South African Spiritual Director Adri-Marie van Heerden talks with Nate about making friends cross-culturally, the need for humility, and learning to see others as God sees us — with great regard.

Adri-Marie's organization is called Tending the Fire. You can contact her at [email protected].

Nathan talks with prison chaplain John Paul Westin about the penitentiary as parish and learning to see each person there as God's "friends and special ones."

Show Notes

A few annotated book suggestions from John Paul:

• Cur Deus Homo — Anselm of Canterbury thinks about why God needed/chose to become human.
• The 3 Colors of Community, Christian A. Schwarz — How highly flawed individuals can use their propensity to sin to help build healthy Christian community.
• Fearfully and Wonderfully, Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancy — The human body (sick or healthy) can show us so much about the wonder of God and our human nature.
• The Shack, William Paul Young — God can heal the deepest wounds and betrayal.
• John's Gospel, John son of Zebedee — A look at life through the eyes of the beloved.
• Life of the Beloved — Henri Nouwen's beautiful consideration of the nature of Jesus' friendship.
• The Brother's Karamazov — Fydor Dostoevski's brilliant and crazy story of God's presence in a chaotic Russian family life.
• The Heart of the Parish, Martin Thornton — Seeing wherever you are as your parish and your life as filled with your neighbors and parisioners. Everyone.
• Hearing God — Dallas Willard's encouraging challenge to believe Jesus when he tells us we really can talk to God like we talk to one another.
• Reading the Bible with the Damned — Bob Eklad's believes that people on the margins often have intense experiences of God's involvement in their lives that are of biblical import.
• Letters and Papers from Prison —Dietrich Bonhoeffer's reflections on seeing God's loving presence in prison and how it transformed his thinking.

Audrey Elledge and Elizabeth Moore, authors of Liturgies for Wholeness, join Nate to talk about the formational power of liturgy and friendship.

Show Notes

Books by Elizabeth Moore and Audrey Elledge

• Liturgies for Hope: Sixty Prayers for the Highs, the Lows, and Everything in Between
• Liturgies for Wholeness: 60 Prayers to Encounter the Depth, Creativity, and Friendship of God in Ordinary Moments

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Every Moment Holy (liturgy series by Douglas McKelvey and other authors)

Ways to connect with Audrey and Elizabeth:

Elizabeth Moore:

Instagram

Twitter

Audrey Elledge:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

This meditation by Nathan Foster on Luke 22 invites us to the Mount of Olives where Jesus prayed “let this cup pass from me.”

Trevor Hudson shares reflections on the influence that Desmond Tutu had on his life — as a friend, colleague, cellmate, and “contemplative in action.”

Show Notes

• Desmond Tutu's Nobel Prize biography page
• Made for Goodness by Desmond Tutu
• Books by Trevor Hudson

Other Episodes With This Guest

• Ep 47: Trevor Hudson — Friendship with God
• Ep 73: Trevor Hudson — Holiness is Better Than You Think
• Ep 131: Trevor Hudson — Listen to the Groans
• Ep 154: Trevor Hudson — Meeting Christ in Our Tears
• Ep 153: Trevor Hudson — The Litmus Test for Lent
• Ep 215: Trevor Hudson and Jan Johnson — What Is Spiritual Direction?
• Ep 239: Trevor Hudson — Seeking God

“We enriched each other.” Luci Shaw speaks with Nate about her rich friendship with Madeleine L'Engle and how they made one another better writers and better followers of Jesus.

Show Notes + Transcript

Nate: Lucy, we get to talk about your friend today. How did you first come to meet Madeline?

Luci: Well, Madeleine and I met originally at Wheaton College at a conference on, on literature, and she was a speaker and I was a speaker, and so we just happened to connect at that, at that time, and we discovered we had a lot in common.

Madeline had just written a couple of poems that she wanted published. So, since my husband and I had just started the publishing company, Harold Shaw Publishers, I asked Madeline if she would like us to publish her poetry. Which is one of the things we had planned to do, was publish poetry people of faith. So, we did. We published two of her books. One was called A Cry Like a Bell. And the other one was Oh, I can't even remember the name of it. But this was very early on. And we discovered the more we talked, the more we found we had in common. 

We loved Bach. We loved the music of Bach. We had a number of common friends. That was way back when. 

Nate: Now, was this before she'd written Wrinkle in Time?

Luci: She had written A Wrinkle in Time.

Nate: And then you two went on to write some books together.

Luci: That's right, yeah, we had our publishing company, and we were trying to publish, books by people of faith who had a literary bent. Anyway, that was the beginning of a really fruitful friendship. We found that, though Madeline had a number of people who were devoted to her and looked up to her, she didn't have many colleagues who were sort of meeting her at the friendship level, not just the sort of worshipful level that she had managed to accumulate.

So, the first book that we did together, I asked her to write a book on faith, how faith and literature work together. So she, at one point, handed me this very untidy typescript. Piles and piles of typed notes and possible chapter headings and so on.

So I had to just take the whole thing, pull it apart, I emptied my dining room, got the table out of the way, and started making piles. of different ideas that would flow together. We called it the Weather of the Heart. 

She needed someone who could sort of say, Madeline, you can't say that. You know, that's... not orthodox. We'll have to talk through that one. So, we did. We did a lot of discussion. She came from a very liberal background in New York City. I came from a very conservative background. And we sort of met in the middle and discovered that we loved each other's works. And we learned a lot from each other and through each other.

Nate: What did you learn from her? 

