further enrichment and empowerment of the already rich and empowered at the expense of multitudes.

Spirituality and Childhood

Here are links I received to two short poems for today's post on spirituality and childhood. They are by Irving Karchmar and dedicated to the birth of his children. There follows a link to a short poem I posted last May, then the text in full of an essay by Sabah Negash on children and prayer. Thank you Irving and Sabah.

Little Girls, Like Butterflies (for Becky)

When a Child is Born (for Matthew)

Sky Smile (Scroll down a little ways after you click.)

Belief Comes Even to the Hearts of Children

Definitions: Allah = God; Masjid = prayer house; Dua = prayer; Alhamdulillah = all praises are due to Allah

My mom (May Allah (swt) have mercy on her soul) instilled in us at an early age that Allah (swt) listened and answered the prayer of His servants. Of course, as children, we simply believed because our mother believed and we always knew her to be a truthful woman. But our faith in what she said would one day be tested.

My mom raised us in the high desert of California. She wanted us to be raised in as near an Islamic environment as possible; since living in a Muslim country was out of her reach, she chose an isolated place (desert) where we could be raised islamically. I can remember spending hours and hours exploring our "desert land" with my younger sisters, something we could have never done in the city. The highlight of any day would be to find "desert treasures" which ranged from beautiful stones, lizards, desert flowers, and the occasional lost items of desert travelers.

Near our home there was a huge hole that had been dug to build a masjid. While the masjid was never built in that spot, the hole served as a recreational center for my sisters and I. We would ride our bikes up and down the slopes wishing we could be like the boys with their bike flips, trips and flies. We would also have little tea parties, play hide and seek. It was our wonderland. It was also a spot to take our spoils from our scavenger hunts.

On one particular day, we found what looked like ordinary stones but once cracked open, turned out to be beautiful on the inside. They had somehow crystallized on the inside of the stone. We had hit the jack pot! Now, we had only one problem, remembering the stories of the gold rush, we had to protect our new treasures, especially if we were going to get rich off of it. So, we decided to hide our precious stones.

Our mother always told us the power of dua, so we decided to put it to the test, after all, this was important. We found a nice spot in the big hole to bury our treasures. We put our stones in the hole and made dua, "Oh Allah, please protect our treasure and don't let anyone ever find our stones. Ameen” After a couple of rained in days, we went back to check on our treasure but could not find it in the spot we put it. We knew it could not have be stolen as one, no one lived out there except us, two, it had been raining, and three; the place had not been touch since we left it. Then it suddenly dawned on us, we forgot to exclude ourselves from that dua, Allah (swt) was answering our dua, no one was going to find our treasures, not even us!

Well, from that day, we learned to coin our duas to say exactly what we mean :) But we also learned that Allah (swt) does indeed answer the dua of His servants. From that day on, we truly believed in the power of dua, not just because my mom said so, but because it had truly worked for us. That was not the last time we made a dua that came to pass. Years later, Alhamdulillah, He continues to answer our prayers and somewhere in that big hole lies protected our beautiful stones.

Copyright © 2007 by Sabah Negash

God's Political Will - ?

Dubya: Representing More than You and Me
I’ve noticed references to George figuring that it’s God who put him in the Oval Office. This makes me wonder if he also figures that his dad’s presidency and his family’s powerful connections to the corporate world, not to mention Texas state government, were all just a coincidence. Of course, it could be said that the whole package was God’s will – but then what meaning are we to attach to the concept of “God’s will?” Anything that happens? Anything that happens that we like?

God’s Own “To Do” List
Take that familiar laundry list of political positions that their proponents often try to present as God’s will, including anti equal rights for gays and support of equal rights for stem cells and fertilized ova – because they’re really just like you and me, only without the central nervous system. Spare the lives of fertilized ova that are destroyed at fertility clinics anyway because the Bible says to (I’m still looking for that passage and I’m determined to find it); allow people with horrible degenerative conditions to suffer for decades and die rather than let medical research go forward that might save them.

The commandments were wonderful, but maybe the “God” who generates lists today would work better doing things by heart.

God in Contemporary Ventriloquism
If that laundry list is truly God’s will, it leaves many of us marveling over God’s talking points and positions. At least the idea that such a God might have decided to put George in the White House would finally begin to make some sense. But frankly, I think it’s obvious that our political positions are our own. And whenever I see another one of those ventriloquist acts where somebody uses the word God like a hand puppet, I quietly change the channel because I can always see the lips moving.

I thought Sheri Lewis and Lamb Chops were a lot better. However, I’ll admit that Dickey Cheney and Mumble Chops are the absolute best. Heck, Cheney even talks out the crooked side of his mouth when he’s not using the dummy!