What do Bill Cosby, mystery, yearning, "Almost Famous," transparency, tears, and Jethro Tull have in common?

My book, Embracing the Gray: A Wing a Prayer, and A Doubter’s Resolve, has elicited many Five Star Reviews at Amazon.com.  Here are some more that have come in… 

I want to get right to the point: Buy this book! It is a memoir of a serious Christian and his faith journey, but so much more. Other reviews have given you a pretty detailed view of what it comprises, so let me focus more on what it is not. It is not a conventional memoir, starting from A and ending with Z. It is more a series of vignettes in Mr. Hollingsworth's life that exemplify how he struggled and how he grew in his faith. It is not a "preachy" book in regards to faith. Rather, it describes the struggle that just about all followers of Christ experience. It does not insult the reader by talking down to them, summing up what a chapter means. Rather, one is left to decide for themselves what conclusions should be drawn. It is not a book of rigid Christian doctrine, describing a narrow path to faith. Rather, Mr. Hollingsworth shares with the reader timeless principles of faith. The chapters comprise wonderful short stories or events in his life, and regardless of the details of each, I cannot imagine the great majority of readers not identifying with his struggles, sharing his emotions, and being enriched from his telling. This book is filled with hope, doubt, sadness, reflection, joy, wonderment, yearning, questioning, affirmation, and so much more. But if I had to describe a single term for what it evokes, it would be humanity. Like I said: buy this book. You will be richer for it. 
D.A. 

Honest and entertaining. Embracing The Gray has been one of the most rewarding reads I have had in recent history. Mark has the relatable, honest, and humorous qualities of great storytellers like Bill Cosby, and manages to inspire deep thought in an honest spiritual journey all at once. I look forward to reading it again.
S.C.B. 

Treasure the questions. This book is a collection of the some of the blogs from one of the most thoughtful, insightful, entertaining and challenging writers in the blogosphere.  I have been a keen reader of his writings for a number of years and I was excited when I heard of the release of this his first book.

It does not disappoint. It is a journey into the world of a man who has lived an extraordinary life but has clearly kept his feet on the ground and so displays himself as an ordinary guy. The son of a pastor he shares the story of a boy brought up in a world where he realizes he has his own big questions about God. The book explores this ongoing journey from the trusting faith of a child through his agnostic period (whilst at bible college!) through to his acceptance that if God is God & Mark is not, then he will never have all the answers. This is the gray that is mentioned in the title.

The stories are all incredibly readable and in many cases very moving. My personal favourites were "Entertaining Angels" and "In a Highland Meadow"

If you like your faith stories and parables full of simple answers & platitudes, give the book a miss and pray really hard that tragedy never visits your door. However, most of us accept that life is full of mystery & as such this book is a welcome addition to our library. I cannot recommend it highly enough. 
G.S. 

Simply stunning. Honestly, Mark's life runs parallel to the film "Almost Famous," only it's more exciting. I won't ruin any of the surprises, but I guarantee you'll have several moments where you say to yourself "I can't believe all this happened to one person."  The only book I've ever read with a meeting with U2, and an incident with a drunken, suicidal gunman live just pages apart. And both are true. Loved it!           

S.H. 

You’ll be reading passages aloud to the nearest person. Embracing the Gray will have you reading with your mouth agape, or tearing up, or laughing out loud. You'll be inspired by the author's transparency and humor. You'll enjoy this read if you are interested in music, travel, deepening relationships or spiritual things. There is no shying away from the "hard questions" here.

S.D. 

Excellent.  I appreciate Mark's refreshing honesty about his faith, his struggles, and the joy and torment that life in general brings. I was moved to the brink of tears often. The compassion exhibited throughout is inspiring.

B.B. 

In a world where many people try to delineate the "black & white" - the "one way or the other" - it's refreshing that someone has "embraced the gray" because that's where we all live. There are too many factors involved in everything to make a clean cut decision between "this and that" - even though that's what many of us want. What is written in this book are Mark's experiences, but I'm sure any/all of us can relate somehow. If not, then I don't know..."I may make you feel, but I can't make you think..." (from “Thick as a Brick” by Ian Anderson/Jethro Tull). Either way is good by me. Get the book, read it, and come to your own thoughts as to how what is said applies to your own life.

S.H. 

