What I’m Writing: I’m so happy to announce that the acquisitions committee at Liturgical Press has looked with favor on the book proposal for “Everyday Annunciations: On Learning to Say Yes,” and I now have an Oct. 15th deadline to deliver the full manuscript for publication. I’ve been thinking about this one for a decade; it’s a particular darling of my heart, growing from my experience as a blindsided 51-year-old widow back in 2002 and based on the difficult, recursive but ultimately life-giving path I’ve walked since. As a new widow I imagined myself uniquely abandoned, was consumed by existential despair and longed to be “beamed up” myself. As the years have passed, though, my eyes have been gradually, gently opened to the universality of such “annunciations” in human lives—how nonnegotiable, unwanted, or even daunting positive disruptions summon pretty much everybody to reimagine their roles and capacities, their lives’ meaning periodically throughout a life’s span. Indeed, my work with the elderly and dying over the past decade has suggested that learning to navigate such changes in a way that’s humble but also dignified and creative—a way that skirts both the extreme of “manifesting” which suggests that you CAN indeed always “get what you want” if you badger the divine enough, and the extreme of “let go and let God” thinking that makes humans utterly helpless passive pawns–is essential if one is to have a hope of navigating the challenges of aging with anything like grace.
Knowing all-too-well from personal experience how difficult such acceptance is in practice, how much reassurance and constructive modeling disrupted ones need, I’m planning to include many “ways in.” The book will feature stories of ordinary people and saints who struggled with their own everyday annunciations, wisdom from many spiritual traditions and discussion of Christian theology both classic and contemporary, research in fields including trauma/coping studies and creativity theory, and personal narrative. To further “normalize” the diverse responses disrupted ones might evince, each chapter will be grounded in a Renaissance painting of The Annunciation as recounted by Luke, each one depicting a different take on Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel depending on which moment in the story the artist has chosen as a focal point. My hope is that these images and my reflections on them will invite readers (as one of these paintings once helped me) to understand the process of growing toward “yes” as a necessarily multifaceted, multi-stage one, one granted to have been not instantaneously easy even for Mary herself–thus to treat themselves with more mercy as they seek constructive acceptance in their own lives.
As I write this blog entry I’m 8,500 words in thanks to having written the intro and first chapter for the proposal, with 31,500 remaining. Anticipated publication in early fall, 2024.
Here we go!
What I’m Listening To: Last Tuesday, as I waited through the day when I knew the acquisitions committee for this new book was to meet, I turned to music as I so often do at anxious moments. In particular, I found myself playing and replaying David Nevue’s instrumental version of the contemporary Christian hymn, “More Love, More Power,” feeling it center me and calm my soul. So many versions of this song are aggressively loud (even heavy-metal-ish), focused on the “power” part. This one is surpassingly gentle and meditative in its twinning of the title themes. And the implied message I heard aligned so perfectly with this book’s assurance: that opening in trust to sustaining love will somehow, in God’s good time, provide the sustenance we need, though perhaps not in the form we anticipate. “Everyday Annunciations” now has a theme song.
Something Beautiful in My World:
Teaser alert: on the chance that you’ve ever felt guilty about even a brief crisis of faith when a disruption of comfortable business-as-usual has seemed dauntingly beyond your capacity to handle, here’s Lorenzo Lotto’s 1534 so-evocative “Recanati Annunciation,” the set-piece for chapter 3.
