The resident feline got the worst of a cat fight, is groggy on antibiotics and pain meds, and despite all the TLC, has somehow gotten out of the houseboat and gone into hiding under the raft, somewhere in the six inches or so between the top of the flotation logs and the bottom of the raft itself.   I’m very much afraid she won’t come out at all.

High anxiety.

I kayaked around the raft in the rain, flashlight in hand, calling for her. No response. Nothing to do but dry off and try to distract myself online, where I found that I’d been emailed an article on TEDGlobal by Steve Marsh in the current issue of Delta Airlines’ Sky_Magazine, with this lovely couple of paras on me:

TED’s sangfroid is ultimately a good thing. Case in point is my favorite talk of the week, given by Lesley Hazleton… A self-described “accidental theologist,” she examines the essential role doubt plays in any faith, making an example of the divine revelation of the Koran to the prophet Muhammad on a mountain outside of Mecca in 610. “ ‘Doubt,’ as Graham Greene once put it, ‘is the heart of the matter,’ ” she says. “Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction.

Between sessions on Thursday, I buy Hazleton’s book, The First Muslim, and tell her that her talk reminded me of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of despair. She uses the index in her book to find the passage that acknowledges the connection and signs my copy, ‘To Stephen—Knowing you’ll love a bio of Muhammad that bows in passing to Kierkegaard!’ Lesley Hazleton is cool.

Irony? Paradox? Life? All I know is that I just wish I could be cool about the missing feline…

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Update:

Uncool lasted eight hours.  Wounded cat finally emerged.  Florence Nightingale here back on the job.

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Further update, October 9:

Healing well in progress.  Florence Nightingale retired.

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Under the heading Disappointing But Not Exactly Surprising:

There will no Turkish edition of The First Muslim.  My Turkish publisher received a reader’s report on the book from an un-named “academic member of Islamic history” at the Faculty of Theology at Marmara University, and today emailed to say that “The report showed more than a few aspects about your book which, considering the current political situation, might not be desirable and welcomed in Turkey.  I am apologetic to tell you that our company has decided not to proceed with your book.”

Since the book had already been translated and was ready for publication next month, this is a decision that comes at some cost to the publisher.

Here’s the upshot of the report:

The work seems successful in general.  However it has some lack of knowledge and misinformation.  Besides, it has an attitude imputing the prophet Mohamed and Muslims especially when it comes to Jews… The book is the product of a serious labor.  Nonetheless it is concluded that the translation of the book to Turkish is not appropriate when it is considered lack of information mentioned above and negative comments which are sometimes beyond the purpose and sometimes understood to be made consciously.”

The full report is here.  It seems I should have simply skipped over the tension between the early Muslims and the Jewish tribes of Medina, which culminated in the massacre of the men of the small Qureyz (Qurayza) tribe, and was, the academic reader argues, the fault of the Jews themselves.  (This argument is very familiar to me, since I’ve debated it many times with fundamentalist-leaning Muslims, both in public and in private.  I am equally familiar with most of the other points raised by “the academic member” — though the one about Jesus having or not having a father struck me as particularly picayune.)  The real complaint, of course, is that the book is not a hagiography, and does not conform to the requirements of piety.

As the publisher wrote, this is a political decision.  These are edgy times in Turkey, where Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party seem intent on deepening the instititutionalization of Islam despite strong secular resistance.  Three months ago, Taksim Square was the epicenter of the secular/religious clash.    Inevitably, my book falls into that same volatile intersection of religion and politics.  That’s the realm I’ve been exploring for years now, and will continue to explore.

Just not, it seems, in Turkish.

“You’re a Muslim, so why would you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

That’s how Fox News’ Lauren Green began her challenge to Reza Aslan’s right to write about Jesus.  The video of her interview with him instantly went viral (in fact, several accidental theologists sent it on to me — thank you!).  It inspired several spoofs, including this one here.  Aslan’s book, Zealot (my San Francisco Chronicle review of it here) was already #2 on the Amazon bestseller list;  by the next morning, it was #1.

“Gotcha, J. K. Rowling!” Aslan responded.

But aside from the small detail that Christianity was founded by Paul, not Jesus, Green’s question may not be such a terrible one after all.

