Tag: tony kriz

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The 2015 Risk was worth it

Cornelia Becker Seigneur  By Cornelia Becker Seigneur

What an amazing experience at our Faith & Culture Writers Conference this past weekend! I am exhausted and over-did it and felt it at night. I needed to rest more during the days. I will pay later for it later. But, I am so grateful to be alive (truly!)  And, that I can smile thinking about the weekend. An exhausted smile, but a smile nonetheless.

This year, we tried something new, adding an extra experience Pre-Conference during the day on Friday that we titled “Breathing Space- A Mini-Retreat.” That is always a risk, trying something new and different. What if it flops. What if numbers are really low and it looks like a failure. And, when registration numbers were not coming in as quickly as we had anticipated, I’m not going to lie, I was worried. As the conference director, I see the reality of the finances.

Adding the Mini-Retreat and new art spaces and live art were in response to comments from last year’s survey, saying people wanted more down time, more small group interaction, additional opportunities for fellowship. In short, people wanted to not feel so rushed.  And, when one mini-retreat group leader, Nish Weiseth, had to drop out of the afternoon time frame due to a family situation just a week before the event, I started doubting even more. Maybe, this added day was a bad idea.

Then, I prayed and asked others on our lead team to pray.

Our team’s executive administrator, Bethany Jackson, encouraged me to take the group and I appreciated her vote of confidence. But, I really needed to be careful not doing so much since my accident. I was already slated to share from the main stage about my accident, so I just decided to say no to leading this small group. It was hard to say no, as I love leading small writing groups, but I knew it would already be a grueling weekend. I reached out to a few people to see if they could possibly lead that small breakout group for that portion of the mini-retreat. Karen Zacharias Spear and Micah J. Murray stepped in, joining Seth Haines and Brooke Perry, and Romal Tune and Tony Kriz.

God is good. He always provides just whom he needs.

Then came the conference, and people told me how amazing they felt that the mini-retreat experience was. One person said:

“Okay, we can go home now. I’m filled up.”

Others said that God was working on their souls and in their hearts and they were being healed and restored and I am hearing all of these comments and this was only during the “pre-conference,” and I am already shedding tears of joy. Exhausted tears of joy.

Sometimes, when you risk, it flops. Sometimes it goes well. Sometimes it’s in between. But all the time it’s worth it.

The Lord was so in this weekend, and we truly could not have done it without Him. And, that is a good place to be.

That comment I heard over and over again. That God was at work.

It was God, working through my incredible leadership team and committee members and behind the scene folks that made this past weekend possible. I am humbly grateful for their service and friendship. After my accident, they just kept on moving forward. We only had three months to go. We should not have had a conference, but God had other plans.

So many folks worked behind the scenes to make this event go so smoothly. And, these wonderful people were doing more than just running a conference. They were giving their lives. Many took note of the personal nature of our conference. Bob Welch, one of our speakers, said, “Wow,  a few weeks before the conference, I received a hand-written note saying you were praying for me!” I’ve never had that before. We wanted to be intentional about making people feel like they mattered.

We serve a creative God who carved something beautiful out of nothing; and now He calls us to create, to fill the blank pages of our lives with our WORDS, our stories, His Story. We prayed that people would find a place of community and belonging; and, from listening to the conversations, both at the pre-conference, “Breathing Space: A Mini-Retreat,” and throughout the weekend, I think that was happening.

So, we risked, we dared, we dreamed.

And, it was worth it.

——————-

Cornelia Becker Seigneur was is the mom of five children between the ages of 12 and 25, with a set of identical twins in the mix; she has been married to her college sweetheart for 28 years. Cornelia loves gathering people together into community and she is honored to serve as  the founding director of the Faith & Culture Writers Conference.  Cornelia longs to serve Christ in any way she can; she thrives on adventure and the extraordinary ordinary and family; and she needs a lot of grace to survive. Find her work at Cornelia Becker Seigneur’s Website

 

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God, gender and the use of pronouns

Tony KrizBy Tony Kriz 

Today on “Off The Highway,” The Shack and Cross Roads author, William Paul Young (whom we just announced is a featured Faith & Culture Writers Conference speaker), addresses an issue for which he is, uniquely, both a lightning rod and a thoughtful scholar.  In The Shack, Paul famously embodies God the Father, “Papa,” as an African-American woman and the Spirit as a wispy Asian woman.

I want to focus today’s post on an implication of Paul’s theology… a very practical implication for me in my vocation.

As a writer on topics of faith and spirituality, God is often the subject of my writings.  At this point in my writing development, one issue that I am working through is the use of God-pronouns in my writings.

To put it simply, do I refer to God as exclusively “he” or do I mix in both “he” and “she” references.  Straight talk.

Paul Young, mixes his references. For instance, he most typically refers to the Spirit as “she” since the Hebrew word for Spirit is grammatically a feminine word.

I had an article published earlier this week on a national website.  As happens, minor edits were made by the editors.  A punctuation correction here, a phrase added there.

In this article, the editors changed the word “God” to “he” at several points.

Look, I get it.  From the traditional editorial model, I use the word “God” too often, sometimes multiple times in one sentence.  I say “Godself” instead of “himself”.  My motivation is to avoid the gender question as often as possible.

Here’s the deal:  I would probably prefer to weave in both “he” and “she” in reference to God.  I believe that this would be more ontologically true of God’s character, even though it would be a shock to my religious-literary tradition.  However, I know that because of that shock, many, many people from my traditions would be offended by references to God as “she.”