I continue to be humbled by the response the book is generating.  If you have read it and wish to correspond with me, I always interact with any communiqués.   You can also read many reader reviews (97% are Five Stars) at:

http://www.amazon.com/Embracing-Gray-Doubters-Resolve-ebook/dp/B004L62CN2/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Embracing the Gray is still available for a limited time as a 99 cent Kindle download at that same link, or as a free PDF download at my website (donations accepted):

http://markahollingsworth.com/Node

The Chamber of 32 Doors

Peter Gabriel has been one of my favorite lyricists of the past four decades. His early work as the lead singer of Genesis was already demonstrating his fascination with the spiritual search. This piece from the seminal concept album, The Lamb Lies Down a Broadway, showcases that longing.  “The Chamber of 32 Doors” is the lament of a wayward soul in New York City who is trying to make sense of all those who wish to influence him.

It speaks as powerfully today as when it was penned in 1974…

At the top of the stairs, there's hundreds of people

running around to all the doors

They try to find, find themselves an audience

Their deductions need applause.

The rich man stands in front of me

The poor man behind my back

They believe they can control the game

But the juggler holds another pack.

I need someone to believe in, someone to trust

I need someone to believe in, someone to trust

I'd rather trust a country man than a town man

You can judge by his eyes, take a look if you can

He'll smile through his guard

Survival trains hard

I'd rather trust a man who works with his hands

He looks at you once, you know he understands

Don't need any shield

When you're out in the field.

But down here

I'm so alone with my fear

With everything that I hear

And every single door, that I've walked through

Brings me back, back here again

I've got to find my own way

The priest and the magician

Singing all the chants that they have ever heard

and they're all calling out my name

Even academics, searching printed word

My father to the left of me

My mother to the right

Like everyone else they're pointing

But nowhere feels quite right

And I need someone to believe in, someone to trust

I need someone to believe in, someone to trust

I'd rather trust a man who doesn't shout what he's found

There's no need to sell if you're homeward bound

If I choose a side

He won't take me for a ride

Back inside

This chamber of so many doors

I've nowhere, nowhere to hide

I'd give you all of my dreams, if you'd help me

Find a door

That doesn't lead me back again

- take me away

(“The Chamber of 32 Doors” by Genesis from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, 1974)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTby-nfFd1I

Spirits in a Material World

Eugene Peterson always helps me see in a new way…

G.K. Chesterton once said that there are two kinds of people in the world:  When trees are waving wildly in the wind, one group of people thinks that it is the wind that moves the trees; the other group thinks that the motion of the trees creates the wind. The former view was the one held by most of humankind through most of its centuries; it was only in recent years, Chesterton said, that a new breed of people had emerged who blandly hold that it is the movement of the trees that creates the wind.

The consensus had always held that the invisible is behind and gives energy to the visible; Chesterton in his work as a journalist, closely observing and commenting on people and events, reported with alarm that the broad consensus had fallen apart and that the modern majority naively assumes that what they see and hear and touch is basic reality and generates whatever people come up with that cannot be verified with the senses.  They think that the visible accounts for the invisible.

Having lost the metaphorical origin of “spirit” we operate, in our daily conversations (in the English language at least), with a serious vocabulary deficit.  Imagine how our perceptions would change if we eliminated the “spirit” from our language and used only “wind” and “breath.”

Spirit was not “spiritual” for our ancestors; it was sensual.

It was the invisible that had visible effects.

It was invisible but it was not immaterial.

Air has as much materiality to it as a granite mountain: it can be felt, heard, and measured; it provides the molecules for the quiet breathing that is part of all life, human and animal, waking and sleeping—the puffs of air used to make words, the gently breezes that caress the skin, the brisk winds that fill the sails of ships, the wild hurricanes that tear roofs of barns and uproot trees.

It would clarify things enormously if we could withdraw “spirit” and “spiritual” from our language stock for a while.

Superficial misunderstandings can be easily disposed of: Spirituality is not immaterial as opposed to material; nor interior as opposed to exterior; not invisible as opposed to visible.

Quite the contrary; spirituality has much to do with the material, the external, and the visible. What it properly conveys is living as opposed to dead.  When we sense that the life has gone out of things and people, of institutions and traditions, eventually (and sometimes this takes us a while) we notice the absence.  We look for a file-drawer kind of word in which we can shove insights, images, and desires that we don’t have a precise name for.  “Spirituality” works about as well as anything for filing purposes.