I’ve been there, and often still am — from the other side, as it were.  The first time conservative Muslims asked why I’d decided to write a biography of Muhammad, I spluttered in amazement: “But you don’t think he’s worth writing about?  This man who carved such a huge profile in history?  He’s your prophet, how can you even ask?”

It quickly became clear that this was not a sufficient answer, and that the question was not about my decision as a writer.  It was about my decision as a Jew.  Just as Green focused on Aslan’s Muslimness and assumed that his real agenda was to attack Christianity, so certain conservative Muslims focused on my Jewishness and assumed that my real agenda must have been to attack Islam.

Let’s get one thing straight right away:  just as many mainstream Christians have welcomed Aslan’s book, so many mainstream Muslims have welcomed mine.  It’s the conservatives we’re talking about here, those who cannot tolerate any deviance from received orthodoxy.

In the context of Fox’s Islamophobic politics on the one hand, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the other, perhaps such suspicion is inevitable.  But since Aslan’s book and mine both draw on scholarly resources but were written for general audiences, there’s another less obvious factor.  Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam.  Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief.  Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

But what if Green had interviewed Aslan not with the desire to criticize, but with the desire to know?  What if my conservative Muslim questioners had been more curious than judgmental?  Without such knee-jerk defensiveness, the question of what a non-Christian brings to the study of Jesus or a non-Muslim to that of Muhammad becomes an interesting one – a question, that is, about the value of the ‘outsider’ point of view.

Precisely because he or she does not come from a place of belief, what seems obvious to the insider is not at all so to the outsider.  It demands to be explored, to be understood on the multiple psychological, cultural, and political levels on which history takes place.  Done well, this process can create important new insights into otherwise received versions of history, opening up fresh ways of seeing and understanding, and finding new relevance in old stories.

As with Jesus, so with Muhammad:  by placing him in the world he experienced, in the full context of place and time, politics and culture – the ‘outsider’ biographer honors the man by honoring his lived experience.

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith;  it humanizes it.  And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

The talk I gave at TEDGlobal twelve days ago just went live!

Here it is — on Muhammad, the relationship between faith and doubt, and the travesty of fundamentalism:

Anything you can do to forward/repost/facebook/tweet/email/tumble/reddit/generally-spread-the-word will be wonderful.  Let’s stop being the far-too-silent majority!

Shortcut url is http://on.ted.com/Hazleton

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[In case you missed it, my earlier TEDx talk on reading the Quran is here.]

Newly back in Seattle after an amazing couple of weeks, I’m jet-lagged, news-lagged, and above all, TED-lagged.

Eleven days ago, I was onstage at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh. The talk — on Muhammad, doubt, and the travesty of fundamentalism — may be released on TED.com as early as this coming week, but meanwhile, in the tease category, here’s a still shot:

The TED audience was beyond-words wonderful.  I still can’t quite believe the generosity of their ovation. But how do you come down from such a high?

I hereby declare a new addition to the DSM-IV manual of psychiatric disorders: post-TED syndrome, which poses the patient with the problem of how to get her feet (let alone her head) firmly back to earth after a week of non-stop talk and ideas and excitement and superb company?  (Plus some great music and dancing too).

Seven days ago, I took the back-to-earth idea literally. If you had been in possession of a pair of good binoculars, you would have found me roaming the wilds of Romney Marsh in Sussex, totally wind- and rain-blown, along with thousands of sheep and the most bullish lambs I’ve ever seen — sturdy little bruisers, each with a very distinctive vocal point to make about my presence.  (On the menu that evening in nearby Rye: “Romney Marsh lamb.” My response: “Noooooo….!”)

Forward a bit, and four days ago I was doing my roaming in London, meeting my brilliant UK publishers over grappa in a club so private it has no name (British release of The First Muslim is set for November 7), doing tai-chi early mornings by the lavender field in Vauxhall Park (triple espresso at the ready), communing with the Rothkos at the Tate Modern, zipping along the Thames in water taxis, and downing elderberry lemonade and tahini-drizzled eggplant at Ottolenghi’s in Islington (his cookbook Plenty has the best recipe I’ve ever found for socca).

So today, back in my houseboat in pacific Seattle, my head is reeling from it all, and I have a new way of posing the post-TED problem: how do you get your feet back to earth when you live on a raft that floats on forty feet of water?

