A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance (Diana Butler Bass) - Review
We live in challenging times. There
are wars aplenty, turns toward authoritarianism in what have been stable
democracies, and a growing coarseness in our social conversations (not just in
our political ones). For Christians with a progressive perspective, there is a
need for spiritual resources that provide wisdom and foster perseverance.
Fortunately, those resources are available. Some of these resources are deeply
rooted in tradition, including the liturgical year that runs from Advent
through Pentecost, ending on Christ the King Sunday. Who better to lead us through the year than
Diana Butler Bass?
Diana Butler Bass is one of the better-known
Christian authors and scholars of our day. Her books include studies of Church
History (A People’s History of Christianity), church life (Christianity for the Rest of Us and Christianity after Religion), theology (Freeing Jesus), and spirituality (Grateful and Grounded), along with
a few more. Like many of us, she has been on a spiritual journey that started
in mainline churches, moved into evangelicalism, and then post-evangelicalism.
As she has taken that journey, she has gathered wisdom, which she has shared
with readers and those who have heard her speak. Because she has spent much of
her career in the public sphere, she has persevered. Her faith and her wisdom
are on full display in her latest book, A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations onFaith, Wisdom, and Perseverance.
I often review books written by
authors I do not know personally. Many of them are people whom I’ve not
encountered before receiving the review copy. Therefore, I can be a bit more
objective. There are others, Diana being one, with whom I’ve had a long-standing
relationship. So, I approach a book like this from a more personal perspective.
In other words, I know much of the backstory to what she shares in her books. In
our conversations over the years, I have discovered that our spiritual journeys
have paralleled each other (we are essentially the same age, and had she gone
to Fuller rather than Gordon-Conwell for seminary, we would have been seminary
colleagues). So, I find it difficult to
refer to her by her last name. So, in this review, I will speak of Diana, not
Bass.
Diana has been speaking for more
than two decades about the intersection of faith and contemporary life. She
brings her training as a church historian (she holds a Ph.D. in American Church
History from Duke University) together with lifelong experience in the church,
along with great communicative skills that allow her to speak words of wisdom that
resonate with many contemporary Christians. I appreciate her willingness to
explore and speak to the concerns on the hearts of many inside and outside the
church. She often does so, by drawing not only on her skills as a scholar, but
personal experience in the church and in the world beyond. Now, in A Beautiful Year, she does something different, offering readers a year-long
devotional that follows the liturgical year. She shares in the introduction a
word about calendars, which she says “tell stories.” They tell stories about “who
we honor, what we treasure, what we aspire to. They are teaching devices—doing
their work through cycles of repetition and ritual” (p. 1). While our “secular
calendar” is largely an inheritance from the Roman Empire, the liturgical
calendar offers us a different vantage point to mark time, one that tells a
different story.
Readers of A Beautiful Year are
invited to inhabit that different story that takes us deeper into our faith as
Christians. If we follow this calendar, marking it by picking up this series of
meditations each week, we discover, as Diana points out, that “the Christian
year is a cycle of stories and rituals based on the life and teachings of Jesus”
(p. 5). That is a key point that needs to be embraced by contemporary
Christians who often lose sight of Jesus, as we merge Christianity and nationalism.
Now, A Beautiful Year is not a daily devotional. Rather, it contains
fifty-two meditations, enough to pick up one a week. Most of the meditations
are based on essays posted on her Substack page, The Cottage.
Being an Episcopalian, Diana knows
the rhythms that the lectionary provides as one moves through the liturgical
year. This spiritually defined year begins with Advent, which generally begins
the last Sunday of November or the first Sunday of December, and flows on for
fifty-two Sundays until the church reaches Christ the King Sunday, which is not
her favorite Sunday. Like many, the word king is problematic, because "it is wedded to social privilege and pyramids of wealth and power and invested with centuries of inequities and fairy-tale fantasies" (p. 310). Nevertheless, it is part of the year, so we must deal with it. So, she suggests we deconstruct the concept of monarchy, which is a worthwhile project. So, as we follow the liturgical calendar, we move through the year, picking
up each of the major seasons—Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and
Ordinary Time (also known as the Sundays after Pentecost). Along the way, she
devotes more meditations to some seasons than to others. Thus, there are seven meditations
for Advent (including Christmas Eve), along with six meditations for the season
of Christmas, but only nineteen for Pentecost, which covers half the year. Fortunately,
Diana gives readers permission to pick and choose meditations that speak to
them, no matter the time of year. So, if you want to read her meditation on “The
Greatest Christmas Special Ever Aired” in July, you may do so. Since we both
grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as late Baby Boomers, she mentions three—Rudolph
the Red-nosed Reindeer (1964), Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), and How
the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)—but I’ll let you discover which is her
favorite of the three. The key here is that all three carry quite well the
message of the season that God loves everyone. I picked that one because it
resonated with me.
Because Diana has drawn her
meditations from her Substack blog, each reflection picks up on insights that
have come to her at a particular moment. While particular moments spark the
conversation, they are not so time-defined that they won’t transcend the
particular moment that sparked them. What makes this particular set of meditations
different from many is that it speaks theologically to concerns that many
progressive Christians have about the world we live in. She speaks to people
like me who have been part of the church our entire lives, never thinking about
abandoning our faith, while also speaking to those who struggle, especially
those who, like Diana (and me), find themselves in a post-evangelical world. As the subtitle reminds us, this is a set of
meditations that speaks of “faith, wisdom, and perseverance.” For many, that last
word is an important one. How do you persevere as a believer when the world
seems out of control? Where might God be present in all of this? Having a book
like this, one that emerges out of Diana’s own journey as a public theologian
who has faced significant pushback, especially since she is a woman who is
speaking into spaces that many conservative Christians believe belong to men.
She writes in her conclusion to this
set of meditations, after having walked wotj is through the liturgical year,
picking up on its various messages, while addressing difficult texts and
topics, that "Christianity isn't linear time. Rather, time wends through
rituals and readings to be experienced all over again" (p. 314). That is
quite true because once one reaches Christ the King Sunday in late November,
the next Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent. With the first Sunday of Advent,
everything starts over again with the call to prepare ourselves for the coming
of God’s realm. While the liturgical calendar doesn't really change (yes, three
cycles follow the story lines offered by Matthew, Mark, and Luke—with John
sprinkled through each of the three cycles), she acknowledges that we change as
time passes. Thus, "some years, the stories speak with urgency; other
years, they may bore with their repetition." So, we may experience some things
that are familiar to us, and then we’ll be surprised as we encounter something
new. Thus, she writes that "The Christian year isn't a line. It isn't a
circle. It is a spiral of spiritual wisdom from Jesus through the millennia to
us" (p. 315).
Those people who have read Diana’s
earlier books know that she is a gifted communicator and writer. They will not
be disappointed by this book, even though it is different from earlier books.
Even if she draws from her Substack page for meditations, they may speak to
readers differently here than on that site. So, as one works through A
Beautiful Year, they will gain the benefit of the wisdom that Diana Butler
Bass accumulated during her years of walking through the liturgical year,
wisdom shared here in the form of fifty-two beautifully written meditations.
A Beautiful Year may be purchased at your favorite retailer, including my Amazon affiliate and Bookstore.Org affiliate.
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