Book Review: YOU CAN TALK TO GOD LIKE THAT by Abby Norman

You Can Talk to God Like That: The Surprising Power of Lament to Save Your Faith

by Abby Norman
200 pages
Published May 18th, 2021 by Broadleaf Books 

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Abby Norman is a pastor and a gifted writer and it shows. The first thing that jumped off the page as I started reading this book was Abby’s pastoral tone. She is not preaching at you about lament. She is coming alongside you to encourage you as she talks about how lament can draw us in closer to God.

Abby tweeted in December of 2020 that she didn't mean to write an increasingly relevant book, but she did! The past year and a half of dealing with the pandemic and the chaotic political nonsense, along with the ongoing violence against Black people by police officers, mass shootings… there is no shortage of things to lament. 

Abby is a great writer and I am sure she is a great pastor. Abby and I have been internet friends for longer than I can remember now, and I even got to meet her in person at Evolving Faith in 2018. She has been such an encouragement to me in ways big and small over the years. And I am so thankful she wrote this book! I think it could encourage a lot of people. I know it encouraged me. I ended up reading it in one sitting but I definitely want to go back through it and take my time with it.

One particularly moving part was when Abby talked about how we can hold hope for each other, and sometimes we need that because hope is too heavy for us sometimes.

My favorite part (if I have to choose just one thing) is the prayers Abby prays for her readers at the end of each chapter and at the end of the book. These prayers wash over me like the ones Sarah Bessey often prays for her readers and listeners. This is the prayer at the end of chapter 1:

“I pray that you are comforted. May the outpouring of your grief be accompanied by the outpouring of God’s love. May you work through the practice with patience and mercy for yourself and your circumstances. May your wounds be covered in balm. May you be close to God.”

And this one at the end of chapter 3:

“I know this can be scary. Not all of us have had a lot of practice talking back to God. As you embark on this exercise I pray that you land in the arms of a God who is good and holy and big enough to handle every single bit of your sorrow and rage. I pray that you would not be afraid of the strength of your own sorrows. I pray that you would land in strong arms.”

And also this one at the end of chapter 5:

“It is not lost on me that continually I am asking you to do hard things. This may be the hardest thing of all. Being wrong can be such a gift to us if only we embrace it. I pray that you will be so grounded in your belovedness that you will be open to the Holy Spirit changing your mind. I pray that you will be open to a bigger God, a bigger grace, a bigger community. May you experience your belovedness together.”

Then, at the very end of the book, she brought tears to my eyes as she prayed for us, her readers, in a closing benediction: 

“Imagine me in my collar and my bright-red lipstick, my eyes shut tight behind my cat-eye glasses and one hand held in the air, hovering over your head, as I cry, 

May you go into the world trusting the God who sees you just as Haggai trusted the God who saw her. May you feel known and validated in your deepest struggles and greatest heartaches. May you always know that you are not alone, that God is with you, that God sees you. 

May you go into the world with the willingness of Ruth, to lament with others, to see their pain, to identify with them. May your heart break for those who are not like you, for those who have been forgotten by the powers and principalities of this world. May your presence remind them that Jesus is Emmanuel—God with us. May you cry hot tears over other people’s suffering. May you be filled with a compassion that will draw you closer to God. 

May you go into the world crying out, weeping like the Holy Mother herself, broken at the sight of her child being broken by the empire. May you weep and gnash your teeth and make a holy scene. May you refuse to get up out of the streets until the ways of the world are changed, until the most vulnerable among us are included, until the church means it when they say, “All are welcome, all are beloved by God.” 

May you go into this world lamenting like Mary Magdalene in the garden, who had been just hoping to bury her beloved rabbi. May Jesus meet you in the places of your deepest grief and invite you into a new and holy way of being, for the kingdom of God is coming, and the kingdom of God is here. Amen.”

What are you waiting for? Go get her book and read it! :-) 

You Can Talk to God Like That Affiliate Purchase Links: Bookshop.org (supports local bookstores)

Amazon: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible Audiobook

Abby Norman is a writer, blogger, speaker, and licensed local pastor in the United Methodist Church. Her writing has been featured in Huffington Post, SheLoves Magazine, and The Mudroom. Abby lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her college sweetheart, two daughters, and a very bad dog.

Follow Abby on Twitter: @abbynormansays

View all my book reviews

I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and Amazon and I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Discussing "The Universal Christ" by Richard Rohr (Reclaiming Christianity Podcast)

In June of 2019, I recorded three episodes with John Weldy on his Reclaiming Christianity podcast discussing The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr. This post has been in my draft folder for some reason for a long time but I'm going to go ahead and post it now. So if you are interested in listening, here are the links to those episodes and the bullet points of what we talked about.

• 2.5: Christ is Not Jesus' Last Name (Chapter 1)
  
• Jesus & Christ
• Creation: the first incarnation
• Supernatural & natural
• God loves things by becoming them
• The eternal Christ
• Names of God
• Incarnational worldview
  
  
• 2:6: Worldviews (Appendix 1)
  
• Material worldview
• Spiritual worldview
• Priestly worldview
• Incarnational worldview
• Which of these worldviews sounds like the way you see the world?
  