So since it looks like I’ll be traveling quite a bit in the foreseeable future, I thought it might be an idea to register with Homeland Security’s  trusted-traveler program and thus avoid the hassle and long lines at airport security.   Which is how come I turned up yesterday at SeaTac’s US Customs and Border Protection office for my interview.

I did kind of wonder how it might go in light of the fact that The First Muslim has just been published.  What would Homeland Security make of this?  Should I even mention it?  Were they likely to make a biographer of Muhammad a trusted traveler, or would stereotype win the day so that the subject alone would set off alarms in the bureaucratic mind?  There was only one way to find out.

The interview didn’t start off on quite the right note.

“Sorry to hear about Margaret Thatcher’s passing,” said the Customs and Borders officer when I told him that I had a British passport as well as an American one.

“I can’t say I am,” I replied before I could bite my tongue.  “Not least because my father was a doctor in the National Health Service, which she did her best to dismantle.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t make assumptions.”

And with that he had my interest.  I hadn’t expected that apology.

“You’re a writer?” he said.  “What do you write about?”

“Religion and politics.”  And with that I had his interest.

“Big subject!” he said.

“Which you could say is why we’re here in this office right now,” I replied.

We both smiled kind of ruefully.

He pulled up the US customs record of my travels.  “So you focus on the Middle East?”

“Of course.  It’s where all three of the major monotheisms began, and it’s where religion and politics are most intricately intertwined.”

“Isn’t that so,” he said.  “In fact that’s what I studied.”  Turns out he’d majored in Middle East history — specifically the 1920s to the 1940s. “The Brits seem to have had a lot to do with creating today’s Middle East.”

“With a little help from the French, true,” I said. “They have a lot to answer for.  As do we, especially since we went marching into Iraq with no idea of what was really happening there…”  Oh god, what was I saying to an official of the US government?

Yet he was nodding, though whether in agreement or in acknowledgment of my hopelessly liberal point of view wasn’t clear until he said:  “We all need to know much more history.”

And that was my cue.  I reached into my pocket and handed him my card — the one with the cover of The First Muslim on the front.  “This might help some,” I said.

He studied it a moment, and then: “Interesting!  Thank you.  I have to read this.”

The next thing I knew he was taking my photograph and my fingerprints (on a neat little machine glowing with green light), explaining the intricacies of how to use my newly approved trusted-traveler status, and giving me his card.

As I picked up a coffee before wandering out of the airport, it occurred to me to ask why I was surprised at how relaxed and sensible the interview had been.

Partly, I think, we’re so used to inane encounters with low-level TSA contract employees in the security lines that it’s easy to forget that there actually are intelligent people higher up the line.

Partly,  as an immigrant to the US, my experience years ago of dealing with another branch of what is now Homeland Security, namely the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had been downright Kafkaesque.  (In fact I’d have said that the INS officials I encountered then had deliberately out-Kafkaed Kafka, except that I knew they’d never even heard of him.)

And partly too, of course, there’s the Orwellian Big Brother aspect of Homeland Security — the awareness that one way or another, we are all, however innocent, under surveillance.

That may be one more thing the Brits, among others, have to answer for.

I don’t believe in omens, though I confess I’m sometimes tempted to.

Like when I realized just three weeks ago that The First Muslim was being published on the day on which Muhammad’s birthday falls this year.*  I wish I could say that this was the result of careful planning on my part, or on that of my publishers.  In fact it’s either a wonderful coincidence, or…

You see what I mean about omens?

That was just about the time the first finished copy of the book arrived in the mail.   Since it came straight from the printers, I didn’t recognize the return address, so wasn’t sure what was in the padded envelope until I opened it.

And went “Oh my God!”

I think I might have mentioned somewhere that the cover was elegantly understated.  Perhaps even a tad overly under-stated.  I do remember suggesting to the publishers that they increase the color values just a little – a slightly more saturated yellow as in the photo in the right-hand column, for instance.  “We’ll see what we can do,” my editor said.

She didn’t get back to me on that, and I hadn’t expected her to.  So I had no idea that the yellow had been transformed into gold!  Thus the “oh my God,” repeated several more times as I traced the raised pattern of it with my fingers.

