Favorite Books of '23! (Part II)
Having an existential crisis reading Kevin Nye's call to end homelessness + reads I'm looking forward to in 2024
Hey there friends,
We’re back with Part II of my favorite reads of 2023. Today just one essay to share on a book that mattered to me last year—
’s Grace Can Lead Us Home. I got real in this one. Thanks for going to vulnerable places with me.If you missed Part I, in which I riff on bell hooks and a bunch of mystic liberationists, you can find it here.
Per usual, pardon the typos :)
Much love y’all,
Nathan
(to recap) Favorite reads of 2023
Salvation: Black People and Love, bell hooks
On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Fight to Build a Union, Daisy Pitkin (reflection post coming May Day ‘24!)
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform your Life, Dacher Keltner
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (Volokhonsky and Peavar translation)
The Following of Jesus: A Reply to The Imitation of Christ, Leonardo Boff
With Head and Heart: The Autobiography & The Creative Encounter, Howard Thurman
The City State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865, Mark Peterson
Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness, Kevin Nye
We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People, Gustavo Gutierrez
The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song, J. Kameron Carter
Teachings of the Christian Mystics, intro & ed. Andrew Harvey
Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Robert Perkinson
Grace Can Lead Us Home by Kevin Nye
wrote the book I wish someone handed me sixteen years ago when I first wandered under a bridge to share a sandwich and have a good conversation, and wandered out with a lot of questions and the seed of a vocation.Kevin explains the causes, complexities, and “solutions” to homelessness as clearly as anything I’ve read on the topic, busting myths left and right as he goes. Whether it’s historical origins, the impact of trauma, the primacy of housing to ending houselessness, the role of mental health and addiction, the significance of social isolation (and, inversely, community), the power of racism and cruel political decisions, the fears and anxieties and awkwardness of relationships, the grief of relationship with the unhoused, what you can do, or some spot on theology woven through all of this — Kevin has a gift for laying all of this out in a briskly readable style brimming with compassion, vulnerable personal stories, humor and a vision of the heart of Jesus for the liberation of the poor that the church desperately needs. I wish I knew how to write as clearly and as powerfully as him. I hope this book finds broad readership among Christians and beyond.
For me, however, getting through Grace Can Lead us Home was something of an existential crisis. I needed eight months to read Kevin’s very readable book. I kept avoiding it. Kept putting off the next encounter. I found myself unable to get through a page without wandering off into memories, then running away from memories, fleeing the feelings they kept forcing me to deal with. I couldn’t get through this book without getting lost in anger at the church and stuck in shame over my own disconnection from this issue and the humans suffering at the center of it.
I read Kevin telling stories of people he lost and lost myself remembering the day I was calling around to agencies collecting the names of the dead, and Paul’s name was spoken back to me, and I wandered out into the street sobbing because Paul had so recently found a home, had worked so perfectly at the task the system had set for him, but now here he was on my list of the dead to be read on the winter solstice with the others.
I would get lost remembering how naïve I was to co-sign on Shannon‘s bank account when she entered that rehab we’d fought so hard to get her into. Remembering how my stomach crashed through the bottom of my feet as we walked into the dimly lit recycled nursing home in North Houston that was to be her recovery center. How I instantly knew it was not right for her when this was supposed to be the victory moment of our story together, the end of the fairytale of overcoming parole officers and addiction and the streets. I remembered the call I received from Ben telling me Shannon was found dead in the median of a highway. Apparently a recurrence of the aneurysm that gave her that receding hairline and impossible-not-to-love wit. I remembered the night I flew back to Bryan to gather in the living room our community friends who had been along on that journey to grieve and the moment her mother walked in and let us hold her.
I kept remembering with grinning tears every time Ray called me a “fuckin’ housie” — his pet term for anyone who didn’t “live in the dirt” to use another Ray-ism. How I didn’t know the best way to handle the tyrant I felt he became when he started living in Beloved Community Village, how I didn’t just go straight to him and how hard he cussed me out when my efforts came to light. I kept getting brought back to the bright afternoon when Ray and I were wordlessly reconciled at Rhonda’s bedside, bound together by struggle and love, and by our tears, as his beloved finally relinquished entrapment in her abused body, encircled by family, blood and found. How I couldn’t make it back to Denver to be among the gathering of left behind grievers who sang to Ray’s memory under the tree on California Street he most associated with home.