Luci: I learned to be a lot more open about what faith in God was all about. That you didn't have formulas by which to describe your faith. That this was a freeing thing, that the Holy Spirit of God could work in different ways. We just enjoyed each other's experiences with the Spirit of God. We shared so much. We found that working together was truly an act of worship to God. 

I remember after working through an entire manuscript, The Weather of the Heart, we finished all the copy editing and so on, we spontaneously stood to our feet and sang the doxology, "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow." 

Nate: What do you want people to remember about her?

Luci: I want them to remember that she loved God with all her heart. That she wanted to be God's child and servant. And I think that what I could bring to her was a sense that God was larger than either her understanding or my understanding of God. That God was so magnificent and so wide, in the ways we could reach to God through the Holy Spirit.

So it was a very Trinitarian friendship. She loved Jesus, and you know, the fact that God was both Jesus and also the Divine Creator of the world. 

Nate: How did you see her work influence people spiritually?

Luci: I think she asked a lot of questions that people had. People you know, had a lot of questions because God is knowable through various ways, but not always easily understood. And because Madeline had a very great respect for the Bible and for Holy Scripture, and she realized that, throughout Scripture, God speaks to us through metaphors.

God spoke to Moses with the Ten Commandments, but also through acts of grace and love. It was, an ongoing, free flowing relationship that God wants to have with us as his children, as his followers, and both Madeline and I wanted to have that characterize our life and our writing.

Nate: Mm-Hmm. . Do you miss her?

Luci: I miss her a lot. I think I was the only true friend she had at the level where we could be honest, really honest with each other. We rescued each other several times. 

Once she was in California speaking at a conference and she became very ill and was hospitalized. And I was living in the state of Washington. And she phoned me and she said, can you come down and be with me? So I went down to the hospital in Santa Cruz and spent three weeks. I lived in a motel nearby, and came in and spent time with her, telling jokes, writing things together, just conversing at the deepest level about what our lives were meant to be, and what was truly significant and important for us to believe and to do with our writing. 

And of course, I was a poet. She's a fiction writer. And sort of, we met in the middle, which was a really good place. We enriched each other at that wonderful level. 

I also got to know her family. I spent quite a bit of time visiting New York and staying with her in her apartment on the Upper West Side.

Most days we would walk over to the cathedral, Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And go to communion there at noon.

And that was the sort of thing that we were able to join in wholeheartedly with no reservations. But also, when we had questions, we were able to share our questions with each other and search what the great theologians had to say and what Scripture had to say about topics and about themes.

When we had doubts, when we had huge questions about what God was doing in the world. We could share those with each other and pray together. We did a lot of praying. 

Nate: Sounds like a really special friendship that you two had. What was the role she filled for you?

Luci: She filled for me a challenge. She would ask me to move beyond my evangelical faith and open up to various other questions about who we were to be in the world, how we were to reflect the Holy Spirit's wide ranging creativity in the world.

So we can be part of that flow of creativity that comes through the Holy Spirit into the created world.

Nate: What was she like as a person?

Luci: Well, she was quite-- she was, pretty strong minded. Yeah, she didn't suffer fools gladly, but she was very loving to people who were questioning, who were seekers after God.

I think one of the things that blessed me was that ...

Amisho “Sho” Baraka joins Nate for a fascinating conversation about George Washington Carver — a man whose faith directed his genius toward the good of others.

Resources

• The Man Who Talks with the Flowers: The Intimate Life Story of Dr. George Washington Carver, by Glenn Clark 
• Essential Writings of the American Black Church, by John Hunt
• Tuskegee University
• He Saw That It Was Good, by Sho Baraka
• Album: ​“The Narrative,” Sho Baraka, 2016
• “Bravery to Faithfully Create,” article by Sho Baraka on renovare.org

Other episodes with this guest

• Episode 234 : Sho Baraka — He Saw That It Was Good

Pastor and author Andrew Arndt talks with Nathan Foster about how the stories and examples of the desert fathers and mothers move from exhaustion, burnout, and pain into a more vibrant faith.

Mimi Dixon shares how the life and words of Catherine Doherty—a pioneer for interracial justice and mentor to Thomas Merton—helped her to return to her first love.
 
Resources

• Poustinia, by Catherine Doherty
• Catherine Doherty writes about prayer and sacraments as ways to welcome and know the presence of God in “First Meet God” 
• Luminous Lives, a Renovaré e-course hosted my Mimi Dixon

Matthew Clark joined Nate in-person to tape this week's podcast conversation on the topic of truth — truthful storytelling, truthful music, true relationships and true worship. 

Visit Matthew Clark's website.

Books by Matthew Clark

• Tale of Two Trees  
• Only The Lover Sings 

Find Matthew's music on Spotify and Apple

Matthew's Podcast — One Thousand Words: Stories Along the Way

Printmaker Sally Kendrick talks with Nate about the creative act of finding and printing specimens from nature as a way of cultivating "openness to the presence of God and willingness to receive the love of God." 

Sally Kendrick is a Maryland-based photographer with Carolina roots. She began experimenting with cyanotypes as a way of cultivating a habit of attentiveness to the beauty in the natural world around her. 

• Read Sally's essay "Attention Grows into Love" on renovare.org.
• True Impressions: Daily Prayers (artwork by Sally Kendrick) available for purchase or for free download.
• Sally has graciously offered some of her cyanotypes as downloads that can be printed locally.
• You can connect with Sally on Instagram at @turkeycreekprints.