This had to be a special author’s copy, I thought.  It’s been many years since publishers commemorated a book’s publication by ordering up such a one-off copy for the author (usually leather-bound, with gold leaf on the edges).  It was a token of appreciation, and a lovely one, but they’d stopped doing it because of the expense.  Now Penguin’s Riverhead Books imprint had clearly resuscitated the practice.

I called my editor immediately to thank her for ordering such a beautiful author’s copy, and then came the best surprise of all:

“Oh no,” she said, “this isn’t just for you.  All the books are like that.”

So I’m still kind of amazed at the physical existence of my own book.  Is this stunning production really the same creature as the innumerable drafts of much-scrawled-on typescript pages strewn around my study for years?  It’s as though with publication it’s achieved a separate existence.  Like a teenager leaving home, it will now make its way in the world on its own terms, an independent agent only tangentially related to me.   All I can do is wish it well, cheer it on, defend it when it needs defense — and trust that others will agree that it lives up to the sheer elegance of its cover.

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[*Re Muhammad’s birthday:  the  traditional Islamic date is the 12^th of the month of Rabi al-Awwal, which falls this year on January 24.  The Christian date changes each year since the Islamic calendar is lunar, which means that the Islamic year is eleven days shorter than the Christian one.  To further complicate matters, the 12^th of Rabi al-Awwal is the Sunni date;  Shia celebrate the birthday, known as mawlid, five days later.  And one more complication: not all Sunnis approve of the idea of celebrating the birthday.  Observance of it is banned in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, for instance, whose dour Wahhabi version of Islam seems ever suspicious of joy and festivity.]

If only all books were this well read!  This is author and poet Tamam Kahn‘s galley copy.  (Galleys are softbound uncorrected proofs, sent out for early review before the hardcover has gone to the printers — thus the banner across the top saying it’s not for distribution.)   And I love this photo because it’s such a vivid expression of the act of reading.

Yes, the act of reading:  nothing passive about it, but an engaged interaction of reader, writer, and subject.  (I read with a similar intensity, though I prefer a pencil to tabs, marking the margins with lines, exclamation marks, and perhaps a brief Yes! or an abrupt No!, but sometimes getting carried away with extended comments crawling up the side of the page to spread out along the top.)

Tamam posted the photo alongside her review of The First Muslim today.  Here’s how it begins:

There is much that is wonderful about this book! I opened the manila envelope, slid the book out, opened it and began reading. Two hours later I was calling to my husband across the room, saying, “Listen to this…”

This is what it meant to be an orphan: the ordinary childhood freedom of being without a care would never be his… At age six, he (Muhammad) was now doubly orphaned, his sole inheritance a radical insecurity as to his place in the world.

Accurate instinct on the basics. In all the years that I studied Muhammad’s life, I never gave much thought to him as an orphan. This fact is often mentioned by historians, but none make us feel the alien landscape in which the boy finds himself in the way this telling does. A certain wariness crept into the corners of his eyes and his smile became tentative and cautious; even decades later, hailed as the hero of his people, he’d rarely be seen to laugh.

Then Lesley Hazleton takes the reader deeper. At age five, he is returned to his estranged blood mother Amina; abruptly, a child between two worlds. In that same year, after the two of them visit relatives in Medina, several days journey north, she dies on the return trip.  …now doubly orphaned.

The whole review is over at Tamam’s blog, Complete Word.  She ends it with this:

This humanizing of the man, Muhammad, is the thread running through the book. Often, in the media, what is written about Muhammad or the word “Muslim” is overlaid with dramatic and political innuendos to support a variety of loud viewpoints.

Here, it’s like she begins by talking to us in a quiet tone on that noisy street. Come inside where it is calm, and listen to Lesley Hazleton tell about a man who became The First Muslim. It’s a good story.

• What inspired you to write The First Muslim?Basically, frustration! I’d read several biographies of Muhammad as background for my previous book, After the Prophet, but though they seemed to tell me a lot about him, they left me with little real sense of the man himself. There was a certain dutiful aspect to them, and this made them kind of… soporific. Which seemed to me a terrible thing to do to such a remarkable life.

