“Where Goodness Still Grows” Book Highlights
I found it interesting to read this right after “Riley Unlikely,” because of the similarities leading to such different outcomes. Both ladies grew up in christian homes, wanting to be missionaries. Both went abroad. Then the roads divulge.
Riley is still young, in the first phase of missions, with a very complete system set up to help her succeed (and perhaps keep her stuck). Amy (this author) was barred unexpectedly from returning to missions because of evangelizing in a closed country when she was “supposed to” only be teaching English (Written about in her first book, “Dangerous Territory.”
“Where Goodness Still Grows” is Amy’s second book, her next phase, you might say, where she’s struggled through deconstruction and refused to let go of God. It is a beautiful read. She’s struggled through living a “normal life” in the USA after falling in love with life abroad. She struggled with white saviorism, and having to “do it all yourself.”
She put it so well: “These days I’m wondering what it might be like to reimagine neighbor-love using what I’ve learned of mother-love. I’m beginning to believe that loving my neighbor isn’t about having a defense ready, but about letting my defenses down and opening myself up. The ethos of mothering, poet Cynthia Dewi Oka writes, “involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies.”
I love that idea of moving from neighbor love to mother love. Her book is by themed chapters, each one drawing out important parts I’d never thought of.
Lament: “I grieve what I have lost in losing my confidence in contemporary American evangelicalism. I grieve what white evangelicalism in America has done in capitulating to capitalist greed, in prizing our own comfort over our neighbor’s safety, in remaining blind to the racism in our hearts and our country, in raping the earth. I lament the ways in which I and we have failed to practice our cherished values well. For me to lament these failures does not imply there are no virtues to be found among Christians. Sometimes we have let love lead us, sometimes we have let fear lead us. I’m lamenting the times in which fear won. And I’m lamenting then because I still have hope we can change. I could, in my despair, keep quiet, stay safe, and repress my feelings. Or I could, in my dispare; try to burn it all down: to destroy my childhood faith because it wasn’t perfect, because it wounded me and so many people. I don’t want to do any of those things. I want to lament, hoping that in lament I find space for new, more expansive and constructive ways of understand faith and virtue: believing that by God’s grace something beautiful can still be born from my grief.”
Purity: social anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her book “Purity and Danger” argues that dirt only becomes dirt when it’s out of place. Hair on your head is beautiful, hair in your soup is disgusting...purity is about things being in their right places. Instead of asking “How can I be pure?” And answering by pointing to a list of rules for appropriate sexual relationships, perhaps I begin to practice the virtue of purity by asking where I belong- where I fit in the world, what my right place is within it- and by accepting that my place is wherever Jesus is...because in Jesus there is no negativity dominance. His love and purity are so strong that any impurity they encounter is immediately made beautiful. To be pure, to be in the right place, requires only this: to be with Jesus.”
Modesty: “modesty was about power, whether it was about men having power over women’s bodies or women using their bodies to gain power over men. It is virtuous and loving to act with your neighbors best interests in mind- but it is really virtuous to seek to control your neighbor? Women (may) learn to see their bodies as innately problematic. The modesty doctrine teaches women to see men as less human, as having less power over their own impulses than women do. (It) taught us to be afraid of our bodies instead of recognizing them as good creations, gifts of God, and sources of knowledge.”
Discernment: “to know anything, I would have to begin by believing something, something ultimately unprovable outside the system it created...my high school principal actually gave me a more helpful discernment practice than anyone else in my life had. He allowed me to search for truth as a whole person, with a body, mind, heart, and soul, rather than just as a brain. He told me to let my doubts seek answers not just in logic or an external authority, but in my desire. I doubted that God was real, but I didn’t want to live without God. A life without God was not, for me, one that was livable—it would lead me to despair. And so my desire let me to belief.”