I came to know a number of amazing people in my time as a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. The one I wish to affirm and amplify today is Claire McKeever-Burgett of West Texas. She is among the real ones of Nashville. I’m proud to know her. She also has a book out.
In Blessed Are the Women: Naming & Reclaiming Women’s Stories from the Gospels, Claire invites us to open our mixed bags & to consider the mixed bags of others. As she tells and shows and witnesses, there’s generational trauma waiting to be processed within and among us, but there’s also generational joy at the ready, waiting to be accessed and set flowing and rolling down, within and among us, like rivers of healing and living water. Claire speaks as one who knows and as one energetically situated and advocating within and alongside cultures and communities you might know well. Belmont and Baylor and Black Mamas Matter Alliance are here. There’s also Act Like a GRRRL and Thistle Farms.
Claire does that rare thing of loving the mixed bag that is the Bible too much to let bigots decree what it means. Reading this book, I’m reminded of the rare thing Frederick Buechner did, especially in Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Claire and Buechner both locate their dramas and ours within the biblical text creatively and poetically and, to my mind, prophetically. In her feats of attentiveness…characterizing and, to a profound degree, channeling the women who formed, challenged, and nurtured Jesus, Claire manages to enjoin us in their stories, bearing witness to their witness. And most impressively, she shares, in moving detail, much of the data of her own life amid song, prayer, blessings, and the lifting up of public witness drawing us into, in her phrase, “new truth and bigger love.” There’s memoir and meditation and calls to action all at once.
So….this Wednesday at Parnassus, Claire is joined by the poet and author Ciona Rouse (Lovely interview with Ciona here) to celebrate and discuss this amazing new book among us. People new and old to Nashville sometimes ask me where the real people are and how to go about joining them. Everybody’s real, but some people strike me as more obviously committed, at this stage in their process, to healing within and without than others, more committed to baseline moral seriousness (and therefore art and poetry and other righteous efforts). The real ones. In short, Beloved Community. You’ll find it here.
And if you aren’t even in Nashville, get hold of Claire’s book and read and discuss it with others. Or even better, invite her out to where you are to address your people. This is how the work gets done.
Hey David! It’s late out here in California but I thought that I would let you know that early this morning I called my Bookstore and ordered me a copy of "Blessed Are The Women" from my Go-To Bookstore for any (mostly) book I want to add to my library: Hearts And Minds Bookstore in Dallastown, PA. I usually place my orders online but decided to call personally hoping to speak with my best-friend-I-have-never-met-and-bookstore-owner Byron Borger. Alas, Byron was not available. But. I got to speak with Amy and asked her to mention to Byron that I was ordering based on a post I had just seen from David Dark. Amy immediately exclaimed, “Ooo! Recommended by David Dark!? I must get myself a copy! . . . I can see why Byron and you are friends!”
Just wanted you to know! “Blessed Are The Women” likely will appear in Booknotes soon!
Yours in Appreciation,
David Bekowies
“Old Timer with Walking Stink No Plaques”