  There was a terrific story to be told here: the journey from neglected orphan to acclaimed leader—from marginalized outsider to the ultimate insider—made all the more dramatic by the tension between idealism and pragmatism, faith, and politics. I wanted to be able to see Muhammad as a complex, multidimensional human being, instead of the two-dimensional figure created by reverence on the one hand and prejudice on the other. I wanted the vibrancy and vitality of a real life lived.

  But of course I was also impelled by a certain dismay at how little most of us in the West know about Muhammad, especially when Islam is so often in the headlines and there are so many competing claims to “the truth about Islam.” This one man radically changed his world—indeed he’s still changing ours—so it seemed to me vitally important that we be able to get beyond stereotypes and see who he really was.

  What are some of the biggest misconceptions about Muhammad?

  Let’s take just the two most obvious stereotypes: the lecherous polygamist, and the sword-wielding warmonger. In fact Muhammad’s first marriage, to Khadija, was a loving, monogamous relationship that lasted 24 years, until her death. The nine late-life marriages were mainly diplomatic ones—means of sealing alliances, as was standard for any leader at the time. And it’s striking that while he had five children with Khadija—four daughters and a son who died in infancy—he had none with any of the late-life wives.

  As for the warmonger image, Muhammad maintained a downright Gandhian stance of passive, nonviolent resistance to both verbal and physical assaults for 12 years, until he was driven into exile from his home in Mecca. The psychology of exile thus played a large role in the armed conflict over the subsequent eight years, until Mecca finally accepted his leadership in a negotiated surrender, with strong emphasis on avoiding bloodshed.

  Is there anything you had to leave out?

  I know there’s a tendency to elide certain issues of Muhammad’s life, not least among them the rapid deterioration of his relations with the Jews of Medina, which was especially hard for me, as a Jew, to write about. But to evade such issues seems to me to demonstrate a certain lack of respect for your subject. A biographer’s task is surely to create as full a portrait as possible. If you truly respect your subject, you need to do him justice by according him the integrity of reality.

  What alternative title would you give the book?

  Perhaps “Seeing Muhammad Whole.” Or “A Man in Full.” But since Muhammad is told three times in the Qur’an to call himself the first Muslim, I knew early on that this would be the title.

  Did you have a specific audience in mind?

  It kind of hurts to think of intelligent, open-minded readers as a specific audience…

  Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?

  Far more than inform! The pleasure for me lies in the “aha!” of understanding, of grasping the richness of reality, with all its uncertainties and dilemmas. It’s in the practice of empathy—not sympathy, but empathy, which is the good-faith attempt to understand someone else’s experience. Those who nurture images of Muhammad as the epitome of either all evil or all good may well be disconcerted, but then that’s the point: empathy trumps stereotype any time.

  What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

  The First Muslim isn’t a “message” book. If anything, since I’m agnostic, you might call it an agnostic biography. But I think many readers may be surprised at Muhammad’s deep commitment to social justice, his radical protest against greed and corruption, and his impassioned engagement with the idea of unity, both human and divine—major factors that help explain the appeal of Islam.

  How do you feel about the cover?

  I loved it the minute I saw it. Riverhead brilliantly avoided all the usual obvious images—domes, minarets, crescent moons, camels, and so on—and opted instead for the understated elegance of this classic “knot” tile design.

  Is there a book out there you wish you’d written?

  On Muhammad? No, and that’s exactly why I wrote The First Muslim. The book I wish someone else had written didn’t exist—one that brought psychological and political context to the historical and religious record, and one I actually wanted to read instead of feeling that I should.

  What’s your next book?

  I’m thinking it’s time to explore exactly what I mean by being an agnostic, and how this informs my ongoing fascination with the vast and volatile arena in which religion and politics intersect.

• 

Just released:  the video of the talk I gave at TEDxRainier on November 10, 2012.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/9aC7bUTBKv0]

I can’t judge how effective the talk is (a few of the slides were dropped in the video-editing process, including a shot of Newsweek‘s infamous ‘Muslim Rage’ cover).  But as with my previous talk on reading the Quran, I do think I’m getting at something that needs to be said in today’s politically manipulated climate of suspicion and distrust.

If you agree, it’d be great if you’d help by forwarding this to all who will be, might be, or simply should be interested.  You can use the buttons below to email, tweet, or post to Facebook.  Or just copy and paste this page’s url or the YouTube one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aC7bUTBKv0.  Thank you!