  
• 2.7: Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Appendix 2)
• Order
• Disorder
• Reorder
• Where do you see yourself in this process right now?
  
  

My Progressive Theology Book Club group on Facebook discussed Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez for our January book. 

Our February book is Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith by Mihee Kim-Kort and our March book will be Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It by Brian McLaren.

If you want to read and discuss those books with us, join the facebook group: Progressive Theology Book Club

Discussing Marcus Borg's "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time" (Reclaiming Christianity Podcast)

My friend, John Weldy, and I have recorded 4 new episodes of Reclaiming Christianity. (Subscribe on iTunes.) The first one is an introductory episode as we launched the second season of the podcast. The other three are all spent discussing different parts of Marcus Borg's book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.

I want to say up front that I don't agree with Marcus Borg on everything. For one thing, I can't go as far as he does with who he believes Jesus was/is and the strong distinction he makes between the "pre-Easter Jesus" and the "post-Easter Christ". Borg is operating from a skepticism that follows from the Jesus Seminar's take on the historical Jesus and historical accuracy of the Gospels. But aside from that, I would say that I still find 70-80% of the book really interesting, useful, helpful, and encouraging in various ways.

I think it is good and necessary for us to realize that we can (and should!) read books where we don't agree with the author on everything and we can still get something out of them. There is value in that.

So here is a brief rundown of the four new episodes:

• 2.0: Season 2 Intro - in this episode John and I talk about how we got from "there" to "here" (conservative evangelicalism to progressive Christianity), and why we want to do a podcast called "Reclaiming Christianity".
• 2:1: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time... Again (Chapter 1)
• Childhood image of Jesus often does not evolve
• Your image of Jesus influences your Christianity
• The historical Jesus
• The influence of Christian tradition on the gospels
• The nature of God
• Pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus
• 2.2: Sophia Became Flesh (Chapter 5)
• Jesus as the Son of God
• Sophia, the Wisdom Woman
• Sophia as a Personification of God
• Sophia, Created with God in the beginning
• Jesus, child of Sophia
• Logos
• Breaking patriarchal imagery
• Reading of Psalm 23 that you can find at the end of this post

• 2.3: Jesus, Compassion, and Politics (Chapter 3) - Yes, we recorded them out of order, John had his reasons. :-)
• Compassion is the central quality of God and Jesus
• Compassion as a sociopolitical paradigm
• Compassion vs. mercy
• God as "womblike"
• Holiness vs. compassion
• Purity system in the time of Jesus
• Righteousness vs. sinners
• Be compassionate as God is compassionate
• Final thought from the end of the book in chapter 6:

“Believe did not originally mean believing a set of doctrines or teachings; in both Greek and Latin its roots mean “to give one’s heart to”. The “heart” is the self at its deepest level. Believing, therefore, does not consist of giving one’s mental assent to something, but involves a much deeper level of one’s self.” - Marcus Borg

John and I would love to interact with you and your thoughts about this book and/or these episodes where we were talking about the book. If you have a comment or question about something or want to tell us something that really resonated with you or something you disagreed with, and why, we want to hear it and would love to include it on our next episode. You can either leave a comment here or in my Progressive Theology Book Club group on Facebook. Or even better, you can email me (JenniferNeyhart [at] gmail [dot] com) a 30-90 second audio clip if you want to have your voice literally be on the podcast. You can also do that quite easily through Facebook Messenger.

The last thing is that alternate version of Psalm 23 which I read in episode 2.2 on the Borg book:

Psalm 23
The Divine is my Shepherd
I have all I need
She makes me lie down in green meadows
Beside the still waters, She will lead.

She restores my soul,
She rights my wrongs,
She leads me in a path of good things,
And fills my heart with songs.

Even though I walk,
Through a dark and dreary land,
There is nothing that can shake me,
She has said, She won't forsake me,
I'm in Her hand.

She sets a table before me,
In the presence of my foes,
She anoints my head with oil,
And my cup overflows.

Surely, surely goodness and kindness will follow me,
All the days of my life,
And I will live in Her house,
Forever and ever.

Glory be to our Mother, and Daughter
And to the Holy of Holies,
As it was in the beginning,
Is now and ever shall be,
World without end, Amen.

(Click here to listen to this version of Psalm 23 on youtube.)

Discussing Why I Left, Why I Stayed by Tony and Bart Campolo

If you've seen many of my posts this year you probably know that at the end of 2017 I started an online Theology Book Club by creating a Facebook group and inviting people I thought might be interested. And that led to opportunities to be on John Weldy's podcast, Reclaiming Christianity, where we talk about the books we are reading in the book club. So our book for this month is Why I Left, Why I Stayed by humanist Bart Campolo and his father, evangelist Tony Campolo. And last night John Weldy, Thad Crews and I discussed the book and our own faith journeys.