On the other hand, referring to God as “he,” particularly if it is exclusively as “he” is also offensive to a significant group of people that I very much care for, a group that has often experienced indefensible abuse at the hand of males.  I want to write as inoffensively as possible.  I desire to be heard.

So what am I left with?  I can either risk offending (thus losing my message) a fairly large group by using “she” AND “he” for God OR offend another group of people (for whom the offense is often much more visceral) by sticking strictly with “he.”

My solution.  Since we don’t have an all encompassing or “neutral” pronoun in English, I try to avoid pronouns for God as much as possible.  Even if it makes my writing slightly more wooden.  If you read my most recent book ALOOF, you may even notice that from the start of the book to the end, my use of God-pronouns decreases along the way.

And why not?  Even if it is wooden, this is God we are talking about.  Throughout human history there has been a special deference to the names of God.  Scribes would use a different quill when writing a word for God.  Orators use unique and specific phrasing when speaking God’s name(s) aloud.  Why not also remove the use of pronouns, at least in English, so that whenever God is referenced the full gender-spectrum is always embodied in each use.

What do you think?

On the other hand, I am also playing with the idea of using the pronoun “they” for God, instead of “he” or “she.”  It removes the gender dilemma.  And it was God who referred to Godself saying “Let US create humankind in OUR image… Let US create them male and female.”  Maybe a transition to “they” could provide a lovely solution.  Also, it would be fun to watch auto-grammar-correct deal with a sentence like: “When God speaks to people, They tend to do so in a way that surprises.”

[Watch today’s episode to hear more of William Paul Young’s thoughts on the topic.]

Tony Kriz (D. Min.) is an author/teacher of faith and culture through media and at universities, conferences and communities of faith, and returns as one of our speakers at this year’s Faith & Culture Writers Conference,  for which he serves on the Advisory Board. He has taught in the spheres of Intercultural Studies and Spiritual Formation at Multnomah University and Warner Pacific, among others.  In addition to his recent book Aloof, he’s the author of  Neighbors and Wise Men: Sacred Encounters in a Portland Pub and Other Unexpected Places(Thomas Nelson, 2012).

Many were first introduced to this unique thinker under the name “Tony the Beat Poet” through Donald Miller’s book, Blue Like Jazz. Tony has served in places as diverse as the Muslim world and Reed College. Tony lives with his family in North Portland in an imbedded, intentional community.

Website: www.tonykriz.com | Twitter: @tonykriz
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The Quest for Epiphany

 mult9_2_015-2by Tony Kriz

There is something that happens when pen hits the page, when pixels populate the screen. It is like the unknown becomes known.  It doesn’t always happen that way.  In fact it is the categorical opposite of predictable, of formulaic, but when it happens, it is magic.

Writing transcends consciousness.

I am not a genius writer. Far from it.  I have a simple formula that guides the majority of the chapters of my long form writing (books).  It goes like this (I can’t believe that I am admitting this):

You start with a story.  The magic of a story is not its drama.  It is not its otherworldliness.  It is not that it is exceptional.  The magic of a story is found in its meaningfulness.  You may ask, “Meaningfulness for the reader?”

No.  The magical element is the meaningfulness for the author.  Magic and meaningfulness exist in a delicate marriage.  When a writer writes out of their own visceral meaningfulness and into honest expression there is the real hope that magic will happen.

One more thing… When I write a book, I am essentially asking myself one formative question.  When I wrote Neighbors and Wise Men, I was asking myself “What are my formative memories when non-Christians taught me how to follow Jesus?”  In my current book, Aloof, I was asking myself “What are my formative memories about God’s presence and God’s troubling absence?”

Once a story is identified, I often don’t actually know exactly WHY it is formative, I simply know that it is.  I begin the chapter by teasing my best guess as to what the stories formative lesson might be; that is my introduction.

Next I tell the story.  I write very existentially.  If you were to happen upon me writing a chapter in a corner booth at a local pub or coffee shop, odds are you would see my face contorting with the emotions of the story I am writing.  You might see my eyes filled with moisture or a hotly furrowed brow.  That is how I write.

When the story is fully told, including a well-imagined setting, sympathetic characters and a believable conflict and climax, I move to the chapter’s conclusion.

This is where the magic happens.  It does not happen every time, but when it does, it is one of the great endorphin cocktails.  Suddenly, as if I am an observer and the chapter itself is a seducing character sitting across the table, the true meaning of the story blossoms right before my eyes.  

I rarely see it coming.  How could I?  And the surprising frequency that this newly realized meaning is harmonious with my spackled-together introduction (bringing new meaning I could not have predicted) is soothing, comforting and arousing.

If we were to flip together through the pages of my books, both of us would probably be surprised by how many chapters I would admit “I did not know where this chapter was going to end when I started it.”

Keep writing.  Write viscerally… existentially… and dare the magic.

Let the epiphanies come.  That’s how we move from the blank page to something beautiful.

Tony is the Writer in Residence at Warner Pacific College, the sponsoring host for the 2015 Conference; Tony is also on the Faith & Culture Writers Conference advisory board, and a speaker at this year’s event.  He has been at every single Faith & Culture Writers Conference, either as an attender, speaker, keynote speaker, advisor, or leader. His new book Aloof: Figuring Out Life with a God Who Hides is coming out in January, 2015. Tony writes at www.tonykriz.com.