COEXISTING

in the Church of Shadow and Light

Church of Shadow and Light comes out officially tomorrow. It’s a book about living in the tension between the shadows and light that are part of being alive on planet earth. It’s a book about loss and picking up the pieces and stumbling forward. It’s a book about the small things that add beauty to that which seems devoid of anything worth looking at. It’s a book about peace and wondering what would happen if we got what we wanted. It came together during a challenging time for me personally, and it comes out during a challenging time for everyone.¹ It’s a small offering to a world that doesn’t often celebrate small things. Writing it helped me coexist with myself (and others) during a year that was too much, and I hope reading it does the same for you.

Here’s the forward.

Do you ever wonder about what truth and beauty really look like? Or how shadow and light are both necessary to create that truth and beauty? I think about that a lot–about how truth and beauty and shadow and light find ways to carry us through hard things; about all the people in the world who feel lost in forests of hopelessness; about how far away peace often feels.

I think about what Rumi wrote so long ago: “When I go toward you | it is with my whole life.”

What’s worth going toward with a whole life? That’s one of those questions that doesn’t have “one right answer.” Kind of like there’s no one right answer to “who or what is God?”

So I wonder about the questions that don’t have one right answer, and how those questions matter. I also wonder about the questions that don’t have any answers at all.

Consider what happens when you ask a forest what’s important and it doesn’t respond. What if you took the silence as an invitation to find your own truth on a forgotten path, one that’s uncovered only by walking the edges of unanswerable questions? Sometimes it’s the path leading deep into the shadows that allows a way forward to rise up in a language only light can translate.

It’s not easy to accept the invitation to walk the paths that require living the questions. Yet even though there is nothing but mystery inside such an invitation, there is also comfort, or maybe something more like reassurance, in allowing all things to be possible.

I think about the church of shadow and light, about how we know our holy places by how accepting they are of our whole personhood, by what we’ll endure to be there to pray, by the simple knowledge that something shifts each time we show up. I think about truth and beauty and how they are found inside shadow and light, and the peace that shows up when we allow both to exist.

So, I hope you get a copy (which you can do anywhere you get your books online, or your local indie bookshop can order it for you if it’s not on the shelf, or you could request your library purchase a copy). If you haven’t already, purchasing directly from the publisher is a great option—all the dollars go to folks who worked on the book and me, rather than large corporate entities. If you order from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, I humbly ask that you leave a review which helps others find the book (which you can do starting tomorrow.) Or you can leave a review on Goodreads whenever you like. Or just tell somebody about the book or post about it on your social media channels, which is very much appreciated (and free).

“Every moment is the end of something and the beginning of something else. What ends now? And what begins?”

1. Those let’s be honest….pretty much every period of life on earth has included challenging times—much of what’s happening these days is ‘unprecedented’ but living in a time of “unprecedented happenings” isn’t new.