Listen to this episode here.


(Subscribe on iTunes)

Panelists: J.L. Neyhart, Thad Crews

The Panel gives their book recommendations:

• J.L. Neyhart - Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans and Out of Sorts: Making Sense of an Evolving Faith by Sarah Bessey
• Thad Crews: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Book review of Why I Left, Why I Stayed by Tony and Bart Campolo:

Thad and I both felt like Tony and Bart talked past each other a bit. Thad doesn't think Tony understands what Bart's real issue is: that he just doesn't/can't believe that stuff anymore.

When I was reading Bart's chapters I kept thinking that I agreed with him on a lot of his criticisms of evangelical theology, but I wanted to say what about this? What about these other interpretations? These other options? Contrary to what some of them (conservative evangelicals) may say, it's not their interpretation or nothing.

John asked me and Thad to give our responses to the following questions:

• Tell us a bit about your background.
• What does leaving/staying mean to you?
• Why did you leave/stay?
• How have you responded to pressure to stay/leave?

Then John read one of Bart's chapters in the book (p89-95) and we discussed it.

I really liked something Tony said in the next chapter, responding to Bart's issues with the errors and contradictions in the Bible:

"Sure, if you try to read it literally, the Bible contains some mistakes and inaccuracies, but that is not how its ancient authors expected it to be read, and that is not how it has been read by Christians for hundreds and hundreds of years. In fact, the idea that the Bible is literally and inerrantly true is a relatively new one, introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by a small group of American Protestants in a series of tracts called “The Fundamentals.” Unfortunately, those fundamentalists and their followers have led lots of people—including lots of skeptics—into reading the Bible the wrong way. 

As I see it, the Gospel writers were not as interested in the details of Jesus’s life as they were in the truth of it. Like their Old Testament counterparts, they carefully constructed their stories to give their readers insights about the meaning and purpose of life. To ask if this or that really happened the way it’s described is to miss the point. What matters isn’t whether each of those accounts is scrupulously accurate and consistent with all the others. What matters is what they collectively reveal about the nature of God." (137)

I also agreed with this quote from Tony:

"the penal substitutionary doctrine of the atonement is only one explanation of how our salvation was accomplished by Jesus on the cross, and [...] none of them alone can contain the whole story. What happened at Calvary is far too profound to be reduced to a simple formula." (131) 

Panelist Goodbye - Where can people find you?

J.L.: JLNeyhart.com

• @JLNEYHART on Twitter
• J.L. Neyhart on Facebook
• Theology Book Club

Thad Crews:

• http://mydeconstructionblog.blogspot.com/

Closing:

Theology Book Club:
June: Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans
July: Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans

If you would like to join the Facebook Group you can click here to email me. Or click over to the Theology Book Club page and submit the contact form you will find there.

This is a link to an Amazon list of the books we have been reading/will be reading in the book club.


Previous episodes that I have been on:
35: Evolution of the Word by Marcus Borg, part 1
30. Axioms of Faith (Finding God in the Waves by Mike McHargue)
29. The Cosmic Christ (Love Wins by Rob Bell)
27. Women and Evangelicalism (Rescuing Jesus by Deborah Jian Lee)
20. Living Through a Faith Shift (What is the Bible? by Rob Bell)
19. God and the American Empire (What is the Bible? by Rob Bell)
18. Anakephalaiossathai (What is the Bible? by Rob Bell)

Finding God in the Waves by Mike McHargue (Theology Book Club - March 2018)

As you may know by now, at the end of 2017 I started an online Theology Book Club by creating a Facebook group and inviting people I thought might be interested. This group is intended to be a safe space to discuss books and theology from more of a "Progressive Christian" point of view.

This month we will be reading and discussing Finding God in the Waves by Mike McHargue (aka Science Mike on Twitter).

Blurb from Amazon:
From the host of the popular podcasts, The Liturgists Podcast and Ask Science Mike, a story of having faith, losing it, and finding it again through science—revealing how the latest in neuroscience, physics, and biology help us understand God, faith, and ourselves.

Mike McHargue understands the pain of unraveling belief. In Finding God in the Waves, Mike tells the story of how his Evangelical faith dissolved into atheism as he studied the Bible, a crisis that threatened his identity, his friendships, and even his marriage. Years later, Mike was standing on the shores of the Pacific Ocean when a bewildering, seemingly mystical moment motivated him to take another look. But this time, it wasn't theology or scripture that led him back to God—it was science.

Full of insights about the universe, as well as deeply personal reflections on our desire for certainty and meaning, Finding God in the Waves is a vital exploration of the possibility for knowing God in an age of reason, and a signpost for where the practice of faith is headed in a secular age. Among other revelations, we learn what brain scans reveal about what happens when we pray; how fundamentalism affects the psyche; and how God is revealed not only in scripture, but in the night sky, in subatomic particles, and in us.

​If you would like to join the Facebook Group and join the discussion you can click here to email me. Or submit this contact form below: