Patty Kirk talks about
"Confessions of an Amateur Believer"

Added February 14, 2007

Joyce: Patty Kirk, welcome to In the Library Reviews!

Confessions of an Amateur Believer is an incredible spiritual journey. What prompted you to write this collection of essays?

Patty: I started writing the essays in this book almost from the moment I became a Christian. Not on purpose, really, or even with an eye to publishing them anywhere. They just sort of came over me in response to what was going on in my life and in my mind as I struggled to understand the Christian life I was suddenly a part of. Writing was how I processed what I was learning. As a brand new believer and simultaneously a newcomer to the Bible Belt, where everyone seemed to be a Christian, I found myself in a weird sort of cultural vacuum. I expected that I was going to change overnight into a good person, someone who was kind and selfless and humble and patient and who embraced every aspect of what I was learning about Christianity. When that didn't happen, I started asking my Christian friends questions and trying to figure things out, but they all spoke a language that was foreign to me, using vague expressions for things that they had assumed happened to me-Jesus knocking on the door of my heart, for example-but that I never experienced in that way. They also never seemed to struggle with or even question key concepts of their various faith traditions that I found perplexing and often off-putting. Later I discovered that my friends struggled as well but hid their doubts for fear of being thought unchristian. Nevertheless, as I say, I couldn't understand their answers to my questions. Often they didn't really answer and just changed the subject. Or they got defensive and, as I felt, tried to shut me down. So, I felt like I was on my own, as a new believer, and writing was where I ended up taking my questions. In my writing, it was just me-my day to day experiences-and the Bible and God. I wrestled in my essays, and there was no one to tell me there was anything wrong with that, no one saying "just" give my worries to Jesus, and so on. I ended up writing three times as many essays as what are included in this book.

Much later, after I had been writing these essays for years and had begun reading them to others, I got an email from a student, a lifelong Christian who was really struggling in life and, recently, in his faith and had started writing similar essays of his own. He asked me if I had ever thought of what he called my "weird little devotional essays" as a sort of prayer. That was a nice idea. A gift, of sorts. He gave me my prayer life. I had always been unhappy with my attempts at daily devotions. They were too sporadic and boring and nowhere near as fulfilling as what I heard people talk about at church. I got distracted easily, was too focused on my own needs, or just not as into it as I thought I should be. It was like prayer was something I had to force myself to do. And God seemed absent, somehow. But when I was writing, I was 100% present and so was God. And I was highly motivated: I couldn't rest until the essay was written. And afterwards, I always felt as though I understood-or accepted, perhaps-some small aspect of God and my relationship to him better. Some trait or lesson. Not much. A tiny little thing at a time. But enough to keep me growing and wanting to know more. So anyway, these essays are more or less my prayers.

Joyce: The insights you present are significant to understanding the process of coming to a saving faith. In my opinion, seasoned Christians can benefit from this view. Yet, you also connect solidly to seekers of the faith. Who then is your target audience?

Patty: When I started reading my essays aloud to others, my listeners always said the same thing: "You are so honest!" I didn't know what that meant at first. I have come to think what they mean is that I go openly where they go only in secret. In other words, although it wasn't clear to me in the early years of my faith, most of my Christian friends struggle as believers, too. Sometimes it was with some aspect of their faith tradition or with a problematic passage of scripture. Many struggled with the Christian life they wanted to lead, with their own expectations and disappointments and failures as Christians. Others were bored and struggled to really care about their faith-to be genuinely interested in what they heard and sang at church or read in the Bible. They were all, in these struggles, just like me, coming to faith for the first time. I think that's how we proceed as believers. I always tell my students that real learning happens only if you go somewhere you haven't been before, somewhere new and probably somewhat threatening and scary. That what I think spiritual formation is-stepping out into new spiritual territory, struggling to understand and find your way, learning, growing.

I didn't really start out writing these essays for a target audience beyond myself and, in some sense, God, but if I had to say who the resulting audience is, it would be the growing believer. Some of them might be where I was as I wrote these essays: taking their first shaky steps into a new and strange life shaped by hope and finding much along the way is not how they expected or wanted it to be. But a likelier audience, I think, is believers who've been at it a while and gotten tired along the way. Or frightened. Or frustrated. Or hurt. Or angry. Or bored. Such longtime Christians are probably way more familiar with many of the Bible passages I talk about than I am, but many have gotten out of the habit of really reading God's word and taking it personally. And many secretly feel cut off from God. They long to feel ardent and alert as believers, as they once did. They have stopped growing, and they know it. It is my hope that the story of my growth journey will jumpstart their own similar journeys by modeling struggle and even doubt as a means of engaging deep faith.

Joyce: Do you feel your journey into faith is unique, or do you believe most people walk the same paths with different proportions of these experiences?

