CoL: Good Things this Week

Three good things this week:

1. The Faith Club, the book and the website. In the Culture of Life, we all have to grow up, grow out of our bad habits, our childish desire for endless ease and comfort. The women who established the first Faith Club and wrote about their experiences and conversations are doing that. What I call growing up, they call deepening their faith and their connection to each other. One a Catholic, one a Muslim, one a Jew. Instructive here, is that their conversations were not always easy, simple, comfortable, or gentle. But they were sincere, they were committed to finding their own faiths and each other's, and more people like these women should be in charge of the world. They went through the hard part where most of us give up. Faith or no, their example is a good one for each of us.

2. This I Believe has been back on the air for a while on NPR. On the local St. Louis on the Air show, the people behind it revealed their ultimate goals for the program : to let everyone, over as much of the planet as possible, read each other's short essays stating their core values or beliefs and how they came to hold them. Very Culture of Life move here. While a small number of the submissions are aired or collected into anthologies (which seem to be selling like things that sell out quickly), every essay ends up on the website -- in a smartly designed database, I might add. Here, we have a chance to read people engaged deeply in the soul-search required to become fully oneself. Writers sometimes spend a year working on just this little essay, writers professional and not, famous and not, influential and not.

More of this, Class, more of this. Let's all go write one! Because the thing about love is that you can't chicken out in the face of its demands and tests. That part of the grown up way of being.

3. Personal YAY: I sent my poetry manuscript to the Fence Books Motherwell Prize contest, and so did a friend. I'm hoping that in the end they have to choose between us. THAT would be too fun. And then she said I should submit it to every contest I can dig up. We'll see.

With that, on this rainy day, back to the 'brary for me. Research oh wonderful research!