And again, most definitely, I’d love to hear your comments, every which way they trend!

It’ll be a few weeks yet until the video of the TEDxRainier talk I gave last Saturday goes online (multiple cameras — fortunately I was unaware of them — involve post-production work).  But here, by way of a teaser/preview, are three stills just sent me by the organizers.  They’re in chronological sequence, and they do seem to capture the spirit of the talk:

Great pre-publication review of The First Muslim in the current issue of Publishers Weekly (alas it’s subscriber-only, so I can’t link to it):

Despite Islam’s position at the forefront of the American consciousness, the general public knows little of its founder and prophet beyond platitudes and condemnations. Hazleton (After the Prophet) attempts to rectify this imbalance with her vivid and engaging narrative of Muhammad’s life. The author portrays her subject as an unlikely and unsuspecting vehicle for the divine, “painfully aware that too many nights in solitary meditation might have driven him over the edge.” Sympathetic but not hagiographic, her work draws liberally from a long tradition of Islamic biographical literature about the prophet; the nuanced portrait that emerges is less that of an infallible saint than of a loving family man, a devoted leader of his people, an introspective and philosophical thinker who reluctantly accepted the burden of conveying the word of God, and a calculating political strategist. Hazleton writes not as a historian but as a cultural interpreter, reconstructing Muhammad’s identity and personality from the spiritual revolution that he sparked and the stories that his followers passed down. While the speculation is sometimes off-putting (as when Muhammad’s final illness is confidently diagnosed as bacterial meningitis), the result is a fluid and captivating introduction that will be invaluable for those seeking a greater understanding of Islam’s message and its messenger.

I love the idea of being less a historian than a cultural interpreter.  If I don’t quite see the problem with the bacterial meningitis issue, no matter.  Roll on January 24.

Library Journal’s Barbara Hoffert chose The First Muslim as one of her picks for January 2013.  This is what she wrote:

Understanding Islam would seem to mean understanding the life, the times, and the beliefs of its founder, but there don’t seem to be a lot of universally acknowledged biographies of Muhammad around.  I’ll go out on a limb to highlight this one, because Hazleton, who reported on the Middle East for over a dozen years, wrote the well-regarded After the Prophet: the epic story of the Shia-Sunni split, a PEN-USA Book Award finalist that won praise from several quarters.  Hazleton aims to examine how the man Muhammad — an orphan, a merchant, and an exile — upended the established order and became the Prophet.  Keep your eyes peeled.

No comment on that phrase “universally acknowledged,” but to get such a nice nod so far ahead of publication is much appreciated.

Back when, I wrote here that I was going into hermitry for “just a few months, probably,” in order to focus on the final draft of The First Muslim.  Hubris strikes again!  I now realize it’s been nearly a year.

But I’ve finished the book.  All 99,901 words of it.  (Actually, a few thousand more if you include the end notes, bibliography, etc, but hey, who’s counting…)  And it’ll be published in January, which suddenly seems just round the corner.

“We gotta celebrate!” friends here in Seattle said after I’d pressed the Send button to my publisher.  Champagne all round, heels kicked up, nights on the town — all that good stuff.  But nights on the town require energy, and I had none left.  I was too exhausted.  The book was finished, and so, it felt, was I.  Instead of celebrating, I did what I’d known I’d do come this moment:  I collapsed.  The sofa and I became one.

But as days passed with me cradled by that sofa – well-worn dark green leather, thoroughly scratched up by the resident feline – I realized that this wasn’t a painful exhaustion.  It was a happy one, the kind you feel after an arduous hike through magnificent landscape.  You’ve forded streams and clambered up mountains you never thought you could manage.  By the time you get home, everything is aching.  You can’t wear shoes because of the blisters.  The muscles in your legs are so sore it feels like you’ll never be able to walk properly again.  But who cares?  You know, at a far deeper level than skin and muscles, that it was absolutely, totally worth it.

That was a few weeks ago, and now my energy’s coming back.  I’m up off the sofa, ready to interact with the world again and resume this great improvisation known as life.  So here’s a big thank you, fellow accidental theologists, for your understanding, patience, encouragement, and support over this past year.  Now that I’m back, on with the conversation!