Patty: Not long after I started looking into the possibility of getting my essays published as a book, I discovered that that the thinking in the book industry is that if you want to publish a collection of writings, they have to hang together, somehow, as a narrative. That was a problem. I figured what connected the essays was my spiritual journey, which they pretty much followed. But most of the essays incorporated material from more than one time in my life, so they didn't lend themselves to a simple chronological arrangement. The first agent I sent the book to rejected it because it lacked a "backbone," and the agent I ended up signing with gave me the assignment of grouping the essays and figuring out how they fit together from that. I started out with about three times as many essays as what ended up in the book, but they divided themselves pretty obviously into the four section headings of the book: Meeting God, Struggling, Progressing, and Rest. At the time I thought that was because the four phases in my spiritual formation-which I have seemed to go in and out of over and over again throughout my faith journey-were just recurrent preoccupations of my own life. Then, after I sold the book, I participated in a faculty development workshop in spiritual formation at the university where I teach, and one of my colleagues taught us that traditional models of spiritual development describe pretty much the same four phases, although with different names. The names he used in our workshop were "awakening, purgation, illumination, and unification." The stages are not generally seen as a steady uphill climb, he said, but rather phases we spiral in and out of throughout a lifetime. So I guess I'm no different than anyone else. I found that comforting. But, of course, the particulars of each person's faith story are unique. That's one of the many cool things about God: he could have made us all automatons, but he made all different.

Joyce: Since the title includes the word, "confessions", was it difficult to share these thoughts and memories?

Patty: Sort of, at times. Once I got the book in the form it's in now, I read the whole thing aloud to my husband, and he commented more than once that he could never allow people to see some of the aspects of himself that I reveal about myself-such as my impatience with my daughters or my meanness toward old people who call our house. After he said that, I started being worried that I sound mean and impatient and arrogant in the essays Then I remembered that I am mean and impatient and arrogant.

More often, though, I have the opposite difficulty. A former colleague of mine used to always whisper to me at meetings, "TMI." Too much information. That's sort of who I am, and I worry about that: that the essays are solipsistic and egotistical, borne of a sick desire to expose myself, as the Germans I used to live among accused Americans of doing all the time. According to them, it is a national trait.

Joyce: In your book, you say that faith must come from outside of yourself. Therefore, should readers consider these essays a demonstration of how God worked in your life?

Patty: Um, I guess so. I mean, I definitely believe that faith comes from God and that God works in my life directly.

I think what you may be getting at is what journal editors kept referring to as the "take away value" of my essays for readers. They were always wanting me to tell them what the takeaway was, and with my essays that's a little difficult to pin down. I wish I could tell readers, for example, exactly how, based on my experience, to pray for others. Or sort out the traumas in their lives. Or raise their children. But all I have to offer about these particulars of Christian living are the stories of how I mess things up and the amazing promise, as I understand it from the Bible, that God just doesn't give a rip. He loves us anyway. So, the essays don't really work as any sort of modeling for others except insofar as they might encourage readers with the message that we're loved. Anyway. Despite our failures. Despite out inability to be holy. And our lives, even in the most awful moments, routinely display this promise, if we just pay attention.

Once, the wife of the pastor of a church my family used to go to gave me the best encouragement I think I ever got. She was talking about my relentless worries about being a bad parent, but her words apply to everything. "God picked you to be your girls' mom," she said. "He had precisely you in mind." That's it, I think. That's what I want the book to say to my readers who might be looking for advice on how to live: God picked you to lead the life you live. It was you, precisely you, that he had in mind.

Joyce: Your writing style is elegant and exquisite. Do you have plans for future books?

Patty: Wow, what a compliment! I don't think I've ever been called either one of those adjectives before. Thanks.

I'm at work on a second book due out in the beginning of 2008-another collection of essays that together comprise a sort of spiritually-focused food memoir. With recipes, no less. I had my first meaningful cooking experience when I was just little and started doing most of the cooking in my family when I was eight, and cooking has always been a big part of my life ever since. Nowadays, the kitchen is my personal retreat-house and prayer closet and church, in many ways. The book-chronologically this time, more or less-follows the evolution of my spirit, so to speak, via essays that hover around my food/cooking experiences, beginning with my childhood in California and Connecticut and then as I moved around the world-New Orleans, Boston, Switzerland, England, Berlin, Beijing, Hong Kong, and other places in between. It's been rather hard to describe these essays-especially the spiritual focus, which is implicit rather than explicit in most of the essays-and I feel uncommonly blessed that Thomas Nelson agreed to take it on. There's an essay about baby-sitting at a resort, for example. And one about my mom's country upbringing, and another about what I learned of California history in my elementary school social studies classes. And there's one that begins: "The first year I voted, I registered as a Communist, which I understood to be a person who believed in sharing resources equally for the benefit of all . . ." It's hard to see from these descriptions how they could possibly fit together, but they do. And people seem to really like the essays when I read them aloud. Anyway, I'm really excited about this book

Joyce: Patty, thanks again for sharing your thoughts and for writing such a powerful and personal book.

Patty: You're so welcome. Thanks for reading my book and taking the trouble to interview me. The In the Library Reviews website was new to me, by the way. I really like it. Thanks for your efforts on behalf of writers and readers!

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