Jean Vanier Is a Genius

I ran into Jean Vanier over and over and over this year. Vanier is the founder of L'arche, an international network of communities in which the able-bodied and the disabled live together, serving to heal one another and flourish as a community. I'ver read about, and read from, Vanier in the past, but this year he seemed to be everywhere I turned.

* I had a moment of epiphany where I thought he might be a good teacher for my book, so I re-read Becoming Human and quoted him frequently in Deliver Us from Me-Ville.

* My friend Chris Heuertz, director of Word Made Flesh and author of a book I edited, Simple Spirituality, received a really nice endorsement from Vanier.

* Vanier coauthored a book with Stanley Hauerwas, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, which my employer published this fall and I just finished reading this morning.

* I once rescued a tattered copy of his book Community and Growth from a broken-down home being renovated in a rough-and-tumble Chicago neighborhood, but I've never read it. Matt Woodley, the author of Holy Fools, told me it changed his life.

Vanier, it seems, is everywhere I want to be. He offers a deceptively simple understanding of what it means to be Christian and what it means to be human. He addresses the first in Living Gently in a Violent World:

Faith in Jesus is trust that we are loved. It is knowing that deeper than being part of a group, religious or otherwise, there is the fundamental experience of becoming a friend of truth, a friend of Jesus, a friend of God. But I can't do this alone. I need community. I need friends.

I was recently challenged to write a statement of my faith in 140 characters or less. It strikes me that such an exercise would be relatively easy for someone like Vanier, whose strong intellect is eclipsed by his courageous ethics and his steadfast humility. I imagine his Twitter of Faith might read something like this:

I am loved, therefore I am.
I am, therefore I must love.

Of the Making of Books There Is No End

A friend of mine in the publishing business has often compared books to little missionaries: they go where we can't, they speak to people we might otherwise never meet, they propel conversations that otherwise might have died on the vine of our own locality. It's a nice image, a helpful rationale for publishing as an industry. No less voluminous a writer than N. T. Wright, however, offers a counterpoint in the closing paragraphs of his John for Everyone commentary:

Once the Word has become flesh, all the books in the world can't do justice to it. Nothing less than flesh can now do justice to the meaning of the Word: your flesh, my flesh. Books can reach a small way out into the world. Our lives, in the power of the spirit, can reach a lot further.

I suppose that both these statements are true. Books serve their purpose, and to the degree that we share our scholarship among various localities we are binding the whole church together and deepening its discipleship. But to the degree that books are nonrelational--to the degree that they dictate rather than converse, decree rather than contextualize--they fall short of the relational kingdom that Jesus calls us into. Books are means to an end; the end is that author and audience, like Paul and his correspondents, would have one another in their hearts, would share in God's grace.

Incidentally, and appropos to this post, if you're looking for a nonprofit to throw your money at this December, consider Word Made Flesh. Their executive director, Chris Heuertz, wrote a mighty book this year called Simple Spirituality, but their main work is to build relationships of justice and mercy with some of the poorest people in the world. Helping them out is tantamount to helping a community of women trapped in the sex trade find their way out, or helping a garbage dump community of outcastes fight for just treatment and human dignity. Plus, they're just really good people to be in a relationship with.

No New Insights Are Good New Insights

I'm just back from the Urban Youth Workers Institute at Azusa Pacific University, one of my favorite conferences of the year. People come from all over the country to consider how youth ministry functions in the urban context, which is important, since most major publications related to youth ministry is produced out of a worldview that is largely ignorant of urban life. The environment of UYWI is casual, relational--almost like a reunion--but simultaneously very serious and no-nonsense.

I managed to supply some nonsense. I was selling books and meeting with authors and other culture-shapers along with my friend and coworker Andrew. We had a good time commenting on all the quirks of Azusa, California, particularly its aversion to hotels and sit-down restaurants. I got to present a book contract to a relatively new friend and his wife, and I had conversations with a number of complete strangers about what they'd like to read or write.

Andrew and I were joined for a good chunk of the silliness by Chris Heuertz, a good friend and author of the soon-to-be-released Simple Spirituality, and Andrew Marin, a good friend and author of the 2009 release Love Is an Orientation.

