My good mates over at JesusManifesto.com have posted an interview I have done with author Sara Miles about her new book which Rob Bell has called “one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read.”
Here’s the first part of our conversation visit here for more:
http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2010/02/an-interview-with-sara-miles
Jarrod: Sara, evangelicals love conversion stories. The more dramatic the better. And for certain segments of the American religious imagination you’re perfect fodder. A self described “blue-state, secular intellectual; a lesbian, a left-wing journalist with a habit of scepticism”. You’re everything a lot of the stereotypes of Christians in your country want to convert!! Yet your story lacks all sentimental elements that would make it a success story for one side of the culture wars. Your story is too provocative. Too moving. Too messy. Too unboxable. Too much like the rest of us who don’t fit the stereotypes. You haven’t become “a red-state, religious anti-intellectual”, you’re not now a “heteronormative right-wing journalist for Fox News with a habit of easy-believism.” So… you’ve converted to what?
Sara: Conversion isn’t a single dramatic moment but an ongoing process of change. I’m constantly being converted into deeper relationship with God….a relationship that has messy boundaries, because it includes all the rest of God’s beloved (and infuriating) people.
It’s really tempting to decide I’ve found all the answers, and that I can wrap up the mystery neatly and proceed with my life. But Jesus, in practice, turns out to be wildly destabilizing, and the Heavenly Comforter turns out to be less a cozy resting place than, as the Orthodox sing, the “Spirit of Truth, blowing everywhere and filling all things.”
All I have to offer –to conservative evangelicals as to left-wing believers– is my witness that this thing is real. I don’t deserve my relationship with God, I didn’t earn it, I can’t say I figured it out on my own steam. But I know who my shepherd is. And I know he doesn’t belong to me, or to people just like me, alone.
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