I couldn’t think about trauma without remembering the time we tried to reconcile the villagers with our staff and board and wound up in a five hour trauma dump that left us all shaking, knowing we’d messed this up, unsure how to fix what we’d built, not wanting to ruin the power sharing we’d worked so hard to craft but knowing we couldn’t keep doing it like this. Kept wandering off pages about mental health thinking about the stares and the rambles and the laughter and the fights and the chess games and the hugs and the marrow-deep smell of burnt coffee and unwashed humanity at Network.
And I kept thinking of all the churches. All these broken churches where these white middle class Christians sit and sing and run committees that Kevin was calling out to join in bringing an end to homelessness. And then the rage would come. And I’d put the book down for another couple months.
I thought of the halfway house run by Emmanuel Baptist that kicked Shannon back out to the streets because, like all of us, she was imperfect, fallible, addicted, and they were too committed to the wielding harshest edges of penal substitutionary atonement to hold onto someone that human.
I thought, of course, of First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs. Of how they train parishioners to hand out cards that direct people on the streets to agencies in the name of “best practices” and “partnerships.” How they professionalized care and institutionalized stigma and segregated relationships. I thought of the young man who fell asleep on the pews between services, the one who lost his insulin kit and when he searched for it they didn’t believe him. They called the security guard to kick him back out to the street because nothing was more important than that the second service begin on time without interruption, and how we rushed to the fire station to check his blood sugar and discovered he would have died if he fell asleep again. I kept thinking about how this big brick church that was so determined to preach grace they would have killed this kid to keep on preaching. How the local mission pastor told me not everyone belongs at every church. How I’ve never been able to get over it or forgive it.
I thought of the time Jeremy was kicked out of the rescue mission in Fresno for no other reason than that he was gay. How he taught me to cook the best chicken of my life when he wound up borrowing my bed that night—how I think of him every time I sear a breast in my cast iron skillet and toss it in the oven at 450 and how wish I had the rest of the recipe for the risotto he served with it.
I thought, bile rising, of the debate I participated in just weeks before moving away from Denver. We were in the Baptist church across from the statehouse, the same one I’d officed in the basement of for the past few years. I remembered my back in forth with the policy director for the “No on Right to Survive” campaign, another Presbyterian come to represent the perspective on why we shouldn’t pass civil and economic rights for people forced to survive on the street. I remembered how we were debating three feet from a pulpit with a plaque memorializing the day Dr. King delivered a sermon there, and how sick I felt to desecrate the legacy of the man who started the Poor People’s Campaign with the conceit that there should be any trace of debate among Christians over whether or not it should be legal for the poorest people to take the most basic actions of survival in our society that’s so egregiously failed them.
And each time I would force myself to keep reading this book I kept thinking…
“Honestly, Kevin, I already know all of this. I had to learn it the hard way. You say it better than me, but I f——g know all of this and the shame of it burns inside me. Kevin, I’m so ashamed to know all this and be so absent from these struggles and relationships. Don’t you know all these memories running through my mind are already three, five, ten, fifteen years old? Don’t you know I’m just another sell-out fake looking after toddlers a long way from actual relationships at the margins? Kevin I’m so angry at these churches and these Christians. Aren’t they, aren’t we, the ones who built this society that leaves people out in the cold in the first place? How dare we imagine we’re the hope of this injustice? Isn’t that arrogance the problem? Do I even believe we/they are worth these kinds of books anymore? What are we even doing here? Did you not watch 2020? Do you really still have hope in this?”
All of which amounted to something of an existential crisis for yours truly disheveled co-op director and writer.
But page by page I kept reading. And I kept remembering.
I thought of how I’ve tried to walk away from homelessness over and over. I thought I was done in seminary. I thought I was done when we moved to Boston. How I keep trying to “go upstream” and keep getting lost. And I realized I can never be done. I’m too angry at what we’ve done to these dear people. I’ve been loved too much by them to walk away. I’ve found too much of my true self in their midst.
I had to remember Christ Chapel who, for all their shortcomings, was the first to bring me to the homes of the poor just to be of use.
I thought of the ramshackle Christians of Potluck in the Park led by the fearless Dan Kiniry who showed me what it looks like to enflesh radical communion where the first are last and the last are first and all of us belong to one another and play beach volleyball.