We had hoped to have copies of Simple Spirituality available to sell, but no such luck; the book is still at the printer for a couple of weeks. I had hoped to have copies of Deliver Us from Me-Ville to give to my friends and save myself some postage, but that too didn't quite make the deadline. Bummer. I drowned my sorrows in Cap'n Crunch Shakes from Carl Jr's and consoled myself in the company of very goofy friends. We danced on the edge of making a waitresses night and getting ourselves kicked out of a Thai restaurant--the best food within walking distance of the campus of APU, even though we didn't walk. I watched two of my friends/authors get to know one another and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I have no new insights coming out of UYWI--oddly enough, between selling books and meeting with people I caught only about fifteen minutes of the conference itself--other than the insights I gained over coffee or saki or Cap'n Crunch shakes or leaning against a post talking to a complete stranger. All in all, I'd saythe conference was a success.

Word on the Street

I heard today that Deliver Us from Me-Ville is now in print. That's good. I read earlier this week that whole denominations almost never recite the Lord's Prayer, and so (I infer) may never get the joke in the title. That's bad.

Being in print means that the book will soon be on sale at fine booksellers from Amazon.com to Zazzy'z Coffee House and Book Seller. That's good. I also learned that Borders Online lists the title as "Deviler Us from Me-Ville." That's bad; nobody wants to be deviler than they already are.

These are the things bookwriting divas such as myself fret over as their books go from the abstract to the concrete, from being in their heads to being on their shelves. I have never been quite so neurotic as those weeks surrounding the release of my books. So I apologize in advance or at long last, depending on whether I've already worn out my welcome with you, or I'm starting to sound a wee bit obnoxious.

The following people are the final endorsers of my book. They, along with eight other folks whose comments were posted earlier, saw fit to declare publicly that they read the book and didn't throw up. Their endorsements are particularly meaningful to me because I'm fans of each of them; their own writings have been in many cases seminal for me, and their decency has in many cases been arresting and inspiring all at once. I hope you'll check out their books and, if you're so motivated, you'll pick up a copy of mine and let me know what you think.

***

David offers a winsome, intelligent, and challenging look at one of the most difficult subjects to address honestly—ourselves. Below the surface of this book is an insightful critique of the self-centered approach to life. For those who are interested in finding a better way, this book offers hope.
—Brian Sanders, executive director of the Underground Network and author of Life After Church

In Deliver Us from Me-Ville, David Zimmerman focuses on the problem we all want to ignore—namely, that we are all stuck on ourselves and that it messes up every relationship we have. I can’t think of a more important problem to address in a new book. (I just wish I had thought of it first!)
—Mike Sares, Pastor, Scum of the Earth Church

With Deliver Us from Me-Ville, David Zimmerman has established himself as a credible social critic, a subversive voice calling for virtue in an age of substance-less posturing, and a humble prophet of hope in an image-driven day of cynicism and self-absorption. His newest book is provocative, imaginative, and full of pointed, yet understated jabs at what Christian community has become. His thoughtfulness regarding over-identification with self is guided by his pithy gems of literary hilarity. Deliver Us from Me-Ville is fresh, innovative, and all that is great about insurrectionism in Christian authorship.
—Christopher L. Heuertz, International Executive Director, Word Made Flesh, and author of Simple Spirituality

Zimmerman’s book is a searching, sober, and at times very funny, analysis of the impact that the culture of narcissism, or excessive self-importance, has on the Christian mind. It even offers escape routes out of Me-Ville—ways to keep the saving knowledge that we matter so much to God, safe from the corruption of mattering too much to ourselves. So read this book and get over yourself!
—Ben Patterson, campus pastor, Westmont College and author of Waiting and He Has Made Me Glad

With light-hearted wit, self-effacing humility and utter seriousness, Dave Zimmerman takes on one of the great idols of our cultural-captivity. Deliver Us from Me-Ville is a warm invitation to leave behind our narcissism to more fully embrace The Way of Jesus.
--Mark Scandrette, author of SOUL GRAFFITI: Making A Life In the Way of Jesus