The frequent use of the word as a catch-all term is understandable in a society in which we are variously depersonalized, functionalized, and psychologized.  The particularity of each life is obscured by reductionizing abstractions. 

Life leaks out of us as we find ourselves treated as objects, roles, images, economic potential, commodities, consumers. 

Even though daily life is much simplified and made easier by these various reductions, something in us rebels, at least in fits and starts.  Most of us, at least at times, sense that there is something more, something vastly more. We need a word, any word, to name what we are missing.

(Eugene Peterson, Christ Play in Ten Thousand Places)

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

We are spirits in the material world

Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail you
They subjugate the meek
But it's the rhetoric of failure

We are spirits in the material world

Where does the answer lie?
Living from day to day
If it's something we can't buy
There must be another way

We are spirits in the material world...

(The Police/Sting from Ghost in the Machine, 1981)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDs9zbiumDc&feature=related

"The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it," and other Henri Nouwen Quotes (Part 1)

Internationally renowned priest and author, respected professor and beloved pastor Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) wrote over 40 books on the spiritual life. His books have sold over 2 million copies and been published in over 22 languages.

Nouwen felt called to the priesthood at a very young age. He was ordained in 1957 as a diocesan priest and studied psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in his native Netherlands. In 1964 he moved to the United States to study at the Menninger Clinic. He went on to teach at the University of Notre Dame, and the Divinity Schools of Yale and Harvard. For several months during the 1970s, Nouwen lived and worked with the Trappist monks in the Abbey of the Genesee, and in the early 1980s he lived with the poor in Peru. In 1985 he was called to join L’Arche in Trosly, France, where people with developmental disabilities live with assistants. A year later Nouwen came to make his home at L’Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada for the final ten years of his life.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Henri. Let me know which ones resonate with you:

You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.

Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one's own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but do not know how.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

God loved you before you were born, and God will love you after you die.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

One of the tragedies of our life is that we keep forgetting who we are.

When we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.

Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.

In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don't receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy.

The real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others?

Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.

The soul of the artist cannot remain hidden.

His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.

Christians should put survival of the planet ahead of national security...Here is the mystery of our global responsibility: that we are in communion with Christ- and we are in communion with all people...The fact that the people of Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Russia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia are our brothers and sisters is not obvious. People kill each other by the thousands and do not see themselves as brothers and sisters. If we want to be real peacemakers, national security cannot be our primary concern. Our primary concern should be survival of humanity, the survival of the planet, and the health of all people. Whether we are Russians, Iraqis, Ethiopians, or North Americans, we belong to the same human family that God loves. And we have to start taking some risks- not just individually, but risks of a more global quality, risks to let other people develop their own independence, risks to share our wealth with others and invite refugees to our country, risks to offer sanctuary- because we are people of God.”

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.

Here we glimpse the mystery of God’s incarnation. God became human not only to act among us but also to be the recipient of our responses.

The great spiritual task facing me is to so fully trust that I belong to God that I can be free in the world--free to speak even when my words are not received; free to act even when my actions are criticized, ridiculed, or considered useless.... I am convinced that I will truly be able to love the world when I fully believe that I am loved far beyond its boundaries.

While my friend always spoke about the sun, I kept speaking about the clouds, until one day I realized that it was the sun that allowed me to see the clouds.

In this crazy world, there's an enormous distinction between good times and bad, between sorrow and joy. But in the eyes of God, they're never separated. Where there is pain, there is healing. Where there is mourning, there is dancing. Where there is poverty, there is the kingdom.

The world is waiting ... for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.

As long as I keep running about asking: "Do you love me? Do you really love me?" I give all power to the voices of the world and put myself in bondage because the world is filled with "ifs." The world says: "Yes, I love you if you are good-looking, intelligent, and wealthy. I love you if you have a good education, a good job, and good connections. I love you if you produce much, sell much, and buy much." There are endless "ifs" hidden in the world's love. These "ifs" enslave me, since it is impossible to respond adequately to all of them. The world's love is and always will be conditional. As long as I keep looking for my true self in the world of conditional love, I will remain "hooked" to the world-trying, failing, and trying again. It is a world that fosters addictions because what it offers cannot satisfy the deepest craving of my heart.

When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.

More to come...

Thoughts?