I remembered On Ramps Church. On Ramps who connected Jeremy to me when he got kicked out of the rescue mission. On Ramps who is of the poor and for the poor, and how its way of being saved me from walking away altogether.
I thought of tiny Beloved Community Mennonite Church after whom Beloved Community Village where Ray and Rhonda lived was named. Of their radical witness of solidarity and service.
I thought of how that Baptist church across the from the statehouse with the King plaque on its pulpit hosted a Safe Outdoor Space in its parking lot just months after hosting that debate as the pandemic drove thousands into the streets. How dozens of people survived the pandemic, found care, and found housing because of their generous love.
I thought of the church we attended before leaving Denver who would also risk solidarity and hostility to host an SOS.
I thought of Solid Rock Community Church that’s using its land to build affordable housing and the joy of walking alongside Rev. Ben and their leaders to imagine what could be and be crazy enough to make it happen.
And I wondered, after all, who else in this messed up society is doing crazy things like Solid Rock and On Ramps, Beloved Community Mennonite and First Baptist Denver?
And at the end of all my cries and all my memories I heard Kevin say again, this time to right me: “Nathan, grace can lead us home.” Nathan, it’s ok. You can still come home to yourself. You can still come back to the true self you found in the midst of these friendships and struggles, the places where Christ still lives among us.
I wondered why its so hard for me to find as much grace for others as I need for myself. Because we Christians are a big part of the problem. I’m not sure how much hope I have in us. But Kevin’s right. Grace can still lead us home.
Some reads I’m excited for this year
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, W.E.B. du Bois (I got 200 pages in last year, just 528 to go! This book is a radical retelling of the most pivotal period of American history. What makes it so relevant to current debates on the left is that it treats race as a class problem and vice versa. A cornerstone of the Black radical tradition and worth every minute.)
Reparations and the Theological Disciplines: Prophetic Voices for Remembrance, Reckoning, and Repair, eds. Michael Barram, Drew Hart, Gimbiya Kettering, and Michael Rhodes (I was sent a copy by my old seminary to write a review for Pacific Review and couldn’t be more excited!)
From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, Alex Gourevitch (There is so much to learn from movement history. I feel like I’ve barely begun. The solidarity economy work I’m apart of today feels very similar to this post-Civil War period of multi-racial organizing led by the Knights of Labor.)
Continuing my tour through “classic” Christian mystics, I’m working through things already on my shelf. I think I’ll read some St. John of the Cross (probably The Ascent of Mount Carmel) and Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
During my morning meditation, I pair a more traditional contemplative text like the ones above with something in the engaged/liberation stream of spirituality. This year that’s going to include Barbara A. Holmes’s Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, Howard Thurman’s The Centering Moment,
’s gorgeous Living Resistance and I’ll hopefully get to Dorothee Soelle’s The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance.Some others in the big-stack-by-the-big-green-reading-chair I hope to get to in some order are:
Fiction … The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov, Dubliners by James Joyce, and continuing Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead series with Home and Lila
Theology … Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times by Joerg Rieger, Being as Communion by John Zizioulas, Mujerista Theology by Ada María Isasi Díaz
Critical Theory … Unpayable Debt by Denise Ferreira da Silva, The Communism of Love by Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman, Slavery as Social Death by Orlando Patterson
I think I just picked my quarterly 4:
1Q: Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes (started it just before the holidays)
2Q: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing
3Q: Marjorie Kelly's Wealth Supremacy
4Q: Danielle Allen's Justice by Means of Democracy.
In between I'll continue Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Year War on Palestine, Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto, and Toni Morrison's The Truth of Self-Regard.
I don't promise to resist other books not on the list because when has that ever worked? But I do hope to do as you're doing, Nathan, and read from my current shelves. Reorganizing and trimming said shelves will help.
Thank you for writing this, Nathan! I recognized so much of myself in that, even in your visceral response to my words. That tension existed even while writing, and I guess it’s easier to write hopeful than to be hopeful. Something I’ve begun articulating more recently (and wish I had at the time) was this notion: I don’t actually count on the church to be the force that ends homelessness; but I don’t think we can do it without them. In light of that, I can hold my rage at the churches and Christians who cause harm and my hope and joy when churches/Christians link arms, not necessarily as a tension but an expectation. We just need *enough* churches and Christians, not all of them.
Anyway, thanks again for this. I need to get up to Boston soon!